Podcast: Download (6.1MB)
Subscribe: More
As I began my monthly rituals of circling around writing my Quest column—rituals which generally include brooding, conversations, naps, internet searches, leafing through poetry books, walking the dogs, cleaning the kitchen, reading friends’ updates on Facebook, casting about in my mind for something wise I read or heard long ago that I can share—rituals of circling similar to my dogs’ as they prepare to lie down, following some cellular memory for creating a nesting spot—as I did all of this, something shocking emerged in my awareness: I have never preached or written, explicitly, about joy!
Podcast: Download (3.7MB)
Subscribe: More
I figured that in exploring the topic of joy it would be good to ask an expert for some input. So I decided to interview my dog, Piper, who is pretty much the most ridiculously joyful being I have ever encountered. We say of Piper that her emotions run the gamut from cheerful to ecstatic (with exceptions for baths and/or our other dog getting treats which “rightfully” belong to her).
July / August 2012
“From joy springs all creation,
By joy it is sustained,
Towards joy it proceeds,
And unto joy it returns. ”
—The Upanishads
The Supreme Court decision earlier this week regarding the Affordable Health Care Act is yet another reminder that we can anticipate an election season fraught with intense partisanship. The free exchange of ideas, even radically disparate ones, is essential to a healthy democracy. Yet we also know that discourse in this country is not infrequently more an effort to entertain and titillate than to actually examine complex social and political issues.
It’s fascinating (and occasionally rather unsettling) to observe the intense emotions that characterize some of the rhetoric in the American public square. It can be equally intriguing (and perhaps even more disturbing) to recognize those kinds of intensities within oneself. As a minister of a congregation in Maryland, an issue that I and many of my fellow Unitarian Universalists are keenly focused on is the future of marriage equality in this state. I recently attended an interfaith training that was supported by Marylanders for Marriage Equality, the Lutheran organization ReconcilingWorks, and the Human Rights Campaign in which we were challenged by our very fine presenter, ReconcilngWorks Executive Director Emily Eastwood, to confront opponents of marriage equality not with debate and rational arguments, but by seeking to connect, understand and care — while still advocating for LGBT rights. This is no easy task for a guy like me who has made some very rational, downright academic arguments for marriage equality publicly on more than one occasion. I sometimes wonder if it is as common fallacy among religious liberals that if we could just explain “the facts” to a benighted world, people will come to “the truth” (which usually means that they will agree with us). Referring to marriage equality, Ms. Eastwood pointed out, “This is not a head issue, it’s a heart issue.” People don’t oppose same-sex civil marriage because they have carefully analyzed empirical data and peer-reviewed, double-blind studies about it. They oppose it because something in their innards clenches when the subject comes up. And if I’m honest, I’ll admit that my own intestines squirm when I listen to people grouse about “defending” marriage (and my wife feels the same way).
James Luther Adams, one of the most influential Unitarian theologians of the twentieth century, remarked that “Where our heart is, there our reason will be.” It very often happens that we are not dispassionate and objective even when we think we are. We are both thinking and feeling beings at all times, and we function this way in the most intimate aspects of life as well as in public discourse on matters of import to our communities, our nation and the whole of creation. We are also spiritual beings. The Golden Rule is not, “Thou shalt pedagogically seek to change thy neighbor’s opinion to be more like thyself.” What does it mean for us to put our self-righteousness aside and seek to truly understand a different point of view — even one we will never, ever agree with? To seek honest connection with another human being under such circumstances is the work of a very mature, enlightened being.
The poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote, “Religion is something infinitely simple, ingenious. It is not knowledge, not content of feeling … it is not duty and not renunciation, it is not restriction: but in the infinite extent of the universe it is a direction of the heart.”
While I cannot agree wholeheartedly with this great existentialist poet about what religion is not, I share his sense that, whatever else it may be, religion is a direction of the heart. I mean this in a two-fold sense: any religion worth embracing will, in and of itself, contain an element of emotion which is both inspiring and satisfying. At the same time, any religion worth embracing will be sufficiently reasonable and encourage sufficient spiritual discipline so that it will serve to channel our feelings in positive ways—that is, it will offer direction to our emotions, tempering them when they are out of control and provoking them when they are sublimated in unnecessary or unhealthy ways.
Much of the history of liberal religion, in general—and Unitarian Universalism, in particular—has been devoted to crafting an approach to religion that is more rational, more reasonable, more intellectually coherent, and more congruent with empirical evidence than more traditional belief systems. I celebrate our cultivation of reasonable religion. But the life decisions we make—great or small—rarely lend themselves to purely rational processes. The value judgments we all make on a daily basis—about what we eat, who we love, what we enjoy, what work we undertake—may all lend themselves to attempts at rational explanation by social scientists but arriving at those personal judgments is anything but a purely rational exercise.
What separates the sanctuary from the laboratory, the church from the academy, the congregation from the learned society, is the richness of human feeling that goes into shaping and expressing the values we affirm and promote. And so we strive to find the balance between head and heart, to create a worldview that meets our deepest emotional needs without acquiescing to the ridiculous. A faith which represents a direction of the heart need not be grounded in simplistic sentimentalism or frivolous feeling – although sentiment and feeling will be found within it – perhaps even simplicity and a certain measure of frivolity, but it will esteem love and compassion, kindness and responsibility.
Waldemar Argow warned that, “Religion without emotion is a stunted, ineffectual thing. Religion that is all emotion is a childish and even dangerous force quite incapable of solving the problems we have to deal with. The ideal in religion is to establish the proper balance between mind and emotion, the thinking mind showing us the way we ought to go and the loving heart leading us to walk in that way.”
Courage comes in many forms and it wears many faces. We often think of those who put themselves in harms’ way for the sake of others as being courageous. The firefighter who rushes into a burning building. The soldier who risks life and limb to save a buddy who’s been wounded. The mother who shields her baby from imminent danger.
This past week, I saw another face of courage. It was worn by a young woman who lives in Arizona, whose mother brought her across the border when she was an infant. All her life she lived in fear. In fear of the knock on the door in the middle of the night. In fear of the police who patrol her neighborhood. In fear that when she came home from school her mother would be gone, taken to a detention center to be deported.
This young woman, now in her twenties, has declared her freedom from fear and has become an advocate for the rights of undocumented people just like herself. She has attended and spoken out at immigrant rights’ rallies. She has “bucked the system” and achieved both a Bachelor’s and a Master’s degree from Arizona State. She has started a “language exchange” in Phoenix, where undocumented youth from her community can come and teach Spanish, thereby earning a little cash to support themselves while they also learn to speak English from their students. (See the video here: Spanish for Social Justice ) She is, in all aspects of her life, proclaiming her heritage, her identity and her status in the face of frightening, brutal and repressive forces. And she’s doing it with joy and love. The face of courage that I encountered last week wears a big smile, and it is beautiful.
After hearing this woman’s story, I’m called to ask myself where courage comes from. Not the “run into a burning building” courage (which, while certainly admirable, often is more a reaction to circumstance), but the kind that says “I’m in this for the long haul, no matter what.” The kind of courage that enables and empowers us to get out of bed, day after day, to face a world full of risk and danger. I have to believe that this kind of courage is grounded in love. In the love that we receive from others and in the love we have for the world.
We need a community of love around us to provide the foundation for all that we do. Knowing that we are loved, no matter what, by our family and our friends gives us the courage to venture out into a hostile world. It also forms the basis of our self-esteem, the basis of our belief that our lives matter and that we can make a difference. This kind of love empowers us to declare our own worth in the face of those who would deny it.
A love of the world calls us to engage with it, in all its beauty and all its horror. When we love the world, like a parent with a troublesome child, we acknowledge its imperfections, yet we cast our gaze to the horizon of its potential. Love for the world allows us, in the words of Bobby Kennedy, “to dream things that never were, and say, why not?” And it creates in us the commitment to do what we can to make those dreams a reality.
As I move through the days ahead, I will carry the image of this young woman with me. She is, for me, the new face of courage.
Peace,
Peter
There is a protest at Tent City tonight, the place where Sherriff Joe Arpaio holds thousands of immigrants in his self described ‘concentration camp.’ Where there is never any relief from the Arizona heat, where humiliation is a daily occurrence.
I’m with my people, in our bright yellow Standing on The Side of Love shirts that match the school buses that take us there, Unitarian Universalists in Phoenix for our annual convention. There are hundreds of us going, a couple of thousand maybe, mostly white, middle class, documented. And yet I am afraid.
I’m afraid because I’ve heard there will be counter-protestors, militia folks maybe, perhaps with the weapons which are legal to carry in Arizona. I’m afraid because it’s so hot, because I’m not exactly Olympics material in my physical fitness, because I am taking a teenaged child whose safety means everything to me.
And then, as we sit in worship and prayer, preparing to go, speakers from the local Latino community speak. A young woman describes her decision to commit civil disobedience, to be arrested by Sherriff Joe Arpaio, because she is tired of living in fear, of her whole community living in daily fear of being rounded up for real or imagined infractions and thrown into the Tent City, as they have been for the past 20 years. A young man describes arriving in the United States at age one, and now facing deportation –leaving the only country he’s ever known to be sent to one which is foreign to him.
And I begin to feel embarrassed by my fear. Not ashamed, not guilty, just embarrassed. As if I am a kid who grabbed too many cookies off the plate. And I think, this fear that binds us all, this fear of being arrested and humiliated and tortured in our own country: How does that hold us back? How does that diminish us? The young woman who chose to be arrested says, Yes, she was afraid, but she’s been afraid all her life. This arrest, in a way, freed her. I think of the words of the poet Audre Lorde, in her essay which is desert-island-essential to me, The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action:
What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence?
As we get into our bright yellow school bus, a minister offers a prayer for our journey. I say to the driver, Are we holding our departure up because we are standing up praying? And she looks up with some annoyance and says, “No! I am praying!” As I begin to lead the crowd off the bus, she says, “Thank you so much for doing this. My husband is in there.”
At Tent City, I don’t see any counter protestors, with or without weapons. I see a small gaggle of brave locals, who have come to thank us for being there. One woman I speak with tells me that her inability to pay for a traffic infraction landed her there for ten days. She describes the endless heat, the lack of adequate drinking water, the horrible food. She says then, tears in her eyes, “My girlfriend is in for a year.”
Another man holds a sign charging Joe Arpaio with homicide. I ask him how many people have died at Tent City. He says at least five. I ask him if his church stands up to speak out about this. He replies sadly, “I am still Catholic but I do not go to church anymore. Most of us don’t. There was one priest who spoke out for us but they got rid of him.”
As I get back on the bus to go back to air conditioned comfort, a shower and clean pajamas, his words stay with me most. I wish that I could have responded, in Arizona or in my own home state of Minnesota, “You would be welcome in my church!” I know that the Phoenix UU church is doing fantastic work to be welcoming, to stand tall as an advocate for justice for immigrants. And yet I know that, while we stand on the side of love, sometimes we stand too far off to the side, in our fear, in our privilege, buffered, unwilling to disrupt our comfort. I offer a silent prayer and wake up this morning with his words still piercing my heart.
(Photos by Jie Wronski-Riley)
My ministry in Philadelphia has led me to have two homes: a house in Central Pennsylvania with my husband and an apartment in Philadelphia near the church. This week, my husband came to Philadelphia to help me to move to another apartment. As with many things in my life, this moving experience has led me to reflect and to pay attention. It is a good change, but all change has consequences.
Neither apartment is large, but the new one is big enough to have a separate office space and to host small groups. I say this so that you will know that this move was not like changing houses. Still, there were boxes of books and papers, boxes of dishes and kitchen equipment, and the basic furniture. We are no longer young, so for the first time in our adult lives, we hired some men to help us move the furniture. They looked at the furniture and said, “Oh, this is easy it’s just furniture!” It would not have been easy for us. Moving reminded me of my need for help and my appreciation for that help, both volunteer and paid. Change often means that we need help. I am grateful for community. I am grateful for caring relationships.
Rick and I moved all the boxes and all my clothing. Did I mention that the new apartment is a second floor walk-up? There are actually four flights of stairs. Most of the time, this is nothing, and I prefer having stairs so that some exercise is built into my days. Did I mention that it was the hottest day of the year so far? The morning after we carried all these boxes, I wasn’t sure I could move my body at all that day. At first, walking across the room seemed out of the question! I could and did! Moving led me to pay attention to my body and to be gentle with myself about my physical limits. Change means that we do different things. I am grateful for what I am able to do.
How could it be that I had so much stuff in a one bedroom apartment in two years of being in Philadelphia? Do I really need all that stuff? The answer, of course, is no, I don’t really need all that stuff. Some of it I gave away before the move, and some of it, I am sorting and giving away after the move. Figuring out how to use things or where to put things in a new place helps me to see what I have. There is an inertia, a not seeing, that comes from having things in the same place. Moving overcomes that inertia. Moving reminds me of my desire to live simply. We have not changed houses for 18 years. I think now would be a good time to simplify. What is in o ur house simply because of inertia and not because we are using it or will use it? What is in my life simply because of inertia? Change allows us to see things in a new way. I am grateful to see new possibilities.
Another reminder in this move came from my cat, Annie. Annie was terrified by this move. Of course, she could not understand what was happening. When she arrived at the new apartment, she ran to a dark place and hid. She only emerged wide-eyed and jumpy when I opened a can of cat food. Annie saw where I put the food and took a bite. She ran to her hiding place again. She came out crying. I petted her and showed her the litter box. She hid again until we went to bed when she started crying, only stopping when she was held and comforted. Her reactions remind me that change can be distressing especially when we do not understand what is happening. By morning, Annie was fine. She stopped crying. She knew that her needs would still be met. Food, litter box and her people were all available. She found the windows for entertainment. She slept comfortably. Annie reminded me that we all need comfort. We may need time to become comfortable with change. We can accept change more easily when we understand what is happening. I am grateful for the comfort of caring relationships. I am grateful for understanding. I am grateful for awareness.
May we all be aware of gratitude.
It is a strong word, evil… and one those of us of Liberal Faith have not always engaged well. I mean the word… people of Liberal Faith have often come into contact with evil, we just have trouble calling it that.
This week, I am in Phoenix, attending the Justice General Assembly of the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations. Two years ago, when other denominations and institutions were being encouraged to boycott Arizona over the passage of the anti-immigration law known as SB-1070, our denomination was invited by both our Phoenix congregations and by our Arizona Allies for immigration reform to come to Arizona. We were invited to forgo much of our normal General Assembly business, and to come and allow their stories of facing the evils of our nation’s and this state’s current immigration policy to transform us. We were invited to stand in solidarity with them. We were invited to learn, grow, and transform with them.
And yet, in our desire to be present and to “make a difference” in this time of deportations and family separations and the dehumanization of being forced to prove your citizenship status because of your skin color, we of liberal faith who have come to Arizona this week also have the potential to cause harm, and to commit acts that would be viewed by some as evil… perhaps not in their intent, but certainly in their effect.
I believe in the ultimate unity of all things. That all of us are part of the greatest reality which I define with the name God. For me, God is all and is in all, the rocks and the trees, the birds and the bees, the smallest atom and the largest galaxy. All interconnected and interdependent, we are all a part of God. All of the divisions that we humans see or hope to see around us are coping mechanisms that we limited creatures have created to deal with an unlimited divine reality.
One of those coping mechanisms is the imagined division of good and evil. I am not saying that good and evil are imaginary, but rather that the division between them is. At their core, good and evil are human valuations of acts, intents, and events that happen within the wholeness that I call God. More than perception, naming something as “good” or as “evil” has a lot more to do with the values of the person doing the naming than it does being an inherent aspect of the thing being so judged.
Let me take immigration as an example. I believe that current federal and many state policies regarding immigration to be evil. I believe that the enforcement of immigration policies here in Maricopa County, Arizona, and in many parts of this state, is evil. And, that belief says a lot more about me than it does about the events here in Arizona themselves… or at least it says a lot more about the values that I hold at the center of my life.
I find immigration policy and enforcement, as it is currently being practiced in Arizona and beyond, to be contrary to by belief in the inherent worth and dignity of every person. I believe that the arbitrary border of the United States forgets that this land was unjustly taken from indigenous peoples, some of which are my ancestors. I believe that this nation depends upon the labor of many who are undocumented, and not recognizing them and regularizing their immigration status is a new defacto form of slavery. I believe that human rights are being violated every day in the name of border enforcement. I believe that people are not being given the democratic rights to representation and self-determination.
And so, I believe that the current form of immigration policy and enforcement is evil. I believe that because my principles, values, and religious faith call me to that belief… and as such I am responsible to do whatever I can, in good conscience, to bring an end to that evil.
You see, neither good nor evil have a metaphysical reality. I do not accept that there is some metaphysical being who embodies evil and brings it into the world. I believe that naming a metaphysical nature to evil (like the devil) is a way for humans to name something as evil without having to take personal responsibility for working to end that evil. A metaphysical center for either good or evil has the effect of disempowering humanity for their responsibility for what is good, and for what is evil in the world.
Because each and every one of us has tremendous capacity for good, and for evil. And, because not all human beings agree on our foundational values, principles, and religious faith, many of the things I view as supporting good are viewed by someone else as supporting evil. There are those here in Arizona who believe that all of these religious liberals coming to stand with and bear witness with our local allies is a form of evil. We each also have the capacity to commit acts that might be evil in our own eyes, were we to see them clearly.
An example of such would be if we religious liberals came to Arizona like “saviors” and attempted to paternalistically take leadership in this long running struggle, instead of coming to learn from those who have been in this struggle for so long. We are here at their invitation, to learn from them and to stand with them. If we were to try and engage this struggle in any other way, we would be in danger of committing another evil, in our own eyes as well as theirs.
Evil exists, and it is in us. We human beings create it, even when we sometimes don’t intend to… and what we define as evil is one of the clearest expressions of what we value ourselves.
Yours in Faith,
Rev. David
Can you give $5 or more to sustain the ministries of the Church of the Larger Fellowship?
If preferred, you can text amount to give to 84-321
Quest for Meaning is a program of the Church of the Larger Fellowship (CLF).
As a Unitarian Universalist congregation with no geographical boundary, the CLF creates global spiritual community, rooted in profound love, which cultivates wonder, imagination, and the courage to act.