2018.12.2 Healthy Humility

2018.12.2 “Healthy Humility for this Being Human”          Rev. Laura Bogle

Reading:  “Christmas”

by Lynn Ungar, minister for lifespan learning, Church of the Larger Fellowship

It was all so complicated:
The questionable parentage,
the awkward journey,
the not knowing where you will sleep,
or when the baby will come,
or what his life will look like—
even what the world will be like
when he is grown.
Life is usually that complicated.

It was all so simple:
Keep walking. Stop when you can.
Breathe. Through the pain, breathe.
Hold him. Feed him. Keep him warm.
Cradle his head in the palm of your hand.
These are things we all know.

It was, it is, so complicated
and so simple:
Love what does not belong to you.
Love what will be broken.
Love what mystifies you.
Love what scares you.
Love the aching flesh
no more and no less than
the brilliant star.
Love what will die
and what will be born again
and die again
and be born again
in love.

 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

It was, it is, so complicated
and so simple.

The woman who often babysits my kids (for those of you who may not know, my partner and I have a 7 year old and 4 year old twins)  is pregnant for the first time.  With twins.  She is visibly pregnant now, being due in February.  She recently took our girls out to a public event and recounts the interesting reactions she got from people who assumed our kids were her kids and that she had a least one more on the way.  The judgments –both good: “Aren’t you an amazing woman!”  and critical “How can you have so many kids?”—seemed to surprise her.  Welcome to parenthood, I thought. 

She is definitely still in the starry-eyed phase of anticipation.  Not that she’s naïve or not nervous. Who wouldn’t be starry-eyed?  She wants to be a parent, and if all goes well she will be welcoming two new lives into this world!  

It’s just that you really have no idea what it will be like until it happens for you.  I have often thought “I wish someone had straight-up told me: parenting is really, really hard.”  And I have thought about saying to her, “You know there will be times when you will go out in public in the equivalent of your pajama pants, and you won’t care.  There will be times when you will wonder why you are doing this.  There will be times when you will have no idea how to do it, or what to do.  There will be times when you act in ways you aren’t proud of.  You will be changed and you will be humbled in ways that you can’t imagine right now.  Parenthood will put you face to face with all that you don’t know.”

Or is that just me?  J

But I haven’t said any of those things to her, because why not stay in the starry-eyed phase of anticipation as long as possible?

In the Gospel story of Luke we hear the account of the angel Gabriel – an angel!—coming to tell Mary of her pregnancy.  With THE Messiah! Talk about starry-eyed! 

But Mary, in her wisdom, asks Gabriel “How is this possible?  How can this be?”  She doesn’t understand. 

It doesn’t compute, given all she knows at this point in her young life of human beings, and herself, and how things work.

But then she just says, “Here I am. Let it be.”

Well, actually, the New Revised Standard Version of the translation is:  “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.” 

Now, for me, especially if we are reading this passage with the virgin birth of Christ in mind, I have a little knee-jerk reaction when I get to this part.  This isn’t humility, it’s God’s humiliation and subordination of a young woman.

But UUs are not believers in the virgin birth generally.  We are much more interested in the human-ness of this story, which has plenty of deep meaning.  Perhaps this is a story of a woman holding the anticipation of the transcendent miracle of life, a new baby to be born, alongside the very realistic questions of how it will all happen. When will the baby come?  Where will we all sleep?  Will we have enough?  Will I be a good enough parent?  Will everything be all right?  How will it all be possible?

And then Mary does this amazing thing, she just says “Here I am.  Let it be.”

The contemplative Catholic monk Thomas Keating wrote, “This is really what humility is, which is a basic disposition in the spiritual journey: the capacity to accept all reality—God, ourselves, other people, all creation—as they are and as they manifest in… the present moment and its content.”

The words human, humane, humble, humility à humus – soil, of the earth, grounded.

Rather than reading this moment as a moment when Mary subordinates herself, even a moment of humiliation, we might read it as a moment when Mary with her own agency simply accepts her condition with a grounded strength, a moment of healthy humility —she is going to have a child, she isn’t married, she is poor, she is a persecuted religious minority.  She doesn’t know how they will survive, but somehow she is willing to be open, to keep going, to hold on to life, to figure it out as they go.  “Here I am. Let it Be.”

It is all so complicated.  And so simple.

Perhaps Mary--and Joseph, too-- being Jewish, had the lesson of Hannukah in them – the lesson that you often have more than you think, that more is possible than you imagined, that it is good to stay a little starry-eyed or you might miss the miracle.

Hannukah means “dedication.” As the people gathered to re-dedicate their temple after it had been destroyed by the Syrian army, they had just one small bottle of oil, enough to burn for only one day.  And they knew it would be 8 days before they could get more.  They did not expect that small bottle of oil to last for 8 days, but they lit the oil anyway.  They did not expect that small little bit of oil, to be enough.  Perhaps they sat in the dark for a while, wondering if they should even bother until they had gotten more oil, and then they went ahead and lit that small little light anyway, and waited. 

For eight days they waited for more oil and as it turns out the light was with them all along.  Turns out they had enough.  A miracle.

Maybe the Hannukah story helps us understand the deeper miracle in the story of the birth of Jesus, or any child, or the unfolding of any long-term human relationship – the miracle of love and light that can arise out of the most humbling circumstances, when we don’t think we have it in us, when we don’t understand, when we don’t seem to have enough, when everything seems to be in chaos, or simply impossible.  And yet we say “Here I am, let it be.”  We stay grounded.  We focus on what we do have, no matter how small. Sometimes all we can do is light our light, with dedication, and see what happens.

Mary, anticipating the birth of this special child, has no idea what is in store for them – the journeys they will have to undertake, the great love that will arise, and the great sorrow.

Any of us in long-term relationships—whether parent-child, partner, friend—can attest that we don’t ever know exactly how it will unfold.  There are the starry-eyed phases: anticipating a new baby, falling in love, finding a kindred-spirit friend when you’ve felt so lonely, even embarking on a project with a new partner in work—all exciting and full of possibility and dreams and imaginings of how it will be.  Sometimes finding a new spiritual home can be like this too!  Some people kind of fall in love with a congregation all at once.

And then there is the inevitable come-down-to-earth reality—misunderstandings, tensions, human mistakes, stress, disappointments, our own imperfect and sometimes selfish selves, loss and sorrow.  The moments when we discover that the way we thought it would be isn’t quite the way it turns out.  The perfect family holiday card doesn’t quite capture the hurt feelings that happened around the Thanksgiving table. Don’t you wish just once you’d get a holiday card with the toddler pitching a fit, or the teenagers looking sullen, or—something imperfect but real?

After a while the starry-eyed expectation wears off. 

It all gets so complicated.

During this holiday season, many of us will be spending time with people we have known for a very long time, with lots of differing expectations.  For some of us that is joyful, for others of us it is a trial.  For most of us I’d venture to say… it’s complicated.

This season I invite us to approach these people and relationships with a humble spirit, which is not to vacate your own needs and perspectives, but to simply see them as they are, and see yourself as you are, and reality as it is.  To say, “Here I am.” And let it be.

At the same time, see if you can re-capture a little bit of the starry-eyed perspective, see if you can approach the possibility of mystery and miracle—the humility that comes from remembering that you don’t know everything there is to know yet about that parent you have known your entire life, or that child you have known their entire life, or that spouse or cousin or neighbor.  Or yourself. 

It is so complicated, and yet so simple, this being a human in relationship with other human beings.

As poet Lynn Ungar says,

“Love what mystifies you.
Love what scares you.
Love the aching flesh
no more and no less than
the brilliant star.”

Which is to say, let us come down to earth, and re-dedicate ourselves to loving what is real—the complicated, humbling, humanness of this life—all of it--

AND let us keep our starry-eyed dedication, too, keeping our own flame lit, looking ever out and up, believing in, open to the miracles in our living and our loving.

Amen.

2018.12.2 Meditation

2018.12.2     Meditation and Prayer

Creative Spirit of Life, God whose energy is Love:

Some come today expectant, optimistic, closer to another new year,

Ready to welcome the season’s growing light,

Excited for something new coming into our lives.

Some come today quiet, wondering, perhaps a little bit of fear residing in our hearts.

The longest night of the year is still ahead of us,

Like the Maccabees with their tiny bit of oil, some are wondering if the small bit of energy we have will be enough to get us through. 

Let us simply come down and settle, look for and see the miracle of the everyday.

Help us to lay down the expectations that don’t matter in the long run,

The expectation to buy,

The expectation to consume,

The expectation to be joyful without exception,

The expectation to have perfect family time,

Let us lay down all those expectations that burden us.

Help us to embrace this time of darkness as beautiful, as necessary as the light. Help us to embrace waiting with expectation for what truly matters

The expectation for another season of growth and change on this earth and in our lives

The expectation for the birth of new life,

The expectation that each one of us born may yet become one who helps the light last, who helps to create a more loving and just world,

Let us take on all those expectations that bring us to more abundant life.

May it be so, Amen.

2018.11.18 Becoming an Ancestor

2018.11.18 “Becoming an Ancestor”                        Rev. Laura Bogle

Reading  by Krista Lukas

The day I die will be a certain

day, a square on a calendar page

to be flipped up and pinned

at the end of the month. It may be August

or November; school will be out or in;

somebody will have to catch a plane.

There will be messages, bills to pay,

things left undone. It will be a day

like today, or tomorrow—a date

I might note with reminder, an appointment,

or nothing at all.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Our neighbor died in this last week.  He lived alone and died at home.  It was one of those expected unexpected deaths.  He had been in very poor health for quite some time.  But he wasn’t on hospice or anything.  No one knew this was the week he would die.  He was still getting out and about.  The last time I really talked with him was the Sunday of our All Souls service and I gave him one of the beautiful table decorations we had here that morning.  It’s still sitting on his porch.

Now, this person was estranged from much of his family.  I don’t know that whole story.  But he knew his neighbors and he had friends and fellow Vietnam veterans who would occasionally stop in.  I don’t know yet if there’s really going to be a service, a memorial, or anything like that for him.  His death is sad, but to think that he may not be honored or remembered with even a small ritual gathering troubles me the most.

In the Pixar movie Coco,  a little Mexican boy named Miguel who loves to play music goes on a journey to find out just why playing music is forbidden in his family.  It is Dia de los Muertos, the Mexican holiday for honoring the dead around All Saints and All Souls Days.  Miguel ends up visiting the Land of the Dead and meeting many of his ancestors there. 

These are skeletal beings, in the movie, but still very real and solid. Along the way he also meets a skeletal guy who keeps kind of flickering in and out and eventually completely disappears.  Miguel doesn’t know what’s happening, so he asks another resident of the Land of the Dead, who answers,

“He’s been forgotten. When there’s no one left in the living world who remembers you, you disappear from this world. We call it the final death.
…Our memories, they have to be passed down by those who knew us in life in the stories they tell about us. But there’s no one left alive to pass down Cheech’s stories. Hey, it happens to everyone eventually.”

From The Independent https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/features/coco-pixar-second-death-final-death-day-of-dead-dia-de-muertos-a8164491.html :

“Coco’s concept of the ”final death” actually draws straight from traditional Mexican ideas of the “three deaths”. The “first death” is the physical one, the death of the body. The “second death” is more of a natural one: the moment the body is laid to rest in the earth and returned into nature’s cycle.

The “third death” is the most definitive: the moment the last memory of you fades. Día de Muertos [through its rituals of remembrance] helps to delay that final death.”

Our current “Facing Death with Life” class has only met twice and we’ve already come up against the challenge of our current US culture that pretty much denies death at every turn:  the medical realm, the cosmetic and supplements industry, the sanitized funeral home experience, our inability to simply say the words “He died.” But instead we have long lists of euphemisms to keep from saying it outright.

Everyone will die.  But very few of us talk about that fact, and many of us don’t even think about it, unless we have a terminal diagnosis.  As we age it might get easier to incorporate this awareness into our daily life, though this is not a given.

I mean, we all have a terminal diagnosis, but it is really hard to grasp the idea that someday you and I will cease to exist. 

The final death is even harder to confront for many – the idea that sometime in the future there won’t be anyone left who remembers you. 

We want to be remembered. We want to think our life has had some meaning.  Think about the picture of cave art – all of those hands from thousands of years ago.  Still remembered in a way.  They left their mark.

This is one of the reasons why I feel it is so important to have an All Souls service each year.  Both to set aside time to remember those who have died, AND to remember our own deaths. 

Memento mori in Latin means “remember you will die” – it was part of medieval Catholic spiritual practice. You can find jewelry from that time period that reflects the practice – rings with a skull, pendants of skeletons, or crossed bones, or a gravediggers spade, or simply an hour glass. 

Remembering you will die – as the poet says, “It will be a day like today, or tomorrow”--automatically asks the question, how will I be remembered? 

We may not all of us believe in any sort of afterlife.  In fact our tradition asks us to focus more on this life than the next.  I will die, so how shall I live? 

Perhaps a spiritual practice for us, today, as Unitarian Universalists is not just remembering that we will die, but remembering that we all, every one of us, are becoming ancestors—whether we ourselves have had children or not.  We will live on to the extent that we are remembered as ancestors, as the ones-who-came-before in our collective story.  

So let us ask ourselves:

Who really knows me?  Am I letting people really know me? 

What am I doing with this one life I have, with my gifts and my limitations?

How am I giving myself away, here and now? 

What am I passing down to the future generations? 

Will I leave behind a patiently and intricately stitched quilt of love to keep someone warm as they remember me? 

Will I leave behind my helping touch to those in need? 

Will I leave behind my simple listening attention to those who need to be heard? 

Will I leave behind a garden, a tree of life, sustenance for those who come after?

What am I doing with my resources, including my financial resources, for the flourishing of all life into the future– because if there’s one thing we know about death, it’s that you can’t take that stuff with you.  You can’t take your bank account or your house or your car or your 401k.  If you are blessed to have financial resources that you will leave behind, have you been clear about where you want those to go? Do you have a will?  Have you thought about sharing not just with your family but with organizations that reflect your values?   If you want to find out more about legacy giving to our congregation or to support Unitarian Universalism more broadly to support the work of our values in this world, we have resources to help you in that discernment. 

It is hard in the flow of day into day to wake up and remember that this all will end.  But when I do have that flash, just a moment, then it puts everything else in perspective.  Those who know they are dying, or face a possibly terminal illness, often have this gift of awareness to give the rest of us-- To know what is most important.

  

Randy Pausch was a lecturer at Carnegie Mellon University, a father of three small children, and a member of the Unitarian Universalist church in Pittsburgh.  When he was diagnosed with Stage 4 pancreatic cancer, he knew he would die soon.  And he gave his “Last Lecture” at Carnegie Mellon, a tradition usually for people who are just retiring.  But he did it with his own impending death in mind.  This was about 10 years ago and you may remember it – his last lecture was published, he got quite a bit of media attention. 

He was an engineer and he approached his own impending death as an engineering problem.  He said in one interview, “I have things that I can do that will make a difference.  Things that will help my wife, things that will help my kids.  …So for me to frame [my death] as an engineering problem put the focus on ‘OK I might not like this situation but what can I do with my remaining time to make the best outcome I can?’ [My last lecture and other messages to my children are] Pretty inadequate substitutes for a living Dad.  But engineering isn’t about optimal solutions, it’s about doing the best you can with what you have.”

Randy’s experience raises other questions for all of us:  Who do I want to talk to about my own death, and what I want for it, about what I hope to leave behind and how?  Why haven’t I had that conversation yet?

I want you to know that I consider it one of the highest honors I have as a minister when people invite me to have this kind of conversation with them.  It’s one of the most meaningful and important parts of my ministry with you.  Not just the doing of a memorial service when the time comes, but the conversation and the preparation before-hand. 

And I will ask you – who else do you need to be having this conversation with? What do you want to say to your family, your friends, your church community now?  You have time, now, to say how you want to be remembered, and to live out today how you want to be remembered.  

Many of us will be gathering with family, friends, loved ones over the coming winter holidays.  What conversations might you open up with those loved ones? If you’d like help having those conversations, I am here for you. 

Wherever you are on this journey through life, may a contemplation of your own death help you to see your future life as an ancestor, living on with those you have touched.  As you say “yes” to this life day after day, may you be building a legacy of love.  And may you know that here in this community of memory and hope, you will be remembered. 

May it be so.  Amen.

2018.11.11 Ancestral Healing

2018.11.11      “Ancestral Healing”   Rev. Laura Bogle

Reading:  excerpt from The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston

"When we are born, we have curses and gifts from our parents and ancestors [that] come from way back, and generation after generation, we work on them, with them.

They are curses because there are terrible problems and hardships…the most difficult questions of humanity, such as ‘why war?’ and ‘what is love?’….

They are also gifts, because we have the opportunity to come up with the most beautiful answers."

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

If you go out Sevierville Road about 12 miles from Maryville, on your left hand side you’ll see a small old Presbyterian Church, surrounded by a cemetery.  Eusebia Presbyterian Church, founded in 1786.

And if you roam that cemetery, you’ll find more recent gravestones, as well as ones that look simply like worn rocks.  Covered in lichen, it’s hard to tell anymore if there are any markings of name or date on them. 

One of these very old and worn gravestones has a more recent and legible one placed right next to it, as well as a marker from the Daughters of the American Revolution, indicating that the person buried there had served in the revolutionary war.  It is the gravestone of one my ancestors, Joseph Bogle, who died here in Blount Co., in 1790.  I believe it is the oldest marked grave of a white person in the county.  He was my great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather.

Now, if my father were still here, I’d probably have more to tell you about our family history, he was a collector of stories and genealogical information.   But some of my father’s ashes are buried right in that same cemetery, close to the ancestors that linked him and me to this East Tennessee land.  My father’s name was Joseph Bogle, too.

But I’ve got some written documentation of research done by other family members.  How did the Bogles come to settle in East TN?  We don’t even know for sure what year or when that original Joseph Bogle was born.  Speculation is that he, or at least his forebears, were born in Scotland around Glasgow.  They then were part of colonizing Northern Ireland with Protestants through the Ulster Plantation.  And then they left Ulster for Pennsylvania.

Like many other Scots-Irish folks, we see record of Joseph, his wife Jean and their children having moved down through Virginia and eventually to this part of the country in the 1780s.  This land would not be part of the state of Tennessee until 1796, six years after that Joseph Bogle died.

My father Joseph Bogle was born and raised in middle Tennessee.  And how did my father’s branch of the Bogles end up in middle Tennessee?  Well, the family lore is that following the end of the Civil War, two Bogle brothers, including my great-great Grandfather Joseph Black Bogle, were basically run out of town, because they had sided with the Confederacy, and as you historians know East Tennessee was strong Union territory.  They eventually settled in Middle Tennessee, south of Nashville.

I am descended, at least in this line of my ancestry, from a people on the move.  A people searching, a pioneer people. A people who were part of a Revolution to create this democracy.  What fortitude it took to strike out for new lands, not just once but several times over.  What hardships and challenges they must have lived through.

And yet, as I read through the genealogy that I have access to, I have so many other questions about what is left out.

For instance, my Bogle ancestors were here living on this land when the removal of the Cherokee took place.  I have found no mention of my ancestor’s relations with the people who were already living in this land.

And in reading the history that I have, I’ve also found no mention of whether or not my ancestors owned slaves—just that at least part of the family sided with the Confederacy. 

I have some research work to do.  And if any of you are curious about the same kinds of questions about your own family, I invite you to join me and share with me what you know.

I am telling you this bit of Bogle family history not because it is particularly unusual or special, but because it is actually very usual and representative of the complex legacies many of us in this country—especially, but not only, those who are white-- have inherited.

In fact, to become “white” in this country has very often mean disconnection from all  of the stories and family lore, the good and the bad. Disconnection from any sense of ancestry at all.   To become “white” meant assimilation to the dominant culture, very often leaving behind cultural practices and ways from the “old country.”

Even if we know the good stories of pioneering and perseverance, we often are disconnected from the shadow side of the story – at whose cost? 

My colleague Rev. Molly Housh Gordon tells her family’s story of settlement in Oklahoma, and says:

“My maternal family remained in Oklahoma, our story and the state’s intertwined, our ancestors’ beloved bones buried in that contested, stolen land.

I once heard “On Being” host Krista Tippett, a fellow Oklahoman, call Oklahoma a land without history, a place where people left their past behind, some by forced march from ancestral lands, and some by chosen sojourn in pioneer wagons.

But the truth is that our entire nation suffers from a studied amnesia, a cultivated forgetting regarding the twin genocidal conditions of its founding – slavery & native cleansing. We either distance ourselves from memory entirely, or we tell stories about ourselves with important details missing from the telling.

Every family does this….

Every town does this….

Every nation does this as well – this careful forgetting. Ours does it more studiously, more insistently, and with more feigned innocence than most.”

Disconnection from the fullness of our history is dangerous.  In fact, this amnesia might lead some of us today to be surprised by the rise of white nationalism around us.  But that white nationalism would continue to make an appearance, generation after generation, makes sense in light of our ancestral stories that have never been fully examined, nor healed. 

Anyone out there watch the TV show “This is Us”?  It is masterful storytelling about how the past impacts the present and future, in the lineage of one particular family—flashing back and forth from different time periods.  Without giving too much away, one of the recent story lines is about a present day son, who has struggled with alcoholism, exploring a more full picture and story about his father who died when he was still a teenager.  In the process he learns more about his father’s service in Vietnam, he uncovers family secrets – or at least stories that were never told. The more he understands the past, the more he is able to understand himself.  It is part of his own path towards personal healing and writing a different story for the future.

The same thing that happens on the family level happens on our collective national level.  The United States has family secrets, or at least stories we don’t tell out loud.  The more we understand those stories, the better we will understand ourselves.

I don’t think it is possible to heal our country’s collective legacy without squarely looking at it and telling the truth about ourselves. 

This is not a recommendation that white folks go around feeling guilty for the sins of our forebears, that doesn’t help anyone.  But you know, there has never been a truth and reconciliation process for our country, for the devastations of the genocide of native peoples and the enslavement of Africans.

It is a challenge to all of us to do some examination, to ask some hard questions even about our own family histories, about our nation’s history, and to tell the truth about them. To tell the whole story.  It is a challenge to do the spiritual work of holding the contradictions in one place – the gifts of strength, ingenuity, and resiliency some ancestors passed to us—and the legacies of harm that were left.  It is a challenge to then be responsible for what we do with those legacies.  Only then will be able to live fully into our call today to be agents of healing and transformation. 

This is one reason why our area UU congregations are planning a trip to Montgomery, AL, in February.  We will visit the new Legacy Museum which traces the history of racial oppression from enslavement all the way up to present-day mass incarceration.  And the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, acknowledging the victims of racial lynching in this country.

Our congregation will also be reading the book “An African American and Latinx History of the United States” with a book discussion in January.

Our Unitarian Universalist 7^th Principle is the affirmation of the interconnectedness of all of creation.  Taking interconnection seriously means remembering our interconnection with the past and the future.

Buddhist teacher Thich Naht Hahn:

“All our ancestors and all future generations are present in us. Liberation is not an individual matter. As long as the ancestors in us are still suffering, we cannot be happy, and we will transmit their suffering to our children and their children. Now is the time to liberate our ancestors and future generations. It means to free ourselves.”

All of us, no matter our immigration stories, no matter our family lineage, hold complex legacies, ones with gifts and burdens.  Let us continue to ask questions about those legacies.  It is my theological perspective that the more we are able to honestly incorporate from the past, the more Love will be able to break through to help us write a new story for the future. 

This is the work of redemption, not just for ourselves and for our future generations, but it is how we actually participate in the healing and the salvation of our ancestors—the ones we knew and the ones whose lives we can only imagine.

May it be so.  Amen.

2018.11.4 All Souls Sunday "Facing Death with Life"

2018.11.4 All Souls Service: Facing Death with Life

When we breathe in, we breathe in the same air as the ancestors.  The same molecules that filled the lungs of the known and the millions unknown through the ages.

On Friday night I went to see kind of a strange show – it was a German band that back in the nineties was so obsessed with Cormac McCarthy’s novel Suttree, set in Knoxville, that they made a kind of pilgrimage to East Tennessee in 1997.  They came to the place that McCarthy wrote about so well, to soak it in, to take pictures of downtown Knoxville, which back in the mid-nineties was mostly bedraggled and boarded up and ghostly.  And then they wrote a whole song cycle about it back in Germany. Kinda strange.

Well, they came back to Knoxville on Friday night and played their music, while old film footage and photographs of East Tennessee from the 1950s, played on a screen behind them.  It was kind of dream-like, seeing grainy black and white images of places that were at once familiar and at the same time totally different.  I left thinking about how everything changes always, every world passes away eventually, but traces are left. 

Like the impression of a place made through a novel travels across the world. 

The skeletons of buildings that once were vibrant, stood empty a long time waiting to be transformed back to life again. 

The anonymous lives of those captured on film surely left their mark, on their own small world at least– family, community, church, business. 

When we breathe in, we breathe in the same molecules as the ancestors.

When we dream, we might be visited by spirits.

The poet Wendell Berry writes:

Nightmares of the age invade/my days and darken them,

But sometimes my sleep is lighted/by a better dream.

One night, as if in justice perhaps or mercy,/ or by some kindness of this world,/ I dreamed of my father.

Long ago he would play the piano, lively songs/ of World War II, rocking on the bench,/sometimes singing, as he played.

And then a lasting sorrow came, / and no more piano music after that.

In my dream my father was again/ playing the piano.  He was beautiful.

He was smiling. He was playing

An elated improvisation on a tune/neither of us had known in the old time.

The notes shone singly as they gathered brightly together, “Daddy,” I said,

“you could play anywhere!”  He smiled

At his thought’s music, and played on.

Now, my own father wasn’t a piano player, but he had other gifts, and I’ve been wishing he might make a dream visit during these nightmares of the age we face today.  To share some sort of wisdom, encouragement. Or at least one of his corny jokes to lighten my mood.  I wonder often, What would he have to say about the latest headline?

And sometimes I think back to my great-grandmothers, and I wonder what would Laura Marsh, who raised 7 children on a farm in Kentucky,  What would she have to say about this age? One thing I know she’d say: Go Vote.  She was one of the ones who worked for women to have the right to vote.

And I bet Anna Ellis, who raised her kids over in Spring City, TN, would say the same.  And Margaret Bogle and Inez Bell.  If you haven’t already voted, go vote on Tuesday, OK?  On orders of my great-grandmothers.

Or what about my great-grandfather Harry who emigrated to the west coast of this country from New Zealand of all places, in the early 1900’s to go to Bible College and ended up serving a little church in Harlan, KY, during the coalmine wars? What would he have to say about this age, and the dream of America, and who it is for?

And what about America’s spiritual ancestors?  Wouldn’t it be amazing if we could wake up from our national nightmares with a visitation from spirits who could help us have a better dream?  Spirits who could help us improvise a different tune, a new tune no one knew in the old times, a lively, hopeful, dancing tune? Who hasn’t, of late, wished for a Martin Luther King, Jr. -- someone who can speak with moral authority and poetry and move us together through pain but towards healing and the dreamed of promised land?

But instead, it’s been a couple of weeks of once again confronting the lasting sorrow that comes with death. 

We have seen the lasting sorrow of the private grief of the loved ones of the 11 killed during worship at Tree of Life synagogue just a little over a week ago. 

Daniel Stein, 71; Joyce Feinberg, 75; Richard Gottfried, 65; Rose Mallinger, 97; Jerry Rabinowitz, 66; brothers Cecil Rosenthal, 59, and David Rosenthal 54; husband and wife Bernice Simon, 84 and Sylvan Simon, 86; Melvin Wax, 88; and Irving Younger, 69.

In the Jewish tradition there is a practice of never leaving the body alone after a death.  For those 11 in Pittsburgh, there has always been someone present with them, praying over them, accompanying them. Life, Life present in the face of Death.  And now comes a period of the faithful community accompanying the mourners, in very specific ways.   Life, present in the face of Death.

The grief is private, and it is also very public. And by that I mean, the private grief can be echoed and held by a larger body of Life.  The mourners recite the Mourners Kaddish during worship each week for a year, the community remembering along with them, they are not alone in their grief. 

As you and I have experienced our own griefs and losses, we may feel with open-hearted empathy the grief of those families and friends in Pittsburgh.

And even beyond that sense of human-to-human empathy, there is the grief and sorrow we feel when we see, once again, the effects of deep-seated hatred of “the other.”  It moves us, and we recall other sorrows in our national story.

In this last week I listened to the service held at our National Cathedral in Washington, DC, as the remains of Matthew Shepard were laid to rest there, 20 years after his death.  Bishop Gene Robinson, the first openly gay Bishop consecrated in the Episcopal church, gave an emotional homily.  He said he was there not just for Mathew, but also to celebrate Mathew’s parents.  He said, they could have so easily gone home and simply grieved the loss of their son privately. But instead they shared their grief with the world, they shared their son with the world. And they turned his Death into Life. They faced the most horrific thing any parent could face and they turned it into Life.  I have no doubt that the work of Mathew’s parents and the Mathew Shepard foundation has literally saved the lives of LGBT people.  Facing death with Life.

It is not so different from the story of Reb Leizer we heard from Sheri this morning – turning the experience of unimaginable loss into new life.  Reb Leizer continued to play the music of his people so that the children of others might be found and reunited with their heritage, if not their families.   

Facing death with Life.

Who among us has not felt that lasting sorrow upon the death of a loved one, or will one day?

No one.

Yet, as Unitarian minister Phillip Hewett wrote: “We know that no branch is utterly severed from the Tree of Life that sustains us all.”

The sorrow that we cannot hold alone, we hold in common. Let us not be alone in our mourning.

I invite us today to breathe in the breath of the ancestors.  To dance with them, to dream with them.  Worlds pass away and still something remains.

We breathe in the breath of not just the ancestors of our own families, but also Mathew Shepard, and the suffragettes, and those from the Tree of Life Temple, and Reb Leizer, and Martin Luther King, Jr., and so many others whose names and stories can wake us up to the music of this life, and can open us up to what is truly important, and can keep us moving, keep us dancing, keep us rising up, keep us living in our hope not just our despair.

I don’t want to rest in peace. And I’m not sure I want the ancestors to rest in peace either.  I want them to keep speaking to us, to keep troubling us, to keep asking us questions about how we shall live bravely and lovingly and powerfully in the face of Death.  So may we weave the past into the present, so may we weave the sorrows and joy, the promise and the pain, the spirit of Life and Love.

Amen.

Closing prayer:

Spirit of Sustaining Love that connects us in life and in death,

Be with us all in our times of grief and sadness.

Help us to remember that we enter into this world in mystery and we leave it in mystery, and yet we are not alone. 

Help us to find peace, reassurance, and comfort in the remembering here today. 

Help us to live lives that weave Joy and Sorrow together into one fabric of Love.

We give thanks for the lives that have touched our own, all those named today, and those held silently in our hearts.

Let us know our connectedness with All Souls across time and distance.

Give us the courage to follow in the spirit of ancestors we admire, creators of the world we want to leave our children.

May we find faith that even in death, love remains, and hope endures.

As we are blessed, may we be a blessing to one another. Amen.

Singing Refrain:

All this Joy, All this Sorrow

All this promise, all this pain

Such is life, such is being

Such is spirit, such is love. (John Denver)

2018.10.21 Something Greater from the Difference

2018.10.21      Persistence: “Something Greater from the Difference”      Rev. Laura Bogle

Celebrating 10 years since the charter of Foothills UU Fellowship

How many of you were present or involved in this congregation ten years ago when this congregation was chartered as an official congregation of the Unitarian Universalist Association?

Why do I ask that question?  First, to give some love to those of you who worked so hard to bring a dream to life, and have persisted with it to this day.  And secondly, to look around and see all the many more people we have touched and included since then.   I know each one of you could name at least one other person who was here ten years ago and is no longer with us, or just not with us this morning!

None of us, including me, has the full story of who we are and how we came to be.  Each one of us has our own experience intersecting with the collective story.

We might even have differing opinions about what anniversary to celebrate.  Do we celebrate when the Blount County satellite ministry of TVUUC first started in 2006?  Do we celebrate the anniversary of the charter of this congregation 10 years ago on October 19th, 2008?

Do we celebrate the 70^th anniversary next year of when Lon Ray Call came to East TN and helped plant the seeds of TVUUC and Oak Ridge, the congregations which then helped spawn Westside UU Church and our own congregation? 

And why not look even further back to remember the efforts to start Unitarian and Universalist congregations in East TN in the 1800s.  So different from us today – think about that little Universalist church in Harriman in the late 1800’s founded as part of the temperance movement there!—and yet, part of our collective history.

Those churches that were started in the 1800s didn’t survive in their particular form, but I wonder what ripples of Love and Freedom were sent out from those gatherings that continue to touch us today in ways we may never know?

The charge from the ancestors we read earlier (you can read it here)  helps me put the years of this congregation in perspective.  Ten years is such a short time really, when seen in the larger flow of our history.

And yet, a lot can happen in ten years, a lot *has* happened in ten years.  Children of this congregation have grown up and moved off to adulthood.  Babies have been born and are growing held by many hands.  We have worshipped in several different locations, each move bringing different gifts and challenges.  Leaders have contributed their gifts to shape this congregation and in turn been shaped themselves.  Lots and lots of work by many hands.  Some people have come and some have gone.  Members have died and been memorialized and remembered—I especially want to lift up Laura Post, Rosemary Gilson and Ed Mucha who left legacy gifts to this congregation.  And three weeks ago the installation of your first called minister. Life flows on.

Think for a moment about what will happen in the next 10 years.  How old will you be in 10 years?  If you have children in your life whether you are a parent or grandparent or aunt or uncle or teacher or friend to children – how old will they be in 10 years?

And now I want you to think about 50 years beyond that.  Think 70 years out from 2008.

Which ones of us will still be here?  What are your hopes and dreams for the world of 2078?  (I want to acknowledge that I am asking this question in the context of a recent very sobering report by the Inter- governmental Panel on Climate Change.  It is heavy on my heart, and I will be preaching more about that this year.) 

There are days I get bogged down in the minutiae of the day-to-day of life, sometimes in the minutiae of the administrative tasks of keeping an organization going. 

It is good and life-giving to remember why we are here, what is the point of this particular faith community?

Why do so many of us give so much to continually create and sustain it?

Last June I asked a version of this question at our Leadership Retreat “What is the core reason for being of our congregation?” and the top three answers, in order, were:

--Community—valuing and fostering deep relationships that foster on service to one another

--Social transformation—pursuing justice and beauty in the world through the creation of networks for good

--Purpose-finding—clarifying, articulating and acting on one’s personal mission in life

These categories come from a series of reports called “How We Gather” that looks deeply at today’s religious landscape, and looking at trends especially for faith communities on the liberal side of the spectrum.  Other options were personal transformation, creativity, and accountability—all of those are present with us as well. 

You may find yourself gravitating to one or the other of those answers as your reason for coming here.

Community, social transformation, and purpose-finding are great reasons for a Unitarian Universalist congregation to exist.  Those categories might even drive some of our decisions and planning about what we will and won’t do over the next few years.

But, here’s the thing –

--There are other places to find and build community that are not congregations—I have heard testimonials from some of you about the real community you have found at CrossFit or your kids’ school or your neighborhood.

--There are plenty of places to participate in social transformation – and many of you participate in them!—nonprofits doing good work here, and of course political organizations

--There are endless books and coaches and classes that will help you find and articulate your purpose in life.

So why come here for any of that?  Why come here for community, social transformation or purpose-finding?  I want you to think about that for yourself, and I’d love to hear from you.  

Here’s a brief version of what I think:  I think it is because we as a community of faith also offer a connection to Something More that transcends our individual lifetimes, and our individual needs.

I don’t quite mean just a spiritual experience – after all many of us could just go hiking on Sunday morning and have a spiritual experience.

I say sometimes that we are a gathering of memory and hope.

By that I mean to say that we are a place that pauses to remember ourselves and our place on this earth, to remember those who have gone before and those still to come, to remember that we are part of a living tradition that provides wisdom, challenge and sustenance.

And we gather in hope. Not easy optimism, but we gather to be hope, to be hope for one another.  To work at embodying our best ideals so that we can live into a world of Love and Justice for all.  We gather trusting that when we each bring our gifts to the table everyone can be fed, abundantly.

THIS is the something greater that can only be seen and experienced when we place ourselves in the broad sweep of history, remember how insignificant we are, and are willing to give significantly of ourselves anyway, trusting that something greater will arise from the differences between us.

Our congregation is about community, and it is connected to social transformation, it can help us find our purpose, and we often have spiritual experiences along the way. And then there’s what happens that is greater than the sum of the parts.  Some of us might called that God or Spirit of Life.  You can just call it Something More if you want.

The poet Alberto Rios says--

“You gave me blue and I gave you yellow.
Together we are simple green. You gave me

What you did not have, and I gave you
What I had to give—together, we made

Something greater from the difference.”

We gather not just to connect with the Spirit of Life, with Something More, but to participate in it.

This is why it matters that you are here and that we are here together.

To connect back to the minutiae of running a congregation – this is also why it matters that you volunteer on Sunday morning, or serve in a leadership role, or give generously of your financial resources.  Like the animals in our story this morning, when we all show up with what we have, open handed and open hearted – wow!  Something More happens!

I want you to know that the leadership of this congregation is working hard not just to sustain us but on making sure we are growing and staying relevant and energized for the future. 

If you are not already part of that, there are lots of opportunities.  If you aren’t already pledging financial support to this congregation, you don’t have to wait until next spring to do so. This year’s budget plans to draw several thousand dollars from our savings, and I bet we won’t have to do that if folks who aren’t pledging give a contribution, or perhaps those of you who are pledging decide to give more. 

If you aren’t sure where your gifts could best contribute in leadership, set up a time to talk with me or with a member of the Leadership Development Team.  If you’d love to be a part of building community here through Sunday morning hospitality or organizing social connecting events or being part of our caring team, talk to Sherry Brewer or other members of the Congregational Growth and Development Team and sign up!

The Board has identified a couple of priorities for their own work based on the Long Range Plan. 

They have already created a charge for a Facilities Team, that would be a research group gathering information and thinking creatively about options for future facilities.  Some of you are going to get an invitation from me to join that Team this week. If any of you are interested, let me know.

And the Board is leading us towards our next imaginings of how we engage, together, in the work of service and justice in our community. What is the gift we collectively have to give to our community during this particular time?  How do we live that out?

Here’s what I’m really excited about!  How might the Facilities Conversation and the Community Outreach conversation intersect?  How else do we want to serve our community, and what facilities will enable us to do it??

We need your participation in all of this, not just to run an institution but because we touch Something More when there are more of us contributing.

Today let us celebrate 10 years—and let us also remember and acknowledge our place in the larger flow of history—12 years and 70 years and 100 years.

What ripples of Love and Freedom are sent out from these gatherings that will continue to touch the future in ways we may never know?

You are part of the answer to that question.

I’m grateful to be part of this place of memory and hope with you—where we celebrate the joys, we welcome new life, we create community, we hold each other through the sorrows, we find our purpose, we give our gifts, we transform this corner of the world, we memorialize each other when we die, we leave a legacy for the future.

May it be so.

AMEN.