2019.1.20 Seeing Through the Eyes of Love

2019.1.20                   

Reading: “Human’s Core Function is Love” by adrienne maree brown

Video: Movement Leader Bayard Rustin  https://youtu.be/BxhKgnyWcuw

Reflection by guest Rev. Jametta Alston

Video: Movement Leader Ella Baker https://youtu.be/OjCibLwkOaw

Reflection by Rev. Laura Bogle                    

“Ella Baker: Seeing Through the Eyes of Love”

I chose this video clip to show today because it overlays Ella Baker’s words from 1974 with images about how her legacy continues to inform community work today.

In my view she is one of the most important leaders of the civil rights movement in this country—and, like Bayard Rustin, one that most people have never heard about.

Who here learned about Bayard Rustin and Ella Baker in school?

Ella Baker was born in Norfolk, VA, in 1903, and she grew up on land that her grandparents had worked as enslaved people.

After graduating from Shaw University in NC, Ella was in New York City.  She became involved in the Young Negro Cooperative league and then joined the staff of the NAACP.

As the Civil Rights movement began organizing in earnest in the mid-1950’s, Ella along with Bayard Rustin and the Jewish leader Stanley Levinson organized a group in New York called “In Friendship.”  Through this organization they raised money to support the Montgomery bus boycott and the southern civil rights movement as a whole. 

They did the incredibly important work of moving resources from those who had it, especially those in the north, to make sure that the people who were doing the organizing and the protesting and risking a lot, had the money they needed to meet basic needs.

Baker eventually joined the staff of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in Atlanta.  But perhaps her most important role was as advisor to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee that was founded in 1960. 

Ella Baker believed in and supported the leadership of young people.  In fact she believed strongly in what she called “group-centered leaders” rather than the “leader-centered” style.

She is quoted as saying in 1968, after Dr. King was assassinated, “You see, I think that, to be very honest, the movement made Martin rather than Martin making the movement. This is not a discredit to him. This is, to me, as it should be” (Baker, 19 June 1968).

Ella Baker did the slow, methodical, behind-the-scenes work of inspiring and guiding young people – black and white—into movement action and leadership. 

Cornel West:  “She’s like a jazz musician – it’s call and response.  She’s not pontificating from above, she’s having conversation on the horizontal level.  And that’s genuine leadership, but it’s a different kind of leadership than Martin being charismatic and out there.”

She was deeply committed to the spark of knowledge and agency and leadership present in all people, and bringing that forth. 

Barbara Ransby, who wrote a biography of Baker, says that “she would go into small towns and say, ‘Whom are you reaching out to?’ And she’d tell them that if you’re not reaching out to the town drunk you’re not really working for the rights of black people. The folk who were getting rounded up and thrown in jail had to be included.”” (from:  https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/03/14/where-is-black-lives-matter-headed )

This is seeing everyone through the eyes of love, seeing the possibility present in everyone, even those who are broken and need some healing and redemption. 

And she challenged those in positions of power and privilege – white folks—to also see themselves as leaders in the struggle for human rights.  Three weeks after Dr. King was assassinated, Ella Baker was a keynote speaker at a fundraising dinner in New York City for the Southern Conference Education Fund.  And I have to believe that many, if not most of the folks in the room were wealthy liberal white folks, wanting to support the work of the civil rights movement.  She said in that speech: 

“One of the things about the question of racism…that frequently has come up with me is, “Well, we are not guilty, personally.”

Of course you’re not.  I don’t know that there’s anybody in this room that’s carried on a campaign of racism, per se.  But I doubt that there’s anybody in this room who has not, at some point, been guilty of supporting a racist culture. 

And we must search ourselves to find out how we have been guilty.  Not for the sake of just wallowing in our guilt.  But for the sake of facing the fact that the future of our culture—or our country—depends not so much on what black people do as it does depend on what white people do.

Now, this is a hard lesson for some of us.  That the choice as to whether or not we will rid the country of racism, is a choice that white America has to make.”

We still have to make that choice every day.

It is so easy for us to think the Dr. King was the civil rights movement.  But frankly, ya’ll, that lets us off the hook. And what does it say about what is possible today?  If we are waiting for another Dr. King to show us the way, then we are in a place of hopelessness and despair.

What do we know about how the legacy of Ella Baker, and Bayard Rustin, and yes King and so many others lives on today?

For instance, there are direct connections between the leadership legacy of Ella Baker and the way that organizations like Black Lives Matter and the National Domestic Workers Alliance has organized.   It is a legacy of women’s leadership and queer leadership—gifts that very often get overlooked in the mainstream celebration of MLK Day.

Black Lives Matter has chapters all over this country. And while there are three main identified founders—Alicia Garza, Patrice Cullors, and Opal Tometi-- there are many, many leaders.  And, I want to add: those three identified founders are all women, two of them are queer, one of them is a black immigrant. 

Journalist Jelani Cobb writes, “Black Lives Matter emerged as a modern extension of Ella Baker’s thinking—a preference for ten thousand candles rather than a single spotlight. In a way, [Black Lives Matter founders] created the context and the movement created itself.” (New Yorker article)

The National Domestic Workers Alliance centers the experiences of domestic workers like nannies, home care aides, and housekeepers—overwhelmingly women of color.  These unseen workers in our economy are usually not covered by any kind of labor protections.  Abuse and exploitation can happen so easily.  The National Domestic Workers Alliance seeks to build alliances with the people who must employ them, especially disabled folks, elders, and working parents, to lift the standards for working conditions AND the access to this kind of care for everyone who needs it. 

Like Ella Baker and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee:  Very focused on local needs and leadership.  The people most impacted leading the way.  A sense of a “leader-full” movement – not just one well-known leader.

 A focus on personal relationship – really building for the long haul, turning to neighbors and friends and inviting them into the movement, and valuing the range of gifts that people bring.

As contemporary social change facilitator adrienne maree brown says, “If the goal was to increase the love, rather than winning or dominating a constant opponent, I think we could actually imagine liberation from constant oppression. We would suddenly be seeing everything we do, everyone we meet, not through the tactical eyes of war, but through eyes of love.”

Here in Blount County, Blount County United was formed after the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO.  Here is a place open to all in our community to engage and participate to support racial justice and equity, right here.  It is an organization doing the dedicated, slow infrastructure and relationship building.  Their next monthly meeting is Saturday, 1pm at St. Paul AMEZion.  All are welcome to attend.  And on Thursday Jan. 31^st the Blount County United Education committee will hold an important public workshop:  “The Impact of Structural Racism on Personal and Community Well-being.” This is part of a series of community programs that will use a racial justice lens to look at how public policy affects personal and community well-being.  Attendees will participate in a simulation to help them better understand the impact federal policies have had in creating and sustaining economic inequality. Participation is encouraged by the well-informed as well as those new to this topic.  Our hope is that this experience will inspire individual and community-based actions that produce equitable access, opportunities, treatment, and outcomes for all.

Like Bayard Rustin and Ella Baker, Let us see through the eyes of love, the possibilities present in every community, in every person, in every time.  Seeing through the eyes of love does not mean a weak kind of inaction but this deep love and recognition of interconnection leads to powerful and risky action for social change, including civil disobedience when it is strategic.

Will we take up the charge of our Unitarian Universalist faith that tells us none of us are free until all of us are free?

Will you, will we, take up Ella’s charge:  The willingness to stand by and do what has to be done, when it has to be done.

Only when we do this, can we truthfully say we are living in hope.

May we make it so.  Amen.

2019.1.13 Islands of Sanity

2019.1.13 “Islands of Sanity”     Rev. Laura Bogle

Reading "What This World Needs" by Margaret Wheatley

This world does not need more entrepreneurs.

This world does not need more technology breakthroughs.

This world needs more leaders.

We need leaders who put service over self, who can be steadfast through crises and failures, who want to stay present and make a difference to the people, situations, and causes they care about.

We need leaders who are committed to serving people, who recognize what is being lost in the haste to dominate, ignore, and abuse the human spirit.

We need leaders because leadership has been debased as those who take things to scale or are first to market or dominate the competition or develop killer apps.  Or hold onto power by constantly tightening their stranglehold of fear until people are left lifeless and cowering.

We need leaders now because we have failed to implement what was known to work, what would have prevented or mitigated the rise of hatred, violence, poverty, and ecological destruction.  We have not failed from a lack of ideas and technologies.  We have failed from a lack of will.  The solutions we needed were already here.

Now it is too late.  We cannot solve these global issues globally.  We can see them clearly.  We can understand their root causes. We have evidence of solutions that would have solved them.  But we refused to compromise, to collaborate, to persevere in resolving them as an intelligent, creative species living on one precious planet.

Now it’s up to us, not as global leaders but as local leaders.  We can lead people to create positive changes locally that make life easier and more sustainable, that create possibility in the midst of global decline.

Let us use whatever power and influence we have, working with whatever resources are already available, mobilizing the people who are with us to work for what they care about.

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If climate change has ever led you to feel despair, hopelessness, grief, disorientation, or even nostalgia about how the weather or the land used to be – there’s a word for that: solastalgia.  Solastalgia is a word coined just a couple of years ago by philosopher Glenn Albrecht, who says: “Solastalgia is when your endemic sense of place is being violated.”

The word is being picked up by medical and mental health professionals.

According to the BBC, “Medical journal The Lancet’s 2015 Health and Climate Change report discusses how solastalgia is connected to ‘dis-ease,’ or a lack of ease due to a hostile environment that a person is powerless to do anything about.”

I felt it just this week when my daughter was commenting “It’s never going to snow!”  and I thought, wow I don’t feel like I can tell her any differently.  I have no idea what the weather pattern here will become in her lifetime, and no one else really knows either.

The report released last October by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is enough to send any of us who are paying attention off to bury our heads in the sand.  It is really, really hard to face.  But face it we must, and more and more I believe that the inevitability of climate change and how we as human beings will live in the midst of it is the central question for us as a religious community.

Although I know many of you are familiar with the main points of that report, I want to repeat them here this morning, not to be depressing, but because I think it is important that we say this stuff out loud to one another.

According to the NY Times: “The authors found that if greenhouse gas emissions continue at the current rate, the atmosphere will warm up by as much as 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 degrees Celsius) above preindustrial levels by 2040, inundating coastlines and intensifying droughts and poverty. Previous work had focused on estimating the damage if average temperatures were to rise by a larger number, 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit (2 degrees Celsius), because that was the threshold scientists previously considered for the most severe effects of climate change.”

Johan Rockström, a co-author of the recent Hothouse Earth report, said … ““Climate change is occurring earlier and more rapidly than expected. Even at the current level of 1C warming, it is painful….”

According to The Guardian: “The world’s leading climate scientists have warned there is only a dozen years for global warming to be kept to a maximum of 1.5C, beyond which even half a degree will significantly worsen the risks of drought, floods, extreme heat and poverty for hundreds of millions of people.”  https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/oct/08/global-warming-must-not-exceed-15c-warns-landmark-un-report

Mind-boggling and very rapid global economic and policy change like the world has never seen would need to occur to keep us to the 2.7 degree Fahrenheit (or 1.5 degree Celsius) warming mark.  Meanwhile we have a  President who has promised to pull us out of the Paris accords, and Brazil, the world’s seventh largest emitter of greenhouse gases has recently elected a leader who vowed to go down that same path.

It is way beyond the scope of one sermon for me to fully explore this, but I am convinced by reading the reflections of many others that the global rise of religious fundamentalism and fascist political ideology is not unconnected to the instability, fear, and uncertainty that global climate change produces.

For 50 years Margaret Wheatley has been working with leaders and organizations around the world. She has worked with grassroots change groups, and large Fortune 500 companies, and even our US military.  The quote you heard comes from her new book “Who Do We Choose to Be? Facing Reality, Claiming Leadership, Restoring Sanity.”  In this book Wheatley lays out the general trajectory of rise and decline that all human civilizations and empires throughout history have cycled through—and points to our place in that cycle today.  We are on the downward slope, and climate change is putting us beyond a tipping point.  As she says “at a certain point, criticality is reached and the system changes rapidly into a new state.” (46)

She writes that “In our bright, shiny, techno-optimistic twenty-first century global culture, we believe we have stepped off the arrow of time.  Our technological and scientific genius gives us the capacity to bypass the fate that has overtaken all other complex civilizations. 

In our arrogance, we believe that we can use our superior intelligence as never before, change history, bounding forward in great leaps, no longer subject to the arrow of time.  We believe we are the height of human evolution rather than just its most recent, predictably problematic manifestation.  The belief in never-ending progress is fueled by our inexplicable arrogance that we can supercede the laws of the Universe.  Our constantly expanding technologies and innovations may appear to be adaptive responses to the environment.  But this is not true.  Quite the opposite:  for the first time in history, humans are changing the global environment rather than adapting to it.” (31)

This trajectory of global environmental collapse touches everything.

Think about the issue of immigration that our country is so divided by – some predict that there could be as many as 300 million climate refugees worldwide by 2050. 

  

Already, the hidden driver behind the migration of Central Americans north is climate change.  They may say they are fleeing violence in cities, which is certainly true, but often they moved to the cities because their crops in the countryside were failing due to drought and disease brought on by changing weather patterns.  Food insecurity is a powerful motivator to move, just like the threat of violence.  And climate change isn’t currently a reason that someone can claim asylum – though there are people working to change that.

Writing last November, long-time climate activist Bill McKibben talked about how climate change is shrinking our planet, as more and more of it will become unfriendly to human habitation.  He says, “Human beings have always experienced wars and truces, crashes and recoveries, famines and terrorism. We’ve endured tyrants and outlasted perverse ideologies. Climate change is different. As a team of scientists recently pointed out in the journal Nature Climate Change, the physical shifts we’re inflicting on the planet will “extend longer than the entire history of human civilization thus far.

The poorest and most vulnerable will pay the highest price. 

…The planet’s diameter will remain eight thousand miles, and its surface will still cover two hundred million square miles. But the earth, for humans, has begun to shrink, under our feet and in our minds.

…a period of contraction is setting in as we lose parts of the habitable earth.”

According to one study, sea level rise alone could displace 13 million people just in the United States.  Think about this—already our community has seen people coming through here, escaping hurricanes and floods to the south and the east of us.  Needing housing, food, work; some never able to go back and rebuild.  Those with resources are able to pick up and move to literal or figurative higher ground, and while still difficult, have a better chance of making a new life;  those without resources will move when they have to, if they can at all, and will depend on a web of support from others to survive.

So right here in Blount County, as we as a congregation are engaged with community organizations creating more support systems for the homeless,  how is climate change intersecting with that work?

We could ask the same question about other issues we care about -- Health care, senior care, education, racial and economic inequality, the health of animals and plants and whole delicate ecosystems.  It is all interconnected.  As John Muir once said, “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.”  This is no place more true than when we are talking about the very planet on which we depend for life.

I know many of us have and are personally taking steps in our every day lives to reduce our “carbon footprint.”  Driving less or driving a hybrid, or eating less meat or no meat at all, reducing how much plastic we use, bringing your own mug on Sunday morning, turning down the thermostat—all those kinds of choices.  And I think those are important things to do, because if nothing else they are a kind of spiritual practice, a daily reminder of commitment, and a way to feel like you can do something. 

And I also believe that there are many amazing steps being taken around the globe towards using more renewable energy, and that gives me hope.  For instance, California has recently committed to making all of its electricity carbon free by the year 2045.  I do not want us to give up on the possibility of making big policy changes, regardless of who is in the White House, that will make a big impact.  I recently met a woman who was involved in an 18 month campaign to stop a high-pressure gas pipeline from being built under the streets of Roxbury, MA.  They didn’t win that campaign but they sure got a lot of attention on the issue and won some smaller victories, like forcing the gas company to admit that they didn’t have a sufficient safety plan.

So, virtuous and ethical personal choices are important. Political and community organizing is important.  Policy change is important.  I find hope in them.  But to be truly hopeful we must grapple with the reality that we aren’t stopping climate change at this point – we are simply trying to make it less worse. 

Who, then, do we choose to be?

For Wheatley, hope lies in our ability as human beings to create and lead what she calls “islands of sanity.”

She asks, “Who do you choose to be for this time?  Are you willing to use whatever power and influence you have to create islands of sanity that evoke and reply on our best human qualities to create, produce, and persevere?”

Islands of sanity are places where people are able to retain their humanity, their human being-ness, no matter what.

How do we remain faithful to our Unitarian Universalist principles and faithful to our basic humanity under conditions of great suffering?  This question is why I think it is important to really face and feel the despair that climate change provokes in us.  Otherwise we aren’t able to act in truly hope-filled, faithful ways.

I’ve been thinking about this for months now.  For me, right now, this is the core reason we exist as a community of faith.  To be an island of sanity, amidst a lot of increasing chaos.  This is what gives me hope for the future – all of you, all of us, and all those many other islands around us with whom we are in relationship.  I want to be clear here, I am not just talking about Unitarian Universalists – that would be the height of arrogance and exceptionalism.  We have a lot to learn from other communities and congregations and organizations – especially those less privileged who have endured and survived through periods of suffering in the past. 

Margaret Wheatley sets out some good questions to consider whether your organization is developing as an island of sanity.  (pp. 55-56)

What is the quality of relationships?  Are people willing to really be there for one another?  Are people more self-protective or less so?  Every week we when we affirm our covenant we promise “to help one another.”  Are we living that out?

Are we expressing more fear?  Or more love?

When a crisis happens, are we using our values to resolve the crisis, or are we being reactive?  Are we thinking long-term when we approach challenges?

Is there a high level of willingness to contribute?  And do we have high expectations about those contributions?

In regards to financial matters, do we have a sense of abundance or do we protect what we see as scarce resources?  “Has selfishness replaced service?”

I encourage our leadership to be asking these questions of one another.  And let’s keep asking each other and ourselves, given the reality of climate change, who are we choosing to be now and in the future? 

This week several people in our congregation will be gathering to do some visioning about our service and justice work into the future.  (And if you are interested in that conversation, please talk to me or Board President.)  Let’s keep these questions in mind as we do so. 

In addition, I am challenging all of us in these two specific ways:

1) I want to learn more and be in conversation with each other about what is happening with climate change and how we are called to respond here where we are.  In April I’ll be leading a conversation on one book entitled “Justice on Earth: People of Faith Working at the intersections of Race, Class, and the Environment.”  If there is interest, I will lead on ongoing study and reflection group bringing in other resources.  So, let me know if you are interested.

2)    The second way I want to challenge all of us right now is to remain open to our neighbors.  As climate unpredictability increases, and resources become more scarce it will be very easy to circle the wagons and protect what is ours.  Right now the dynamics of division in this country are encouraging us in that mindset.  It is very easy to objectify “the other” across the political divide – often in a sarcastic or funny way that releases tension but nevertheless dehumanizes. 

I see this a lot on social media.  I want to challenge us to take all our neighbors seriously enough to engage in public on the issues, with compassion and vulnerability.  We don’t have to like people who think differently than us, we don’t even have to give any time or credence to their viewpoints, but we are called by our faith to remember that they are human beings who suffer like us.  As even climate deniers will be impacted by climate change, will our compassion be there for them too?

Community organizer Sendolo Diaminah has said:  “Organizations are actually networks of coordinated promises….  They are ways of being with each other that allow us to coordinate our commitments and therefore have more power to shape (that is be in a relationship of agency with) the future.”

How are we as an organization shaping the future?  I am not optimistic about the future of our planet.  But that does not mean I am not hopeful. Climate change will force us into different ways of living.  I am hopeful because I still believe that we human beings can choose the way of love, the way of compassion, the way of sharing resources, the way of adapting using our highest values.

Rebecca Solnit reminds us that despair is just another kind of certainty, and our spiritual task is to live hopefully in uncertainty.  In her 2017 essay “Why Giving Up Hope is Not an Option” she says, “Optimism assumes that all will go well without our effort; pessimism assumes it’s all irredeemable; both let us stay home and do nothing. Hope for me has meant a sense that the future is unpredictable, and that we don’t actually know what will happen, but know we may be able write it ourselves.”

Let us all consider ourselves as leaders from the future, knowing that the choices we make today will impact far, far beyond our lifetimes.

Let us open to the despair enough to be truly moved to change and action.

Let us remember that the promises we make to ourselves and to one another, and our ability to lives out those promises, is the hope we seek.

And let us never forget that we need each other, we need to stay together, for that hope to flourish and grow.

May it be so, may we make it so.  Amen.

2018.12.23 Where is the Good News?

2018.12.23 Reflection following our “No-Rehearse Pageant” based on the story of Jesus’ birth as told in the book Refuge by Anne Booth.

Where is the good news?

According to Matthew: “Now after they had left, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and said, “Get up, take the child and his mother, and flee to Egypt, and remain there until I tell you; for Herod is about to search for the child, to destroy him.” ¹⁴ Then Joseph^[h] got up, took the child and his mother by night, and went to Egypt, ¹⁵ and remained there until the death of Herod.”

Where is the good news?

Over 2,000 immigrant children were separated from their parents this year and held in US detention centers.

Where is the good news?

Currently there are over 15,000 immigrant children in our detention centers, most crossed our border as unaccompanied minors.

Where is the good news?

50% increase in deportations from our country in the year 2018. (from Washington Post: “Ronald D. Vitiello, interim head of ICE, said last month at his Senate confirmation hearing that deportations increased nearly 50 percent during fiscal year 2018.”)

Where is the good news?

On Dec. 20 the Trump Administration issued directives that asylum seekers on our southern border must remain in Mexico for the duration of their court proceedings.

Where is the good news?

There are more than 5,000 people waiting for their asylum claims to be heard in Tijuana alone.

Where is the good news?

This month 7 year old Jakelin Caal Maquin died in the custody of our government after traveling 2,000 miles with her father.

Where is the good news?

Pregnant women are travelling from Central America, walking thousands of miles, don’t even have a donkey to carry them

Where is the good news?

Parts of our government is shut down over funding billions of dollars to build a wall.

Where is the good news?

According to Luke, Mary, a pregnant, a poor woman waiting to give birth, says,

 “My soul magnifies the Lord,
⁴⁷     and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, … ⁵² He has brought down the powerful from their thrones,
    and lifted up the lowly;
⁵³ he has filled the hungry with good things,
    and sent the rich away empty.

Where is the good news?

On Dec. 10^th, over 30 religious leaders got arrested on the border, attempting to pray with migrants on the other side.

Where is the good news?

After ICE raided a meatpacking plant in Morristown last spring, teachers rose up to care for and protect their students whose parents had suddenly disappeared.  A whole community rallied around those families.

Where is the good news?

Today over 50 houses of worship across the country are harboring immigrants, protecting them from arrest and deportation.  Hundreds more have said they are willing to do the same.

Where is the good news?

One of those immigrants, Rosa, recently took sanctuary with Cedar Lane UU Church outside of Washington, DC.  She has three children who are US citizens: 11, 9 and 6.  They can’t stay with her, but at least she sees them every week.

Where is the good news?

Three times a day, every day, a team of helpers meets the bus from Dallas as it arrives in Knoxville.  Providing translation help, diapers, food, medicine, warm hats, toys – for families released from detention, travelling in a strange land, just trying to get to familiar faces. [ These donations will go directly to that effort.]

Where is the good news?

Every week on Wednesday morning, church members stand quietly outside the non-descript ICE office with a sign that simply reads “Love Your Neighbors.”  It is the day and time people come to “check-in” with ICE.  They must wait outside no matter the weather.  The line is long.  There is no bathroom.  We get in trouble for passing out warm coffee and donuts.

Where is the good news?

Well, we are the good news.

Or, we can be.  We can be part of the good news, alongside our neighbors. 

Jesus said, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.’

Good news is born again and again, over and over, in and through human beings. 

Not just one time 2,000 years ago.  But here, today, as we allow ourselves to be the bearers of good news.

This week, during this time of family and friends, this time of celebration and gifts, how will we be bearers of good news? What angels will we let ourselves hear?

How will we focus on the star in the sky calling us onward?

How will we labor to bring forth hope? 

2018.12.16 Cosmic Humility

2018.12.16      “Cosmic Humility”                 Rev. Laura Bogle

READING for Meditation

"When I Heard the Learned Astronomer"  by Walt Whitman

When I heard the learn’d astronomer,

When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,

When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide,

   and measure them,

When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with

   much applause in the lecture-room,

How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,

Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,

In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,

Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

READING

From the introduction to “Why Religion?” by Elaine Pagels, Professor of Religion at Princeton University and author of The Gnostic Gospels (and many other books)

“And what do you do?” asked a man at the crowded reception at the New York Academy of Sciences, where my husband, Heinz, a theoretical physicist, was the director.  “Write—about the history of religion.”  Startled, he backed away, as if afraid I might clamp a hand on his shoulder and say “Brother, are you saved?”  Hearing this, someone else asked, “Why religion? Why do that? Are you religious?”  Yes, incorrigibly—although I grew up among people who regarded religion as obsolete as an outgrown bicycle stashed in a back closet. …

Responding to that question [Why religion?], I started with one of my own: Why is religion still around in the twenty-first century? …

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UU minister Rev. Jeanne Harrison Nieuwejaar in her book Fluent in Faith, tells a story about a parent and a young child, out on a cool evening, and watching the sun go down.  A beautiful sunset appeared, the sky streaked with golden and rosy colors, and the little kid set aside their toys and just watched quietly.  Then turned to the parent and said, “What makes the sun go down?”

The parent said, “Well, the earth is like a huge ball spinning slowly in space.  Each time it spins completely around a new day begins.  It seems to us like it’s the sun that’s moving, but really we are the ones that are moving.  The sunset happens when the earth turns away from the sun.”

And the kid looked up and simply said, “oh, I was hoping it was God.”

The scientific explanation of a sunset is pretty breathtaking. 

And yet the ancient breath of spirit that speaks in story and poetry and metaphor persists in children, and in us grown-ups, even in this scientific age.  Why is religion still around in the 21^st century?  

What is it in us, deep down, that still is hoping for God – even though we’ve long ago grown up and learned the scientific explanations and rejected the mythological miracles?

It seems to me that yearning is especially present during this season of the year. Even the most rationalist, even atheist folks among us might find themselves caught up in the drama of stories of the season – whether hannukah or winter solstice or the birth of Jesus at Christmas. 

These days we can also describe the winter solstice, using the scientific knowledge available to us – the tilt of the earth away from the sun as it orbits, making the days ever shorter until we reach the longest night of this year this week.  We enter the season of winter, as the earth begins ever slowly, each day to tilt back to the warmth and light of our star. 

Now I want you to think about a time when you were outside on a winter night and the stars took your breath away, and you felt very small in the world—how big the universe is, beyond our comprehension.  How mysterious are the biggest questions – the ones that matter—like how it is that we came to be here on this planet spinning in space, with just the right balance of elements for life, just the right balance of darkness and light.  Why is there so much beauty?  Why is there so much suffering?  And what is this life for anyway?

We answer those biggest questions with scientific explorations, and we answer them with the religious stories of the ages.  Often these answers get pitted against one another, as if they cancel each other out.  As if believing in the scientific explanation of what elements make up the stars means one can’t find deep meaning in a story about how a star signified the miracle of the birth of a child who would grow up to be a liberator.

Luckily, we Unitarian Universalists are a both/and tradition.  You don’t have to choose scientific rationality or mythological meaning-making. 

I loved learning about astronomer Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin for our Time for All Ages today – I have to tell you I had never heard of her before.  What a scientist!  What an amazing star gazer and trail-blazer.

{story about her at 5 years old, seeing a meteor, deciding right then that she’d be an astronomer}

And I wish I knew more about her personal life and beliefs.  But we know that she and her husband, also an astronomer, were members of the Unitarian church in Lexington, Massachusetts.  And we know that she taught Sunday school there, to older elementary aged children.  It seems she was quite dedicated. 

Her daughter told a story about her mother donning heavy woolen slacks and walking more than three miles to teach Sunday school one bitterly cold winter morning when the family car would not start.

Somewhere in her, alongside her life-long scientific exploration, was the impulse to gather with others in religious community, to remember and remake the old stories.

Being a woman scientist in her time she didn’t get much reward—monetary or recognition.  But, she wrote, her reward was the ever-widening horizon.

This is the best of scientific humility—to know there is always more to know, and you might be wrong.  The gift comes in asking the questions.

This is also the best of spiritual humility—the meaning comes in the seeking, not in the destination.

Perhaps as she matured, she too, entered into what philosopher Paul Ricoeur called “the second naivete.”  As Rev. Victoria Weinstein says, “In Paul Ricouer’s philosophy of second naïveté, we enter into the mystery of sacred stories not with the naïveté of one who can’t think for themselves, but by choosing to engage the poetic sensibility rather than leading with our critical, intellectual faculties.  More simply put, when we have reached the maturity of second naïveté – a kind of chosen innocence — we make a decision to abide together in wonder rather than to dismantle sacred narratives in an insistent search for rational facts.”

We don’t set aside our thinking and inquiry to enter the second naivete – we simply recognize that different parts of our lives and our selves need different things. 

We human beings are more than rational beings, we are emotional beings and we are spiritual beings.  We leave the astronomer’s lecture hall to stand outside under the night sky, or join with others to sing songs and tell stories about stars.

Elaine Pagels’ new book Why Religion? is a very personal account of this balance between rational inquiry and religious feeling in her own life.  She is an academic and scholar of religion, working primarily on Early Christianity and the complexity of differing viewpoints present in the early Christian movement.  She is one who has brought to light the so-called heretics, the Christian gnostics who were excluded from the eventual biblical canon.

She was married to a theoretical physicist.  Her life was full of rigorous intellectual pursuit.

And she, as she says, has been incorrigibly religious throughout her life. 

Her book weaves reflections on her academic explorations with her very personal and hard life experiences to answer that question Why is religion still around in the 21^st century? 

As a young mother, she and her husband learned of the terminal diagnosis of her first son, who lived a few years before dying at age 6.  She writes, “But whatever the rationalists say, and whatever the doctors could tell us about how cells break down, nothing they said could satisfy the need to find meaning. … What is clear is that meaning may not be something we find.  We found no meaning in our son’s death, or in the deaths of countless others.  The most we could hope was that we might be able to create meaning.” (103-104)

When her husband suddenly and unexpectedly died in an accident a year after her son, Elaine worked hard to create meaning over time—leaning on the contemplative presence and blessings of Trappist monks and the persistence of life with friends; finding it too in her exploration of the origin and meanings of Christian story and symbol and how they could speak to her condition today.  Creating meaning helped her face what cannot be explained or understood.

So, maybe you are an atheist who brings out the nativity set or menorah each year.

Maybe you are a pagan who gets choked up by the Hallelujah chorus every dang time.

Maybe you are a scientist who loves to hear that old gospel tune, “Beautiful, beautiful star of Bethlehem.”

Whether it is the impulse to respond with awe and wonder to the night sky, or the impulse to find meaning during our darkest days and nights when the unimaginable happens, it is religious story, music, community and practice that can help us open up meaning when we fear there is none, that can help us feel.   That can help us feel less alone.

On the longest night of the year, this Friday night, will you step outside and look up at the stars?  If it is a clear night, see what you can see.  If it is not a clear night, see what you can see.  Remember the earth is tilting on its axis.  Feel the weight of the world shift.  Know that the light will return.  Look for a sign in the sky.  Remember that throughout the history of humanity, people across time and space have done the same.  Think about those others here, with whom you gather week in and week out.  Know you are not alone.  Feel your place in this galaxy of stars.  Feel the presence of what is beyond our understanding.

May the stars shine on.

Amen.