Find a Stillness

Rev. Peggy Clarke, Senior Minister

February 19, 2023

 It’s been such a warm winter, it’s nearly been spring with the exception of maybe 4 days- Christmas, of course, when we were all standing outside wrapped in every winter item we could find, and one brutal weekend two weeks ago – and even then, there’s been no snow or ice to speak of. This week, it hit 70. The problem is, at least for me, that winter is the time I slow down. As a working mother with big obligations in many areas of my life, I’m busy all the time. I need winter to force a slow-down, and this year, I’ve been short-changed. Instead of the natural stay-inside response to freezing weather that slows things down after the holiday season, we went from the hustle and bustle of December singing Busy Sidewalks to actual busy sidewalks, and all the growth and productivity of springtime.

In the absence of that necessary and common winter slowdown, I’m offering instead this sermon. It’s meant to be a meditation on winter and stillness with the explicit invitation to just breathe through it, letting your body relax, letting your mind go. I promise not to say anything important. I won’t talk about trauma, I won’t call you to action, I won’t give you anything deep to think or worry about. There will be no facts or figures, nothing you’ll want to remember later. Not today. Today is meant to be a gift, a kindness, a way for your brain to slow down, for your body to be still, for you to rest. So, listen to the meditative sermon. Or let your mind wander. Notice how beautiful the stained glass here is. Then come back to my words which are nothing more than an invitation to lean in to the stillness of winter.

Make yourselves comfortable. Take a deep breath.

Annie Dillard says, “I bloom indoors in the winter like a forced forsythia; I come in to come out. At night I read and write and things I have never understood become clear; I reap the harvest of the rest of the year’s planting. Outside, everything has opened up. Winter clear-cuts and re-seeds the easy way. Everywhere paths unclog…The woods are acres of sticks; I could walk to the Gulf of Mexico in a straight line. When the leaves fall, things stand mute and revealed. Everywhere skies extend, vistas deepen, walls become windows, doors open. All that summer conceals, winter reveals.”

I live in the woods, which might seem odd since I only ever see any of you here in Midtown, but I do. My house is surrounded by trees and for much of the year, we can’t see the other houses on our street through all the leaves. But in the winter, the woods empty and I can see everything. The spring is a virtual cabaret of flowers and budding trees and the summer is a carnival of life and autumn a festival of color.  But the winter is more like a memorial, a time for reflection and revelation. The trees and shrubs end the autumn in a dramatic striptease exposing a bare Earth and the humans make our way inside where we are less vulnerable, less exposed than the planet appears to be.

And then things get quiet. When there’s snow, sound seems to be absorbed and we enter the quiet time. Even when the snow melts and turns that awful gray, the chill keeps us indoors where we can think. Humans don’t talk about hibernation, but I think we do, in fact, enter a semi-hibernation state where we eat heavy food and sleep longer hours, and move more slowly. It’s natural for us to hole-up, to make our homes into little caves, to be lazy. And, to be clear, I’m not using the word lazy as a judgment, just an observance. Doing less isn’t bad. It’s counter-cultural, so it’s unusual, but it’s not bad. Sometimes, it’s even good. It’s time to recharge and it’s wholly necessary.

This is what sabbath could be for us. One day a week for rest. To be honest, I’m not a leader in this field. I have one day off each week and I still read email or do other work things. So, I preach these words for me to hear as much as anyone else. In a world that measures success by market growth, that understands the rhythm of the planet only insofar as it pertains to economic advancement, requiring everyone to do and spend more each quarter than we did the last, observing the sabbath is a wholesale rejection of a culture that cares nothing for our collective spiritual well-being. Taking one day as a break from the system that sees us all as commodities, instead focusing on healing and breathing, and being in relationship, could be a balm for ourselves and this perpetually moving culture of ours.

My aunt is dying. I spent a lot of time in her home recently with my uncle and cousins, who are some of my favorite people. Carolyn is dying at home. She’s too young, but she’s in bed surrounded by her family. There’s nothing like the stillness of a home waiting for death. I’m sure you all know what I’m talking about. We’ve spent a lot of time being still. Waiting. We make small talk. We make big talk. People move in and out- old friends, nurses, neighbors, caretakers of many kinds – and we sit. We hold her hand. We tell her stories, although she’s been asleep for a week. We eat when we’re hungry, never really clear about what time it is or what meal it’s supposed to be. Time has little meaning when everything is just what we understand to be Before. There is great sadness in our stillness, in the stillness of that house. And there’s connection. And tenderness. And love. Even as we do little more than breath together, and wait.

So many of us – the entire planet, really – had the experience of collective stillness for at least 3 months, and really more like 2 years, didn’t we? We were ordered into our homes. We were told that moving around was hurting us, was spreading a deadly virus. We need to stay still. Keep ourselves contained. And as sure as we were that we could never do that on any large scale for any period of time, it was stunning how quickly we did just that. We all stayed still. We moved indoors and waited.

Quarantine felt like a multi-national spiritual practice. Everyone inside. Everyone stay still. Everyone breathe deeply and lean into your powerlessness. Everyone. Shhh…Don’t move.

Let’s all try it. Let’s try for a moment to not move. Let your hands rest, maybe drop your eyes to a fixed place on the floor. Breathe in. Feel your breath move through you. We’re going to breathe a little together. We’ll breath in to the count of 4, then hold for 7 and breath out for 8. Doctors tell us this is good for our bodies.

Breath in 1-2-3-4. Hold 1-2-3-4-5-6-7. Out. 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8. Again.

And sit. Feel the seat. Maybe it’s uncomfortable. Feel the air on your skin. The floor beneath your feet. Your clothes on your body. Breathe.

And let your mind rest. Watch the thoughts melt away. Lean into the nothing. Let your body be still, but not so still you feel afraid to move. I was once joining a Roshi for the Zen practice of sitting and when I realized I wasn’t allowed to move I nearly had a panic attack. Don’t be that still. There are no rules. This is just about being. You and I are just being. We aren’t doing. We are still and we are breathing, and we are alive, and it is enough. It is good. It is very good.

I will keep talking, and you can tune back in or you can keep feeling your breath moving through you.

W.B. Yeats, the Irish poet wrote: “We can make our minds so like still water that beings gather about us that they may see, it may be, their own images, and so live for a moment with a clearer, perhaps even with a fiercer life because of our quiet.”

We can make our minds so like still water. Stillness is the tool that brings us back from fragmentation into wholeness. So many of us live lives of division, running from one thing to the next, waiting for moments just to sit down and when we do, it’s often in front of a screen or while waiting for whatever’s next, possibly someone who’s late who’s also living a life of  fragmentation. There’s an accepted state of constant semi-attention to the sound of voices, music, traffic, the generalized noise of what goes on all the time around us or the volcano of words that crash on our computer screens with their attachments and links to more words and tweets and updates. This keeps us immersed in a flood of racket and words, a diffuse medium in which our consciousness is half-diluted: we are not quite “thinking,” not entirely responding. We are not fully present and not entirely absent; not fully withdrawn yet not completely available, leading us all into a state of semi-consciousness as we make our way through busy days. Stillness is the healing balm that brings us back to ourselves and into right relationship with the world around us.

So, let us sit. Still. Let us sit still. Just for this moment, with Madison Avenue busy behind you, let us sit still. Let’s breath into the stillness of our bodies, long deep breaths. Let the world progress around as it does, let the day move and the buses pass, and the sirens blare, but let us sit still. There’s healing in the stillness. If we do it long enough, we’ll hear our own voices quietly telling us where to go next. We’ll see our ancestors smiling. We’ll feel ourselves rooted in Earth and nourished from our common Source.

These winter days, with or without the cold and ice, are an invitation to move inward, to rest. To be still. This is our season to appreciate the Sabbath, the sabbatical of the winter, now is our chance to reclaim our lives from the busyness, to move indoors and discover what the stillness of winter will reveal.

We’ll close with this poem by the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda called Keeping Quiet

Now we will count to twelve
and we will all keep still.

This one time upon the earth,
let’s not speak any language,
let’s stop for one second,
and not move our arms so much.

It would be a delicious moment,
without hurry, without locomotives,
all of us would be together
in a sudden uneasiness.

The fishermen in the cold sea
would do no harm to the whales
and the peasant gathering salt
would look at his torn hands.

Those who prepare green wars,
wars of gas, wars of fire,
victories without survivors,
would put on clean clothing
and would walk alongside their siblings
in the shade, without doing a thing.

What I want shouldn’t be confused
with final inactivity:
life alone is what matters,
I want nothing to do with death.

If we weren’t unanimous
about keeping our lives so much in motion,

if we could do nothing for once,
perhaps a great silence would
interrupt this sadness,
this never understanding ourselves
and threatening ourselves with death,
perhaps the earth is teaching us
when everything seems to be dead
and then everything is alive.

Now I will count to twelve
and you keep quiet and I’ll go.

Healing the Wounds that Bind Us

Rev. Peggy Clarke, Senior Minister

February 12, 2023

Google “religious scandals” and you will be as overwhelmed as I was with the dizzying array of salacious events to choose from. Faced with an astounding list of options, I first clicked Jim Bakker, since that was a familiar name. A televangelist with his own Christian theme park, he and his wife founded the Praise the Lord Club, a televised program netting over $200 million a year. Bakker resigned from his ministry after paying his secretary to be quiet about raping her and then he went to prison for felony related to accounting fraud.

In 1990, Covenant House, an organization designed to help runaway kids, was slammed with accusations that Fr. Bruce Ritter, their larger than life founder, sexually abused some of the kids in his care. That revelation opened the gate for a tidal wave of stories from people across generations all over the country not just accusing priests of molesting them but of a massive system of cover-ups aided and abetted by the most powerful men in the American Catholic Church.

Just a few months ago we learned that a Hasidic school in Brooklyn has been failing to educate their students essentially neglecting to teach them math, English, science or social studies, choosing instead to spend huge sums of money on religious indoctrination and Yiddish. Orthodox schools have also gotten city and state money for children with disabilities, but the schools have provided little or no accommodations for those children. Making these scandals even worse, lawmakers in the area have known for years but haven’t wanted to appear antisemitic or to challenge the voting block which they need to maintain their power in the neighborhood.

People calling themselves Christian have been trying for-ever to convert people who don’t conform to sexual or gender norms. LGBTQ people have been subjected to electroshock treatments, conversion camps, and full communal exclusion when they display behaviors considered outside the acceptable societal expectations. Christian preachers croon about hell and cite narrow interpretations of scripture to marginalize people, leading to unbearable pain.

A woman I know was raised a Jehovah’s Witness. She met her husband in her church, but soon after marrying they decided they wanted to take a break from Sunday mornings and stopped going to church. The minister told the community to shun them, which meant to completely shut them out of their lives. The community included their parents, grandparents, brothers, and sisters. They were excluded from gatherings of all kinds; not even phone calls were allowed. Under pressure, the couple agreed to return to church where the shunning continued for 6 months until they proved their faithfulness.  

I was raised without religion, a fact many people tell me they wish was true of them. Both of my parents had been treated badly by their religions of origin. They’d both experienced trauma as children and neither of their respective religious traditions or communities were able to speak to their needs in any meaningful way. To make it more complicated, after they fell in love, the fact that he was Catholic and she was Jewish meant that neither family was supportive of their relationship. My mother’s mother forced a break-up. My father’s cousins looked for my mother’s horns. The whole thing was destructive and when I was born, they agreed to keep me away from organized religion. (We can see how well that turned out.)

Religious institutions have been the source of tremendous pain in the lives of millions of people.

Raise your hand if you have been hurt by a religious community or particular theology. Keep your hands up. Raise your hand if you rejected religion because it was harmful to you. Keep your hands up. Raise your hand if, before coming here, you were sure you’d never step foot in another church/synagogue or other house of worship again.

You can put your hands down. That’s a lot of us. A lot of people right here in this room have experienced religious trauma or have barely escaped it, and we aren’t alone. Our streets are filled with people who have been hurt, rejected, or otherwise harmed in one of a thousand ways by the very institutions they were taught to trust.

I read a sermon written by a colleague of mine down in Georgia. Her name is Charlotte Arsenault and in her sermon she references a writer named Jim Palmer. He’s done a lot of work on this subject, but what I found most interesting is a list of messages people get from religion that create trauma. Here’s his list:

I am inherently bad.

I can't trust myself.

My heart is wicked.

I deserve punishment.

I don't measure up.

I am powerless.

Self-denial is holiness.

I need forgiveness for who I am.

I need to be saved from myself.

I am worthless on my own.

Being devoted to God means staying in an abusive relationship.

Therapy or medication is a lack of faith.

Self-care is selfish.

The world is evil.

If I mess up I will lose my salvation and go to hell.

People I deeply love are in hell or will go there.

Everything outside my church culture is a threat.

I can never be good enough.

Feelings are dangerous and not trustworthy.

I am not capable of thinking for myself.

Obedience is true discipleship.

Questioning is a spirit of rebellion.

I must be perfect.

My struggles mean I am not trusting God.

I am nothing.

I am weak.

And lastly, God will fix it for me.

To Mr. Palmer’s list I’d like to add:

You don’t need science if you have faith.

You might be in pain, grieving, terrified, but it’s all God’s will.

This is God’s plan.

Your beloved died because God wanted them with Him.

Sex is sinful and separates you from God.

Clergy are closer to God than you are.

Clergy are rarely wrong, sad, angry or in need.

This is because they have real faith.

When you are wrong, sad, angry or in need, it’s your lack of faith.

Women are subservient to men.

Women should not lead.

Women should be quiet.

These might be messages you’ve heard before. If so, I’m sorry. I’m sorry anyone said these things to you or implied them or build a world or system around them. I’m sorry anyone has had to hear them, or that anyone believes them enough they’d repeat them. Those messages saturate our culture, sink into our minds, and effect self-worth in powerful, often lasting ways.

People are running from organized religion, and it’s no wonder. The hurt perpetrated, over and over, generation to generation is finally repelling people, something I hope is a sign of health. I hope there’s a wholesale rejection of messages that don’t align with other shared cultural values.

If I were to make a list of what messages I hope people are hearing or assuming here, here are some things that would be on it:

I am beautiful

I am made in the image of all that’s Holy

I am loved

When I feel broken, there’s somewhere I can go to be reminded that I am whole

Everyone behaves badly sometimes

Everyone gets angry

Everyone feels sad

Everyone knows how it feels to be lonely

None of these feelings are a lack of faith

Everyone is loved

Everyone is saved

My gender, my sexuality, the color of my skin, are reflections of God

I am part of the divine spirit that lives and loves in all of us

My voice matters, even if I don’t have a job or a home or don’t speak English

It’s OK that I don’t have answers

Questions are faithful

One of the ways I see religious trauma play out is in inherent distrust of clergy, and sometimes other church leadership. It’s always interesting to me when I see people start to question the motives of their friends once their friends are sitting on the board. I tell board members when that happens that it’s not about them, the same way I know the similarly suspicious energy I receive isn’t about me. It’s one of the ways we play out years of pain or childhood religious trauma. It’s safer to assume malintent of people with any kind of religious authority. I mean- it’s annoying for us, but in some ways it’s also understandable. I don’t want to downplay the trauma it perpetuates, though. At least two past board chairs here have been honest about how that experience has eaten at their souls. One recently spoke publicly in a congregational meeting that she has some PTSD as a result of how badly she was treated by other members of this congregation when she was in a position of authority. Often in UU churches, once a board chair steps off the board, they leave the church, sometimes just for a while, but often for good. We’re seeing ministers fleeing under similar circumstances. With a national shift toward self-care, clergy across denominations are deciding they can’t be lightning rods any more. We’ve all heard the old adage: Hurt people, hurt people and whether they are aware of it or not, that anger plays out in houses of worship over and over again, continuing the cycle of victimization.

As we make our way toward a congregational covenant, acknowledging the religious trauma we might be carrying will be necessary. We don’t want to keep rehearsing pain, building our defensiveness into new relationships, designing new systems on foundations of unprocessed suffering. We don’t want to perpetuate the same trauma on others because we haven’t come to terms with it within ourselves.

One sermon isn’t going to heal anyone. That’s a magic touch I just don’t have. Today is one step in a process of mending those fragments of our spirits that are still torn, or frayed from having been pulled out from under some heavy guilt and rejection and familial or cultural weights. The steps toward healing aren’t linear. I can’t tell you what’s first, and the fact that you’re here says you’ve already begun. This is more of a spiral where you know the pain and feel it and consider it and deconstruct it and then know it and feel it again. It’s a movement, like all healing is, a dance deeper in and back out again in a process of discernment and letting go and finding replacements for the messages that cause so much hurt.

Those healing messages are spoken here every week, and even as you hear them, they won’t push out the more damaging messages until they are lived and demonstrate themselves to be real. One of the things that helps us to live them is to be honest about them. To talk about where and when and how the damage was done. And let me acknowledge something some of you might need to hear. I know some of the damage was done here at Community Church. I know that this church hasn’t always been the safest place for everyone. We haven’t experienced sexual misconduct from leadership – as far as I know – but there are other ways for clergy to behave badly, ways for leadership to damage a church in a slow-burning, the effects of which are seen over time rather than in the in-your-face-ness of a mega-church guilty of tax evasion or paying off rape victims. We don’t talk about it much here, which I wonder about sometimes. Does it seem disrespectful to name openly what’s been happening here over the last 40 years? Is it that the people still here aren’t the ones most hurt, so there isn’t much to say? Is it that the people causing the hurt or dysfunction might still be in earshot? Or is it that we’ve all been taught not to speak these things out loud, that millennia of listening to religious in power conditioned us to keep quiet?

Just before the Me Too movement hit nationally, the female clergy within the UU Ministers Association started telling some difficult truths. At the beginning of that reckoning, one of our luminaries who has worked with congregations in the aftermath of clergy misconduct gave a critical lecture to our entire membership. She started by invoking the closing scene of Raiders of the Lost Arc where the lead character played by Harrison Ford told his friends not to look as the Arc of the Covenant was opened and the demons were released killing anyone with their eyes open. Instead, she said, Look. We might be afraid, but we have to look and see what’s in the box we’ve been keeping closed or we will never heal. 

A few months ago I apologized from this pulpit for something I’d said the year before. It was a very deliberate act and I did it for several reasons. One was that I regretted what I’d said. It was also because I suspected very few people in this room had ever heard a member of the clergy apologize from the pulpit. It happens very rarely. In fact, I was trying to remember a time I knew of where it had happened without the person resigning and couldn’t come up with one example. This isn’t to say there aren’t plenty, but none come to mind. What does come to mind is people recognizing something they did and then walking away. That might be appropriate sometimes, but I’d like to think there are ways to acknowledge mistakes that allow for a continuation of covenantal relationship. In fact, that’s what I think covenantal relationships are. Some of you have asked me to forgive you for things you’ve done or said and my response is always, “Of course”. That’s covenant lived in real time.

And that’s authentic religious community. No shunning. No converting. No hushing or denying. We speak truth in love. And when we can’t, when we can’t find truth or love is distant, we say that too. We say it in faith, knowing that we will make our way back to ourselves and to each other, that we are together, walking each other home. As Alice Walker tells us, “There is no god but love and so rising is inherent in our heart beat as we move carried or knocked about by life. This we know: We were not meant to suffer so much and to learn nothing.”

So we are here with our broken hearts, our healing spirits, and our wisdom being born.  

Reclaiming History: The Rise and Fall of Black Wall Street

February 5, 2023

Rev. Peggy Clarke, Senior Minister

After the Civil War, the 5 Indigenous Nations living in what is now Oklahoma gave a group of freed people land on which to start new lives. Word got out that the Territory was a safe place for newly liberated people, creating a land rush that only got more intense through the rest of the century.

In 1889, OW Gurley, born to freed people in Alabama, moved to Oklahoma where he purchased 40 acres with the idea of supporting other Black people to buy land and build homes and businesses. Often called the Architect of Greenwood, the neighborhood in Tulsa sometimes referred to as Black Wall Street, Gurley provided loans and other support to encourage the creation of a new community for Black people. 10 years later, he was joined by JB Stradford, a Black lawyer from Kentucky, who built homes and businesses including a luxury hotel. In that intervening decade, restaurants, doctor, dentist and lawyer offices, schools, grocery and candy stores, banks, churches, pool halls, hair salons, and theatres had opened up and by the turn of the century Greenwood was a destination for Black people to settle or vacation. They even had their own hospital and newspaper, the Tulsa Star, founded and run by an activist committed to telling the story of this thriving Black enclave. You could live in Greenwood and never leave. Covering about 35 square blocks – from Lex to 7th, from 35th to 42nd st., everything a family needed could be found in walking distance. Families were accumulating wealth and were spending it in their own community, keeping the neighborhood self-sufficient, while the people were interdependent.

There are some lovely stories of the Greenwood neighborhood. Ellis Walker Woods walked from Memphis to Oklahoma after seeing a flyer advertising for Black teachers. As a college-educated man, he soon became the principle of the Booker T. Washington High School. Simon Berry, a pilot, learned that the taxi service in Tulsa only served white people, so he borrowed the money for a Model-T Ford to drive Black people where they needed to go. He then expanded creating a bus line and then a charter plane service for wealthy Black oilmen. Mable Little arrived in Greenwood with $1.24 and was able to open a hair salon with the help of other female entrepreneurs who were committed to supporting each other in this new world they were building.

On May 30th, 1921, 19 year old Dick Rowland, a Greenwood resident working in greater Tulsa, got on an elevator run by a 17 year old white female elevator operator named Sarah Page. When the elevator opened, Ms. Page accused Mr. Rowland of attempted rape. In subsequent investigations, it seems clear that nothing actually happened on that elevator, but the accusation was all that was needed. Rowland was arrested the next morning and brought to a Tulsa jail. By then, rumors were circulating about an assault, fed by a front page story in the primary Tulsa paper accusing Rowland of raping a white teenager.

As evening fell, a group of white men gathered outside the courthouse demanding the Sheriff release the teen to them. He and his deputies refused and barricaded themselves into the top floor. About 25 armed Black men showed up offering to help the Sheriff protect Rowland, but he turned them away, telling them to stay outside or go home. As the evening progressed, as many as 1500 white men were at the courthouse where the 25 Black men, now joined by their neighbors and totaling 75, stood guard. Shots were fired and the Black men retreated, heading back into the Greenwood neighborhood. Assuming the shots were from the Black men, the Sheriff deputized some of the white mob and asked for help catching them.

That white mob, now acting on behalf of the law, and soon joined by even more people coming in from all over Tulsa, descended on Greenwood and started to burn it down. Firefighters came to the scene but later reported that they were threatened at gunpoint when they tried to put out the fires. The rioting went all night and into the morning. In the end, more than 300 people were dead, almost entirely Black, more than 6,000 of the 10,000 Greenwood residents, including children, were arrested and put in holding cells, and every home and business had been looted or burned to the ground. Almost 1300 private homes were flattened along with schools, theatres, their media outlets, and even their hospital. All gone. No white people were ever charged with anything related to the violence in Greenwood.

A few days later, Rowland was released from jail without charges. It seems he’d accidentally banged into Ms. Page during the ride. He never returned to Tulsa.

Newspapers called it a race riot. In Tulsa it was called a Race War. No one called it a massacre, which is, of course, what it was. The Boston Massacre saw 5 killed. The worst riot in American history until then saw 119 dead, and they were on both sides as were death tolls of most other American riots.

Not only did they not call this a massacre, within weeks, no one talked about it at all. It was a big story with major newspapers covering it in the immediate aftermath. There were even white people taking pictures, creating postcards, and selling them as souvenirs. But by August, no one was talking about it at all. It seemed to have been largely erased from American history, until recently.

At the 75th anniversary in 1996, the City of Tulsa created a Commission to investigate. It’s from them that we have most of our statistics. Even with that acknowledgement, we were looking at the 100th anniversary with most Americans having never heard of the Tulsa Massacre.

The decision not to tell the story was the result of a cultural conspiracy from both white and Black people. On the one hand, the people of Greenwood were traumatized. Everything they knew was gone. Their homes. Their clothes. Their neighborhood. Their neighbors. They were terrified it could happen again, which was a legitimate fear since the Ku Klux Klan increased in both size and visibility right after the massacre. Their numbers swelled to over 10,000 in the city, ensuring that Black people remained silent. And white people didn’t want to keep talking about it either. The city officials were afraid of scaring off oil tycoons with talk of riots and other residents were just happy it was all behind them. So as not to embarrass the city, people in charge agreed not to include the incident in history books and many newspaper accounts were removed and archived to microfilm. Black residents didn’t want to pass on the pain to their children, or to dampen their ambitions and white residents didn’t want to admit any of this had happened at all. Together, they ensured that the story was never told.

It became part of the American conversation in 2019 when HBO aired the first episode of The Watchmen which opens with a depiction of that horrible night. Like so many Americans, I watched and assumed it must be fiction, as the rest of the show is. But curiosity was piqued and some vocal historians injected the conversation with facts, which are now making their way back into American culture, adding depth and texture to our understanding of who we are, where we come from, and how much work there is still to do.

We have entered Black History Month and I have to ask myself, “How can we celebrate Black History when we don’t even know it?” And I’m asking that question during a spasm of intentional, institutional mis-educating, history-erasing, fact-denying activity. Right now – Even Now – Still Now - the governor of Florida is doing everything he can to make sure people don’t know and can never learn American history. An Advanced Placement course was recently updated to include Black Lives Matter, mass incarceration, the relationship between varying oppressions, and explanations of Critical Race Theory. Specifically rejected from the course outline is an article on intersectionality and violence against women of color, as well as Ta-Nehisi Coates’s groundbreaking article on reparations, and a book by James Baldwin.

AP classes are designed by a national board with the intention of helping high school students gain college credit; they are open only to the most accomplished students in the school and are completely optional. Rejecting the curriculum in one state means that no student in any state will have access since AP classes are created for national standardization. This particular course was designed in partnership with the Smithsonian Institute. They have now gone back to rework this Black History course so as to eliminate – or what I’d call WhiteWash - much of Black history.

They’re also eliminating queer history, and gender history, and the very concept of intersectionality in this course. It is not to the benefit of those in power to allow a framework to be taught that recognizes the relationship between oppressions. They would prefer to target individual people or singular groups with accusations of resentment or entitlement, rather than acknowledge a massive system of oppression undergirding the entire American narrative.

Greenwood was not unique in its destruction. Have you heard of Bronzeville in Chicago? In the summer of 1919 they suffered a series of massacres and mass burnings of homes. Or West 9th street in Little Rock, or the 1906 riots in Sweet Auburn, Atlanta where white people randomly killed Black people en masse. I can’t find a death toll for that one either. The stories of so many of these places isn’t told, wasn’t investigated, and has moved into the dark underbelly of our country.

And that’s where conservatives would like it to remain. Unseen. They would like to retain power by keeping We the People uneducated lest we learn from our past or embarrass or make anyone uncomfortable in talking about it.

Timothy Snyder is one of our most respected writers and thinkers on political repression. He has a tiny, critically acclaimed and powerfully necessary book called On Tyranny in which he lays out the steps to resisting the shift away from democracy. The very first thing he tells us in this book is, “Do not obey in advance”. Very often, especially in the early stages of the shift into authoritarianism, power is given freely to autocrats. We see what they want, and we let them have it. Sometimes, like the case of Ron DeSantis wanting the college board to change the curriculum, they ask for it or even demand it, even though they have no moral or legal standing for such a thing. In response – maybe because we want to avoid a fight or maybe because we want to seem flexible or maybe because we’re intimidated by the power being wielded – we acquiesce. We obey. We figure there are ways around whatever they want. Or, we decide it’s not that big a deal. How many students are even taking this course?

And that’s how we end up, 100 years later, not knowing about a night of penetrating violence that killed hundreds, traumatized thousands, and burned a thriving neighborhood to the ground. We obeyed. We didn’t want to embarrass anyone. Make people uncomfortable. We stopped talking about it and thought it went away.

One month a year – and the shortest month at that – to talk about Black history seems a little absurd. But, that’s only if we forget that Black history is American history. We take one month to make sure the past is in sharp relief. We look carefully, thoughtfully, meticulously investigating, pulling at all the threads we have yet to consider. Then we weave those threads into the rest of our larger story.

The story of Greenwood is part of the story. The story of the GOP trying to erase that history is also part of the story. We reclaim our history by telling these stories, and by reclaiming the narrative, pushing back when someone tries to stop us.

There is hope in the struggle. There’s hope in the fact that people are struggling, that we haven’t just acquiesced, that we are raising our voices and using our pulpits. And, I’d like to encourage you toward a little curiosity. Investigate what you don’t know. See if there are stories no one is telling, and start telling them. Maybe post them in our Facebook group. Send them to me or to each other. Tell them over coffee or at the diner. The trauma inflicted on the Greenwood community wasn’t unique and isn’t over. The people of Memphis can assure us of that. Let’s commit to keeping those stories alive.

And when we do that, we keep our communities alive. We keep our history alive. We keep ourselves alive. Each of us. Nurtured by Truth so we can Embody Justice.

The Madness of Love

Rev. Peggy Clarke, Senior Minister

January 29, 2023

In 1963, Ennis Del Mar and Jack Twist have a summer job herding sheep in the mountains of Wyoming. They fall in love but pursuing a same sex relationship is dangerous, so both men leave that summer and marry women. Over the course of the next 25 years, these men struggle with their tremendous passion for each other grounded in an intense, lasting love but tempered by the reality of the time and location of their lives. Not being willing or able to risk the loss of family or safety, they settle on loveless marriages and periodic fishing trips on Brokeback Mountain where they can be alone. It’s during those trips they are each most alive and most authentically themselves. The months and years between are empty, often lifeless periods of waiting for the next time they can be together. Ultimately, Jack is killed although Ennis never really knows what happened and is left to live his life profoundly alone. In the final scene of the movie, Ennis is in a room holding two t-shirts covered in his and his lover’s blood.

On this bleak mid-winter afternoon, I’m hoping to bring a little warmth, maybe some joy, hopefully a brief respite, by talking about love and desire. We’re taking a break from our usually scheduled Love As Justice, and instead, we’re talking about romance.

Romantic love is one of humanities primary relationships. I talk often from the pulpit about the power of love in changing the world, the necessity of love as a tool for social justice, and I’m sure I’ve nearly worn out the word love, speaking it so many times it’s gotten thin, smudged, faded and so soft it might disintegrate. But today I’m talking about romance, about falling in love and living in love and being so defined by love we can no longer even tell it’s there.

Love is all- encompassing, life-altering, world-changing, mind-blowing, family-creating… and family-destroying. It might be the most powerful experience a human can have. The loss of love or the loss of a loved one is equally explosive and life-defining.

The Madness of Love. Or, in the case of Jack and Ennis, the Madness of a Society that Blocks Love. But, that’s so often the case. Regulating love and sex is as ancient as civilization. But desire cannot be regulated.

Romeo was a Montague. Juliet, a Capulet. Their families were sworn enemies, but they met at a ball and fell madly in love. After the party, in what is now famously called the "balcony scene", Romeo sneaks into the Capulet orchard and overhears Juliet at her window vowing her love to him in spite of her family's hatred of his family. Romeo makes himself known to her and they agree to be married, a promise that comes to pass the next day. After their secret wedding and one night together, Juliet’s father agrees to offer her hand in marriage to a suitor named Paris. In an attempt to get away from her fate, Juliet drinks a potion that will make her appear dead. Romeo, thinking his lover is gone, kills himself. When she awakens, Juliet sees her husband dead and follows him to her death.

That story always strikes me as being both an epic love story and a little bit ridiculous. They met, married and died for each other in the course of 3 days. Of course, they were teenagers, so it might not be completely unrealistic.

Regardless of the timeline, this is a classic love story, an ancient story rewritten and timelessly memorialized by Shakespeare and reimagined over and over again for each new contemporary context. We can’t stop telling the story, hearing the story, because love captivates us, because we have all known love – or wished to know love – so powerful we weren’t willing to live without it. It becomes the life of every cell in our bodies, the breath we need to continue minute to minute.

The experience of falling in love doesn’t last a lifetime, but it can set the stage for a lifetime. Real lives are filled with the mundane, with doing dishes and running errands and answering phones and feeding children and going to meetings and living on a budget. Doing those things as you build and sustain a life with someone you love alters the nature of daily life.

We often speak of "falling in love," as if love is stumbled into or we talk of "being in love" as if love is a permanent condition. Both phrases imply that nothing is easier or more natural than love. Yet there’s hardly any human enterprise which begins with such hope and expectation and fails so regularly. Love takes time, effort, even training. It’s not for beginners, a fact Romeo and Juliet found out the hard way.

When we talk about finding a mate, we often talk about becoming desired. Stand in front of any collection of popular magazines and it’s all quite apparent. The problem most people think they have is not  loving better, but becoming more lovable. For men, that often translates to money and power. For women, all too often, we focus on physical beauty. Second to those things for all genders is the ability to maintain interesting conversations, to be funny, and to be well mannered. Being lovable becomes a mixture of being popular and having sex appeal as any high school sophomore can tell you.

It’s as if there’s nothing to be learned about love, that the problem is one of the object, not the faculty. In other words, we think loving is easy, the difficulty is finding the right person to love- the object of my affection. The difficulty is being attractive enough to someone I desire. Love becomes an extension of our consumer culture. We spend our courtship years- which happen between the ages of 10 and 100 – window shopping. We marry when we have found the best item on the market, given our own spending limitations.

But real love requires much more than making the right purchase, more than being desired by one you desire. That might make for a really fun weekend, but then you’re done. Love is what happens after, what happens when the falling is over and you’ve landed in a home with a partner. It’s good to remember that real love isn’t a feeling. Feelings come and go. Scott Peck taught us so long ago- Love is a Decision. Love is a difficult and lasting decision, a decision to be present and honest and fully yourself while encouraging growth and offering support for an other. And while that decision can be changed, that it’s been made creates a container for the rest of our lives. We can feel angry, but that anger is held in the framework of love. We can feel disappointed, or bored, but the decision to love still encircles us. It’s why we can disagree, and decide to talk about it later. We know we’re together, that most things aren’t urgent, that the container we’ve wrapped ourselves in will hold.

Authentic love is also, by its very nature, self-generating.  It multiplies, it expands. It rehearses it's abundance in generosity. Many years ago I was presiding at a wedding for two people entering their second marriage. They had a mature love, one that drew people in and sent them back out with a great experience of joy. I had told them not to pay me for the wedding, so instead, they pulled up to my new house with a car filled with flowers to be planted in my empty garden. When they opened the back of the car, I gasped. There was so much color and life filling this car. It seemed like a perfect reflection of their relationship- filled with a love that multiplies generously.

Real love extends beyond ourselves and into the world. It’s not about desiring one other person, but about loving one person so much it spills onto the streets. One of my favorite moments in the Romeo and Juliet tale is when Romeo refuses to fight. Romeo is confronted by one of Juliet’s kinsmen and challenges him to a duel. But Romeo sees his former enemies as his future family and can’t bring himself to participate. Love has expanded to include even this man he hardly knows. True love is inclusive, opening the lovers to union with all of life. Love awakens us to existence outside ourselves. We can suddenly see the other no longer as enemy but as family.

         Living with someone for a long time, growing older with someone, living in the averageness of daily life doesn’t preclude the need for passion. This is why I loved our opening reading. It’s a regular moment. She’s in a café with her husband. Something they’ve done a thousand times together. But a young woman leans over and asks about his dessert and the author yearns for a life in that moment in which people are reaching for so much more than what’s in front of them, where people are accepting their own lust and giving in to it if only just a little bit. She enjoys that her husband feels something, wants something. He’s still alive. And so is she.

         She can only get to that place because they’ve been together a long time, because she trusts her husband and isn’t living in constant insecurity. She’s learned something about love. She’s learned how to find and offer room within the container of marriage. She’s learned not to be afraid of hungers, not to be afraid to want something or to allow her husband to desire something more. It’s how we grow, how we stay alive. We accept and love the life we are living and we reach for more. Within the container of joy and commitment with a partner, we stay alive by reaching for more.

Falling in love, agreeing to share your life with someone is a risk. You could get your heart broken. It happens all the time, which, if it’s ever happened to you, is difficult to believe. How can people function once that’s happened? How do you get up in the morning, get kids off to school, go to work, have conversations, how do you gather the energy just to take a shower once your beloved has cheated on you, left you for someone else, told you you are no longer loved? How do you move forward when your lover has been diagnosed with a terminal illness or died in a car accident? How can you continue when your heart has been broken? Maybe it’s better not to take the risk, better to let love move by you, remain unnoticed, safe, alone. Love is so likely to end badly, it might be best to stay away. And yet, even with millions of books and movies and songs going back through the ages, warning us, it’s a risk most of us take at some time. We want more from life than what we have, we want to live bolder and sing louder and feel stronger than we do. We want the feeling of falling and of standing and living in love, of creating a life with someone.

UU Minister Rev. Bob Janis wrote a poem I’ve been loving. It’s called “The Hunter”.

Love, the Hunter

Love roams the earth

Looking for victims

Sacrifices to the high God

She is not inescapable

Some days we are too fast

too wary

Once I was able to disguise myself

as a man looking at a train timetable

She went right on by

until I started looking at the numbers too closely

and I enjoyed the way the four looked next to the eight

And I was flattened

If love catches you

then that's it for you

I'm afraid

O you may find a moment or two out of her clutches

A time to reminisce about when the days were your own

and you were the one

trying to capture the world

and bring it home

But in the end

there is only one pit

and we all fall in

And though it's not the fire that consumes us

everything that brought us to this point

down to our very flesh

will be destroyed

But at that point you won't care much

For you will become a part of love itself

Maybe love is after all more of a gatherer.

Ultimately, we want to be caught, want to burn in a fire, be destroyed in a pit, melt into love. We might even want to love so ferociously we’re willing to die or even kill to protect it. Like Ennis and Jack, we’re willing to risk everything we have because when love is real, nothing is more powerful or beautiful or more necessary. We are not here to live numb, cold lives, to play it safe. No one gets out alive. We’re here to live boldly, to risk mightily. We’re here to love what our bodies love, to be with the people we can’t live without, to climb balconies in the middle of the night and profess love unto death. This is what it means to be a people of desire. This is the joy and the madness of love.

By Thy Light Glowing: Winter Solstice

December 18, 2022

Rev. Peggy Clarke, Senior Minister

We’re in a cave, a dark temple, with a fire and some candles to keep us from complete darkness. The light is low, the sounds hushed. We hum, we sway, we huddle together, smiling at each other across the warm light. We see the night through until day, resting, leaning on each other, holding sleeping children in our arms and across our laps. Blankets draped over us, we tell stories about the dark, and the light-returning. We watch for signs of sun as a symbol of the turning Earth, the days yet to come. For tonight, the sun rests having been wrapped by the night and when he returns, we all awaken to greet the dawn, the new day.

The ancient peoples gathered on the winter solstice around fires, inside caves and temples in just that way. They brought comfort to each other, leaned on each other, sang and danced, and created hope and joy with each other. Into the darkest, longest nights, they brought themselves and their families, they prayed to the gods and goddesses who controlled the turning, or whose stories helped make sense of the cycles of Earth that still define our lives.

During these late December, early January days, hovering around the winter solstice, we have about 9 hours of light. That’s it. Just about enough to last the work day. My alarm goes off at 6:00 every morning and it’s dark as night. Within 2 minutes of opening my eyes, I’m outside in the cold, walking my dogs, looking at the moon. Back indoors, I turn lights on and heat up, trying to trick myself into believing daytime has begun. At 7:00, we start the trek toward school. The sun is beginning to wake, but won’t really be up until 7:30. The morning feels soft. Everything is draped in gray, as if the filter from an old black and white tv show has been laid over it all. Red and green traffic lights seem out of place in the muted colors of the morning. When school is over, the sun is already descending, and dark returns at 4:30, hours before the busyness of the day comes to an end.

We live in the dark. We tend to think of daytime as the hours when the sun is up, but for a portion of the year, we move through our lives in an almost perpetual night-scape, waking and working without the sun to beckon or support us. Plenty of people find this lack of daylight depressing, but I find it comforting. Cold and dark conspire to slow us down, to shift us into a state of semi-hibernation, a natural time for winter sleep, and I welcome it. In the story Rev. Jude told us earlier, the sun is tired, so the night wraps around the sun, allowing the sun to rest while the people wait.

There are many stories told all over the northern hemisphere, handed down over millennia, to put this time in context. In Judaism, Hannukah might not be a holiday of major importance, but it is, nonetheless, a story told every year, partnered with music and games, to explain and help us live into this time of dark. The story itself is problematic since we’re technically celebrating the victory of a ruling family opposed to religious and cultural pluralism, but there’s no reason to get stuck on the details. The Jewish story speaks to our shared lived reality. It was dark, very dark, and with the dark came the cold and in the dark and cold there was fear. The people took a chance on hope, used the oil they had and did the best they could to survive. The fire burned for 8 days, long enough to get them through. They celebrated, and we remember every year that faith can sustain us even when it seems all is lost.

Both the Menorah and Christmas Lights are modern echoes of the ancient impulse to cast off the dark, a collective act of defiance. In the very recent past, from the 2016 election through the pandemic, people have been more likely to leave lights on well into March reportedly because days felt sad and frightening and they needed the reminder of joy the light could bring. I understand that, but instead of seeking the light this year, I’m enjoying the dark. It might be a Covid thing. For a good long while, the world slowed down. Recently, it sped up again, and while I’m not romanticizing anything about Covid, the experience of modern life in slow-motion was healing. I’m sorry we seem to have forgotten. As a society, we’ve kicked into high gear again. Before the light returns, I’m hoping for a little more time being comforted by the dark.

In the dark, edges become blurry. In the light, we can see each finger on our own hands, and where our wrist extends outside the sleeve sitting on it. In the dark, it all melts together. My sleeve and wrist and fingers and hands. And when someone puts their hand in mine, I can feel them as distinct, but I see them as part of my own body. We begin to blend, as people will if they are walking arm in arm or a group is huddling together in the dark and the cold, keeping warm. In the dark, we bend and breathe and feel the energy of each other, but the hard edges of our bodies aren’t discernable like they are in the light when we stand apart, hands in pockets.

There is mystery in the dark. There’s growth in the dark. Plant a seed beneath the soil, and the seed will blossom. If you have an idea, a thought, something dangerously brilliant, plant that beneath the soil too so it can take root. It’s in the wet Earth, away from the people and the eyes and busyness of our lives that genius has the space it needs. Babies also need dark, deep in a womb where eyes are closed, but experience profound dependence, and a love not yet quantifiable.

And it’s from the dark that our new world will be born, too. Winter is a time for reflection. A time to sit, to think, to wonder and consider. A time, also, to sleep, to curl up under a pile of blankets, letting imagination run wild.

One of the reasons we moved this service a little earlier – as early as we could possibly get, really, given the availability – was that we didn’t want people walking home in the dark. But, maybe we should have rethought that. Walking home as the sun is going down on a late Sunday afternoon is a perfect time to dream the new world.

We need that time. The world is turning. Turning toward or turning into or turning away from what? What is being born? Who are we in this new time? The dark gives us that space. If we can’t see everything in stark relief, we can pay attention to the interior landscape, to the meadows and shorelines and breathing trees of our own bodies. The world gets larger, we get larger, when we have time to dream in the dark.

David Whyte writes:

When your eyes are tired

the world is tired also.

When your vision has gone

no part of the world can find you.

Time to go into the dark

where the night has eyes

to recognize its own.

There you can be sure

you are not beyond love.

The dark will be your womb tonight.

The night will give you a horizon

further than you can see.

You must learn one thing.

The world was made to be free in.

Give up all the other worlds

except the one to which you belong.

Sometimes it takes darkness and

the sweet confinement of your aloneness

to learn

anything or anyone

that does not bring you alive

is too small for you.

Here in the dark this winter solstice, I plan to wonder about what should be cast off, and what should be reclaimed. I am going to think about who I belong to, who my people are, which bodies should melt into mine and which should be held at arm’s distance. And I’m going to dream the new world, one where everyone has been claimed, everyone has people and dreams that have room to take root.

This sermon wanted to be written in poetry, and music and dance. As I was writing, I kept complaining to myself that my sermon doesn’t have a point. But, that is the point. It’s not time to know or be right or clear. It’s time to grapple, to wander, to lie back and dream big. That’s the invitation of the solstice, of the deep dark that envelopes us. I know how important words are in this congregation and that I’ve already cut sermons nearly in half, but today, seven days from Christmas Eve, three from Winter Solstice, and just two hours from the first night of Hanukkah, what’s beckoning me isn’t the hard line of prose, but the soft body of poetry. Instead of explaining through well researched argument or posing life-defining questions, let’s bury ideas in the soil and dance over them, summoning the sun to birth a fresh year. During this Winter Solstice, let’s hum, and sway, and lock arms and huddle under blankets around a fire together while we dream the new world.

Incarnation: Embodied God

Advent, 2022

Rev. Peggy Clarke, Senior Minister 

Advent. The season of dark, of quiet, of waiting. The story most often told during these weeks in December is that of Mary, a pregnant woman, travelling home with her love, waiting for her baby, anticipating a whole new stage of life as a wife and mother. For millennia, Christians have been living into this story as we inch through the month toward Christmas. It’s part of the Christian paradigm, defining these December weeks, beckoning us deeper into the dark of the season, promising joy and good cheer when Christmas comes, when we celebrate the birth of Jesus, the birth of God into the world.

The entire story- pregnancy, travel, birth, visitors, a baby – the whole thing is so human, so, familiar in its normalcy, so embodied as we all are. Some of us get pregnant, some give birth. We all travel to some extent, all get tired, get sick, experience our bodies injured and aging. In its simplest form, this is a story of bodies.

Mary was pregnant. Nine months. Her feet are swollen, her back is aching. Simple things like getting up from a sitting position were painful and complicated. She and her husband were back in their hometown when she went into labor. Cramps turned to contractions to cries of pain and pushing, blood and tearing, sweat, tears, breathing, squeezing people’s hands while letting out primal screams. It’s hard to imagine a more embodied experience than birth. And then a child. A baby boy. Slimy, crying, getting air into his lungs, cold, bright, eyes closed, screaming. He’s handed to his mother, also crying- a mix of joy and pain and relief.

They were in a manger, meaning they were on the bottom floor of a home where the animals lived. People usually went upstairs to sleep in the lofts, but there was no more room there, so Mary and her betrothed, Joseph, stayed downstairs. When we were in Jordan, we got to see a village more than two thousand years old. The doorways and stone frames and sometimes staircases still stood, letting us stand on the same ground, in the same rooms as people did millennia ago. Our guide casually noted as we visited one of the houses that the alcoves on the ground floor where we stood were the manger, the part of the house where the animals fed and slept. The stairs or ladders led to the second floor, the upper room, where the people stayed. Mary and Joseph would have been downstairs when their baby was born, down in the manger because so many travelers had come to town, there was no more room upstairs.

Advent isn’t the time to talk about Jesus’s birth. I’m ruining the entire spirit of waiting! But every year we talk about anticipation, and then we skip a few weeks focusing on the Jewish and Pagan traditions and land on Christmas when we sing and celebrate, but don’t dig into the theology of the story, so this year I’m exercising a little preacher-privilege to use this Advent sermon to talk about incarnation. What exactly are we waiting for? Why are we on the edge of our seats?

I’ve spoken before about the corners of truth, those particular insights that each religion of the world offers the rest of us. Religion, by definition, is how communities face mystery together, how we live into the big questions of the world. Having done that for centuries, or millennia, those communities have stumbled into wisdom they can offer the rest of us, even if we don’t adhere to all the tenets of the entire faith. Christians offer the world a profound truth related to the nature of humanity, and of what it means to be both human and divine. To demonstrate, or maybe to balance, that for all of us, they tell the story of Jesus’s birth. Stories about gods abound, but stories about children, about tiny, vulnerable babies who are also divine, are a gift offering us an unusual insight.

The image of Jesus as a baby is one of the most profound spiritual images offered by any of the world’s religions. That’s a big statement, so let me explain. Ignoring the infinite ways Jesus has been painted or drawn or sculpted as a child-king, as an infant-idol, with an adult gaze and halo, I’m talking about the actual image of a baby. A real infant. Tiny. No language. Very little sight at first. Sounds are too loud. Crying is the primary mode of communication. Eating, pooping, sleeping. No way to move around. Rolling over from back to front is a big deal. Then crawling. Walking, holding on to a table. A few independent steps. It’s some time before that child can successfully get food into his mouth on his own. This is God.

I’ll say it again because it’s mind-blowing- This is God.

What a profound Truth, what a theological offering, given to us through this Christian story. This is God. The baby. The one whose diapers his grandmother changed, the one who used his tiny hand to grab his grandfather’s finger for balance, the one who is washed and fed and rocked and scolded. This is God.

The idea that Jesus, a human being, was god, was dismissed as part of our original Unitarian founding. I’ve preached on this history before and if you’re interested, I will again, but for now just a quick reminder – There was a debate after Jesus died about whether he was god and because of a variety of political forces, it was decided that the doctrine would include this god-man, fully human and fully divine. Plenty of people believed it and even those that weren’t so sure understood that in a Greco-Roman world with plenty of other god-men in the mythology, this was likely the path of least resistance. The Council of Nicaea declared it doctrine in 325, but the controversy lived on and it was again determined at the Council of Chalcedon in 451. Jesus is one being with 2 natures.

As final as church leaders thought they were being, the question remained. Having added the Holy Spirit, the official doctrine was of a Trinitarian God. One God, Three Faces. It was complicated and debated and embraced and dismissed through history, including by our Unitarian forebears in Europe. In the early part of the 19th century, our own Rev. William Ellery Channing formally preached on Unitarian theology, recognizing that Trinitarianism didn’t prioritize reason which would clearly recognize Jesus as human, a truly great human and model for other humans, no more god than anyone else. Letting go of all supernatural implications, Channing and the Unitarians who went after him, removed Jesus from the realm of a deity.

Which makes sense. Totally reasonable. But with that declaration, we lost the brilliance, the genius, the earth-shattering insight that is the core of the Christian offering. Jesus was god. Jesus, that tiny newborn, fragile, vulnerable, dependent baby born to a young woman on the ground floor of an ancient home surrounded by sheep and camels, was god.

I’d like to suggest that we got sidetracked with that original Unitarian declaration and forgot that the theology of Jesus’s divinity didn’t elevate one man as much as it elevated all of us. We got distracted by one story – his story – and forgot that it’s all our stories. We are all born, we are all dependent, we are all human. Christianity became a cult of One instead of a cult of All. While theologians throughout history were trying to capture Jesus, to enlarge him, they forgot that we are all equally human, all equally divine.

Jesus wasn’t the only one. He was one of the people who became awake to the magnificence of what it means to be alive. He lived communally, he loved unconditionally, he valued life over material things, valued health over money, believed we are all here to break ourselves open and pour ourselves out in service to each other.

Those early Unitarians rejected the idea that Jesus was god, claiming that there is only one God. They upheld Jesus as a role model, a good person who had a strong and necessary message about how we treat each other.  They declared a humanist Christianity that focused on serving the poor and feeding the hungry and healing the sick and visiting the imprisoned and generally caring for and being responsible to each other. There was no reason to get involved with complicated trinitarian theologies or questions about salvation after life; there’s certainly enough to keep us busy here and now without ever asking questions for which we’ll never have the answers. This made sense to thousands of people, and here we are to prove it.

But rejecting that insight, removing Jesus from the realm of incarnate god, of embodied god, separated divinity from humanity for all of us. We’ve done it in the rest of the natural world, too. Removing god from the body of Earth and sending god into the world of the stars separated from our embodied-ness, all of Earth became a collection of objects rather than a communion of subjects. We have made it our habit to remove or deny divinity, separating it from the bodies of our lives.

Russian soldiers have been executing Ukrainian civilians and dropping their bodies into mass graves. Iranian women are being imprisoned for as little as letting a lock of hair show. Unhoused Americans are sleeping and starving on city streets across the country. China is enslaving Uyghurs in an attempt to convert them from their Muslim faith.

We don’t do this when we see the face of god in each other’s eyes.

When I know you are god, that you are part of the great divine mystery, I do not let you starve. I do not let you suffer at my hand. I do not forget you, neglect you, abandon you.

And when I know god is tiny, fragile, embodied and becoming like the rest of us, I know I’m responsible for being god’s hand, god’s eyes, god’s feet. I know I am called to living a life of partnership with Love.

The divine spirit is embodied in each of us. Each of us born. Each of us as children, as teenagers, as young adults, as reproductive parents, as working people, as aging people. We are divine in our wrinkled skin and graying or thinning hair, in our aching knees and failing sight.

Waiting for the birth of god is waiting for us to know that god is here, in each of us, that hope is here because we are here. There is joy already alive. Advent is the time for waiting- but maybe it’s time for us to stop waiting and wake up to the magnificence of who we are, so fully human, so fully divine.

We are waiting for each of us to become awake. We tell the story year after year, and we keep thinking it’s a story of someone else. Mary and her baby 2000 years ago. But it’s our story. It’s the story of humans who are born, who are vulnerable, who are dependent. It’s the story of god who is born, vulnerable and dependent. It’s the story of loving so well and so much people celebrate your birth every year for ever. It’s the story of learning how to love that well, of being that love for each other. Advent is our time to be born into our own magnificence, and to see that same divine spirit in the eyes of everyone around us, no matter how broken or frightened or angry or lost they are.

Because they are god. And we are god. And until we all know that, we wait.

State of the Union

November 13, 2022

Rev. Peggy Clarke, Senior Minister

No one felt as good or as bad as they thought they would on Wednesday morning. After a rollercoaster of an election season, we neither saw the blue sweep in response to the end of reproductive freedom, nor did we see the red wave rebuke of the President’s economic policies. It was an unusual year after a whole lot of unusual years. Some purple states went blue. Some went red. Democracy was on the ballot and people voted to save it. Ish. Some extremists won, and some lost.

Last week I brought you 6 candidates, all GOP extremists, all, as far as I can tell, a threat to our values of truth-telling, peace-making, unity and equity. Of them, 5 lost. This includes the man calling for civil war, the one who said our astrological signs can help us make decisions about our health, the one who doesn’t believe women have a place in public life, the one who rejects evolution, and the white supremacist. On the other hand, Lauren Boebert, the one wondering how many AK-47s Jesus would have owned, won re-election to her seat in Congress, even though she has either never read or completely misunderstands the Bill of Rights, and is calling for an end to the separation of church and state. But, she stands alone in that particular random grouping of candidates I mentioned last week.

The good news is that voter turnout was high, a sign of a healthy democracy and of a continued trust in the system. Without faith in the process, democracy is dead and this week we learned that most people still believe that showing up matters. Our faith in the system hasn’t been degraded such that we no longer see a value in active participation, which would have been a sign that democracy is fading. We also learned that Americans aren’t as divided as we might have thought, evidenced by the number of people who split their ballots, voting both red and blue depending on the particular candidate, rather than blind party allegiance. During interviews outside polling places, people said they were voting for balance, voting against conspiracy theories, looking for stability, maturity, and honest leadership. And whether they were thinking the democrats were rigging the ballots or the republicans were suppressing the vote, people voted for whatever free and fair election initiatives were available to them. They voted to save democracy.

I Know This Rose Will Open

There are reasons, though, for our continued diligence. While a majority of Americans want to defend democracy, there are signs of something more sinister entering the mainstream. More than half of the election denying candidates won. There were 370 running for a variety of offices across the board, and 220 won. Of the 370 running, 100 of them were extremists, claiming intentional voter fraud in the 2020 election and seeking to remove President Biden and restore former President Trump. Of that 100, 40 won.

The others were more moderate in their denial, saying things like, “we need further investigation”, suggesting that this is an open question, when, in fact, it is not. About one third of the incoming House of Representatives includes people who question or deny the previous election. Of them, about 25 are extremists. Most states have at least one Representative who casts doubt on the election. In five states, 100% of the election deniers running won. In another 10 states at least 75% of them won. Of 100 Senators, 17 will be election deniers. Some of the newly elected positions will be populated by people who were at the capitol on January 6th, people who actively sought to overturn the 2020 election. The Governor of Alabama, reelected on Tuesday, said clearly that, “fake news, big tech, and blue state liberals stole the election from Trump”, and the incoming Secretary of State in Indiana said 2020 was a scam.

The problem we’re facing is that fringe conspiracy theories are no longer fringe, finding themselves in seats of power throughout the nation where they are far more difficult to ignore or dismiss and where their extremists views are becoming normalized.

I Know This Rose Will Open

At the same time, misinformation didn’t spread at the speed it did two years ago. Twitter, Facebook and YouTube reportedly removed thousands of posts with misinformation during this election cycle, usually before those posts got any traction. YouTube added $15 million to their budget to hire content moderators for both the US and Brazilian elections, establishing what they called a war room on election day to take things down in real time. Even things that got through temporarily failed to garner the attention the 2016 and 2020 elections taught us to expect. A conservative talk show host in Arizona shared a video on Twitter Tuesday about what he called intentionally broken voting machines. The video was shared 20,000 times, often by people with hundreds of thousands of followers themselves. But, in an unusual turn, people stopped sharing it almost as quickly as they’d started and within a few hours, it had lost its audience.

Free Press, an advocacy group for digital rights said that demand for misinformation was lower this year than in the last election cycle. We saw candidates who traded in blatant misinformation lose, like Senate nominee Bolduc from New Hampshire who said that schools were providing kitty litter to students who identified as cats, playing on fears around transgender people. There was ample evidence that Russia reactivated its massive system of trolls and bots to feed our hunger for conflict and reinforce our confirmation biases, but this year, if they punched through the nets placed on social media, we largely ignored them.

I Know This Rose Will Open

One of the more alarming things we heard from candidates, and from citizens all over this country is a call for, or an expectation of, civil war. Here in NY, those voices are muted, but we can’t deny the January 6th attempt to take down Congress and install an unelected government through force, nor can we ignore the reality that while the red wave didn’t take the country, it did crash on our state, with some of the most extreme now representing us.

Some experts who study the onset of civil wars, the loss of democracies and the rise of authoritarianism have been working hard since 2016 to get our attention. We have trusted – and maybe the whole world has trusted – that the American Constitution is strong, that our democracy is deeply ingrained in our law and culture, and that we are nearly invulnerable to any serious threat. These experts are trying to warn us that while many of us are confident that our institutions are secure, there’s a far-right movement gaining significant traction and while they started small, we are no longer able to ignore them. The presence of armed men at rallies, the visibility of paramilitary groups on American streets, and the waving of alternative symbols like confederate flags or American flags with a thin blue line have become commonplace.

We know, if we watch how this happens through history, that when governments topple, when civil war erupts, when authoritarianism takes over, many people are surprised. This is partially because we get used to the symbols of war, the symbols of democratic breakdown. We dismiss people as fringe, we see them as outsiders in some way, and we rest in the strength of our systems. But, here in NY, a far right candidate for governor got 2.7 million people to vote for him, just a few hundred thousand votes away from the winner, and four House seats flipped, all with far right, Trump aligned, candidates. We might see this shift as something happening to our south or west, but that isn’t in congruent with the facts.

I’m not saying this to frighten you, and I hope I’m not doing that. I’m saying this because I know we are ready to look at what’s real. It’s something I love about our faith. We don’t pretend. We face things directly, honestly, and we aren’t afraid to break through convention to speak truth. Today, this is our truth.

I Know This Rose Will Open

Last week when worship was over, a few of you encircled me because you were worried and you asked me what to do if a country that feels combustible actually ignites. I told you I’d have a better idea today. And I do. I’ve read key books on this subject, listened to advice from our top leaders, and have reviewed what I know from my years of study and here’s what I have. What will save us? Faith, Hope, and Love. Don’t roll your eyes at me.

One of the most dangerous things about this moment in history is our isolation. After years of pandemic lockdowns and quarantines, the rise of video as the primary way people meet, and the dramatic reduction of people working in the same physical spaces, our communities are smaller if they exist any more at all. When we add to that the disintegration we experience in families both because of real distance and because of political divisions, we are living in a nearly unprecedented time of social fragmentation.

This makes us vulnerable in a variety of ways. A good friend, living in a very conservative town, is single and has rainbow and a black lives matter flags on her home. She wondered recently if she should remove them given the political climate. Understanding how mob mentality works, she knows if people take to the streets, she will be quickly targeted. Some of you have expressed similar worries.

While history tells us that these things happen and no one is immune, we also know that people are less likely to harm someone they know. My friend will spend some time knocking on her neighbor’s doors to introduce herself. She’ll pay specific attention to those she thinks are more liberal or moderate, hoping to build a network. In that same town, she and other progressives are scheduling gatherings in each other’s homes. They’re also organizing to support more progressive policies in the school system, hoping to stave off a sharp right turn parent-activists have taken. In other words, they are building community. They are building systems of relationships, with the intention of creating safety nets for each other.

Last week, I told you that hope is active, that hope isn’t the idea that things will be fine, but they might be fine if we work to make it so. As a people of hope, we are called to active engagement. Timothy Snyder, the author of the book On Tyranny, tells us to pick an institution and commit to defending it. An institution can be as small as a local library or as large as the Department of Education. Using your own interests and skills, ask yourself what institution is necessary for a free society and protect it. I’m committed to this one, the Community Church of New York, and with it, to freedom of religion and the separation of church and state.

As Unitarian Universalists, we have a long history of fighting for justice, for centering the marginalized, for seeking equity. We pray in traditional ways, gathering our strength and expressing our gratitude, but we know if we aren’t also praying with our hands and our feet, our prayer is almost meaningless. We are a people of faith, which means we are a people of action, grounded in the shared and deep values of human worth and dignity, democratic principles, and radical interconnectedness.

Faith, Hope and Love. These are our salvation, the response to the eschatological anxiety of our time. We are not ungrounded. We are not helpless. We are not alone. 

This We Believe: On God and Prayer

Rev. Peggy Clarke, Senior Minister

September 18, 2022 

Long before becoming UU, the question “Do you believe in God” was the worst anyone could ever ask me. You might feel similarly. It’s a binary question and I’m not a fan of binary. It’s a yes or no question to the nature of the universe. It’s like asking, “What is the meaning of life: yes or no?”

I have no intention of asking or answering that question today – not for you and not for me. It’s a bad question. It’s particularly bad when people are sure they know the answer and then judge other people if their answer is different. I won’t ask the question and I don’t have an answer. And I’m sure if ever anyone ever comes close to an answer to that question, it won’t be “yes” or “no”.

The universe as I understand it is far, far more complicated than that. It’s profound with mystery- complex, unknown, unknowable. It’s wild, and chaotic with life teeming in the minute and in the magnificent. It’s loving. It’s violent. It’s unpredictable, and I’m not willing to even consider that there’s a “yes” or “no” question that comes close to apprehending the depth or breadth of what it means to be alive or in what ways we are alone and in what ways we are not.

There are times, though, when I seek people who wrestle with these big questions. Not people who answer them, but who live into them. Some are scientists, poets, philosophers. A few of my favorites are mystics. Mysticism, in its formal and academic context, is the radical experience of the divine. My master’s degree is in Medieval Mysticism, a subject I found tremendous comfort in in graduate school where we otherwise spent our time diagnosing and dissecting god. Courses on reason and doctrine were tempered by poetry written a thousand years ago by women and men overcome by Love.

We have mystics closer to our time period who have had similar experiences. The 20th century writer and spiritual leader Thomas Merton wrote of a conversion experience in Kentucky. He said:  “In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all these people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness. . .

This sense of liberation from an illusory difference was such a relief and such a joy to me that I almost laughed out loud. . . . As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now that I realize what we all are. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.”

Merton’s conversion on 4th and Walnut, - now so famous an experience it’s memorialized on that very corner in that city with a big sign marking the spot – that kind of experience isn’t common, but it’s also not entirely unusual. Caryll Houselander, a lesser-known 20th century English mystic had a similar experience. She was riding in an underground train. She writes:

“Quite suddenly, I saw with my mind, but as vividly as a wonderful picture, Christ in them all. But I saw more than that; not only was Christ in every one of them, living in them, dying in them, rejoicing in them, sorrowing in them – but because he was in them, and because they were here, the whole world was here in this underground train, not only the world as it was at that moment, not only in the people in the countries of the world, but all those yet to come. I came out into the street and walked for a long time in the crowds. It was the same here, on every side, in every passerby – Christ.”

Language isn’t our friend today. The word “god” – with or without a capital “G” – can be cumbersome, depending on your own personal history. “Christ” maybe even more so. These words have history. They have politics. They might be connected with very specific images and understandings. They might be connected to personal trauma. To religious trauma. To deep, unnecessary rejection, pain, longing and loneliness. Unitarians in particular have been trying to break open our assumptions and connections around the word “god” from an individual male, white, conscious, all-powerful and present being since the 19th century, but somehow we still default to that, even unconsciously, probably because that image has so saturated our culture and language it requires more discipline than most of us have time for to break free of it. In response, so many of us say we don’t believe in god. We answer “no” to the binary question. What I think we mean is we don’t believe in that, particular god and we haven’t had time to give much thought to the other ones.

Sometimes we find it liberating to hold the same kind of image, but this time god is female. And Black. That gets easier. Warmer. Maybe equally ferocious but on our side. That god might even be sexual. And lesbian. Now She’s starting to get interesting.

Richard Rohr, the director of the Center for Contemplation and Action, poses the idea that God isn’t an individual being, but another name for Everything. Everything is connected to Everything. We aren’t saved alone, but in participation with everyone else, in community with people and with the planet. God is in all things, is all things. The world is both the hiding place and the revelation of God. There is no difference between the profane and the sacred. All life is communion, all life is coherent. Limiting God to a person, a single revelation, makes the world fragmented and small. But, the world, the universe is massive – and expanding. The Holy, the connection, the foundation for life, the platform for our living, is moving, stretching, expanding. And it is the body of God, another name for Everything.

A man who calls himself Wild Bill Balding goes even further. Breaking open the idea that God is the expanding universe, Balding tells us God is a Verb, not a noun. He writes:  

'I am who I am,

I will be who I will be.'

dynamic, seething, active

web of love poured out,

given, received, exchanged,

one God in vibrant community

always on the move,

slipping through our fingers,

blowing through the nets we cast

to hold and name,

confine to nouns, to labels,

freezeframe stasis,

pinned like a butterfly,

solid, cold, controlled, lifeless.

'I am who I am,

I will be who I will be' -

not pinned down by names, labels,

buildings, traditions,

or even by nails to wood:

I am: a verb, not a noun,

living, free, exuberant,

always on the move.

“I am who I am”. That’s what Moses was told. He saw a bush, engulfed in flame, but not burning and he tried to find out what was going on. Yahweh spoke to him and told him he was being called to liberate those who were enslaved by the Pharoah in Egypt. Moses, unsure about what was really happening here, asked who is sending him and the answer was “I am who I am”, sometimes translated as “I am who Is”.

I Am Who Is. An act of Being. And the conversation is an experience, not a belief. That conversation, often called prayer, comes up from our center, not always as words, but as laughter or kisses or sobbing. Prayer is primeval, it’s primordial, it’s our most ancient language, spoken long before we had words. We dance in joy and sorrow and fear. We make wishes, often secret, and howl, sometimes in pairs and every time we do, we are expressing our deepest desires, our longing for a world we once knew or never knew and can’t live without. Prayer is our most authentic expression when we allow it, especially if we don’t try to temper it with those pesky binary questions that end with “yes” or “no”. Once we move into our minds, seeking images or specifics, wondering to what or whom we are praying, we have moved from our hearts to our heads where Mystery is uncomfortable and usually unwelcome.

I remember long ago being told to kneel and pray daily, to say thank you and to ask for things like help and wisdom. I was told if there were specific things I wanted, I could mention those too, but to be aware that sometimes the answer is “no”. So, I did that. I got on my knees and talked. It was fine, and sometimes helped me get clear about things, or made me feel better about something. Sometimes I waited for answers – and I could wait a long time. Then I started feeling like this was a dysfunctional relationship with me doing all the talking and some guy out in the clouds with all the power. When I started studying religion, I asked a teacher how to pray and she genuinely didn’t understand my question. I wanted her to hand me a stack of papers with the right words on them so I’d be sure I was doing it right. Instead, she asked if I sing. Or walk in the woods. Or chant. She asked if I danced, which I did often. She asked if I loved people, which was also a big “yes”. So, she said, she doesn’t understand why I’m asking. It seems I know how to pray.

I thought I’d find the appropriate and accepted posture and start a conversation with the magic words and then I’d wait for an answer. What I didn’t know is that I didn’t need words and the conversation was going on all around me. All I needed to do was notice. I needed to breath. To see. To feel. To listen.

I don’t know the nature of the universe. I don’t know the meaning of life. I do know how it feels to stand in a summer rainstorm, drenched and laughing. I know how to take off my shoes and feel the grass beneath my feet. I know how to hold a door open for someone or how to thank them when they do that for me, how to live into each gift, how to offer gratitude.

Look around for yourself. Just outside this door, you will see giggling children and plumes of exhaust, regal buildings and people scrounging for food, warm winds and tropical storms – in awe and delight you will see all the things, dreadful and beautiful, more wonderful and terrible than is necessary. Let it strike you speechless with worship and fear. It is Everything.

And every once in a while, look around and see that everyone – no matter who they are or what they think or why they’re here,- everyone is walking around shining like the sun.

This We Believe: The Beginning

Rev. Peggy Clarke, Senior Minister

I’m not sure I remember learning about Adam and Eve as a kid, but I clearly remember learning about Moses and the Exodus. That was a story we told in detail for hours every spring with everyone in our extended family around a table. Passover served as a critical part of my own identity. This is the story of our heritage. These are our ancestors. I’m aware that as a parent, I haven’t done that with my own child. As a UU child, my kid might be able to tell you about lots of creation and origin stories, but none of them are his. It’s true for adults, too. The stories that hold us up often weren’t learned as part of our shared faith, but were brought in from somewhere else.

As Unitarian Universalists, we talk a lot about our faith, but when it comes time to define it, we often speak quickly about what we don’t believe rather than about what we do. If pushed, we lean heavily on ethics, and a few shared understandings of what the world should look like. From time to time, in moments that make every religious professional squirm, someone will pipe in with, “We don’t believe anything” which, of course, is absurd but no better than, “We can believe whatever we want” which is an adolescent response to our stated value of a free and responsible search for truth and meaning. Of course you can believe whatever you want. It’s a free country. But, it’s not an answer to the question. Unitarian Universalists do have a common theology, but we haven’t done a good job of articulating it which leaves us scrambling.

To combat that reality, many ministers talk about the elevator speech. We talk about rehearsing it for our members so they can adopt or adapt it and have something useful to say when asked the question. If you’re interested, mine is, “UUs are part of a covenantal faith. We don’t have doctrine, because we believe that revelation continues to unfold.” It’s short, it’s accurate, it gives a broad sense of who we are. I use it often. It’s fine. But when we’re talking about living into our faith, an elevator speech isn’t enough. We don’t live an elevator speech. We live a theology. We live, we are defined, we behave, we are liberated, by a living faith grounded in a shared theology.

Theology is a system, not just a line or two. It’s a deep and wide expanse of interconnected, interrelated stories that become the foundation for how we understand our lives. Theology is poetry and philosophy and ethics and mythology. It’s broad speculation sometimes made very small so we can hold it in prayer when we are most afraid. It translates out to culture and back in to identity and out again to politics and human systems. As UUs, we have theology, but we haven’t been very good about articulating it. Which is why I’m starting this series I’m calling This We Believe. Over the course of the next few years, I’ll take a systematic approach to theology. This will translate to some adult programming as well as we grapple with the big concepts that make up rich theological systems. It’s also, in its simplest form, the basis for this season’s podcast that I record with Rev. Sarah Lenzi called Hope and Heresy.

What better way to start this UU theology than at the beginning. Cosmology. Creation stories. And here at the dawn of a new year, starting at the beginning makes sense. Sort of. I’m not sure that January, 2022 is really a beginning. I think we’ve been in this doorway or portal, this transition into something else for almost two years. We’re living in a liminal space between what was and what will be. We’ll arrive somewhere and that will be the start of what’s next, but for now, we’re living in the meantime.

But if we’re starting our theological quest, it makes sense to start at the beginning. Every faith, every culture, has a creation story. Or two. The stories have a lot in common as you heard from our reading. Light and Dark. Land and Sea. People. Animals. Floods. Some traditions have more than one. Genesis serves as the creation story for Jews and Christians and in it there are at least two distinct stories. One is told by the day. There is a god who exists before anything else and that god creates it all from nothing.

“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness. God called the light “day,” and the darkness he called “night.” And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day.”

It goes on like that. God separates the land and the sea, creates humans, all the animals…you know the story. It’s beautiful and rich. There’s a second story, too. In the first story, humans were formed as part of the creation of all the things. In the second story, it says, “The Lord God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.” It goes on to say that God planted a garden in Eden and that’s where the man lived for what seems to be quite a while because God is busy creating trees and streams and naming things, but then God realizes the man is lonely, so he takes a rib from the man from which he creates Eve. “Bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh.”

This is a foundational story and, for good or ill, it defines the Judeo-Christian tradition and the many countries founded on that tradition, like our own. These stories create order out of chaos. They tell us why things are the way they are. They give us context. We might let go of them in their literal forms, but the mythology lives in our culture and language, serving as the infrastructure for our collective lives.

What are the creation stories that undergird Unitarian Universalism? We begin with science and the Big Bang. It starts with fire. Creation doesn’t begin in one moment; it came into existence in a sequence of events unfolding from within as billions of galaxies. Eco-theologian Brian Swimme puts it this way, “In the depths of its silence, the universe shuddered with the immense creativity necessary to fashion the galaxies…These gigantic structures pinwheeled through the emptiness of space and swept up all the hydrogen and helium into self-organizing systems…” Sidney Leibes, in his book A Walk Through Time says, “The primal brilliance expands briefly and then suddenly, with great fury, enters upon an even more explosive expansion that physicists designate with the phrase inflation, an exponential billowing forth in which the elementary particles, the first material beings, are torn out of a deep well of potentiality and allowed to enter the adventure of evolution.”

About five billion years ago our sun was born and became a supernova seeding all the elements of our solar system. Four-and-a-half billion years ago spinning around the sun was a disc of the original subcloud just large enough to resist the cosmic rays from the sun. A cold remnant of the subcloud, a hanger-on, a residue, a swirling disc of elements, gave birth in time to Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. The planets were formed, and the solar system took shape as a community.

Cletus Wessels wrote, “The earth was a privileged planet with its size producing a gravitational and electromagnetic balance, and its position with respect to the sun enabling it to establish a temperature range in which complex molecules could be formed. Out of these seemingly random conditions came the earth’s stupendous creativity over the next four billion years that brought forth all the beauty of its land, its plants, and its animals. And then between two and three million years ago, the earth became conscious in the human.”

This is our creation story and one that can lead us more deeply toward mystery and awe. This is our mythology. To be clear, to call something a myth isn’t to denigrate it. On the contrary, I’m looking to elevate this story. Myths are big stories, universal stories that we can hold our individual stories up to. They are mirrors, or lenses, ways for us to see ourselves and our place in the universe. To call something myth isn’t a comment about the facts of the story. It’s to say that the story is True. The creation story science has given us offers meaningful insight into our lives on this planet. One of our sources of Truth is science. And, science, like UUs, changes its mind sometimes. New information is made known and new theories are posited. UUs don’t have doctrine because we know that revelation continues to unfold. But, that doesn’t mean we can’t have myths. Myths can change with time, but they aren’t dependent on facts.

The creation story the scientists have given us is ready to be mined for Truth, necessary insights into what it means to be who we are. These stories tell us that the universe is self-organizing and alive. Creation comes from chaos. Everything from galaxies to solar systems to cells and atoms, everything evolves into collaborative communities. Every species helps shape every other, all of life is in an intertwined process of co-evolution. Sidney Liebes tells us the universe is a cosmogenesis – a developing community – with a role for everyone.

Like every great creation story, this one has implications for how we live our lives. We are wildly, radically, connected to and dependent on all life on this planet. Nationalism is absurd in light of the truth of our becoming. It’s also a call to know our place, to keep ourselves right-sized in this massive story. Thomas Berry, the groundbreaking geo-theologian warns us that humans have multiplied into the billions making us the most numerous of all Earth’s complex organisms. We’ve inserted ourselves into most of the ecosystemic communities throughout the planet, reducing Earth’s diversity and channeling the majority of the Gross Earth Product into human social systems. The future will be worked out in the tensions between those committed to what he calls the Technozoic, a future of increased exploitation of Earth as resource for the benefit of humans, and those committed to the Ecozoic, a new mode of human-Earth relations, one where the well-being of the entire Earth community is the primary concern.

I admit, this origin story is more complicated than “God separated the heavens and the Earth and on the 7th day He rested.” But, it’s beautiful in its complexity. Its proximity to facts is enticing. And its implications are transformative. We could embrace this story, adopt it as our cosmology, our central story of creation and the origins of our shared lives. We have it here to mine, to discover Great Truth that can hold us up when we feel overwhelmed or unsure or confused about the world. This gorgeous, ancient, poetic history of a story is the infrastructure for our lives, telling us who we are, holding us together as a community, providing insight into how we should move forward. I can imagine us telling the story to our children, sitting around a table, explaining that they are stardust, no less than the trees and the moon, that their ancestors became planets and oceans and apes, all evolving into the glorious world we’re now a part of.

As we begin this new year, as we continue on this journey into unknown territory, this story reminds us that we are part of something magnificent, a community of elements that organized into this awe-inspiring life and we are now active players in the long, poetry of our creation.