a sermon by ministerial intern Kevin Tarsa

delivered January 29, 2012

at First Parish in Wayland, MA

Reading #1: A Litany of Change

1. “It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the ones most responsive to change.”    - Charles Darwin

2. “Things do not change; we change.”     - Henry David Thoreau

3. “We change whether we like it or not.    - Ralph Waldo Emerson

4. “When you’re finished changing, you’re finished.”     - Benjamin Franklin

5. “When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.”       - Victor Frankl

6. “All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter another.”       - Anatole France

7. “The world hates change, yet it is the only thing that has brought progress.”     

- Charles Kettering

8. “Without accepting the fact that everything changes, we cannot find perfect composure. But unfortunately, although it is true, it is difficult for us to accept it. Because we cannot accept the truth of transience, we suffer.”        - Shunryu Suzuki

9. “We live in a moment of history where change is so speeded up that we begin to see the present only when it is already disappearing.”       - R.D. Laing

10. “Know what’s weird? Day by day, nothing seems to change, but pretty soon…everything’s different.”          - Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes

11. “We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to accept the life that is waiting for us.”   - Joseph Campbell

12. “The changes we dread most may contain our salvation.”    - Barbara Kingsolver

Reading #2

Emily Perl Kingsley was asked to describe what it was like to live through and beyond an event that changed the course of her life. She wanted to help people understand and imagine how it might feel. She said, “It’s like this:

see “Welcome to Holland” at   http://www.our-kids.org/Archives/Holland.html

   © 1987 Emily Perl Kingsley

Sermon: “Change Happens”

by Kevin Tarsa, ministerial intern, First Parish in Wayland, MA

January 29, 2012

So… “Welcome to Holland.”

I don’t know where you expected to be landing this morning…or where you expected to be landing at this point in your life, but chances are at least a few times in your life, you found out quite suddenly that your flight plan had been changed mid-flight, and you landed in an unfamiliar land, where people spoke a different language.

“Welcome to Holland,” I say this morning, because I know that change happens, all the time, to all of us - change expected and unexpected, bidden and unbidden, in large doses and in small. For change is the very nature of existence and nothing escapes its reach. No matter what our age, we don’t have to look any further than our own bodies to know that change is perpetual in our lives, and that we must keep adapting to new realities. (I say, as I adjust my bifocals…)

As James Miller writes: “Infants turn into toddlers, children become adolescents, and adults mature in ways no less striking.” You’re supposed to go to Italy and then:  Your horse runs away, or your child, and therefore, you, are thrown by an illness,  “accidents happen, tragedies occur, … bodies, minds, and spirits are suddenly changed, either for a time or forever. Relationships [begin and] come to an end for all sorts of reasons. Jobs [start, change or] terminate with little or no notice. People die, expectedly or unexpectedly, and life is irreversibly altered for [those who love them] (Miller 13).”

But it is not only painful and difficult changes that throw us. Virtually all change is uncomfortable at some level, even the most positive or hoped-for change, because it disrupts the ways we are accustomed to being and to doing things.

Lea Anderson took Ken and Lisa Maria and me on a wonderful tour of the new Wayland High School. The new auditorium, the “Main Stage” they’re calling it, is beautiful and state of the art, but many people are lamenting the loss of the old “Little Theater.” The new commons where students eat is light and open….but several of the tables are round, and instead of facing a friend or two across the table, students now have to face a whole group of people, which some are finding uncomfortable.

 “The … radio comedian, Bob Burns, …used to tell the story of eating Army food for the first time after eighteen years of his mother’s deep-fat frying. A week of bland GI fare was enough to cure something that he had never known that he had: a life-long case of heartburn. But rather than feeling relief at this improvement, at the lack of pain, Burns said that he rushed into the dispensary… yelling, “Doc, doc! Help me! I’m dying. My fire went out! (Bridges 13)”

Getting married, having a baby, receiving a promotion, opening a business - all change, even the most happy change, incurs loss because with change, by definition something ends, something is no longer exactly what it was, and so neither are we. We have to navigate not only the external changes in our lives, we also have to travel an internal journey in response to those changes and the losses that come with them.

This morning, I’m drawn to speak of that inner journey, using the travel guides of James and John. Not the apostle brothers James and John of the Christian scriptures, but two deep friends who each studied grief.

James Miller, a one-time minister, speaks of the link between change and grief, writing, “Whether the change is minor or major, whether its effect is fleeting or enduring, somewhere at the beginning [of our transitions in response to change] will be a sense of loss. And where there is loss there is grief. The grief may or may not go deep, but it’s grief nonetheless (Miller 23)”

The late John Schneider, a psychologist and a mentor of mine, writes that we all have “significant losses…that result from the changes that are natural parts of life. They come from catastrophes and tragedies as well as from successes and satisfactions (xxvii). Every change,” he writes, “… has both a loss and a gain component. Grieving is how we [know their proportions] and decide what to do with them (Schneider 111).”

There are plenty of books and websites with all kinds of valuable suggestions on how to change yourself or how to adapt to change, but I’ve found …that first paying attention to the losses that come with change and attending to the internal grieving process have been most helpful in my own life. I’ve found that unless I first acknowledge and grieve the losses that come with change, later I have difficulty accepting… the nice things about Holland.

You know, I was supposed to go to Italy. I was. Instead, I landed …in Wayland. Now first, I would like you to know that I am very happy to have landed in Wayland. Wayland has several hundred years of history. Wayland has a Whole Foods Store (for now). Wayland has First Parish. Wayland has Ken Sawyer (for a few more months), and most important, Wayland has you!  I am very grateful to have landed in Wayland.

I was planning, however, to do my internship next year, after I finished classes, but there were several changes in the flight plan: my mother died, our minister resigned suddenly, I lived an unexpected divorce, sold our house, and moved five times within six months. In that same time, John Schneider, my grief mentor, died. As someone at his memorial service asked, “What do you do when your grief counselor dies?”

I turn often to John’s wisdom. With some of the changes in your lives in my mind and heart, and knowing the link between change and grief, I offer a small piece of John’ insight to you this morning in the hope that it might serve you in your journey.

John said that we have to make three discoveries before we can realize the transformative potential of grief. We must discover what’s lost, what remains, and what’s possible.  They are each important, but it’s the first discovery, in particular, that I commend, because from it, the other two follow, and without it, they can be lived only incompletely.

First, John says, we must discover what was lost.

To discover what’s lost, the need may be as simple as taking walks to consider what ended for you when you got married, when you took that job, or when your child started school. It may be making lists of what you’ll miss about your volunteer role, or the home from which you are moving, telling a friend what you’ll leave behind when you graduate or when you follow your dream in retirement. Taking time to notice and to take inventory of what you have lost or are losing or will lose, is the task here, however you choose to go about it. It’s not the most pleasant step, but it’s a very important one.

This is the step that’s often missed when a change seems positive – Why would we be thinking about what’s lost when something good happens? 

William Bridges ran support group for people in transition. The members of the group who had lost loved ones, or divorced or lost jobs couldn’t figure out why the guy who just got a promotion had anything to complain about. But with the promotion came a loss of time with his family, a separation from close colleagues, a lowered sense of competence in his new role. A woman in the group who just had a baby, lost all sense of a life that was her own. Her life was now tied to that of a wonderful, demanding infant. Understanding what they had lost, helped each of them to grieve and move forward.

This step of discovering what’s lost, the step that’s missed when everything seems positive, is the same step that can become overwhelming when a loss is deep and it seems that everything is lost.

John says that when we first respond to change, we are likely to cycle “back and forth between the extremes of making too much or too little of what we’ve lost (114).”

If the change in our lives is a painful one, we may rollercoaster up and down between “everything’s fine” denial, and debilitating despair. Up and down. John says that the truth in such times is in the middle, “Yes, things are as bad as they seem – AND yes, there is hope [you] can get through it,” though most of us can feel only one of those feelings at a time.

What comes next is a time of more “active grieving” in which little by little we face “the full impact of our loss.” Here we cycle back and forth between our coping strategies of either clinging to what we are losing or letting go completely, and our gradual awareness of the depth of our loss. As long as we don’t get stuck in our coping mechanisms, - clinging or letting go/fleeing - they are normal and helpful survival strategies. They give us respite from the pain, and allow us to “take in our loss one manageable bit at a time (116).”  Coping… touching a little more loss… coping… touching a little more loss…

Acknowledging, identifying and gradually feeling the fullness of our loss is the vital first step on the internal journey of transition that comes with all change. The size of this step for you, will depend upon the depth of the change in your life.

It’s the doorway to:

Discovering what remains.

This, I expect, you can imagine easily and I need only state it briefly.  In our own time and way, after honestly facing our loss, we gradually start to look around, and discover that not all is lost after all, and we start to take stock of what we do have. I have seen this remarkable journey many times in people who mourn. James writes, “In this time of discontinuity, …we start to remember our continuities.” Here’s the key: to remember that “No matter what has changed, some things have not changed, (at least not in ways that matter.)  We can “find reassurance [by] recalling those things. [By noting, consciously, what’s left. What’s still here.]

Whatever inner strength you’ve already known, you can draw on it again. However resilient you’ve been, [or] practical or determined, you can be that way once more, for you [already] know how. If someone you love is gone from your life, others remain…(Miller 29)” Recognizing and taking stock of what remains allows us to:

Discover what is possible. 

The spirit of this is not difficult to imagine.

Once we’ve faced our loss and then discovered what remains, we catch our breath, we look around and begin to notice not only what we have brought with us, but also …that Holland has windmills. Holland has tulips. Holland even has Rembrandts. Emily Perl Kinsgley, who wrote “Welcome to Holland,” was writing about giving birth to and raising a child with Down Syndrome.  That was her change in flight plan. Discovering what’s possible is when we find it in ourselves to go out and look at the new landscape in which we find ourselves. We find the new guidebooks, learn new languages, meet new people, see with new eyes - as Joseph Campbell put it, it’s when we “let go of the life we have planned, so as to accept the life that is waiting for us.”

In the interim time ahead, as you search for a new minister, those of you from First Parish  will be asking yourself these questions about every aspect of cong life and your connection to it – What’s lost, what remains, what’s possible? I encourage you to ask them about the changes in your personal life as well.

For large losses, you will need to cycle through these three steps again and again, gradually carving your way through and grieving transforming loss one manageable fragment at a time. What’s lost, what remains, what’s possible?

You may someday reach the very final step of discovering what’s possible - which only happens at the very end of the grieving process, if ever, John says: it is accepting that the past cannot be changed and that we are who we are because of the past, not in spite of it; that we are who we are because of the changes and losses that came our way, not in spite of them; that we are who we are, because there was a change in the flight plan and we never made it to Italy. If we can reach that understanding, we will not spend the rest of our life in mourning, wishing that our life had been other than it has been.

For all this talk of loss and grief, my inspiration this morning is really hope. By acknowledging and grieving the losses that come with change, we best enable ourselves to see and appreciate what’s left, and open our selves to what is possible, so we can know in our bones, that there is yet more love to come for us, more peace, more hope, even more joy to come…somewhere, and we’ll free ourselves to appreciate and enjoy the very special, the very lovely things about …about wherever it is that we’ve landed for now.

So may we be.

Works Cited

Bridges, William. Transitions: Making Sense of Life’s Changes. Reading, Mass: Addison-Wesley, 1993. Print.

Kingsley, Emily Perl. “Welcome to Holland.”  © 1987 at  

http://www.our-kids.org/Archives/Holland.html

Miller, James E. Changes and Possibility: Discovering Hope in Life’s Transitions. Fort Wayne: Willowgreen, 2005. Print

Schneider, John M. Finding My Way: From Trauma to Transformation: The Journey Through Loss and Grief. Traverse City, MI: Seasons Press, 2012. Print

by the Rev. Kenneth W. Sawyer

A sermon preached at the First Parish in Wayland

On Sept. 16, 1979; Feb. 6, 1994; and Jan. 22, 2012

To the list of the basic categories of religion, elements of life most fully lived, to faith, belief, doubt, compassion, justice, mercy, community and love, this morning I want to add one other.  I want to talk about passion.

I do not mean passion as the word is most often used, to mean that which, for instance, goes on in many a movie or television soap opera, I am told.  It is not that I wish to reinstitute religious wars against that sort of behavior, by which I mean your basic 6a definition, passion as “ardent affection,” mixed with something of 6c, “sexual desire,” both of which, you understand, are affirmed in Scripture, but not what I mean to talk about this morning.

While I suppose that that is the most common use of the word “passion” that I don’t want to use – passion as in passionate embrace, or as in “passion pit,” which is what teens once called a drive-in theater  - there are a wealth of other meanings of “passion” that don’t fit my intentions this morning.  I don’t mean, for instance, to affirm the religious nature of outbreaks of bad temper, however well Jesus’ example in the temple with the money-changers would provide a text.

Nor do I mean to affirm uncontrollable displays of emotion, nor a physical disorder that causes suffering, nor (and this one’s the most obscure) that state of being subjected to or acted on by what is external or foreign to one’s true nature, especially a state of desire or emotion that represents the influence of what is external and opposes thought and meaning as the true activity of the human mind.  End quote.  I definitely do not mean that.  I don’t even understand that. (It sounds to me like a definition snuck into the dictionary to get back at someone with whom someone had argued about the proper use of the human mind, perhaps a disliked relative or a professional colleague.)

Nor do I have in mind even more far-fetched uses of the word, of which I know one in particular.  I took a course in Cambridge years ago from a brilliant sociologist and psychologist whose passion it was to decry passion.  (This brings to mind May Sarton’s poem, “Dialogue”:

                The teacher of logic said, “Reason.”

                The poet said, “Passion.”

                “Without logic, we muddle

                And fail, said the teacher

                Of reason.

 The poet said, “Fiddle!

                What about Nature?”

                “Has Nature no plan,

                You poor fuddled creature?

                You’re a rational man,

                Not an ape or an angel.”

                The poet said, “Nonsense!

                I’m an angel, an ape,

                And a creature of sense,

                Not a brain in a box

                That a mere jackanapes

                With logic unlocks.

                I’m total.  I’m human.

                It’s you who are not.”

                “You sound like a woman.”

                The poet said, “Rot!

                You’re just a machine.

                You can’t write a poem.

                You can’t make a dream.”

                But the logical man

                Said, “I’ll stick to my reason.”

                (He said it with passion.))

So it was her passion to decry passion, to study it in surveys and interviews and unmask it for the danger that it is to us all, to women in particular, to anyone who strives for full maturity.

But her definition was so forced as to create no end of confusion, for what she really wanted to attack is what is commonly called Romantic Love.  And one kept having to translate as she would lambaste passion as the root of a good deal of evil, meaning by passion none of the things I have mentioned so far, nor what I mean to affirm later, but meaning instead the kind of ardent affection that is not love, the kind that is not focused on another person but on one’s own idealizations projected onto another.  That’s not mature love at all but a form of narcissism, common to people in their late teens.  She labored mightily and well to identify that kind of behavior, and to contrast it with mature love, which cares for the other person as herself or himself, not as a mirror that we hold up to stare into adoringly; she wanted to insist on the dangers of that deception, and the poor grounds that such feelings make for a marriage.

Which I thought a good point.  But it helped not at all for her to call that passion, since nearly everyone already had a perfectly good definition or two of what passion is and none were apt to be that.

For instance, the way I want to use the word is in the sense my dictionary calls 5b: depth or vehemence of feeling, a state or capacity for emotional excitement.  Like ardor, like enthusiasm, most of all, I suppose, like zest.  Like the gusto the beer ads used to speak of, however unlikely their claims were for providing it; but more than just gusto, just bigness, something like that but better focused, more intent, more purposeful.

Let me tell you about Giacometti’s dog.  In 1951, the sculptor Alberto  Giacometti, the one who does those tall, skinny people, that year he did a dog.  It stands 18” high and is now at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan.  Jonathan Aaron has a poem about a dog, in which he credits the inspiration to Giacometti:

                A Dog

    (After Giacometti)

While he jogs

head-down toward

memory of a taste,

a voice, a pale rectangle

of open doorway,

his front legs

constantly fail

to correct his hindquarters’

sleepy need to travel

somewhere else.

Only his narrow,

low-slung muzzle

gives the rest of him

reason to follow.

His skin

is a thin blanket

thrown over the old argument

of his skeleton

to keep the rain out

and the dry guts in.

Each step he takes

is an achievement

of what remains

ready at any moment

to become less

than the sum of its parts.

But whenever paw hits

pavement, and the shock

ripples down or up his knobby

spine, his bones are shaken

into cooperation,

and all of him

settles into motion

as continuous as the

twist of water

in the gutter beside him.

Ready to cross the wet street

he glances at the traffic,

his eyes glowing zeros,

neon and depthless

before they dim

to a green of sea-worn glass

as he looks the other way.

     (The New Yorker)

OK.  that’s a picture of a dog like Giacometti’s.  Now I will offer another poem, this time by Robert Wallace, and this time precisely about Giacometti’s dog (that’s the name of the poem), which shifts our focus at the end:

                Lopes in bronze:

                  scruffy,

                     thin.   In

                The Museum of Modern Art

                  head

                      down, neck long as sadness

                lowering to hanging ears

                  –he’s eyeless –

                       that hear

                nothing, and the sausage

                   muzzle

                        that leads him as

                surely as eyes:

                    he might

                        be

                dead, dried webs or clots of flesh

                    and fur

                        on the thin, long bones – but

                isn’t, obviously

                    is obviously

       travelling intent on his

                own aim:  legs

                     lofting

                        with a gaiety the dead aren’t known

                for.  Going

                     onward in one place,

                        he doesn’t so much ignore

                as not recognize

                      the well-

                         dressed Sunday hun-

                dreds who passing, pausing make

                       his bronze

                          road

                move.  Why

                       do they come to admire

                           him?

                They wouldn’t care for real dogs

                       less raggy

                           than he

                Is.  It’s his tragic

                      insouciance

                           bugs them? or is

                it that art can make us

                      cherish

                         anything – this command

                of shaping and abutting space - -

                      that makes us love

                          even mutts,

                even the world, accept

                       even

                           the starry wheels by which we’re hurled

                toward death, having

                      the rocks and wind

                           for comrades?

                It’s not this starved hound,

                       but Giacometti seeing

                           him we see.

                We’ll stand in line all day

                       to see <anyone>

                           love anything enough.

Now we are speaking of passion.

That love, that focused, affectionate, active engagement with the materials of his life and of his mind, with the bronze and with the image he holds of the dog, that engagement is a passion whose model bespeaks a more general awakeness, an involvement in life that is available to us each.

“To him whose elastic and vigorous thought keeps pace with the sun,” said Thoreau, “the day is a perpetual morning.  It matters not what the clocks say or the attitudes and labors of <women and>

men.  Morning is when I am awake and there is a dawn in me.”

Marvelous!  Morning has broken, indeed, but only if we are awake to its dawning, said Thoreau: but if we are awake, it our senses are opened, our vitality stirred, if the world has engaged our attention, our love and our energy, if our lives are “passioned,” as the verb used to be, passioned by life itself, then morning breaks ever for there is dawn in us.

But were Thoreau’s words the mere boasting of youth, a young man’s taunting celebration of a vigor that characterizes our earlier years, repeated by me first when I was not yet thirty-five. The vigor of youth, the wisdom of age, a hundred liturgical pieces in every tradition speak of and praise, as though youth were daft and maturity enfeebled.

But even granting time’s toll on the body, the passion of which I speak knows no such season, it stirs the old at least as well as the young.  This is from Clarke Wells:

                “I suppose I should write this week something institutional or churchly or ethical, but my heart

                isn’t in it.  Where my heart is these days is a very personal thing between me and God.  Or who-

                ever it is that turns the seasons and lays the sun across the trees with that sudden and terrible

                beauty.

                “You know, I’ve been taught all my life to believe that growing up meant to become less

                vulnerable, that getting overwhelmed by life is what happens when you are young, that the

                charge of visions, feeling, and nameless longing gradually spends itself in the process of

                maturing, that life as we get older is less tearing, not as confusing, ecstatic, strange.

                “Well, I’m here to testify to the opposite.  And to warn you and others…about what life may

                have in store.  I was driving back from Lowell State University yesterday afternoon on some

                country roads, and I simply had to stop the car near a stone fence and go through it for an

                hour.

                “It had nothing to do with practical matters or politics or theology or vocation or marriage

                or my maturity or immaturity.  It had to do with autumn trees against the blue and shattered

                light and where I am with living.  I report it to you on the chance that you’re as odd as I – that

                it all gets more intense, not less – so that if you have to go through the same thing, like stopping

                your car for an hour, you’ll not feel crazy at your age being torn apart that way.”

One has only to listen to recordings of the cellist Pablo Casals when he was in his 80’s as engaged, as alert, as awake as ever; while even at thirty-four I spoke of looking back on younger years beclouded by concerns of self and identity and other meager distractions.

I certainly don’t feel a whole lot less clouded over now.  I suspect that at any given time many of us at our many different ages are in need of a touch of greater passion, of devotion, of enthusiasm, even a bit of what my dictionary calls “agitated vehemence.”

Now there are limits to such engagement.  Passion is not IT but only a part, albeit an important one. 

I like the way the poet Don Marquis has his cockroach hero archy describe the sides of the balancing act I would call us toward:

                                the lesson of the moth

                I was talking to a moth

                the other evening

                he was trying to break into

                an electric light bulb

                and fry himself on the wires

                why do you fellows

                pull this stunt I asked him

                because it is the conventional

                thing for moths or why

                if that had been an uncovered

                candle instead of an electric

                light bulb you would

                now be a small unsightly cinder

                have you no sense

                plenty of it he answered

                but at times we get tired

                of using it

                we get bored with the routine

                and crave beauty

                and excitement

                fire is beautiful

                and we know that if we get

                too close it will kill us

                but what does that matter

                it is better be happy

                for a moment

                and burned up with beauty

                than to live a long time

                and be bored all the while

                so we wad all our life up

                into one little roll

                and then we shoot the roll

                that is what life is for

                it is better to be a part of beauty

                for one instant and then cease to

                exist than to exist forever

                and never be a part of beauty

                our attitude toward life

                is come easy go easy

                we are like human beings

                used to be before they became

                too civilized to enjoy themselves

                and before I could argue him

                out of his philosophy

                he went and immolated himself

                on a patent cigar lighter

                I do not agree with him

                myself I would rather have

                half the happiness and twice

                the longevity

                but at the same time I wish

                there was some thing I wanted

                as badly as he wanted to fry himself

Given excesses of drug use and violence, I think we have had enough flying into cigar lighters to avoid the boredom of only life.  There are limits.  But archy’s feeling at the end is mine, too, and I want and need to find ways of giving sway to passion’s enlivening spirit, that our alternative to self-immolation not be equally destructive, trivial chores and mediocre challenges and a day-to-dayness that numbs us on our passage to the grave.  “Just as the hand, held before the eyes, can hide the tallest mountain,” says the wisdom of the Hasidim, “so the routine of everyday life can help us from seeing the vast radiance and the secret wonders that fill the world.”

The water metaphor stays with me from Thaddeus Clark.

                (“Life and no moment of it can any more be seized and held than the flow of

                water which streams from an open faucet.  One can only drink and drink deeply

                and continue to drink.” Quoted by Laurel Hallman, “Salvation”)

Of course, it also suggests that any too-consuming thirst for life is going to have us gasping and gagging.  We have to rest, like a person drinking from a faucet, we have to catch our breath.  But still, the water flows and flows, and for all of us the well will run dry.  Our hope and our task and our glory is to drink fully and deeply of life as it flows.

And I say that even knowing that at times the taste is bitter at best.  The word itself knows this.  “Passion” derives of all things from the Latin word for suffering, and it still means that in one sense, as in the passion of the martyrs or of Jesus.  The passion flower is called that not for romantic reasons but because its petals reminded someone of Jesus on the cross.  “Passion” contains in itself etymologically

and as a secondary meaning an awareness of the suffering and pain that passion can involve, and redeem.

I don’t know why I’m so quotey today.  Every now and then it happens, usually with a subject like this one that I have been turning over for years and tossing things into a folder somewhere, anticipating an eventual morning.

I have quotations that are mystic, like this from Annie Dillard:  “Everywhere I look I see fire:  that which isn’t flint is tinder, and the whole world sparks and flames.”  (Which reminds me, although I don’t have the quotation, of a literary contribution, from Brendan Behan, who said about the same thing – as I recall, that one is a fool who cannot see that all the world is on fire.)

And I have quotations psychoanalytic.  This is from Freud:   “The difference between nervous health and nervous illness (neurosis) is narrowed down to a practical distinction, and is determined by a practical result – how far the person concerned remains capable of a sufficient degree of capacity for enjoyment and active achievement in life.  The difference can probably be traced back to the proportion of energy which has remained free relative to that of the energy that has been bound by repression…”

Energy, enjoyment, active achievement – elements, then, of the healthy life as well as of the religious life. 

I even have quotations theological, and with that we come full circle, back to an artist – not surprisingly, to Vincent Van Gogh:  “You must love with a high and intense determination,” he said, “with your will and your intellect, and seek always to deepen, expand and improve your knowledge, for that way lies God.  If a <person> loves Rembrandt profoundly, then in his heart of hearts he knows he knows God.”

If a person loves Rembrandt, or bronze and the image of a dog, or nature, or the progress of the humankind, or excellence, or beauty, or leading the minds of youth to goodness or knowledge, or trading honorably and well in the marketplace of goods or services or ideas – if a woman, if a man, love deeply and fully some good thing, some decent aim, some ennobling process – if her life, if his life be touched with passion, just so much is that person blessed.

May life’s entrancing challenges and joys arrest our wandering attention, and invest our lives with such love, such engagement, such passion.  Amen.

The Homily at the First Parish in Wayland, Mass.

At a Multigenerational Service

On January 15, 2012

By the Rev. Ken Sawyer

       Does anyone here dream when they sleep at night or when they fall asleep because the sermon is too long and boring?

       Everybody dreams. Some people dream in color, some people don’t. People have been known to come up with inventions or solutions to problems they were working on … in dreams.

       Some dreams are things we wish would happen, just like it said in the song [“A Dream Is a Wish Your Heart Makes”]. But maybe not as many as we would like. It’s not like we go to sleep and every time we enter a world where everything is beautiful and fair and delightful.

       At least that is not the way it for me. Most people at least sometimes have dreams that are scary or sad. I hope you don’t have many of them – in fact, I hope you do not have any. I do not have many. No, what I sometimes have are dreams in which I am lost or otherwise frustrated, which is not a wish my heart makes.

        But here’s the thing: Dream can also mean a wish the heart makes when we are wide awake, when we picture something we would like to see happen, like a world that is beautiful and fair for everyone everywhere.

       That is the kind of dream Martin Luther King was talking about. Did he actually dream it one night in his sleep? Probably not. But he could dream it in a sermon or in a speech, and there he was, in Washington, D.C., talking to hundreds of thousands of people, who were there because they wanted freedom and justice for everyone in America, and he was saying the words on the papers in front of him, words approved by the people who organized that big rally, because they wanted to know in advance what everyone was going to say, and the words on the paper were good, not very exciting, but good.

       The big crowd applauded now and then, and one time you can hear, they applauded more than before, and not long after that a woman on stage with Dr. King says, “Tell them about the dream, Martin,” because she had heard him do that before in other places, at churches and other rallies.

       And off he went, not reading any more but sharing this vision of how things should be, with that great repeated phrase, “I have a dream,” that both ends one part of the vision and rolls into the next one, carrying the energy and vision along.

       I thought of calling this homily, “Do Dreams Just Happen?” Well, when it comes to dreams we have when we’re fast asleep, there are people who spend a lot of time studying and thinking and arguing about why anyone has the dreams they do.

        But dreams like Dr. King’s are created, and they get handed down. King’s dream explicitly echoes dreams from the Bible and from our national history, visions of life and of our country people before us created.

       I thank my colleague Victor Carpenter for a quote by the filmmaker Henry Hampton, who produced the television documentary “Eyes on the Prize” about the civil rights movement in America. Hampton said, “When you dream of something, you can begin to take it upon yourself, make it yours, change it. But you have to dream it first.” Like the dream of making that documentary, Victor points out, adding Hampton’s words that a dream is “thinking of the world as you really would have it. I don’t mean wish it. I mean dream it.”

       It is like that for any of us. There are dream we have when we’re fast asleep, but then there are dreams we make for ourselves, what we set ourselves to accomplish. You can read more about it in Kevin’s sermon on will power from two weeks ago. But Hampton says, before you can even draw on your resources of resolve you need the dream – more than a hope, a dream, just this side of an expectation, and definitely a challenge.

       Just last week I read that the psychologist John Norcross said that “Contrary to widespread public opinion, a considerable proportion of New Year resolvers do succeed…. You are 10 times more likely to change by making a New Year’s resolution compared to non-resolvers with the identical goals and comparable motivation to change.”

       It counts for something that at the outset the country resolved that “all people have certain inalienable rights, including life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” We made that resolution, and from the beginning, with slavery, we failed, and again in other ways thereafter, and in some ways still. But the dream has persevered, not just the hope, but the dream of country we seek to be.

       Likewise as a congregation – and I refrain from noting at any length the dreams included in our current capital campaign, even if they are perfect illustrations – right off, when first we gathered in 1640, the act of creation was the signing of a covenant, the whole Puritan venture was inspired by a dream of the society they would create.

       Parts of the dream have changed, but not all. And we go on nourishing in each other a dream for ourselves and society. Henry Hampton, who since has died, accused his fellow UUs of wishing more than we dream when it comes to achieving peace and justice and freedom.

       Maybe so, but we keep trying. And for us, and the country, it helps to be reminded of our dreams, like the one so powerfully put forth by the Rev. Dr. King.

The Sermon at the First Parish in Wayland, Massachusetts

By the Rev. Ken Sawyer

On January 8, 2012

Here we are at the start of another calendar year, and an exciting one it will be here at First Parish. I do hope everyone has read the latest church newsletter, called The Unitarian, prepared by Nan Jahnke, and a beautiful thing it is to behold on screen, but either on screen or in printed form it is also just chock full of activities to look forward to.

There are Walden Forums coming up, and the auction, one of my favorite occasions for the fun it affords, there are special services planned for the spring, including another music Sunday with the return of Carmina Burana (talk about exciting), canvass afternoon and evening talent shows and dinners, the Rummage Sale, museum visits, groups of many sorts, more Interfaith Hospitality Network housing, I could go on and on, and through it all our capital campaign, For All The Ages, culminating in a celebration of its success.

Most of you know, because you read your mail or heard it by word of mouth, that about that time, toward the end of the church year, I will be saying a goodbye to First Parish, having finished my thirty-eighth year as your twenty-ninth minister.

For me, and I know for many of you, it will be a sad occasion. But as it happens, life goes on, and eventually a person turns sixty-eight, as I will this July, and at the end of that month I’ll be gone, not from town, but from this congregation I dearly love. 

I am sorry I did not say in my letter, but given some of the response I have received I will say now that my decision was not based on my illness. Most of you know I have prostate cancer. I don’t think ministers should burden parishioners with details of their personal health, but I know there has been concern that eventually I will need further treatment following surgery last summer. I suppose an illness like that does make one more aware of life’s finitude, and weighs on the side of having time enough to enjoy life in other ways before it ‘s all over. But a half year after the operation what cancer remains has been pleasingly indolent, it’s just wait and watch for now.  

It is uncommonly immodest of me to repeat, but it has been nice to hear not just that people appreciate my efforts over the years, but that I will be leaving, as one of you put it, at the top of my game. This is good, because I am looking forward to a fun and exciting and spiritually rewarding half year ahead.

But as Michael Stipe, lead singer of the group R.E.M. said when the group broke up this past September, after only thirty-one years (ha!), “A wise man once said, ‘The skill in attending a party is knowing when it’s time to leave.’” And I get to leave knowing things are going so well – and that they will continue to, and more so, or at least in interesting new ways, along with all the ways life here will continue.

I like the way Ann Gordon put it once. She likened First Parish to a big, strong, healthy ship – and said while the crew may change now and then, First Parish sails on smoothly.

And while I know it may take a while to see the transition as a good thing – and please know, I know some people may have been looking forward to it – it will be good in many ways, ways that excite me on your behalf. It has been pointed out the asset having Kevin Tarsa as intern this year is in showing again, as in years before, how good the people are preparing for our ministry along with those already experienced at it, like our three second ministers in the last twenty years.

And Lisa Maria will still be here as the other fulltime person, with her abundant energy, skill, fresh perspectives, and personality. She will be joined by an interim minister, and a search process will begin to find your next settled minister, your thirty-second. There is a process for this in place, it is something the UUA has been doing through the ages and they know how to help. Not to worry, things will go fine, and I trust you will return from the summer as glad as ever to see each other and your new minister and the other members of the great staff you have.    

I have a second reading, one I have been saving for this occasion since 1996 when a colleague of mine, Ed Lane, wrote it for the congregation he was serving, at the end of a long career, as the year began in which he would be retiring. He wrote,

“I grieve the loss of Calvin and Hobbs. Bill Waterson closed down my favorite comic strip on December 31. We had been warned several weeks ago that it was going to happen, but, still, I went out to pick up my Sunday Globe hoping to find a last-minute reprieve, that Waterson had changed his mind, that the strip was going to continue.

“No such luck, of course. The last strip marked the end of the year and the new beginning of 1996. Calvin and Hobbs are out with their toboggan. Calvin says: ‘Wow, it really snowed last night!’ May I add, this was back when it used to snow. ‘Isn’t it wonderful!’ Hobbes: ‘Everything familiar has disappeared! The world looks brand-new!’ Calvin: ‘A new year … a fresh, clean start!’ Hobbes: ‘It’s like having a big white sheet of paper to draw on!’ Calvin: ‘A day full of possibilities! It’s a magic world, Hobbes, ol’ buddy … Let’s go exploring!’ as on their sled they are heading off the comic strip page and into the woods.

“I was almost in tears. I want to frame that last strip and drape it in black. Calvin and Hobbes – I’ve long wondered if they were named after the sixteenth-century theologian, John Calvin, and the seventeenth-century philosopher, Thomas Hobbes – have long been my philosophical and theological mentors. Calvin, with his direct but devious no nonsense way of getting right to the issue at hand and sure he is always right – not unlike John Calvin; Hobbs, with his reflective empiricism, finding the holes in Calvin’s logic – not unlike Thomas Hobbes.

“The last words of the strip, ‘Let’s go exploring!’ give us a profound benediction – words for a new year, words of endings and beginnings. I think of them in the context of the excitement of my retirement and of your transition to a life with a new minister, both of which are endings and beginnings. As we grieve the ending let us celebrate our time together, but most of all let us look ahead. ‘Let’s go exploring!’”

But that is the basic message of many a New Year homily or sermon, even at the start of a year that does not have one big change already built in. I think that is the minister’s assignment, to use the occasion of the new year dawning to generate enthusiasm for what things may lie ahead, while acknowledging that not all of it will be easy or good.

I went back and looked over how I handled that assignment in days of yore, when I did (and I did not always), and I noticed several things. First, how often I refer to the current time, whatever time it was, as one particular trying on the spirit. “As we meet in this chilly, troubled time,” that sort of thing. Reading on you find what we were troubled by that year, like the hostages in Iran.

Second, I make a really big deal about the ordeal that winter is, or was at the time. It is as though I never noticed the skiers for whom winter was the payoff of the year. And I like winter myself, even if I once quoted Thoreau, who said, “Is not January the hardest month to get through? When you have weathered that, you get into the gulf stream of winter, nearer the shores of spring.” [2/2/54]

Twice I developed January as a theme, comparing the harshness of the month and the struggles we sometimes have “within our personal lives at times, the Januarys of our lives, those blocks of time that must be endured and lived through somehow, around which there are no shortcuts, which simply arrive to sit upon our days in their lugubrious, cumbersome way, when it seems hard to believe that February will ever come, and knowing that February is no better, only that much closer to March and maybe by then the drift will be carrying us into a new spring.”  [1/4/76]

And yet every time the message is ultimately one of hope and faith and expectation. Even Thoreau, in another winter, in another mood, wrote, “I love the winter, with its imprisonment and its cold, for it compels the prisoner to try new fields and resources.” [12/5/56] And you don’t need to stay imprisoned indoors, though you may, but either way, winter or not, and in the many months after, we are free to find new fields and resources, to go exploring.

Because, as I said on yet another early January occasion, “life goes on unfolding, revelation is not sealed, prospects open up again and again, new challenges, new promise, love yet fresh, peace still possible, hope alluring still.” [1/6/91]

It has been said that every minister has one sermon that they preach over and over in different ways. I think this is nonsense. But I concede that there are themes that persevere, which is, incidentally, one of the reasons I am excited about your having someone new as your regular preacher with different themes than you have been hearing the last thirty-seven and a half years.

Still, it is doubtful you will escape the message of hope and expectancy despite life’s frustrations, failures, pain and loss. It is what our religion does, as do many others. Our Unitarian Universalist take has been a particularly strong hopefulness about human possibility. Some of us are reading William Ellery Channing, founding father of American Unitarianism, as it were. He thinks there are no bounds on human improvement, to the point of the perfection Jesus achieved. So we have never lacked for optimism, though most of us have more modest aspirations. 

New Years can be a time for affirming those aspirations anew — as Kevin discussed in his sermon last week, which you can read on line — as well as a spirit of hope and fresh resolve. Which leads to my final points.

Two years ago I attended a conference on how to use the last years of one’s ministry well. One person was there with only months to go, one was looking ahead ten years. I was not sure.

I learned some things. One exercise was to pair off and tell a colleague what our normal leaving style is, just everyday. I knew the answer for me, because I am aware that there are people who say, I’ll be leaving now, which means a process has begun that will lead to their driving away in about twenty minutes, whereas when I say I’m leaving, I am up and gone, ordinarily. But that will not work here. It was recommended no more than a year’s notice, but more than a few months. Seven months sounds about right, especially since attention at the start of the year needed to be on the new staff and the capital campaign, and by now the Parish Committee needs to start working on the transition.  (By the way, my colleague said he was the person you had to make leave the party so the hosts could go to bed. I heard that he has given his church three years notice.)

But the main thing I took from the conference was the importance of being intentional about the use of one’s time and efforts, discerning what is worth attending to and what can be ignored. This is always a good idea, but it helps when one knows the time involved is limited, in a fairly immediate way. One line was, “Live so as not to later hold any sense of, ‘If only I had….’” Obviously this applies to others than ministers nearing the ends of their careers.

To help us focus on what those things might be that we would be sure to try to accomplish, we made lists, year by year. I have that list. Just making it helped. For one thing, you can see that not everything can fit. Of the things on that list, I have done some. But not all, because other things happened; that’s just how life is. It’s good to focus on what matters and plan ahead, and necessary to alter the plan as circumstances change.

As I have said one way or another several times in the last twenty minutes, such is life. None of us gets to find it nice to be a certain age and decide to remain there, eternally thirty-nine. People we like and count on change, and so do we. But some things go on, and this congregation is one. The new minister will assuredly feel as lucky as I to serve a congregation so vital and able and so fond of each other and of the religious community that lives here.

 So, in the spirit of Janus, as we pass through the door of the new year and then the gate of a new ministry, I hope you all have happy things you can look back on, and lots and lots of happy things to look forward to.*

*The second half of this paragraph repeats the closing words of the earlier Time for All Ages, which talked about Janus.

Sermon by Kevin Tarsa, 2011-12 ministerial intern at First Parish in Wayland

January 1, 2012

First Parish of Sudbury, MA

“Each January 1, millions of people drag themselves out of bed, full of hope, …resolved to eat less, exercise more, spend less money, work harder at the office, keep the home cleaner, and still miraculously have more time for romantic dinners and long walks on the beach (Willpower 38).” Sound familiar, those moments of resolve?

“By February 1, [millions of those same people are] embarrassed to even look at [their] list (38).” Also sound familiar? It does to me!

Those observations were made by Roy Baumeister, a social psychologist and John Tierney, a New York Times science writer, in their book, Willpower: Rediscovering The Greatest Human Strength. I admit I am often one of those millions of people with wonderful, well-intentioned resolutions – to get up earlier, eat fewer sweets, to meditate every day - one of the millions who starts out well, only to fizzle out a few weeks or even days later.

As Benjamin Franklin wrote in Poor Richard’s Almanac:

“Tis easy to frame a good bold resolution;

But hard is the Task that concerns execution.”

So a radio interview with Baumeister and Tierney about Willpower caught my attention. Perhaps they had information that could help me stick to my resolutions or at least explain why I have such a hard time sticking to them. And they did have some  information!

Drawing on a variety of studies, Baumeister and Tierney claim

that at any given moment each of us has “a finite amount of willpower that becomes depleted as we use it,” and that we each have just one stock of willpower to use for all situations (35).

So…at your family holiday gathering as you are waiting for the big meal, you use the same willpower to resist eating those chocolate truffles in the bowl right next to you, as you use to hold your tongue as your brother-in-law spouts his political views. It’s the same supply of willpower getting depleted with each effort, leaving less willpower for the next.

But Baumeister and Tierney say that there is another factor at work here, a factor connected to those chocolate truffles. They say that the amount of willpower available to you depends upon the amount of glucose in your system. Exerting willpower uses and depletes glucose, they claim. (Actually, it depletes the neurotransmitters made from glucose.) “No glucose. [No transmitters.] No willpower (49).” And the more willpower you use, the more you are likely to crave sweet things to get that glucose level back up.

Well, those concepts right there would certainly help explain my grocery shopping experiences! If I shop when I’m hungry, everything looks extra delicious just when my willpower is at its lowest because my glucose is low. And it’s always driven me crazy that even when I am not hungry, I can go through the entire store saying “no” - No, that  is too expensive. No, that isn’t healthy for me. No, I don’t really need that right now - only to put several unnecessary, expensive and/or unhealthy items in my cart in the last two minutes, just before I head to the checkout counter. After all that saying “no,” why did I cave in at the very end?! Because by the time I get through the store, my willpower is totally used up. (Hanging by a thread, like the rope in the photo on our order of service cover.) That’s exactly why they place racks of candy at the check out counter! They call it a “point of purchase” sale, meant to tempt our impulsive side. More like a low-willpower purchase, I say.

Perhaps you can identify with that shopping scenario, if not around food, maybe around books, or clothing, or sporting gear or the thing that tempts you. And perhaps you too have caved in after holding your ground for so long in a conversation, or made a poor decision while you were hungry. Perhaps you too believe Baumeister and Tierney when they say, “Don’t trust the glucose-deprived brain for anything important.”

But before you reach for a candy bar to raise your glucose levels and fortify your willpower,  you should know that Baumeister and Tierney say it’s better to “go for the slow [and steady] burn,” rather than a sudden spike in your blood sugar level which will crash afterward and leave you in worse shape than when you started (58). Eat foods with a low glycemic index, they suggest, in other words eat foods that don’t raise your blood sugar level too quickly, except in emergencies, when, for example, a small raspberry lifesaver might help you stave off a sudden craving for a cigarette, or keep you from making a comment you will later regret.

As you might expect, this idea of a glucose/willpower connection and the notion that our willpower is limited have drawn a great deal of attention and some criticism. There are researchers who argue that willpower is not limited – that it’s limited only when you believe that it is. Willpower is in your head, they argue, not in your diet. It’s your expectation that matters.

My own experience tells me that both thought patterns and biology are relevant to willpower – and intertwined. I’ve been playing with my eating patterns and paying attention to the strength of my willpower as I’ve been working on this sermon this. I had lots of holiday sweets around, but tried to eat foods that wouldn’t raise my blood sugar level too quickly – unless I was getting very tired of writing, and wanted to make one final short push for the day, at which point I turned to those Christmas cookies for help. And help they did…for a short while.

The book, Willpower, is fascinating and if you are at all intrigued I encourage you to read it. While I learned many things, to my surprise, what hearing the interview and reading the book have me thinking about most is the connection between willpower and religion, between willpower and religious community.

Baumeister and Tierney write that “We tend to think of willpower as a force for personal improvement, but…. will-power is [more] about getting along with others.” It evolved in our ancestors to help them get along with the rest of the clan, and it still serves that purpose. It “enables us to …override impulses that are based on our short-term [self-interests] (163). People with stronger willpower are more altruistic. They are more likely to donate to charity, to do volunteer work, and to offer their own homes as shelter to someone with no place to go (260).” As Baumeister and Tierney put it, “inner discipline …leads to outer kindness.” Religion, Baumeister and Tierney point out, remains one of the most common and effective strategies for redirecting people away from selfish behavior, and strengthening self-control.

Now, in spite of the fact that there are plenty of religious people (some, very imfamous ones) who appear to have little or no self-control, I very much believe that religion’s purpose is to shape our behavior, to shape our behavior toward our personal good and the common good at the same time. I had never thought of religion explicitly in terms of strengthening self-control, but of course, at its best, that is what religion does, even liberal religion wherein people sometimes celebrate self-freedom more readily than self-control. (Me included.)

Baumeister and Tierney believe that religion strengthens self-control in two key ways: by building willpower and by improving monitoring.

Willpower is “like a muscle,” they write, “[it] becomes fatigued [if you use it too much] (yes) but you can strengthen that muscle over time through exercise (1).” A stronger willpower muscle has greater stamina. It tires more slowly. Religion helps us exercise our willpower muscle, and it does this any time it asks of us self-control, any time it asks us to do the more difficult thing rather than the easy thing.

This can be in large ways, like turning the other cheek or loving your enemy, but it can also be in smaller ways, like coming to church every week, expressing gratitude before each meal, … Meditating faithfully, praying the rosary, … repeating Hindu mantras, fasting during Ramadan, eating only kosher food, holding specific prayer poses (180)… Studies show that something as simple as getting yourself to sit up tall for two weeks instead of slouching can increase your willpower in all areas of your life.

If there is only one stash of willpower that we use for everything, then exercising self-control anywhere in our life strengthens it for use everywhere. The added value of a spiritual discipline is that it can lift up and reinforce a religion’s highest values while it strengthens willpower, linking values and willpower in a person’s heart and mind. I have always valued spiritual practices, and am now even more inspired to encourage people to pursue strong spiritual disciplines in our UU congregations, especially spiritual disciplines practiced with others…

because the other key effect of religion, Baumeister and Tierney claim, is to improve monitoring. I’ll explain.

Researchers trying to understand self-awareness found a link between self-awareness and self-control. They discovered that when people were placed in front of a mirror, or were told that they were being filmed, they consistently changed their behavior. They worked harder at tasks, they better resisted temptations, and their actions were more consistent with their inner values (113).

Hmmmm….makes me want to put more mirrors around the house.

To talk about monitoring, Baumeister and Tierney look at Dieting. Appropriate this morning since losing weight it the most popular New Year’s resolution. They give three weight-loss dieting rules:

1. Never go on a diet. (nice, huh?)

2. Never vow to give up chocolate or any other food (for weight-

loss purposes).

3. Whether you’re [thinking of yourself or others], never equate

being overweight with having weak willpower (215).”

You can see the glucose dilemma for dieters:

If you try to eat less food or avoid some foods that you like in order to lose weight, that means 1) you won’t have much glucose in the first place, plus 2) each time you resist tempting food, you will deplete your glucose even more meaning that you will have less and less willpower to make wise decisions about eating. It’s a trap! Never go on a diet, they advise, but they do suggest, among other things, weighing yourself every day.

They observed that you can improve self-control by monitoring yourself frequently, whether that means looking at your weight on the scale each day, or looking at the size of your credit card balance each day. And they found that public monitoring improves self-control even more, a key to the success of Weight Watchers and Alcoholics Anonymous. We are better able to regulate our own behavior when we know that other people know how we are doing. It’s a positive use of peer pressure. You are more likely to keep your new years resolutions, if you make them in the presence of other people, especially a romantic partner, Baumeister and Tierney say (177).

For some religious people it’s not a human partner, but God who is the mirror, the outside monitor. God is watching, always, and so influencing behavior, often in powerful and positive ways (181). (Let me tell you, that is the story of my Catholic childhood! All those “bad” things I didn’t do because “God was watching.” And okay, some bad things I did anyway, probably while my glucose was low.) Like Weight Watchers and Alcoholics Anonymous religious communities can offer not only emotional support, but also helpful public monitoring, positive peer pressure when we know that someone else is paying attention and knows and cares about how we’re doing, about how well we’re living up to the values to which we aspire.

This concept has me very thoughtful, especially since some of us have experienced painfully intrusive social monitoring in religious communities, and so are wary. Whether we know it or not, our UU communities already act as mirrors, already offer public monitoring. We can’t help it, we’re human communities after all, and our norms and values are communicated and enforced in all kinds of ways, I just wonder whether we can make our social monitoring of each other more conscious and tie it more explicitly to the values we say we hold. In our largely “hands off” tradition, with our valuing of privacy and our reluctance to place too many demands, can we with gentleness and compassion, learn to hold each other helpfully accountable to what we say we believe is important?

Our covenants are a start. I wonder, can we offer each other a more conscious positive peer pressure to help each other, in Channing’s words, “to become what we praise,” what we value most highly. If Baumeister and Tierney are right, we can draw upon each other for public monitoring to strengthen our willpower and our well-being, making us better able to reach out to the benefit of others and the world.

Thinking more deeply about both spiritual disciplines and about public monitoring is on my list of things to do this year. One of many things on the list.

Baumeister and Tierney write that the problem with a list of new years resolutions is not our willpower, it’s the list! No one has enough willpower to accomplish the whole list, they say, at least not all at once. Early in the book they offer some very basic advice: Pick one clear goal at a time, they suggest, a goal that is lofty enough to inspire you onward. Keep it in sight, and figure out the very next tiny step that will take you in that direction. And then, even if the step seems too small to be of consequence, take that step. Now.

Thurman and Channing and Whyte have said this all already this morning, framed in personal terms, but know that you do not have to do this alone, that you and the members of your religious community can, and I believe ought to help each other do this every step of the way.

Help each other “keep fresh before [you] the moments of [your] high resolve, that in fair weather or in foul, in good times or in tempests…[you might] not forget that to which [your] life is committed (Thurman).”

“Start with your own question,” but let it be informed by other people and by our tradition every Sunday, every small group gathering, every religious education class, every meeting, every conversation.

The question at hand is -  to what is your life committed?

What is your highest resolve?

What do you praise, what do you value enough to want to become that?

“Start right now,

take a small step you can call your own…”

Start close in,

don’t take the second step or the third,

start with the first thing,

close in,

[perhaps] the step you don’t want to take (Whyte).”

Or maybe, in your heart, it’s the step you do want to take.

So may it be.

Works drawn upon and/or cited:

Baumeister, Roy F. and Tierney, John. Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength.  New York: Penguin Books, by Penguin Books, 2011. Print.

“Willpower: It’s in Your Head” by Greg Walton and Carol Dweck, November 26, 2011, New York Times Sunday Review.

Thurman - Reading #498 in Singing the Living Tradition

Thurman, Howard, and Anne S. Thurman. For the Inward Journey: The Writings of Howard Thurman. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984. Print.

“Start Close In” by David Whyte

Whyte, David. River Flow: New & Selected Poems, 1984-2007. Langley, Wash: Many Rivers Press, 2007. Print.

“Likeness to God” by William Ellery Channing

Discourse at the Ordination of the Rev. F.A. Farley, Providence, R.I., 1828

The Sermon at the First Parish in Wayland, Mass.

On December 4, 2011

By the Rev. Ken Sawyer

          This is a sermon about hospitality, about eating and drinking, about who belongs and who doesn’t, about our religion and inclusiveness, and about Jesus, now that we are into December.

          The title of this sermon, “Jesus’ Altar, The Table,” is an abbreviated form of a sentence by Adam Gopnik, writing in New Yorker magazine nineteen months ago: “The table is [Jesus’] altar in every sense.”

          I am grateful when a good writer like Gopnik takes on the assignment of letting us know what is up these days in the world of Jesus scholarship, a world of much activity. He notes that in just one month the prior year there were ten new books about Jesus. They will keep coming. Christianity keeps growing worldwide, and at its center there is Jesus, this man who probably lived once, who many think lives still as part of a three-part godhead, but about whom we know too little – really nothing for sure – and also too much, since the accounts we have present differing visions of Jesus’ life and taken together present what Gopnik describes as “a single figure who ‘projects’ two personae at the same time, or in close sequence, one dark and one dreamy….”     

          I am going to talk again about the dreamy side of the Jesus we meet in the Bible, just as Unitarians, Universalists, and UUs have done all along, but I concede that the other side is there. I led a monthly discussion group that read the synoptic gospels together – Mark, Mathew, and Luke – and several people were surprised to find the nasty Jesus along with nice Jesus, as Gopnik puts it, adding that “To a modern reader, the relaxed egalitarianism of the open road and the open table” – which we will get to in a few minutes – “can seem undermined by the other part of Jesus’ message, a violent and even vengeful prediction of a final judgment and a large-scale damnation. In Mark, Jesus is both a fierce apocalyptic prophet who is preaching the end of the world … and a wise philosophical teacher who professes love for his neighbor and supplies advice for living.”

          In Gopnik’s view, “That’s what a charismatic prophet is: someone whose aura of personal conviction manages to reconcile a hard doctrine with a humane manner,” and Gopnik is more than okay with that. He thinks that “This fixed, steady twoness at the heart of the Christian story” – “Paul’s divine Christ … and Jesus the wise rabbi” – “can’t be washed away by liberal hope…. Its intractability is part of the intoxication of belief…. The two go on, and their twoness is what distinguishes the faith and gives it its discursive dynamism” – “a song of children, stables, psalms, parables and peacemakers, on the one hand, a threnody of suffering, nails, wild dogs, and damnation and risen God, on the other.”     

          Rest assured that this year we will again go with the song of a child and a stable. We will leave out the slaughter of the innocents that is part of the story as Matthew tells it.       But back to that table Gopnik cites as Jesus’ altar, back to the Jesus we recognize and honor for other reasons than his harsh condemnations and apocalyptic fanaticism. Gopnik says that “What the amateur reader wants, given the thickets of uncertainty that surround [the subject], is … not so much a verdict on whether Jesus was nasty or nice as a sense of what, if anything, was new in his preaching.” Why did he attract followers, indeed disciples, and a cult form in his memory even after the end of history he predicted did not happen, and he himself was executed?   

          What Gopnik cites is a “wild gaiety about Jesus’ moral teachings [that is] fresh and strange even now. Is there a more miraculous scene in ancient literature than the one … where Jesus absent-mindedly writes on the ground while his fellow-Jews try to entrap him into approving the stoning of an adulteress, only to ask, wide-eyed, if it wouldn’t be a good idea for the honor of throwing the first stone to be given to the man in the mob who hasn’t sinned himself?”

          Gopnik notes that Jesus’ “brash, sidewise indifference to conventional ideas of goodness,” his “social radicalism [was] highly social… Jesus eats and drinks with whores and highwaymen, turns water into wine, and, finally, in one way or another, establishes a mystical union of a feast through its humble instruments of bread and wine.

          “The table is his altar in every sense.” As which point Gopnik turns to John Dominic Crossan, as I have myself. Crossan is a co-founder of the Jesus Seminar, that went through the New Testament and decided what things Jesus did say and do and what he probably or certainly didn’t. I once heard him give a lecture at the UUA General Assembly. He is probably our favorite Catholic priest.

          Crossan “makes a persuasive case,” thinks Gopnik, “that Jesus’ fressing [eating] was perhaps the most radical element in his life – that his table manners pointed the way to his heavenly morals. Crossan sees Jesus living within a Mediterranean Jewish peasant culture, a culture of clan and cohort, in which who eats with whom defines who stands where and why. So the way Jesus repeatedly violates the rules on eating, on ‘commensality,’ would have shocked his contemporaries. He dines with people of different social rank, which would have shocked most Romans, and with people of different tribal allegiance, which would have shocked most Jews.”

          Another Catholic priest, Father Tommy Lane, whom I found on line, wrote that “a beautiful theme,” especially in the gospel of Luke, is “Jesus breaking down barriers between people…. The scribes and Pharisees and customs of society had erected barriers between people but Jesus broke down those barriers. He wanted to reveal the love of God to all people and show that God loves them equally. Therefore Jesus did not pay heed to social taboos or the restrictions of society or religion of his time but he broke down barriers between God and sinners, tax collectors, Samaritans and women” – and Lane offers abundant examples in every case.

          (By the way, Lane says the tax collectors we read of in the Bible were really toll collectors. And fressing? One of you, who knows German, told me it’s from the German “fressen” [it’s also from the Yiddish “fresn”], and it means to eat but usually refers to an animal. So for a person, it means to eat copiously, ravenously, gluttonously, or without restraint, depending on which source you consult, Gopnik’s point being “the sharpest opposition in the Gospels … Crossan points out … is between John [the Baptist,] John the Faster and Jesus the Feaster.”)

          Jesus’ universalist spirit had its limitations. On the one hand, he would eat with social outcasts and treat the marginalized as stars in his stories; but on the other hand, oh the things he had to say about the pious and the wealthy.  

          Our Universalist congregations in the earliest days of that movement in America, deeply Christian every one, were more inclusive still, attracting the rich, the poor, and the many in between. This was back in the first half of the nineteenth century. 

          “…George Rogers, who traveled thousands of miles as an itinerate Universalist preacher in the 1820s and 1830s, described his experiences at Universalist gatherings. Once, between worship services, the congregation gathered at a schoolhouse where provisions were ‘spread out on a common table, to which, without respect to rank, or condition, or opinions all that would come might come, and partake freely, without money and without price…. All were on a parity, all distinctions of caste were lost sight of; all individualities were merged in the mass; and as one family all rejoiced together in a common and glorious hope.’”

          This account is from a book by my colleague Mark Harris, our minister in Watertown, “Elite,” sub-titled “Uncovering Classism in Unitarian Universalist History,” of which there was quite a bit in Unitarianism from the beginning, the movement attracting mostly people of greater means and education than average, including most people in the upper classes in Boston.

          “By the end of the nineteenth century Unitarians and Universalists were more and more alike.” But early on, Mark writes, “Many Universalists from the geographic area I call home [Orange, Mass.] were … converts from the Baptist faith who were farmers and smaller property owners…. Universalists came from all walks of economic life…. Class mixture was common among the Universalist faithful.””

          They had a theology to go with it, that “common and glorious hope” that George Rogers referred to, universal salvation, in heaven and maybe here on earth. Mark writes, “What is perhaps most startling about these early Universalists … is the understanding that the embrace of God is meant for all humanity. This contrasts sharply with the cultural underpinnings that associate salvation with individual achievement and success. Early Universalism emphasized that there is a moral community of all people in the Godhead. Central to the Universalist gospel is an egalitarian, classless idea of salvation.”

          Mark is part of a ministers’ study group I belong to, and we read and discussed his book, along with another informative but also disturbing book about UU history, Darkening the Doorways: Black Trailblazers and Missed Opportunities in Unitarian Universalism, essays collected by Mark Morrison-Reed, a black UU minister and author of the earlier book, Black Pioneers in a White Denomination.

          I do not want to dwell on the negative episodes both Marks document, times when we were not the welcoming, inclusive people we want to be because of prejudice regarding class or race. There are examples of indifference and failure of support and some cases of shockingly coarse discrimination. The group was particularly and understandably disturbed by Mark Harris’ account of Unitarians who supported eugenics in the first part of the twentieth century.

          But there are heartening stories as well, and heroes. Here is how Mark Morrison Reed puts it:

            “The story told by the biographies, memoirs, documents, and essays gathered here is painful but not befuddling.  On the one hand, it is a tale of systemic paternalism and prejudice-induced failure of vision, of squandered opportunities, and of good intentions turned into tragedy more often than triumph. On the other hand, it is a tale of idealism, courage, intrepid allies, dogged determination, and steadfast loyalty in the face of rejection. This exploration of the tainted reality behind Unitarian Universalism’s espoused liberalism is heart-wrenching but leads to an important truth: The premise that liberal religion has not and cannot attract African Americans is false.

            “The most obvious theme is that, feeling the pull of religious freedom, [some black] individuals were drawn to liberal religion and chose a faith community that was white in every way and often – despite its espoused humanitarian values – racially bigoted…. That they chose our faith traditions as their religious home should fill us with pride; that they suffered the indignities they did, at the hands of our spiritual ancestors, will fill us with shame. What I learned as I divined and despaired over the fate of these black trailblazers is that there will be other opportunities: New women and men will come forward. African Americans will be drawn to liberal religion as they were in the past.  Our challenge today is to develop a culturally inclusive vision that is grand and hopeful enough to inspire, and a way of being that is open and welcoming to all races and cultures: Asian, Native American, Hispanic, and those withy roots in Africa. As we build in the present for the future we dream of, the only reliable foundation is one that honestly acknowledges, grieves, and celebrates the past; otherwise, we will remain captive to beliefs and behaviors that have not served liberal religion well.”  

          Mark Harris also has hopes for the future, believing that “at heart Unitarian Universalists long to have a faith that learns from all kinds of people, rich and poor. I never want to feel that there is anyone, including myself, who does not belong.” He thinks back fondly on those to those early years of Universalism. “…Demographically and socially Universalists actually lived out the values expressed in their faith of freedom and equality. A diversity of classes participated, and many members, especially before 1850, saw a classless vision of both heaven and earth. Universalist congregations welcomed both rich and poor, businessman and seamstress alike.

          “The elite Unitarians found the actual embodiment of the tenets of their democratic faith much more difficult, and this remains a challenge to Unitarian Universalists today. How do we live out a faith where all are truly welcome? Who is our message for?

            “When John Murray [founder of American Universalism] was preaching in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York in 1773, he reported, ‘All my friends were to be found among every class of people, from the highest to the most humble.’ All classes understood him. How can we, like one of our founders, learn to make friends among all classes…?”

            May everyone feel welcome at our table.    

Sermon by Kevin Tarsa, ministerial intern

First Parish in Wayland

November 27, 2011

Reading: “What Song” by Victoria Safford

http://www.uuworld.org/2003/03/calltoworship.html

Sermon:

If such a universe existed and you noticed it, what would you do?

By the way, that’s a true story – about the universe.

I know, it sounds crazy, but apparently such a universe does exist. 

Noticing it? Now that sometimes requires a reminder, at least it does for me.

It’s Thanksgiving weekend, and of course gratitude is the topic du jour, our annual reminder to pay attention to all that we have in our lives and in this extraordinary universe. The sermon title “got gratitude?” is inspired by the “got milk?” advertisements produced, originally, by the California Milk Processor Board. In print form, the ads show famous, attractive people sporting milk mustaches, and the ads portray milk as wholesome and vital for every health-desiring American. For some reason the ads fail to mention lactose intolerance.

When I told someone that I was planning to preach on gratitude today, the person said, “That’s a stupid subject!” I know, it is easy to get too sweet about gratitude, and I’ll do my best to stay on this side of that line. I’ve long thought of gratitude as a simple staple in our diet, one of those unassuming but important items to include in our meals every day, something we don’t want to be without.

You may remember the very first “got milk?” television ad:

A history buff who is surrounded by Alexander Hamilton memorabilia gets a radio quiz call and will win $10,000 if he can name Hamilton’s duel opponent. He’s surrounded by the answer but he has just stuffed a sticky peanut butter sandwich in his mouth and he can’t get the answer out clearly. He reaches for his carton of milk to come to the rescue, but it’s empty! He cries out in anguish, and time runs out. Then, on a black screen, the words appear and a voice asks, “got milk?”

“got gratitude?”

It’s not a fancy dish to place on a feast table, but gratitude is sustaining and nourishing in my experience. It’s good for us, in whatever form we can digest it, good for strong psychological, emotional and spiritual health, something many of us know from experience, and an understanding supported by a growing body of research.

To cite probably the most often-cited study: In 2003 researchers Robert Emmons and Mike McCullough, who study forgiveness as well as gratitude, reported that people in their studies who kept a daily diary of things for which they were grateful, increased their levels of happiness and life satisfaction within just two weeks. They were less depressive, less envious, and less anxious, more willing to part with possessions, more optimistic and more energetic. They exercised more, got more sleep, had fewer illnesses, and had made progress toward personal goals. After more studies, a push by positive psychologists and an endorsement from Oprah, keeping a daily gratitude log became a popular, even trendy, practice.

It is deceptively simple.

Each day, perhaps before brushing your teach in the evening or first thing in the morning when you wake up, write down up to 5 things for which you are grateful that day.

That’s it.

You may have today’s list in mind already, from your “thankful” list earlier in the service. Writing it down, however, does seem to make a difference.

As simple as that is, I have found it helpful, in general, yes, and especially in challenging times, like when I cared for my mom as she was dying. I recommend it to you.

Based both on ongoing research and my personal experience, I would suggest to you that you make a gratitude list every day for the first two weeks and then once a week after that, depending upon how it’s feeling. Try it. Like the proverbial “apple a day,” keeping a gratitude log is good for you.

Galen Guengerich, Senior Minister of All Souls Unitarian Church in NYC, claims that gratitude is not only good for us, it is the heart of our faith. In a 2007 article in the UU World he wrote that gratitude ought to be the center of Unitarian Universalist theology, and Unitarian Universalism’s defining discipline, not the appetizer or the dessert in our spiritual meal, but the main course!

I’m going to use Guengerich’s own words mostly, but will do a little rearranging here as I attempt to carve out the essence of his main points. Bear with me …

Guengerich believes that religion’s role is to help us find our place in the universe, this awe-inspiring universe in which “everything that exists is made up of … parts that are borrowed from, shared with, and related to others,” a universe in which nothing exists in isolation. “The first principle of the universe is not independence,” he writes, “but its opposite: utter dependence.” (That’s utter dependence…not udder dependence) Guengerich quotes Alfred North Whitehead: “we are dependent on the universe for every detail of our experience.” “We’re dependent on parents, …plants, …animals, …trees, …sun[light], [earth, minerals, atoms] - in every respect we are utterly dependent,” Guengerich writes.

“The human tendency, however, is to assume the opposite,” he says. “We pride ourselves on being self-reliant and self-sufficient. This liberating emphasis on the [autonomy of] the individual” has accounted for some of our “greatest accomplishments” AND “it also represents our gravest danger.” The risk is that we may think that our “destiny [is] independent of others,” and that we can therefore “disregard our dependence.” According to Guengerich, gratitude is our salvation. “Gratitude,” he writes, “is the means by which we remember … our identity (in the universe]. “Gratitude reminds us how utterly dependent we are on the people and world around us for everything that matters.”

I have to confess, at this point, that recognizing my utter dependence doesn’t go down easily. In order to swallow the idea of utter dependence, I have to struggle against the powerful gag reflex of my desire for autonomy and independence.

You would think that Guengerich might mention interdependence somewhere, but he does not. And as I’ve chewed on Guengerich’s ideas I’ve become aware, reluctantly, that while yes, there is a layer of interdependence which is vitally important in our reality, underneath that layer of interdependence is a foundation layer which really is, in the end, complete dependence on things outside of my self. There is something freeing about that awareness.

But once we see how dependent we are, Guengerich believes, we also see our duty to all those people and things upon which we depend. It becomes our obligation “to foster the kind of environment that we want to take in, and therefore become.” Our sense of dependence calls forth “an ethic of gratitude” he says, “[that] demands that we nurture the world that nurtures us in return.  It becomes our duty [to work] for a future in which all [our] relationships … are [as] fair, constructive and beautiful [as possible].

For Guengerich, religion is made up of awe and obligation. He claims that “gratitude is the appropriate religious response to the nature of the universe” - a sense of obligation lays claim to us in response to our sense of awe at the grandeur of it all. That is THE religious response, he says. And “unless our faith is mere intellectual affectation,” he adds, “…the defining element of our religious faith must be a daily practice, [a discipline] of some kind. For Jews, the defining discipline is obedience: …[to] the commands of God. For Christians, the defining discipline is love: [of God and neighbor]. For Muslims, the defining discipline is submission: … to the will of Allah.”

While [Guengerich believes that] obedience, love, and even submission each play a vital role in the life of faith, [his] current conviction is that our defining discipline should be gratitude, a constant acknowledgement that “our present experience depends upon the sources that make it possible. Unitarian Universalists are called to be disciples of gratitude,” he says, and “to learn gratitude as a daily practice.”

And I thought I was just keeping a list of 5 things every day! “Disciples of gratitude.” Hmm…I wonder what we get to wear?

My encouragement to you to adopt practices of gratitude came from a slightly different direction, centered in the idea that the function of religion is to tie our sense of personal well-being to collective well-being and vice-versa. I am not yet certain whether gratitude is the very center of our UU faith, I’ll have to digest Guengerich’s ideas a while longer, but I do know that being grateful links my sense of personal well-being to the well-being of others, and that is important to me.

The people who kept the gratitude journals in the studies I mentioned earlier not only benefited personally from the effort, they were also more likely to help and to offer emotional support to others. Feeling gratitude, researchers have found, predisposes us to other positive states of mind, lifting us upward and priming us for prosocial behavior, so the effects of our gratitude ripple outward (Ladner). Another study found that when we express our gratitude, when we thank people for something they’ve done, not only are they more likely to assist us again in the future, they are also more likely to do things for other people.

None of this is surprising. What inspires me to speak of it today is my memory of a congregant who told me last spring that at this point in his life he doesn’t so much feel a need to know more, as to learn how to live what he already knows. The invitation here is simply to live what we already know, to practice gratitude consistently, even faithfully…to become disciples of gratitude and to develop a daily discipline of gratitude as Guengerich and experience suggest.

I expect that you may have all kinds of ideas and suggestions and practices to recommend. I think that the deceptively simple practices are the place to start: 

Pausing to surface gratitude each time we eat, or when we rise in the morning, or when we go to bed at the end of the day, for example.

Simple, ordinary, everyday fare – that can nourish us and others. The initial key is to learn to stop, to pause each day to notice what we have received.

Let me recommend a less well-known practice for challenging times:

It is the ritual practice called NAIKAN developed by Ishin Yoshimoto based on a form of Buddhist self-examination. It is rooted in awareness of “the compassion that is bestowed on us in life, and the inherent self-focus that permeates our actions and our thoughts. (13).” It is counterintuitive and I commend it to you.

You can use this in a general way any day to reflect on recent events or to reflect on any relationship, but it is especially helpful when you are faced with a challenging relationship. It is powerful way to call forth gratitude. (I do not recommend it to address an abusive relationship, however.)

The process involves asking yourself three questions, and ONLY three questions

1. What have I received (from ___________)?

2. What have I given (to _______________)?

3. What troubles and difficulties have I caused (___________)?

I told you it was counterintuitive. You will have noticed the glaring absence of a fourth question: “What troubles and difficulties have people cause ME!”

You might fear that the third question - “What troubles and difficulties have I caused?” -would lead to a self-deprecating mea culpa, but that is not my experience. After answering the first two questions, answering the third question calms my heart, helps me to see more clearly and allows me to feel more positive, calmly assertive and present in the relationship. It is one of the most enduring ways I’ve found to deepen my compassion, and it all begins with gratitude. Perhaps gratitude is our salvation.

Three questions…What have I received? What have I given? What troubles and difficulties have I caused?

I have one final practice I would like to recommend, but first, a brief return to milk.                      

A story went around the internet claiming that when the “got milk?” ads rolled out in Spanish, the ads bombed because the translation of “got milk?” into Spanish meant, essentially, “are you lactating?” A Snopes.com search suggests that there is a double entendre possible there, depending on the context, but there is a more significant and serious translation issue, one of culture and life experience.

The “got milk?” TV ads end with someone who is in trouble somehow because they’ve run out of milk. Funny to many of us, but for immigrants from central or south America or Mexico who had migrated north, often at great cost and risk to find work in America, the empty carton of milk, the image of deprivation, was not funny, it was reality.

What about the practice of gratitude when our store of gratitude seems completely empty or inaccessible? When we don’t got gratitude? What about the practice of gratitude when things are really tough, and life is pain-filled?

Remembering my mother and her journey with cancer, I know that all the benefits and challenges of disciplines of gratitude remain, though though gratitude practices may require extraordinary effort. I know that gratitude is always available, though at times it can be masked by pain. I know that it is still possible to see some of what we have rather than only what we lack, but a friend of mine who lived his vocation studying and helping people through grief, taught me that sometimes the pain is so great, that we simply cannot hold our own hope, and someone else needs to hold it for us for a time. We have to feel a loss fully before we can really start to take stock of what remains in our lives.

For the difficult times, there is one last gratitude practice I might suggest. One of the most powerful ways to generate a sense of gratitude is to remember kindness we have received in the past. We can evoke our own feelings of love, generosity, and compassion by remembering the love, generosity and compassion that was once offered to us. Many people are affected most strongly, by contemplating kindness they received as children, especially from parents or caregivers (Ladner). 

So rather than my talking any more about practicing gratitude, let’s practice.

[relax body… take time…]

I invite you to call to mind someone who was very kind to you in the earliest years you can safely revisit in your mind and heart.

Remember a person who showed you deep kindness when you were young.

            Imagine as completely as you can.

Where are you ?

What do you see?

What do you hear?

What do you smell?

How did that person show you kindness?

What do you feel? (take time)

Hold that kindness, but gradually return your awareness and attention to this room, in this meeting house.

Notice the feelings in your body now. Notice the feelings in your heart now.

“Remembering [someone’s] love [kindness] and compassion for us can cause us to resonate empathically to such emotions, evoking them in ourselves (Ladner 167).” It’s one of the fastest routes I know to a feeling of gratitude and love.

May you carry that gratitude and love out into your day and to all those you touch.

Whether or not gratitude is the core of our faith,

let’s find ways to practice gratitude.

Find your song, your prayer, your praise, your whirling dance, your reverential gesture, to greet this world every day that you are in it.

Let’s make gratitude one of our daily disciplines

at home,

and here,

every time we are together.

So may it be.

Works cited/consulted:

Krech, Gregg. Naikan: Gratitude, Grace, and the Japanese Art of Self-Reflection. Berkeley, Calif: Stone Bridge Press, 2002. Print.

Ladner, Lorne. The Lost Art of Compassion: Discovering the Practice of Happiness in the Meeting of Buddhism and Psychology. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2004. Print.

Seligman, Martin E. P. Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment. New York: Free Press, 2002. Print.

Seligman, Martin 2002  The Free Press (Simon & Schuster) NY, NY

Emmons, Robert and McCullough, Micheal. “Counting Blessing Versus Burdens: An Experimental Investigation of Gratitude and Subjective Well-Being in Daily Life.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 84.2 (2003): 377-389.

Guengerich, Galen. “The Heart of our Faith: Gratitude Should be the Center of Unitarian Universalist Theology.” UU World Spring 2007

http://www.uuworld.org/ideas/articles/11144.shtml

Why ‘Thank You’ Is More Than Just Good Manners

http://www.spring.org.uk/2010/10/why-thank-you-is-more-than-just-good-manners.php

(cites Grant, Adam M. and Gino, Francesca. “A little thanks goes a long way: Explaining why gratitude expressions motivate prosocial behavior.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 98.6 (June 2010): 946-955

And our Community Life Facilitator, Libby Schap, points out that if you are interested in keeping a daily gratitude journal/log, of course there is an app for that – “thankfulfor”

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/thankfulfor/id405495466?mt=8

(Note that you need to “opt out” of the automatic posting of your list if you don’t want to share your list with the wider “thankfulfor” world.)

The Sermon at the First Parish in Wayland, Massachusetts

On November 13, 2011

By the Rev. Ken Sawyer

            NOVA on public TV is in the midst of a three-part series on “The Elegant Universe,” based on a book of that title by Brian Greene, who narrates the show. The first two episodes, which premier on Wednesday evenings on Channel 2, were on “Einstein’s Dream” and “The String’s the Thing.” Personally, I think they are great fun, and thanks to some incredible tricks of the camera, after watching each three times I am less bewildered than usual about modern theoretical physics.

            That dates back over a hundred years, and in its early stages was largely driven by the determined intellect of one person, Albert Einstein. Some of us can remember back to when he was alive, which he was until 1955, and how back then he was a celebrity – like a rock star of today, someone says on the show. The blurb on one of his books from 1949 notes that “Professor Einstein’s slightest word arouses such intense interest everywhere that it is immediately reproduced on the front pages of the world’s newspapers….”  

            He was famous for having revolutionized the understanding of the world with the formula E=mc2 and his special and general theories of relativity, which maybe many did not understand but all knew established him as the most brilliant person on the planet. And he used his celebrity to comment on matters outside of physics, like war – which he hated — and politics and very much else, including religion.

            Religion ranked with science and music and sailing among the major passions of his life. His concern with religious issues began early and his writings on religion, on religious history and theory, on God, on the relationship between science and religion and on many more are numerous. And his views on religion strongly influenced his scientific efforts, in ways both good and perhaps less so.

            One of his biographers, Banesh Hoffmann, wrote, “Perhaps in a brief biography it seems almost irrelevant to dwell on the religious evolution of one who was to become famous as a scientist. But Einstein’s scientific motivation was basically religious, though not in the formal, ritualistic sense.” Hoffmann then recalls the oft-told tale of Einstein’s utter absorption as a child with a compass he was given by his father as a gift. Einstein, he goes on, “never lost his early childhood sense of awe and wonder.”

            Both of his parents were from Jewish families, but neither was strictly observant, and his father has even been described as a free-thinker. Albert, though, was of more pious cast, and took it upon himself in this early and quite religious stage to refuse pork and otherwise keep the observances. He composed songs in praise of nature and of God to sing to himself.

              In his early teens, he entered a phase of religious disillusionment and rebellion. The certainty and beauty he had found before in the God of his childhood he now found in geometry, having been given a book on it by an older friend of the family.

            Through his life, there combined in Einstein both the craving for knowledge and understanding and the craving for unity and order. These cravings came thoroughly to blend, and his life’s work and passion became the discovery of the beautiful unity and order that he knew from faith underlay the way things seem. Just as it had been determined that electricity and magnetism were related, so Einstein discovered the unity of time and space, and of energy and mass.

            Einstein was a great universalist unitarian, with small letter u’s:  there is a universal unity to everything. The need is to proceed, through the rational and intuitive use of the mind, to how things really are, more related than we thought, ordered and beautiful and bit by bit comprehensible.

            As Einstein wrote, “The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible.” Hoffmann uses that quote and goes on, “When judging a scientific theory, his own or another’s, he asked himself whether he would have made the universe that way had he been God. This criterion … reveals Einstein’s faith in the ultimate simplicity and beauty in the universe. Only a man with a profound religious and artistic conviction that beauty was there, waiting to be discovered, could have constructed theories whose most striking attribute … was their beauty.” 

               The historic figure who for Einstein synthesized the need for knowledge and for order, who united for him the life of the curious mind and the love of God and nature, helping Einstein to own both his religious and his scientific selves and make them one, was the seventeenth-century Jewish-born Dutch philosopher Spinoza — because Spinoza posited a God who makes the religious and scientific searches one; God is what you scientifically explore.

            In the NOVA series, one physicist [S. James Gates, Jr.] says Einstein was one of those physicists who “really want to know the mind of God, which means the entire picture.” Einstein said, “I believe in Spinoza’s God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fates and actions of human beings.”   

            Einstein rejected the social or moral God to whom one prays, who cares about persons. He particularly disliked the idea of a God who would hold humans in judgment; having created us as we are, where would such a God come off condemning anyone for anything?

            No, he wrote, “the idea of a personal God is an anthropological concept that I cannot take seriously…. My views are near those of Spinoza: admiration for the beauty of and belief in the logical simplicity of the order and harmony which we can grasp humbly and only imperfectly.”

            Not that that beauty and simplicity that Spinoza posited are easily grasped – “If God has created the world,” he wrote, “his primary worry was certainly not to make its understanding easy for us” — but they may be found. As Einstein put it, “God is subtle, but he is not malicious.” That phrase has also been translated, “God is clever, but he is not dishonest,” which Einstein paraphrased as, Nature conceals her secrets by her sublimity, not by trickery. There is, he said, “a beautiful harmony in the structure of the world,” and while thinking our way through to it may take seemingly endless effort, those efforts are rewarded, imperfectly and only in part, but still truly and directly with the revelation of truth, of God himself, of creation.

            It was that faith that impelled him in his theorizing and sustained him through the long years of work required. He and others have noted that such scientific accomplishment resulted from depths of faith, the scientist’s faith that truth can be found, and Einstein’s own religious faith that that truth to be found is simple and beautiful and as encompassing and orderly as the cosmic God of Spinoza.

            Spinoza’s God and Einstein’s is an imminent God, everywhere present, revealed not by any actions that a personal God might undertake, but revealed in the nature of nature. We find God by studying the natural world.            

            Not that we are ourselves to be as indifferent to persons and the course of events on earth as is God – far from it, as Einstein’s own life gave witness. He wrote, “I believe that we have to treat values and moral obligations as a purely human problem – [yet] the most important of all human problems.”

            That is the other part of religion. On the one hand religion seeks to comprehend God, which sacred task the scientist performs – indeed, Einstein noted that “a contemporary has rightly said that the only deeply religious people in our largely materialistic age are the earnest men [and women] of research” – and on the other hand religion is charged to provide those values of human justice, peace, and compassion that science can not provide. “It is plain,” he said, “that we exist for the service of our fellow [women and] men. There is no higher religion than human service. To work for the common good of [humanity] is the greatest creed.”  

            But back to his own research, in which he came far: he blended time and space, matter and energy, and figured out how gravity works. In the closing decades of his life, he made some strides on a unified field theory. But the interesting action was elsewhere.

            Remember Einstein and others credited his accomplishments in part to his faith in a special sort of universe, a universe accessible to thought – not easily, but bit by bit accessible, and a universe arranged in a way that is at its deepest level simple and unified and beautiful, as befits the God it embodies. But what if it happens that that is not the way the universe is, in particular, at the level of atoms and sub-atomic particles?

            Einstein’s faith instilled in him perseverance and curiosity and commitment. But by the 1920s the content – not the spirit but the content – of that faith became a retarding rather than a propelling force in his scientific work. That religious attitude, that spirit of questing, that sense that in the scientific quest he was involved in holy work, they kept him vigorous; but the theological content of his faith, the belief in Spinoza’s God – that what you would find would have a necessary kind of structure to it, given what God must be like – closed him off from the development of the school of thought, quantum mechanics, to whose being he had vitally contributed.

            Instead, his faith directed him into unified field theory, the further effort to find that beautiful unity that rests beneath all the disparate forms we perceive. But in the 1920s, quantum theory made huge strides, including that of 23-year-old Werner Heisenberg, who noted that you can not determine both the place and motion of a particle, which meant – to vastly oversimplify – that you could no longer talk predictably about the future, at least not in terms of causality but only in terms of probability, when it comes to very small matter.

            Then Neils Bohr offered a solution to what had been one of the more enticing problems to Einstein himself: Is light made up of particles or of waves? Einstein had himself reopened the possibility of particles as the answer back in the first decades of the twentieth century. But as to which it is, things were still unclear. Sometimes light acted like a wave, sometimes like particles – which is it? Neils Bohr said yes. As a final answer, Bohr said yes, both of those images serve to describe light (and the nature of matter) at times, depending on how you measure, and we have to accept their complementarity as images.

            From Einstein’s religious viewpoint such thoughts were disturbing. For light or, for that matter, for the basic components of matter to be constituted in such a way that we cannot understand their nature but must speak merely of how we perceive them, as waves and as particles, complimentarily, bespeaks a God not merely subtle but malicious in effect. Einstein rebelled. God, he argued, characteristically, would not have made a probabilistic universe. No, he wrote, “the future … is determined.”

            As he famously said, “Gott wurfelt nicht” – God doesn’t play dice. Or as a poet put it, “God casts the die, not the dice.” And God would not have cast the die, would not have made things, so that reality is so veiled and its laws so open to chance. “All science is based on faith,” wrote Hoffmann.  And Einstein’s faith had carried him well. But eventually it misled him.  

            As the show illustrates, physics since the ‘20s has been divided between the realm of the large, where Einstein’s general theory of gravity still reigns; and that of the small, where the general theory does not work but the laws of quantum mechanics are totally accurate. Einstein worked away on trying to combine the laws of electromagnetism and gravity, but could not engage with the weirdness of the quantum world and got left behind.

            But maybe there will be a way of uniting our understanding of how nature works that includes everything, as Einstein dreamed. The NOVA series seems optimistic about string theory, with its mega-minute “vibrating strands of energy.” Maybe Einstein will have the last laugh. Imp that he was, if Einstein was wrong about the absence of an afterlife and somewhere he sits on a cloud looking down, as indifferent to his attire as he was here on earth, his nimbus of hair as whimsical as ever, puffing on his pipe, I am sure he will chortle if one day someone sees beyond the plethora of seemingly discrete phenomena and finds the God-given unity beneath, just as he chortled once when to hear Nazis attacking relativity theory because he was a Jew.

            Einstein’s own outlook turned more wistful. In 1940 he wrote that “it is probably out of the question that any future knowledge can compel physics again to relinquish our present statistical theoretical foundation in favor of a deterministic one which would deal directly with physical reality.” Shortly before he died in 1955 he said, “Some physicists, among them myself, can not believe that we must abandon, actually and forever, the idea of direct representation of physical reality in space and time; or that we must accept the view that events in nature are analogous to a game of chance.” On his seventieth birthday, he wrote that “You can imagine that I look back on my life’s work with calm satisfaction. But from nearby it looks quite different. There is not a single concept of which I am convinced that it will stand firm, and I feel uncertain whether I am in general on the right track.”

            Such was Einstein’s modesty, and the turn of events. But I would rather close with Hoffmann’s more positive assessment: “…As for the monumental general theory of relativity [that redefined what gravity is, and time and space], it was, in an important sense, the creation of one [person], and thus ranks among the greatest scientific achievements of all time. Whatever the future may hold, Einstein’s theory of relativity will be secure. For although all theories are mortal, the great ones, like all masterpieces of art, retain their greatness forever.”   

Two weeks I ago I was in Portland, Oregon attending the Annual Conference of the Liberal Religious Educators Association.  This organization began in 1949 as the Unitarian Education Director’s Association, and in 1955, in a step of partnership with Universalists changed the name to Liberal Religious Educators Association to join efforts with the not-yet-merged Unitarian and Universalist traditions.  Thanks to the generosity and professional support of First Parish, I was able to attend the conference this year, a place where I experienced again the confirmation of boy did I pick the right career and also remembering why I choose the Unitarian Universalist faith in the first place. In addition to keynotes and workshops, one of the greatest gifts of these conferences is meeting with religious educators from all over North America, from all different sized churches, and all different ways of doing church.  The theme of this year’s conference was sustainability. Now, this word, sustainability, certainly is a buzz word, and an important one at that.  Many of you have spoken with folks in this community about the Transitions movement that is picking up steam here in Wayland, and how we can sustain our environment through making choices about how we live our lives, how we transport our selves whether in carpools or by bicycle, what we buy, where we buy it, what we make, and so on, so that every choice, no matter how small can help contribute to the sustainability the environment, our planet, our future.

At the LREDA conference, we approached looking at sustainability in a similar way. How can the choices we make in our churches, small and large, lead us to a future of continued vibrancy, creativity, inclusiveness, and relevance.  How can our faith, and more important our individual churches, sustain ourselves into the 21st century, a digital age that is both more divided and yet, due to technology, more connected than ever?  How can we, here at First Parish, a church that is 30 years shy of celebrating 400 years of a rich history, look forward to another 400?  And maybe a more important, and temporally closer question, is, what will First Parish look like in 50 years, at which time the Unitarian and Universalist traditions will have been formally merged for 100 years?

And so, at a Hilton in Portland Oregon in October 2011, one hundred seventy four religious educators sat in random meeting rooms, ballrooms and mezzanines and contemplated these questions of the future for ourselves in our work, for the communities we are privileged to serve, and for the faith of Unitarian Universalism as a whole.  The question many of us posited, was, where do we start?  Before you get excited, sorry, but this is not an Alice in Wonderland story with a magic potion, nor a matter a brute strength (and as we learned from the carrot story, it isn’t always the obvious choice who ultimately is best suited to complete a task)

During the keynote speech at the conference, Linda Christensen, the Director of the Oregon Writing Project at Lewis and Clark University, challenged us to consider what it means lose our language of origin.  Of the many interesting things Linda shared with us, the story that remains most in my mind is the story of Wangari Maathai.  Some of you may recognize this name, for in 2004 she was the first African woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize for her contribution to sustainable development, democracy and peace.  Linda shared with us a part of Wangaris’ story of when she was a young girl in a mission school in Kenya in the 1940s.  The students in the mission school were required to speak only English at all times.  When a student spoke in her tribal language, punishment would follow.  Wangari’s story is one of having to wear a label on her uniform saying “stupid” if she spoke her native language.  Wangari’s story is one of being physically punished if she forgot to always speak English.  Sadly, Wangari’s story is not singular, nor is it specific to only Africa.  In America, we have to acknowledge our history and that schools on Native American reservations employed similar techniques.  For if you can kill a language from a culture that has an oral history, you can eradicate their history too and make not only their history, but also the people disappear.  For many of us religious educators, this brought up questions of how can we do multicultural community in a way that doesn’t let languages, and the stories attached to those languages, die off, become obsolete and forgetten…as though they never existed in the first place.  I also believe that at times, some aspects of Unitarian and Universalist history are lost because there can be wholesale dismissal of our Judeo -Christian history as being violent or patriachal or any number of very real and valid problems in stories frm the Tanakh and the New Testament.  But, no matter how uncomfortable some parts of some stories may be, they are indeed our stories, and every tradition has stories that have troubling components.  But, as our UU churches grow and we tell stories from Native American traditions, and from Buddhism, and from Persian traditions, and so other cultures and faiths, we must accept all these stories as part of the greater story of humanity.  The good, the bad and the ugly.  These stories are ours to struggle with, to celebrate with, to comfort each with, and to challenge each other with.  We must not forget the rich and complicated stories from Jewish tradition, nor dismiss stories from Christianity as no longer relevant, while at the same time we can sustain our faith by adding new stories to our tradition from varied cultures and religions we can learn from. The Unitarian Universalist Association recognizes six sources that as a faith we draw our wisdom from.  Many of you are very familiar with our principles, as our children, however I feel that it is our sources that will propel our progressive faith into the future.  I know many UUs can’t always remember all the principles in order all the time, yet remember all 7, so on the chance, like many UUs, you are unable to call to memory all of our sources, let me tell what they consist of.  Our UU sources include: the wonder and the mystery of the sacred, prophetic people who remind us to seek justice and compassion in the world, ethical and spiritual wisdom from world religions, Jewish and Christian teachings of love, the use of reason and discoveries in science, and the harmony of nature and the circle of life.  We need to tell stories from all of these places, so that when talk of the creation of the universe we have the equally mind-blowing and beautiful stories that include the cosmology and drama of the Big Bang, Native American stories about giants roaming the earth and creating depressions with their feet that became the oceans, Abrahamic tradition stories that tell of a single deity creating the natural world in 6 stages and resting for the 7th stage,  stories from the Hindu Vedas telling us of a pantheon of gods and goddesses creating a world in which to experience all that is pleasurable and painful in life.

And so, it is through telling our stories that we will remember the language of our faith, and feel free to express it without fear that we will be labeled stupid, or that our stories will be lost if they are not part of the dominant culture.  To sustain our faith, we must not only tell the stories that explain how the world was created, or what, if any, relationship one should have with the sacred, but we must also tell our stories from our experience, from our lives.  For all stories, in all traditions, started simply as an attempt at finding, exposing, and then telling a singular perspective that might explain the human realm and our relationship with one another, and our relationship with the sacred.

Now, some of you know that before I was a religious educator I was a music director. As a pianist and a musician, the word sustain is more often than not understood in my brain as an aspect of musicality and on a piano, as a specific pedal,: the sustain pedal.  When I was 3 years old my mother placed me in piano lessons. She was determined that I, as well as my sister, have musical literacy as a skill.  Everything was moving along fine until I was 6.   Mrs von Gillern my teacher, suggested that since my legs weren’t long enough to reach the sustain pedal and I was advancing at a pace that I would be needing to use it soon, she was concerned that I would become frustrated with lessons and potentially abandon piano altogether.  Her recommendation was that I take a year off from formally studying piano.  My mother took Mrs. von Gillern’s advice, and well…clearly it paid off, for I am not only musically literate, but I can’t imagine every abandoning the piano even a little bit.  If you are unfamiliar with the piano, or the mechanics of making music, this story may seem unimportant.  But the sustain pedal is a powerful and necessary component to making music.  It is not used all the time, but when utilized correctly makes all the difference in the world.

I’d like to take a moment to illustrate how effective the sustain pedal is. Polly, can you give us a chord please without the sustain pedal?  …  And now, Polly, can you give us the chord with the sustain pedal? …  

As you could hear, the sustain pedal makes a marked difference in how long the chord can be heard.  And so I ask, how do we make the same difference in our lives?  It would be elegant and simple if there were but a single pedal we could press down and keep everything going for two, three, four times as long.  Yet,  I posit, that even if there were such a pedal, that like many things in our lives we wish were simple and elegant, it would likely be baroque, a little messy, and at least require a few committee meetings, if not (gasp) Robert’s Rules of Order. And so even though we do not have this pedal, and just as when talk of preserving the environment through green initiatives, we cannot pretend that it is easy, we cannot pretend that it is simple, but we can acknowledge the soul-satisfying action of picking one thing we are good at and start there in taking a taking a step, or pressing the pedal, towards sustaining our faith.  We can all take turns pressing on the pedal that will continue the vibrancy, creativity, inclusiveness and relevance that is so powerful and beautiful about our Unitarian Universalist faith.  Sometimes, some of the things we try in our search of pressing the sustain pedal may cause us to fall flat on our faces, or after a couple of years get boring and no one comes anymore, or we can’t remember why we started doing it that way in the first place. And so, we must try new things.  We must find ways to honor our past, but be willing to let go and move forward.  We must take steps in new directions.  And yet,we cannot forget where we came from.  As the hymn Spirit of Life tells us: roots hold me close, wings set me free.  I had to be patient and wait to grow longer legs to have a sustainable experience with music and a relationship with the piano, we too as people of faith have to be patient as we grow in our personal understanding of Unitarian and Universalist history, Unitarian Universalism’s present and commit ourselves to the future of this evolving, living faith.  Many of us choose this faith, or if you are visiting us today, are considering choosing this faith.  Even if you are a birth-right UU, at some point as an adult, you chose to stay, or you chose to come back.  Being a Unitarian Universalist is not a passive faith.  We are compelled to take an active part in considering the role of the church in our lives, the role of our personal spiritual path in our community and how we blend these two things together.  And then decide how these components affect not only your own children, but the children of your fellow congregant, and newcomers as well.  We are regularly challenged to consider who we are, why we are here, and where we are going. We are seasonally challenged with determining what is important for our children and youth to hold dear as an adult, what values, what ethics, what relationship with the sacred?  There is no silver bullet, no magic potion, no elegant mathematical equation that solves this.  We each have to discover what we can contribute, what we can share.  One way to discover this is by telling our stories.  We have members of this church who were active adults in Unitarian churches, even this church before the merger of Unitarians and Universalists 50 years ago.  We need to hear their stories.  We have members of this church who were wounded and harmed in traditions of their childhood.  We need to hear their stories.  We have members of this church who are atheists.  We need to hear their stories.  We have members of this church who have known nothing but the faith of UUism, and maybe they are only 6 years old and waiting for their legs to grow.  But we need to hear their stories too.  In the telling of our stories we can discover alongside each other what our gifts are.  We can, in the words of Rev. Dr. Rebecca Parker, “serve to feed the hungry, Bind up wounds, Welcome the stranger, Praise what is sacred, Do the work of justice….Or offer love.”.  We can ensure the future of our faith by taking time to consider: what are my gifts, and how can I use them to bless this community?  How can I grow as a person and take a risk, move out of my comfort zone, and perhaps discover a new gift  that I can share to move First Parish forward to another one hundred, two hundred, three hundred, or even four hundred years of a vibrant, creative, inclusive and relevant spiritualilty for the liberal religious people of greater Wayland?  

Well, I have for you not an example of brute strength, nor a magic potion, but I’d like introduce the concept of the sostenuto pedal to you.  This is the pedal that even when your legs are long enough to reach it, takes many years and great study to use it correctly. The sostenuto pedal does something magical and powerful. It allows, for some notes to be sustained, or held, and the pianist can play other notes atop this chord, that are unaffected by the pedal.  

Polly, can you let us hear how the sostenuto pedal works….
As you can hear, the strong backbone of the chord continues on, and yet there new notes added.  Just as in our faith, the strong backbone of liberal Christianity remains in our architecture, our liturgy, even the day and time we meet, but we are adding new notes, notes from humanists, from atheists, from Buddhists, from Muslims, from those not sure where they are on their spiritual journey, but are looking for some companions along the way.  I believe that although these notes have been part of Unitarian Universalism for a much shorter time than our liberal Christian background,  that in time, in a generation, or maybe two or three, these new notes will be added to the sustained chord, and propel our faith into the future.  I believe that First Parish, in its 370 years of history has not only grown long enough legs, but has had the many years of great study and proper leadership to learn how to use this sostenuto pedal.  For some, our job is to keep pressing the pedal when new notes are added, keep the fire burning for friend and stranger alike.  For others our job is keeping searching for new notes to add, allowing some to stay and some to fade, but always searching for more truth.  In this way, not alone, but together, Parker tells us….we can be drawn in community, share the endeavor, pass on the heritage, be a companion to those in struggle, remember the importance of keeping faith, the life of ritual and praise, the comfort of human friendship, the company of earth, and the chorus of life welcoming you.

“This is because:
None of us alone can save the world.
Together—that is another possibility waiting.”

The Sermon at the First Parish in Wayland, Massachusetts

By the Rev. Ken Sawyer

October 30, 2011

OUR LIFE UP TO NOW

            Through all the ages the members of our congregation have taken our meetinghouses seriously. In fact, it took three years of discussion before they replaced the first meetinghouse, built in 1643, with the second one nine years later. The fourth meetinghouse was built where it was, diagonally across the street, only after a court order. And when it came to deciding on a site for this, the fifth meetinghouse, the conversation (to put it politely) went on for seven years.

             All these decisions were made at town meetings, since Massachusetts did not separate church and state until 1833. Projects thereafter have been in the congregation’s hands, and have proceeded more smoothly, starting with the remaking of the interior in 1850, creating this room and the vestry below it.

            I will quote briefly from the final report of the committee that oversaw the work: “Your committee have been deeply sensible, from the commencement of the project, that, though of comparatively small pecuniary magnitude, yet it was one of great importance; - not only to individuals, but to the Parish as a whole: - that, if successfully carried out it would essentially aid in creating and sustaining a permanent interest in the welfare, and in the advancement of those Religious Principles we hold dear and sacred. We felt that, as a Society, we were about to stamp anew the outer seal of our testimony in favor of those principles; and to present to our children, and to those who may stand in our places when we shall have left the present scene, a suitable token of our regard for” our religion.

            They were building for all the ages. Fast forward to the next building projects, a new parish house in 1983 and nine years later, the addition to the meetinghouse itself, including an elevator. Now, nineteen years later, as a result of many years of thought and effort, beginning with a full year’s study involving lots of parishioners and with the resulting Future Plan, continuing through a feasibility study in the summer of 2010 and the creation of a steering committee, chaired by Ross Trimby and Bill Morrison, the next chance to build for all the ages is at hand, and the building is only part of it.

            We also come to today with an endowment, called the East Sudbury Ministerial Fund, or ESMF, created in 1815. Its original trustees were the church deacons and the town selectmen. Most of the Fund is a result of a 1970 bequest from Leonard Draper, Jr., of New York, who grew up in town. Interest from the ESMF is devoted to maintaining the buildings we have inherited or built.

            We have an organ, too, which has served us well, although in its own limited way. The organ, the endowment, and the campus are all part of the For All The Ages campaign, as well as a smaller amount to enable initiatives we may undertake, including those that serve the needs of the world beyond our campus. In that spirit, the morning’s offering for the church and for the great work of Renewal House, will now be received.

COLLECTION

OUR LIFE INTO THE FUTURE

            I said the building is only part of the campaign. But what a cool part! I don’t know if you noticed, but there are some drawings on the front of your order of service. If you look closely, you can see a stick figure making his or her way into or out of this room on the way directly to the second floor of the parish house, which has become handicapped accessible because of the connector proposed by our architect and refined (and made affordable) by Suse Keyes and John Thompson.

            The connector also frees up some space in this building, creates new space in the connector itself, and replaces the need to use space in the parish house for an elevator there. The sexton will have access to both floors of both buildings, and for parents, the nursery will be near by. There is an attractive new entry directly from the carriage shed parking lot, and between the buildings, a garden courtyard, accessible from all sides.

            At last – and this is a favorite of mine – there will be a dedicated youth room in the parish house, as well as well-equipped, well-sized space for other gatherings, additional classroom space, and over here, two handicapped-accessible pews and some upgrading in the kitchen.

            It will be several months before the pieces fall into final place. If we overshoot our goal, there are a few other things we know we want to do eventually and we could do them while we’re doing what we know we want, which is to say, what the Future Plan and discussions identified.

            Before I’m done, I am going to use words by Bill Morrison to put this in religious context, which you would think would be mine to do – Bill even says so – but I think in a piece he wrote recently he connects the dots, as he puts it, as well as can be done. And he quotes me in doing so.

            This leaves me free to deal with two more of the dots: the organ and the endowment. The unrestricted endowment will be known as the Sawyer Fund, apparently named after Thomas Jefferson Sawyer, a prominent nineteenth-century Universalist minister and educator who helped found Tufts College. Truth is, we rely more heavily on our annual pledges than almost any local UU congregation. It keeps us on our toes – we are in no danger of getting lazy about fund-raising, as can happen – but as Bill will note, it is at the same time limiting.

            And then there’s the organ. Some among you remember when our current organ was installed. For many years there has been hope of replacing it with an organ with greater capacity to handle the full range of musical styles. Much research has gone on, and several companies have been involved. I am delighted to say that the new organ has been chosen, Polly and the others who have been helping are very pleased, the cost is even less than we had been imagining, and it has benefits beyond the sound itself.

            Ross Trimby has been in the thick of things, and said I could quote his report to the Steering Committee after he, Bill, Dick Hoyt and Polly met with the man from Andover Organ. He wrote, “Based on the information presented, we believe that we now have a viable organ alternative.  Its position with the console sitting in the center of the choir loft and the organ pipes on either side of the window offers several advantages.

            “The choir can now be arranged in front of the director at the console and between the organ console and the organ pipes. Thus the director can now lead the choir from the organ. The window will now be uncovered.  The massive weight of the pipes will now be located near the center in the back of the choir loft and therefore will not require any further structural changes to the choir loft.           “This new organ with its expanded musical capabilities will greatly enhance our music program.  After instillation, it will be maintained at a similar annual cost to the current annual maintenance contract for our current organ by the same company that maintains the current organ.”

            But enough of quoting Ross. It’s time to quote his co-chair, Bill, offering his thoughts on this Sunday and why on this special occasion it made sense to kick off the drive with a worship service:

         “I have been involved in the church’s strategic planning process for several years now, since 2007.  It has been a long road, involving many in the church, and Ken’s guidance has been instrumental in helping us find our voice.  One area that has shaped my own thinking has been Ken’s work in the pulpit.  Along the way, there have repeatedly been Sundays when I have said to myself, “Well, that’s why First Parish is so important and why this strategic plan should go forward to make the church stronger.”  One such sermon entitled ‘We Are All Ministers, Together’ was given by Ken on May 4, 2008, and is reprinted in the strategic plan, ‘Creating Our Future.’  In a key passage, the Ken says,

         “’The church exists to minister, to be priest to the celebrations of our days, to be the prophetic voice that challenges injustice and oppression, to be the comforting shoulder in our sorrow, the cheering word in our discouragement, the warm smile of companionship in our loneliness, the provocative idea in our boredom, the reminder of divinity in our everydayness, and in our despair, a persistent voice of hope.

         “’I get a role in that, but it is a ministry we undertake together. It is the very mission of the church, to be together, as a people, a ministry, a way of serving the world in love, of serving the world by what we do in caring for each other and for the world we meet between our times together when we make the avowals anew, and rededicate ourselves to that loving mission, setting ourselves again toward our personal ministries, the ways that each of us seeks to do good.

         “’When you take an extra moment to hear your child, thin as your patience has become, when you spend time addressing envelopes on behalf of a cause you think important, when you object to a racist joke, when you stop to ask someone who looks troubled if everything’s OK, you are conducting some part of the church’s ministry to the world, as in gifts for the needy at Christmas, helping restore New Orleans, the involvement of children and youth in the UU Urban Ministry, the upcoming Hospitality Network, and so much more. This church’s ministry to the world.’

       “At this point you [might ask], ‘So what does this have to do with a Capital Campaign?’ I strongly believe the Capital Campaign is not about money or buildings or organs or endowments.  It is about creating better outcomes.  The end result is that we will be accomplishing many of the very things that Ken says the church exists to do, and that I hold so dear.  We will be building a youth room to give our young people a respectful space of their own for deepening their connection with each other and our church.  We will be creating adult spaces to bring about the companionship that we so enjoy and turn to for comfort in troubled times; spaces that will also house the meetings for the provocative lectures, classes, trainings to make ourselves, our community and our world better.  We will be creating funding capacity for social outreach: to help the needy, and other ways to minister to our community.  We will be expanding our music programming to entire genres of music we cannot currently perform, as well as adding the capability of having more concerts for ourselves and involve our friends. Expanding our endowment is perhaps the most important to serving our ministry, for it is usually the items on the bubble of the budget that are paradoxically most significant.  As member and chair of the Finance Committee, I have watched the Parish Committee struggle with these difficult decisions. These painful cuts could have been avoided with the endowment we now seek.

            “So how does this connect with a Sunday service?  Through this Campaign, we are putting our values into action.  The outcomes will result in furthering UU values and help us and our church be our best selves to each other, our families, and our community.  We will be, quite literally, putting our money where our mouth is.  The reason for Ken to discuss the campaign is not to fund raise but to connect the dots [which I decided to let Bill do instead, he does it so well]: from campaign elements to our UU values and our work as a congregation.  That is why I feel that discussion of the campaign belongs in a Sunday sermon: the campaign itself is the embodiment of ministry.  By extolling this campaign’s virtues - its end results - we are affirming the ministry we want.”

       Bill hopes everyone will find this campaign a worthwhile endeavor that we can support on its merits, in any amount. “To me,” he concludes, “the most important thing is that everyone feels that they can participate in the future of the church.”

         Thanks to Bill and Ross and the Steering Committee and everyone who has brought us to this day, thanks to everyone who contributes whatever they can to its success, thanks to everyone who finds aspects of the prospect exciting, as we take our turn at providing for “the advancement of those Religious Principles we hold dear and sacred,” at providing well For All the Ages.