The Faith of a Chaplain (Dec, 9, 2007 High Plains UU)

Good morning. As Kirsten mentioned, my name is Nathan M. and I am a member here at High Plains. As some of you know I serve as a chaplain at Memorial Hospital. I am also a community minister affiliated with this congregation—at least I will be a community minister once I become ordained. Because my life journey has wound around a bit, I have a full-time ministry position, but just now am doing my internship in preparation for ordination. It's all a bit confusing even to me.

Chaplaincy is one of the roles community ministers fill and I want to give you a sense of what I do as a hospital chaplain. I want to give you a sense of what I do and some of what I've learned so far in doing it, both about myself because I think that sharing our individual journeys is part of what binds us together as a community and because I believe that is what ministers especially should do whether they serve inside a parish or outside in the broader community. Before I tell you the what, let's talk about the why.

You see, chaplaincy, and ministry in general for that matter, were not part of the long term plan. For years I was in academia, a professional student, on my way to becoming a college professor. I had the tweed jacket and everything. Before we moved to the Springs I was at Boston University working on my doctorate in Philosophy of Religion. The cultural shift from academic skeptic to empathetic chaplain has been a bit strange—and I know it's given my wife Julia whiplash at times. So there I was at BU, studying away and serving out the indentured servitude that is the PhD. Luckily I got to teach a lot which I loved. The phrase, “I don't know” didn't pass my lips too often and when it did it was part of the phrase, “I don't know, but I'll look it up.” Knowledge was my stock in trade. I was paid to know things, not to not know things. But now I'm a chaplain and I have never said “I don't know” with such frequency or sincerity, and now there is no where to go for the answers. There are no good answers to so many of the questions I get asked. “Why has this happened?”, “where is God?,” “when will she die?” “Am I being punished?” I thought all my years of study in religion, theology, and philosophy would equip me for such questions. After all I could tell you what a dozen medieval theologians or Enlightenment philosophers would say. But one of the first things I learned is that all those answers, all that I had studied, and learned, none of it was actually relevant because these are questions that aren't really asked in hope of an answer. Oh, the person asking may think they want one, but I learned from experience that any answer offered doesn't satisfy. There may not be an answer. Mostly the questions are expressions of pain and confusion not a quest for knowledge. Still, it's very UU and, to me, very Buddhist—the only answers are those that you come to on your own after struggling with the reality.

Strangely enough, I always assumed that my more traditionally religious colleagues would have answers—not ones that would make sense to me perhaps, but at least to themselves. The fact is that the other chaplains that I work with and have met, often have more in common that one might think. Although we come from very different spiritual directions, we all struggle with why these things happen. We struggle with the pain and sorrow we see every day. I at least had very little to lose theologically, a decade of graduate education in religion had already ruined me, but I see some of the student chaplains I help supervise really struggle with what they've always been taught about God's beneficence and justice and the role of prayer.

In my on-going training as a chaplain, I've been asked several times to articulate my pastoral theology—what is the relationship between my faith and my ministry. I struggled for a while, and still do to some extent, to define such a thing. I am nothing resembling a traditional theist. Indeed, if I am completely honest ,I don't have what many would recognize as a “faith.” I tried—I really did. I tried to embrace some theological perspective that would constitute a faith. I tried to get back to my Jewish roots, I tried to massage into a personal theology the subtle definitions of divinity found in esoteric Hindu philosophy. I read about Process Theology where God is not complete, let alone all powerful or all knowing. I drew on years of graduate work in religion and philosophy hunting for some thread that I might weave into however meager a blanket of faith. It didn't work—or at least it hasn't yet. Maybe the years of academic dissection forever spoiled me for “faith.” Maybe it was family history as one very wise Episcopal priest suggested. Faith in God, she told me, is an analogue of faith in a parent—that didn't work so well in my family. Regardless of what brought me to this point, I am still a minister and one that works outside of the “family” context of the Unitarian Universalist parish. Here, a wide variety of ways of being spiritual are not only accepted but expected and indeed cherished. “Out there” a chaplain without a clear theology is a less common entity. This whole question of how my faith informs my ministry just frustrated me.

Then I remembered a Buddhist monk I studied with in Japan. Over some cups of green tea, I asked him about faith. He told me that faith in Buddhism was not, as Paul describes in Hebrews 11:1 “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” Faith in Buddhism he said was predicated, based, upon experience.

Remember back to the reading from the Buddha:

Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe in anything simply because it is found written in your religious books. Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders. ...when you find anything that agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it.

Faith based upon experience. Faith based not upon the unseen and unknown but upon the seen and known. Now that moved me, moves me—quite literally. There is an old African expression that I have tacked up above my desk, “When you pray, move your feet.” Now we're getting closer. I'm describing a process that has taken years and is still very much on-going, but it feels to me like that feeling I get when I am working a cross-word and I start seeing the end in sight, stuff starts falling into place and those hard words are most of what's left, you know 19 letters for a Yugoslavian pudding. All those really tough questions I couldn't figure out start getting filled in by what I already do know. I figure out the unknown part based on my current place, the knowledge I have right now, right here. I finally realized I was working this spiritual equation from the wrong end. I was looking for the faith that would shape and inform my ministry, but the reality, my experience was that my ministry shapes and informs my faith. Indeed, for me, the work of being a chaplain is my faith.

So what is the work of being a chaplain and what faith has it led me to?

Simply put, I provide emotional and spiritual support to patients, families, and staff. And, in some sense, it is just as simple and just as complex as that. Last week was busier than usual, but not atypical. It's important to know that sick people don't go to the hospital much these days. If you're sick, you're usually at home. To be a in a hospital you have to be very sick, or need a procedure that can't be done at an office or as out-patient surgery. To be in one of the critical care wards, you have to be incredibly sick and usually close to death.

A young helmet-less motorcycle rider hit a parked car after drinking too much. It became apparent to his family, who had been at his side for several weeks, that he was never going to make any meaningful recovery. They made the decision to take their loved one off life-support. The daughter of a 78 year old man made a similar choice after doctors told her more surgery wasn't an option for her dad. I spent hours with a woman in her eighties with a delightful German accent who told me wonderful stories about being a war bride and the life she had with her now departed husband. A young, young woman, 23 years old, with a beautiful little girl at home, lay in a bed after she was resuscitated after her heart stopped. She had tried “dusting” inhaling from a “dust-off” can, a bottle of compressed air used to blow dust off computer parts. She didn't get the brief high she was looking for and she didn't know that one of the ingredients used results in sudden death in an astonishingly high number of users including first-timers. Tests were run, treatments tried without much hope, her parents flew in from Alabama, her husband wept. The parents blamed the husband. At one point we had to get security involved because the mother was seriously threatening violence. The young mother died, and in a small saving grace--she became an organ donor. These were, so to speak, the highlights of the week. As always, many got better, some died, but in all cases, no one—families as well as patients, were the same after as before. For each of these families I sat and listened to stories of better times, translated some of the medical-speak the doctors said, helped them think about choices and values, but most of all I tried to provide them three gifts: presence, naming, and acceptance. I think these are gifts we can give to everyone in our lives, even in better times than those I usually deal with.

Three gifts; the gift of presence, the gift of naming, and the gift of acceptance.

I've learned that perhaps the greatest gift we can give someone is to be present to them in their experience. Some might disagree and say that love is the greatest gift, but I see family members all the time who love deeply but in those darkest moments their love lets them go so far, but no farther. To be present to someone is to bear witness to their pain and fear and anger and hope and faith in all the messiness that real tragedy creates. Perhaps above all, being present to someone means accepting that there is a host of things that we can't fix and shouldn't even try. We're such a fix-it culture. When someone brings us a problem or a pain we want to solve it or take it away, but so much of the really serious stuff is beyond our power to fix. Often people don't need a fixer, we either have someone else filling that role or we know the answer already. What we need is someone to be there with us. This is the work of the chaplain, to be a companion to those facing that which no one wants to look at. The chaplain walks with the person and often names their concerns. I say things to people that I never thought I would say. Name fears and hopes that are usually left unsaid, unacknowledged and usually made worse for the silence.

I've learned that to name the emotion or the fear that is present is a gift---not a burden. We so often are afraid to ask the question because we fear that we will make it worse. We're afraid to ask if the doctor said the lump is cancer, or if the baby will die because we have this sense that we might plant the idea and thus cause the fear to grow where none was a moment before. Somehow we don't translate our own experience that tells us that when something scary or bad is happening, we're thinking all the scary thoughts there are to think. Naming doesn't bring the fear into existence, indeed it does the opposite. By creating a space for those concerns to exit the dark interiors of our frightened souls, we allow in a little light. A barrier to presence is the fear that openly acknowledging the elephant in the room will some how make the situation worse.

To say to someone “you must be afraid” or “You must be wondering if she'll die” doesn't make it worse, it makes it better. It gives a kind of permission to explore the feelings, to acknowledge them and the fears associated with them. We have some sense that there is right thing to say to someone in crisis or facing tragedy—there isn't, and we so often lose the good that might be done out of fear of saying the wrong thing. There are wrong things to say, “I know just how you feel” is often less than ideal, but there is no way to take away the pain—which is what we often want to do.

I have also learned about the gift of acceptance. This one is tough and continues to be the most challenging. There have been so many surprises in my time at the hospital. I didn't realize how much I would learn about horrible diseases—and for someone who teeters right on the edge of hypochondria it's been, well let's just say interesting. I hadn't realized how much I would learn about the funeral business. I know more about cremation and embalming than I ever wanted to know. And I hadn't realized how much this ministry would be like living in a foreign country, how what seemed like simple tasks and concepts would take on new complexity and be turned around. It didn't take long to realize that it was easy to develop rapport with the liberal, spiritual but not religious, patients who were originally from the East Coast—that's my mother tongue. It was harder to learn to hear the conservative Southern Baptist from Louisiana, and to pray with her in a language she would recognize and find comforting. It was a foreign tongue to me.

But even feeling “Lost in Translation” as I often do, I've learned to listen beneath the surface and, as needed, to translate into a language that makes more sense to me or in some cases just do my best to appreciate the sound of a language I'll never really become fluent in. Regardless of my fluency or comfort with the language, I've learned to accept and love--even when it is difficult.

I took care of a young man, just turned 18 who had come here from South America to be an exchange student. First week he was here, he got into a car accident and a pretty bad one at that. We weren't at all sure he would make it. His homestay mother was a deeply religion Pentecostal Christian. I had the hardest time listening to her go on and on about how this was all in God's hands. How the doctors didn't really do anything—it was all God. God was going to fix everything. I won't even go into how distracting it was when she would ask me to pray and then start speaking in tongues. She would just repeat these phrases, “God will heal you, God will fix everything, the blood of Jesus will heal you.” Over and over she would say these things. This whole abdication of everything to God makes me a little crazy. If God took care of everything where was he when the kid hit the tree in the first place? I don't know. I don't believe in easy answers to impossible questions. It was very hard to listen to her, but then I started listening to what else was being said behind the words. I'm sure she did believe as she said, but I also started hearing the needs being expressed through the constant expressions of faith. I started hearing her feeling overwhelmed, I started hearing her fear, I started hearing her pain and her need to have someone be in control when she felt so out of control.

But you know I actually get it, I really get it. Just this week has been filled with enough to make my heart cry out for some order in the universe, just the slightest trace that there is someone in control or aware of how my life unfolds and yet I can't believe it. I'm not saying it's not there, I'm just saying at this point in my life, having had the experiences I've had, having learned what I've learned, I can't believe it. But I still need to serve a lot of people who do believe and when the crisis comes need to believe even more, but it is a kind of faith very foreign to me.

The poet Rilke asks us to:

Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day.

I think I'm learning to treat people in this same way—like they were books written in a foreign language. We should always try to understand others, but I think we also have to learn to accept the fact that other people's beliefs may never make sense to us, but we can learn to accept them as they are, trusting that they are doing what we are all doing and part of why we come here—to try and make sense of our experience. I think this is a gift we can give people in our lives—friends, co-workers, family members, anyone struggling with anything which I'm pretty sure is all of us. Sometimes it isn't helpful to try to understand, it can be more powerful to simply accept them as they are.

But all that said, all those mental gymnastics having been done, my ministry as a path leading to my faith rather than vice-versa, the question still stands, what does it mean to me to be a chaplain?

I do not know if there is a God. I do not have that absolute knowledge. Sometimes I think I've seen in the eyes of many faithful people the slight glimmer that they don't know either—but they choose to believe. And so many people I meet have faith like a rock. I however remain without clear knowledge, that is to say, I am an agnostic. I don't know about an afterlife having never, to my recollection, been there. I don't know about God's answering of prayers because although I have prayed and seen those events come to pass, I have also prayed and been seemingly ignored. I don't know anything about the supernatural. I'd like to, I've spent many years of my life trying to understand and gain that knowledge that comes so easily to some. I readily accept the philosopher Kierkegaard's premise that faith is not a project for which the brain is the appropriate tool. How can the finite organ that resides in my skull be capable of perceiving the infinite that we call God? But still I am an intellectual, basing my life in rational thought and I am not ready for that leap of faith. So I've now spent a lot of time telling you what I don't know. As you might imagine I could spend days telling you about the things I don't know. But let me shift to what I do know.

Here I go to back to the reading from Robert Ingersoll, if the naked and hungry are to be clothed and fed, it must be us who provides. In my role, in the world I work in, I see it as whatever healing and comfort is to come, must come through the efforts of humanity—divinely inspired or not. We must act.

I don't know what role a transcendent being may play, but I know I can't rely on any particular response. It might be out of her power or not part of his plan or I might simply be too small to notice.

So I find myself in a bit of a faith vacuum, but not much can survive in a vacuum so I have to fill that space with something. For me, I fill that space with service in the absence of knowledge. I find myself back at that crossword puzzle. Lots of blanks to be filled in, but I take what I know and go from there. What I know is that I can act in the world. I can see needs and help to meet them. I can care, and listen, and hold a hand, and love. So for me, my ministry leads to a faith, a faith in humanity. When you pray, move your feet.

Amen and Blessed Be.

Out of the Depths and into Easter

Today is Palm Sunday. The 6^th and final Sunday of Lent, 40 days after Ash Wednesday. On Palm Sunday, we recall that Jesus the Christ, some 2000 years ago, rode into Jerusalem on the back of donkey. As he entered the city, the people welcomed him singing, waving or maybe laying palm fronds in his path in sort of a middle-eastern red carpet. The entry into Jerusalem is said to have fulfilled prophecies of the messiah and began the countdown to the final Passover Seder, the Last Supper meal that happened on Maundy Thursday where Jesus compared bread and wine to his body and blood and asked his closest disciples to remember him in the gestures of eating and drinking. This, of course, gives rise to the ritual of Holy Communion. The following day, known as Good Friday, he was tried, crucified, and died. On the third day, we are told, he rose from the dead and appeared to his followers. Having died for our sins, the Son of God cleansed us, and prepared the way for us to enter the Kingdom of God through his ultimate sacrifice. The resurrection of Jesus is, of course, to most, the central element of Christianity. As Paul states in Corinthians 15:14 "If Christ was not raised, then all our preaching is useless, and your trust in God is useless" But the Gospel tells us that he did arise and appear to some of his followers. Amen and all praise be to the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

All that said, like a lot of UU’s, I have a hard time with Christianity—and we are in the thick of the Easter season. Millions upon millions will celebrate the triumphant conquering of death and sin made possible through the painful death of Jesus. Christmas at least sort of has it own rewards, that is to say presents—and I rather like some of the songs.Easter is harder for me—now that I’m an adult I have pretty good access to chocolate year round. Easter is also hard commemorating as it does the aspects of Christian faith that I understand least, let alone believe. But, for better or worse I live in a society that is predominantly Christian and a city that is home to some of the most conservative Christians on the planet—or at least it feels that way.

I can trace some of my lack of ease with Christianity to my upbringing. Growing up in an orthodox Jewish setting made me a little leery of Christians. I was taught that Christianity was a mistake, and that most Christians were, to some extent, anti-Semitic—a fear that in a post-Holocaust world seemed justifiable. There is also the simple fact that I didn’t actually go to a church service until I was in my twenties. Christianity was and is, in many ways, quite foreign to me. My wife Julia and I almost didn’t stay at the UU church we walked into in Boston some years ago because of the none too small gold-painted wooden cross that was up front—although it turned out almost everyone was uncomfortable with but it had been a present from a former minister’s family and so was more family heirloom than religious symbol.

But more than cultural elements, I think my discomfort with Christianity stems from some elements implicit in its theology. I have never agreed with the doctrine of Original Sin, I resist the idea that we are fundamentally flawed, perverted, and unable to be good on our own.

I’ve also never understood atonement theory—the idea that Jesus had to die for my sins. I have certainly made mistakes in my life, but none that should require anyone’s death. And let me get this straight, God, for some reason, creates a son, who is fully God and fully human, and then kills him/himself to redeem humanity. Seems kind of a round about way to do things for a supreme being. Don’t even get me started on the Holy Spirit and how the Three are actually One. I’m bad at math to begin with.

Now none of this would really be a problem—if Christianity weren’t so ubiquitous and if I didn’t want to get along with the Christian faith. I spend too much time with Christians to write it off entirely—so what do I do.

In chaplaincy we sometimes talk about “reframing.” Now reframing is not what you have to do when you build a house wrong the first time, rather it is trying to take a certain set of circumstances and help someone understand them in a new way. This is a glass half-empty half-full sort of thing. Yes there is an element of psychological and spiritual sleight-of-hand inherent, but it is also true that how we think and feel about the world determines reality far more than actual facts do.

I’ve been trying to reframe Christianity and the story of Jesus—and I want to share some of what I’m thinking with you.

Years ago I might have balked at this, Academic that I was, I would have been concerned that I would distort the tradition too much, so much so that it would cease to be recognizable to an actual Christian. I would have worried that endeavoring to reframe Christianity would be like going to a Mexican restaurant and ordering nachos but asking the waitress if you could have that without the cheese, meat, salsa or chips but with long noodles and tomato sauce instead. I would worry that if you deconstruct something too far, it isn’t really what you started with in any meaningful way. But, you know, I just don’t care about that much anymore. Reframing in this way isn’t about being true to the tradition, it’s about coming to peace with it inside oneself. Christians can understand their tradition the way they want to, I’ll understand it how I want to.

One place we can start for help in this reconstruction project is with people like Paul Tillich. Tillich was a German theologian who came to America after disagreeing with the Nazis. Deeply influenced by French Existentialists, he believed that the old stories and symbols needed to be interpreted anew. The old ways of understanding them were clearly limiting and, in many cases, impossible in light of the modern world.

Tillich reinterprets, takes the meaning of the potent symbols of Christ and Original Sin and represents them, re-presents them differently. His understanding of Original Sin departs from moral judgment or damnation and focuses instead on a more psychological, though still profoundly spiritual interpretation. In sin, Tillich sees estrangement from, as he puts it “the ground of …being, from other beings, and from him [or her] self.” We can see some of this in the ancient story of Eden. In the story there is at first harmony between the earth, the animals, humans, and the Divine. The first sin, which some might see as disobedience, can also be seen as the creation of distinction. Humans, having eaten the fruit now know the difference between good and evil—that is to say they now see the world as divided, binary, no longer one but now separated into good and evil, male and female, self and other, sacred and profane---the loss of unity, of harmony. The creation of distance is the first sin.

So many philosophers and theologians, especially of the modern age, speak of this estrangement, separation, division, loneliness, anxiety that characterizes the modern human. Hegel, Kierkegaard, Tillich, Sartre, Nietzsche all speak to the deep unease that seems to fill the modern mind and soul. Although more modern thinkers seem to focus on it, the sense is not necessarily new: the Buddha spoke to it 2500 years ago when he spoke of Dukkha—the deep dis-ease that so often afflicts us.

Some attribute it to the breakdown of social roles, to the rise of dehumanizing technology, to the industrial and commercial homogenization of the human spirit. While all that plays a part, it is simply a truth that to be free is to have a certain amount of anxiety. We are free to choose our lives—for good or bad. Plato noted this many centuries ago when he says in The Republic, “the life which he chooses shall be his destiny… The responsibility is with the chooser – God is blameless.” Through this angst we lose our sense of connection to our Self with a capital S, our deepest sense of who we are and our connection to the whole.

I don’t think we need turn to philosophy to teach us this truth; I think we feel this disconnection intuitively. It strikes us hardest during adolescence when we are least certain of who we are, but stays with most of us to some extent throughout our lives. We know when we are aligned with the flow of life and when we are struggling against the current. Here the idea also leans toward the original Greek word for sin, Harmatia—missing the mark, as an archer might miss her target. Original Sin reinterpreted in this fashion moves away from the judgmental indictment of man’s supposedly fallen nature and instead points toward an acknowledgment of the pain and anxiety that are inherent to being a human being in the world.

Tillich sums up this disconnection when he speaks about how modern humans live mainly in the horizontal dimension and have lost our sense of depth. It is this depth dimension that makes a picture into art, a bunch of words into literature, and human life full of meaning. Without this deepening of our experience, our understanding, our spirits, we become simply “a things among things.” Items simply to be manipulated. Without this dimension of depth, we spend our lives pursuing money for its own sake, fame for our childish egos, and shallow connection instead of deep relationship to others, our planet, and ourselves. The loss of the depth dimension of life is the real Original Sin, the true Fall of humanity.

For Tillich, the reason that Jesus is the Christ, the Anointed One, the Savior, is not because of his crucifixion, but because Jesus had not lost this connection to the ground of being, to the source. He was aligned with the river of life. He had recaptured that fundamental harmony, was unaffected by the sin of false dualisms. Tillich calls Jesus the “new being”—a being that lives in the vertical fully as well as the horizontal planes of engagement. His death and resurrection not only remind us to look around during this time of year for the real miracle of spring and the true rebirth we see happening around us, but the resurrection also reminds us of the constant opportunities we encounter to die to what we were and be born again as what we might be. Jesus leaving the tomb is not about a redeemed animated corpse or escaping the fate we all eventually face, but rather it is about the potential inherent in each of us to come into harmony with ourselves and the world around us and in doing so become part of a larger life--a larger life that is, in very real ways, unending, loving, forgiving, and, yes, even potentially redemptive. Jesus becomes a symbol directing us to something deeply internal and external, inviting us into a deeper, more intimate relationship with the holy and ourselves.

Many of us here dig in a bit and reject such characterization of Jesus as perfect in any way. He was just a man, a moral teacher. I often hear UU’s speak of Jesus in this way—as an important ethical teacher, a social rebel, but they get nervous when any transcendent wisdom or spiritual powers are ascribed to him. What would it mean to be a person whose inner and outer being were in complete harmony and in harmony with the world around him? I think such a person would be called a Sage in the Taoist tradition, perhaps a great shaman or medicine man in the Native American tradition. One might say that the individual who was in such a state of harmony has awakened in some profound sense. There is a Sanskrit term from India for such an awakened being--“Buddha.” Strangely enough, I rarely hear people get upset about characterizations of the Buddha as having special insights or powers and we flock to hear spiritual gurus and healers from around the world

Now I can’t talk about Christ without talking about Christians who, truth be told, can be the harder part to deal with. Gandhi once said, “I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. They are so unlike your Christ.” They sin in consigning Jesus and the wisdom to be found in the Bible to the musty tomb of 2000 years without acknowledged growth or change. Jesus himself challenged the prevailing wisdom of the time, tore down barriers to unity and died for his beliefs. I think we all know how much courage it takes to be a real agent of change. Those individuals who have the strength and clarity to really have an impact are rare—and so, some of us, afraid that we ourselves may be called to such challenging tasks, make Jesus separate—not a man, who might in his shared humanity require us to act in a similar way, but instead he becomes a all-powerful God, strangely rendered far less threatening once he is all-knowing and all-powerful and eternal and not very much like us lowly creatures.

It is not as if Christianity has not adapted and changed before. It is no real surprise that the Christian holiday marking resurrection tends to fall right around the Vernal or spring Equinox. The goddess celebrated during this time is named Ostara. Yes, that is where we most likely get the word Easter from. The early church realized it was easier to co-opt or at least compete with the holiday then to try and eliminate the pagan practice all together. The historical Jesus was likely born in September, not December, but December, and December 25^th in particular was an important date for various ancient religions. And while the fluid nature of the dates might further discredit Christianity, we can reframe this as well. Christianity is not now nor ever has been a static tradition. It has grown and changed, adapting to and adopting from different times and cultures. Those who wish to lock it down and embed it in stone are the ones who miss out.

Christianity’s symbols are potent ones: flesh, blood, death, rebirth, sin and salvation, the possibility of human growth—maybe not perfectibility but certainly transformation. The story is a captivating one: a young, innocent woman, a humble birth, a brave prophet with a powerful teaching, apparent defeat, and then a triumphant end. The story of Jesus is not unique—it is echoed in and echoes the story of the hero in many cultures. We need not reject it, just because it is a dominant myth in this culture.

I had thought about offering communion today, but decided instead to invite you into a different sort of communion ritual---one that is found in the world’s contemplative traditions. When you leave here and go have lunch as most of us will, I’d like you to take a moment and take a sip of whatever beverage you are drinking and really taste it, savor it, be present to it and yourself. When you take the first bite of whatever you are going to eat, really take a moment to appreciate the flavor, the texture, the temperature. Eating has become an activity that is mainly horizontal in Tillich’s terms—we eat quickly and without much thought. Take a brief moment and turn it into what it is, a life-giving activity. Appreciate the cycle of death and rebirth that happens in your body in every moment. Walking on water is nowhere near as amazing as what is happening in your body at this very moment. Appreciate your freedom. Do this in memory, not of me certainly, and not even of Jesus, but of yourself—of who you are, who you want to be and the depths of possibility within you. Amen and Blessed Be.

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The Strength of the Spinning Wheel

The Strength of the Spinning Wheel

A Sermon by Nathan Mesnikoff

I had neck surgery a couple of months ago—my second spine surgery in two years. Overall, my recovery is going remarkably well—not too much pain, sleeping OK. I couldn’t drive for a month and a half, which was a real annoyance. But most frustratingly, I am not allowed to ride my bicycle for three months, three whole months—a long time especially considering I had just saved up enough to buy a new bike a few weeks before the surgery. I bought it because I really enjoy riding and also in an effort to inspire myself to a moderate amount of exercise. Aside from the health benefits, exercising gives me a sense of control over and hopefulness about my physical state. I’m glad I’m so eager to get back to riding. I have, like many people, a love-hate relationship with exercise.

I know I need to move my body, and I know very well that I genuinely feel better when I do. When I was younger I practiced Japanese martial arts with an almost fanatic passion. For a long time, karate, judo, and aikido were my main form of exercise. I slowly stopped for a number of reasons during grad school. My back problems have put an end to any intentions of returning to judo or karate. But I can ride my bike and I really enjoy it. The feeling of cruising along, the speed, the wind in my hair, well at least on my face. I actually found myself in the garage a few days after surgery simply staring at my bike. Pathetic, but true.

Well, I didn’t come here today to talk about my workout schedule and how I keep this slender figure. You see, as I’ve been pondering about bicycles and exercise I read a book that shifted, so to speak, my thinking as to where strength comes from and pointed me toward an unlikely place.

Riding with the Blue Moth was written by Bill Hancock, director of the NCAA men’s basketball tournament. The first few pages of the book detail how wonderful his life was—a job he adored, a wife he loved even more, two sons with whom he had very close, loving relationships, a new grandchild, friends, money: the whole proverbial enchilada. But then his older child Will is killed in a plane accident and he and his wife, Nicki, are struck by a profound and understandable depression. Their lives have changed forever and they are lost. They have no idea how to move forward.

Now, I had just requested the book from the library along with a bunch of others on bicycling—some on repair and several stories about long journeys by bike. I was thinking this book was just about a guy who rode across the country. I hadn’t bargained for this much drama, but the writing was good and I was drawn through the book. The title, Riding with the Blue Moth, comes from the author’s metaphor for depression—it seemed like a large blue moth that came and went, at times disappearing only to reappear unexpectedly, smothering him with the pain, confusion, and guilt surrounding his son’s death.

Hancock, pedaling through the deep South, spends his hours in and out of the saddle carefully observing various cultural elements, a close study made possible by the slow speed and intimacy with which he is passing through the region.

He writes,

In Linden, population 2,400, I rode past the Marengo County Academy, a private high school. Laughing teenagers piloted flashy vehicles out of the parking lot. A couple of miles north was the Linden public high school. [Racial] Integration had caused private schools to spring from the ground like rain brings mushrooms. In the last six days, a dozen white people had told me to avoid blacks. No black person ever turned tables. As I struggled to find the meaning, I happened to look down at my bicycle wheel. The wheel is supported by flimsy spokes and gets its muscle from the spokes as they pull toward the center. That force, from pulling together, gives the bike’s wheel its strength. Somehow, many people had managed to overlook that simple technique in life: pulling together creates strength far greater than what each of us could muster individually.

A bicycle wheel is, indeed, a marvel of engineering and hidden strength. You take a rim made of thin aluminum, a circle that should crush instantly with any real weight on it, and you attach it to a small hub with very thin little metal spokes that would also bend and fold with any force applied. You put these elements together and all of a sudden you have an incredibly strong system—one that easily puts up with my 200 lbs going over curbs and potholes on the streets and even worse abuse off road. So how do we go from having simply a collection of individually fragile items to the strength of the spinning wheel? It comes from, in the first place, bringing the items together, and then binding them strongly with a fair degree of tension.

As I thought over the author’s words, and about the bicycle wheel, I continued to see how astute Hancock was in his observation. A wheel isn’t all that different than a community. You take a bunch of individuals who by themselves have real, but in many way quite limited strength, bind them together with bonds of love and necessity and then throw in a fair degree of tension and stress and, if it comes together properly, you have a system with tremendous strength and the ability to support great strain.

The bicycle wheel, and its unlikely strength, makes me think about UU faith communities. We are a curious bunch. We don’t have a unifying faith system anymore—unlike our Unitarian and Universalist forebears who had more specific beliefs that they shared. We hold very little in common in terms of specifics. We certainly have common threads—a concern for social justice, a belief that each individual must find their own path, etc, but we rarely agree on specific theological points. And yet we form communities, we come together to share in our individual journeys and have company along the way, sometimes have another path or perspective pointed out to us.

We exist in tension with each other and, right now, with what feels like the dominant culture. Within our congregations our lack of common faith means we have much more to negotiate between ourselves. This tension can pull us far apart from each other, leaving our congregations feeling disjointed. We see this disjointed-ness when we have trouble raising money. We see this separation when we have trouble finding enough people to serve on needed committees. We see the centrifugal force that threatens to whirl us away from each other when we allow the diversity of our opinions on politics, theology or ministers to lead to the division of our communities. Every congregation I have been a part of has these energies and arguments that move us further away from each other.

And yet, there are forces that can help us harness our tensions. Ideals and values that can take the tension and use it, like a bicycle wheel does, to create strength, to create communities that can support heavy weights and carry us great distances. Our principles and purposes can act as the rim and hub of our wheel—defining our general form, lending us shape, but the strength still has to come from the spokes, from the individuals as they contribute. But you can’t exclude any part. The strength doesn’t come without the stress. A wheel free from stress, with all the spokes loose, quickly falls apart. Indeed a wheel with loose spokes is, interestingly enough, said to be out of true. We are true when we all have a certain amount of tension, when we are all pulling toward the center.

Without our tensions we would not be who we are in this free religious tradition. I hope that increasingly we perceive that freedom as a “freedom to” rather than “freedom from.” Freedom to, for me, implies positive choice. We are free to choose to associate, free to choose our own path, free to express our political views, free to love who we will. Freedom from, what political philosophers call negative freedom or liberty, implies more impositions from the outside. Freedom from prejudice, freedom from totalitarian governments—democratic or otherwise, freedom from the religious baggage of our birth that so often keeps up trapped. Freedom from is good too, but I would hope for us the autonomy and self-determination that the positive freedom to implies. I don’t see this as being in conflict with all I’ve said about being a spoke in the wheel; we make a choice to be part of this community, to be part of that strength, not be coerced by external or internal forces.

All faith communities have internal tensions—this is true of us as well as evangelical mega-churches like New Life church here in the Springs or the most conservative mosques or synagogues in the Middle East. To be in community is to have disagreements. It is sometimes easy to think that our more conservative cousins have it much easier than we, but that is an error in thinking. It leads us to think of other faith traditions and political views as monolithic structures when they are in fact not. My time as a chaplain here in Colorado Springs has been an eye-opener to me. Just as Bill Hancock had his own prejudices and expectations both about people and the Blue Moth of depression confounded, I too have had my assumptions and prejudices exposed. Even in as conservative a town as Colorado Springs, I have been welcomed and loved despite the fact that my own faith journey is quite different than many of my colleagues. I had too often equated certainty of belief for arrogance, when I was in fact the arrogant and overly certain one. I assumed the tension between us would be too great, but once again, properly used and understood the tension can lead to tremendous and unexpected strength.

Bicycles are not the only place we find circles of surprising strength. The martial arts I used to love so much are not without their own spinning wheels—several judo throws are known as “wheels” for the way the person gets spun around, and the martial art I practiced the most, Aikido, consists primarily of circular movements. Judo and Aikido are cousins, both deriving from older arts and both focus heavily on using your opponents weight and momentum against him or her. On many occasions, both here and in Japan, I saw elderly experts toss younger, bigger, stronger players as if they were rag dolls. In fact I was the younger, bigger, stronger rag doll on a number of occasions. I was always amazed at the incredible skill these little old men had and how little trouble they had throwing me around no matter how hard I resisted.

Aikido and Judo both ask practitioners to learn the difficult lesson of harmonizing with an attack rather than simply opposing. In Aikido one doesn’t block and strike, instead you learn to take the incoming energy and spin it off in a direction that is harmless to both you and the attacker. Here we are harnessing the energy of the wheel and its motion.

And again strength is found in an unexpected place. If the lessons from the bicycle wheel are about the role of the individual in community and the need to accept tension and the strength that comes with this, what do the wheels in Judo and Aikido offer? I believe here we learn about the strength in weakness or perhaps more accurately in softness, in flexibility, and acceptance.

The world’s spiritual paths are also, of course, filled with images of circles: from Dante’s vision that culminates in the heavens and the believer circling the divine in heaven, spinning round and round, driven by the motive force of love; to Buddhism’s wheel of existence; to the well-known Taoist Yin-Yang symbol. Circles are among the oldest symbols for life, love, and nature. The Sufi Poet Jalal’adin Rumi, who wrote our opening hymn, founded the Islamic order of mystics known for their spinning dance, the Whirling Dervishes. Rumi invited us to, “Come out of the circle of time, and into the circle of love.”

Certainly the Wiccans and Pagans and other holistically and environmentally-minded here would remind us of the great circles in which we all participate—that of life and death, the seasons, and the almost infinite circular repeating cycles of nature. They would also remind us of the dangers, the loss of strength we suffer and havoc we create on our planet when we try to ignore or remove ourselves from these cycles. Here the strength comes from knowing and accepting our place in these macroscopic circles, allow the energy inherent in the wheel to carry us with it, rather than struggling against it or looking for ways to circumvent it. When in ritual we call the corners or draw a circle we are not, to my understanding, separating ourselves from the world around, we are not creating walls or boundaries that exclude, but rather we are embedding ourselves in the world more firmly, pointing out our connections to each other and the planet.

We are, of course, always spinning—on this planet, in this solar system, in the galaxy, in this body. Our blood circulates, the tides ebb and flow, the moon spins, our days and years pass. We are constantly immersed in circles within circles. I think the trick lies in finding ways of moving with those cycles, of hearing the hidden harmonies, of surrendering to the tides we so often struggle against. That is one reason we come to this place, to create a circle of care, to carve out a small niche in our busy lives so that we might have the chance to listen and observe the cycles of our souls.

And so I’ve counted down the months, weeks, and days until I can ride again, until I can connect with the spinning wheels of my bicycle. In the meantime I hope to pay close attention to some of the other cycles in my life, try to catch their rhythms and contribute what strength I can to these other wheels, other patterns and cycles. I’m going to try to listen to poet May Sarton when she advises that, “Everything that slows us down and forces patience, everything that sets us back into the slow circles of nature, is a help.” I’m trying to find a bit of grace and maybe a little strength in this time off my preferred wheels. May we all lend our strength to whatever rapidly spinning circles we move in and are part of. And may we find the time to slow down enough to catch glimpses of the patterns so that we may appreciate all the more the inevitable turnings of the wheel.

As it says in the 2^nd chapter of Ecclesiastes:

A generation goes, and a generation comes, but the earth remains for ever.

The sun rises and the sun goes down, and hastens to the place where it rises.

The wind blows to the south, and goes round to the north; round and round goes the wind, and on its circuits the wind returns.

All streams run to the sea, but the sea is not full; to the place where the streams flow, there they flow again.

What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done; and there is nothing new under the sun:

Amen and Blessed be.

The Whale Upstairs

The Whale Upstairs:
Moby Dick, Woundedness, and Letting Go

a sermon by Nathan Mesnikoff

We mold clay into a pot,
but it is the emptiness inside
that makes the vessel useful.

We fashion wood for a house,
but it is the emptiness inside
that makes it livable.

We work with the substantial,
but the emptiness is what we use.

---from the Tao The Ching

We bought a new house not long ago over on the west side, a beautiful place for us to call home. Built in 1899, the house wears its age well, but time has made its weight known here and there. The most obvious place is at the top of the stairs. On the second floor is a small area—not really a hallway, it doesn't go anywhere, but just an empty space into which the bedrooms, the bathroom and a closet open up.

Many homes have such spaces, but what makes this one special to me is that here, in this place that is in the physical center of the home, the floor is very, very bowed. The house must have settled over the main beam and just kind of slumps down to either side—our very own continental divide. Just to be clear, this is not just a little slope like the other rooms have; this is enough that you can feel yourself walk up one side and down the other.

Somehow I didn't notice this very noticeable defect when we bought the house. It wasn't until we had moved in that I noticed the hump. At first it bothered me a bit. All right, a lot. I like symmetry and I like houses that are regular and neat. This hump began to offend me, to itch at me, a reminder of all that wasn't perfect with the house. Okay, I can admit to being a bit obsessive—ideas and annoyances can get lodged in my head. I began to wonder how expensive it would be to tear up the floor, to somehow be rid of this reminder of the home's imperfection. And so this lump, this floor that I traversed every morning and night bugged me. Or at least it did until I thought about Moby Dick.

In that vast ocean of a novel, Herman Melville (a Unitarian I might add) places Captain Ahab, master of the sailing vessel the Pequod. The narrator of the story, Ishmael, tells his tale of going to sea on a whaling voyage. Soon enough the ill-fated ship sets sail and Ishmael meets Captain Ahab. Having lost a leg to the infamous white whale, Moby Dick, Ahab is determined to hunt down the great beast and kill him.

Melville describes Ahab's hatred of the whale and what it had come to represent:

“Small reason was there to doubt, then, that ever since that almost fatal encounter, Ahab had cherished a wild vindictiveness against the whale, [and] in his frantic morbidness he at last came to identify with him, not only all his bodily woes, but all his intellectual and spiritual exasperations. The White Whale swam before [Ahab] as the …incarnation of all those malicious agencies which some feel eating in them... All that most maddens and torments;…all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick. He piled upon the whale's white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart's shell upon it” Moby Dick, chapter 41 (adapted)

Ahab, crippled by the whale has invested all the frustration and anger he has ever felt on this animal—and spends the rest of his life looking for revenge. His quest ends not only with his death, but also the death of all but one of his crew. He seems to feel that could he exact some revenge, his life might be made right. He might, in some sense, be made whole again. He could return to his beloved wife and son; he could be satisfied if he could just find and kill the beast that randomly struck out and crippled him.

Poor Ahab never realizes his error, never sees that he is throwing his life away for an illusion. But Ahab's tragic flaw is ours, mine, too often. What do we look for in our lives thinking that, if we only had it, our problems would be solved—money, love, power, health, god? What is it that we are missing that we chase after, wounded deep inside for whatever reason? What is it that we feel at some deep level: if only this one thing were right my life would come together? What injuries do we hold close, forever picking at the scabs, never allowing them to heal, somehow psychically preferring to hold on to the pain that has become part of how we live our lives?

This sense is, of course, an illusion. There will always be more to want. Something else to hunt down. And wounds don't get healed by breaking the knife that cut us or bulldozing the scene of the injury. As the Tao Te Ching tells us, "We work with the substantial, but the emptiness is what we use." That is if we are wise. We focus on the substantial but ignore the emptiness that helps define us, that reminds us of our flawed nature. I'm not talking here about Original Sin or any such theological nonsense. I'm talking about acknowledging that we are all broken in some way: dysfunctional families, disease, spiritual assaults, physical and emotional violence. I once spent several hours with a Buddhist master talking about AIDS and the Buddhist response to the disease. While incredibly compassionate, he thought it strange to focus my research on a particular illness. He admitted how terrible it was, but went on to note that there is "an endless catalogue of human suffering." He was right; we all suffer in some way. We are limited beings. That is not the question. The question is, given our limitations, what are we going to do? Are we going to be Ahabs, chasing after that which offends us, or are we going to seek healing in love and spirituality and family, and yes, in our brokenness. (Oh, and if you happen to be one of the 16 people on the planet without any pain or problems, sit back, read the hymnal and wait for coffee hour.)

To me, Moby Dick carries a deeply spiritual message and I want to specifically talk about the injuries to our souls that we carry around. Most of us here grew up in other religious traditions, coming to UU later in life. Many of us bear scars on our spirit —some as deeply wounded as Ahab, a part of ourselves lost to an angry God or at least those claiming to do the bidding of such a deity. I grew up in an orthodox Jewish setting, and neither Judaism or classical theism ever really worked for me. I never felt comfortable in the synagogue.

I've listened to a number of you recount stories of rejection, confusion, even outright abuse in the religious settings in which you grew up. Many if not most of us bear these wounds. Just last week we listened to a member of our church family recount some of the horrible isolation and pain she felt because of her sexual orientation. I was inspired listening to Amanda speak of, not just the pain, but of the peace of coming through the injuries to a place of deeply spiritual calm. It reminded me of Ishmael when he says, "Even…amid the tornadoed Atlantic of my being, do I myself still for ever centrally disport in mute calm; and while ponderous planets of woe revolved round me, deep down and deep inland there I still bathe me in eternal mildness of joy."

Ishmael, like Amanda and others like her, found a place of peace beyond the hate and the hurt. And, it is important to note, Ishmael with his sense of inner calm and acceptance of the mystery of life, is the only one to survive.

Many of us do not find our way out of this "dark night of the soul." The fact that these injuries exist is a tragedy, but what worries me is the way that we seem to hold onto them. If you want a sense of the spiritual state of the individuals in this church, teach classes in adult religious education and listen to the equal parts anger and anguish that so many have in their hearts. The spiritual diversity we enjoy here at All Souls not only speaks to our core values of tolerance and individualism but is also a testimony to the number of places our members didn’t find spiritual homes. UU congregations are always complaining about lack of space, but I’m no longer sure if that is for RE or for all the spiritual and emotional baggage.

I certainly include myself among the wounded. How long have I hunted the white whale of God? Having been offended and injured I sought to kill the beast with a steady onslaught made of equal parts rage and rationality. I am tired of the hunt.

I am not, please hear me carefully, I am not saying that healing is easy. I am saying that progress is difficult without it—both as individuals and as a spiritual community. I am not saying “get over it” I am saying look at it, embrace it, and continue on the path toward being whole even in your brokenness.

I think there are few better examples of this problem than the fact that I have repeatedly heard people say, in this and other congregations that they felt unwelcome and uncomfortable professing anything resembling a traditional theistic and especially Christian faith. Now, as many of you know, I am not much of a theist, and I am not arguing for a return to the much stronger Christian flavor of our forebears, but I am pointing out how deep our pain goes if it is fine to be Buddhist, Pagan, mystical humanist, or out and out atheist in this spiritual community, but not Christian. Yes, yes Christianity has been the primary force of patriarchal oppression for centuries, eradicated indigenous traditions, resisted all sorts of progressive thought, and been behind countless deaths. I take the history seriously. Still the Christian faith inspired and sustained our forbears admirably, focusing as they did on the religion of Jesus, rather than the religion about Jesus. The elements we so often despise—sexism, original sin, anti-intellectualism, damnation, rigid dogma were not really part of Unitarian or Universalist history. The cool reception Christians often receive in our congregations has less to do with Christian history than with the painful memories many of us still hold close. We’re tilting at windmills that appear to us as giants.

You know I often wonder if the way modern UU's approach religion effectively creates a space for spiritual growth or if in our focus on the individual we overlook a central element of religion. But that is a sermon for another day—August 14^th to be exact, mark it in your calendars.

So how do we emulate Ishmael who survives tragedy and not Ahab who turns it into a career. Being here is a start, I know many people who will never set foot in anything resembling a church again. As with so much, admitting the problem is often the hardest part, acknowledging how deeply the pain goes is a central to the healing process. We must also, of course, forgive ourselves. While serving as a chaplain I’ve met so many people who are worried if god can forgive them for all they’ve done. I always encourage them to forgive themselves first and then worry about the response of that which they hold holy. The intertwined practices of prayer and meditation have shown their worth through thousands of years. Both spiritual disciplines call me to remember that I have rarely had a problem that did not hold learning in its arms. As the philosopher Nietzsche once wrote “That which does not destroy us makes us stronger” and I reluctantly agree if not with the attitude than with the sentiment that challenge can often bring positive change. Certainly essential is the universal solvent, guaranteed to dissolve most problems—love: love of others, love of self, love of the holy. But most of all, what separates the healing from the hunter is choice. Our free will allows us to turn away from less healthy paths, to choose a different way, to ask for and accept help.

Moby Dick is often said to be about the quest for knowledge—a common theme in literature of the time. But while other authors of that era proclaimed humanity's ability to understand and decipher the mystery around us, Melville rejected the idea. Ahab insists on knowing, refuses to live with the mystery and the pain. But we can never fully unlock the mystery, know why our lives unfold as they do. What we do know is that we have a choice—do we turn and focus bitterly on the mystery and the apparently cruel turns life holds, or do we accept our limitations—physical, emotional, spiritual and sail on. I am not suggesting we do not try to learn or understand, Melville values the quest for understanding, our hero Ishmael is constantly relating all he has learned, but he also has a deep abiding appreciation for that which will remain unknowable and that ability to distinguish the subtle line between seeking understanding and obsessing over fate often makes the difference between a deeply spiritual life and an embittered one.

Finally, and being true to the theme of abundance I was asked to preach on, these white whales we continue to hunt sap us, not surprisingly our energy—spiritual, emotional, physical. They keep us on the high seas, sometimes for years, often preventing our coming fully to rest in the love of family, friends, and community. We chase our personal Moby Dick's, often forgetting those we leave on shore. Life is full of gifts, gifts of abundance and joy and yet the simpler more pedestrian moments are often overlooked as we rush by focused on the hunt. I know that I have been blessed with many gifts in this life, and yet it is too common for me to spend 80% of my time focused on the 20% that isn’t going as I want. I suspect many of us do the same. What forms of spiritual abundance do we turn away from because we continue to hold close the injuries of years past? What relationships, with people, with the divine, do let wither because of our fear of reopening those wounds?

And so, each day, week in, week out, I scale this massive hump in our upstairs floor. It still bugs me some, I hope someday I can learn to bless the pain and challenges in my life with more enthusiasm. For now, we've framed a quotation from Melville and hung it on the wall—a reminder to me of the glorious imperfections of life, the mysteries that will remain unsolvable, the itches unscratchable and calling me into a deeper relationship with the gaps in my life, the failures and regrets that can now be allowed to swim away, sounding depths I was never meant to know completely. May we all find ways of turning our ships around, letting go of the pain, and finding peace and healing for our wounds. Amen and Blessed be.