Addressing That-Which-Is-Larger-Than-Us
Sunday, May 6, 2012
Rev. Erika Hewitt
Rev. Erika believes that there must be Something Larger Than Us, or we risk putting ourselves at the center of the universe. Your “something larger” can be the collective unconscious, The Holy, or even creativity. It can be whatever you want to name it — but something shifts when we’re willing to let “it” be out there, beyond our human selves. In this sermon, Erika explores how the act of praying, of opening, isn’t just about living from a place of deep spirituality — it also has everything to do with the freedom of imagination.
Sermon Text:
““Addressing That-Which-Is-Larger-Than-Us” ~ © Rev. Erika Hewitt
UU Community Church of Santa Monica
6 May 2012
Holy One, take me where you want me to go
Let me meet whom you want me to meet
Tell me what you me what me to say
and keep me out of your way
~ Father Mychal's prayer
I have an acute inner timekeeper for cycles both small and large. What this means is that when a meeting runs long, my inner kid begins to squirm uncomfortably – but it also means that on most days I have a heightened awareness of where I was, and what I was doing, a year ago.
Exactly a year ago, I was returning to my church from a sabbatical in Portland, Oregon – the city that’s most home to me. Back in California, I missed Portland’s skyscape; its people; its rain – and I missed a certain group of people: Clara, Hank, Audrey; Mary and Rob. I still miss them... and before I go any further, I should mention that these are not real people.
Just to repeat: Clara, Rob, and Hank aren’t real. They’re an imaginary host of fictional characters who presented themselves to me, fully formed, last spring. They moseyed up and introduced themselves to me throughout my sabbatical, which turned out to be a glorious, trippy, and surprising dance with creativity. It turns out that meeting these imaginary friends of mine was a spiritual exercise – because a year ago I learned that the act of praying, of opening, isn’t just about speaking words to a god you may or not believe in; it also has everything to do with the creative spirit, which some call “God” and others call “the Muse.”
The first book I read on sabbatical was Beginner’s Grace: Bringing Prayer to Life, by my colleague Kate Braestrup. Among her quirky and soulful reflections, I discovered Father Mychal’s prayer:
Holy One, take me where you want me to go
Let me meet whom you want me to meet
Tell me what you want me to say
And keep me out of your way.
You know how sometimes you stumble upon a poem, or a song, or a quote, and it lights up like the Vegas Strip? Have you ever read something and heard a deep, ancient voice whooping, because it hits your soul in just the right spot?
It’s a nice feeling. It’s like being handed a map when you’re feeling lost, or coming up for air after being underwater. These words continue to have that effect on me. And: it feels important to call this “Father Mychal’s prayer.” He’s pictured here, in an icon created by Robert Lentz.
Father Mychal Judge was a Franciscan priest; he was also a gay man; a recovering alcoholic; a chaplain to the New York City Fire Department. He was known for ministering to the homeless, recovering alcoholics,
immigrants, gays and lesbians, and people with AIDS.
On September 11th, 2001, Father Mychal rushed to the smoking World Trade Center along with dozens of New York firefighters. He prayed with them, and with the survivors who staggered out of the buildings. But he was killed – like thousands of others who died that morning – when the South Tower collapsed. He was 68 years old.
Prayer is one of the oldest human practices and one of the most universal. Still, I’m guessing that the word prayer makes some of you squirm, and makes others of you yawn. To you I say: we UU’s are defined by our curiosity. If we Unitarian Universalists believe that our spiritual journeys – our very lives – are dynamic, malleable, and always evolving to accommodate new perspectives on truth and meaning... can’t the words we
use be malleable and evolving, too?
For my part, prayer is a way to “connect and reconnect to the source of our lives.” When I pray, I listen for the steady, nourishing hum underneath the chatter I carry around inside of my head. Prayer is about my relationship with That Which Is Larger, That Which Is Wiser, That Which Is More Creative and More Compassionate than my
individual self.
Whether we approach the Great, Silent Mysterious with awe, despair, or soul-deep questioning, I believe that there must be something larger than us, or we risk putting ourselves at the center of the universe. Your “something larger” can be the collective unconscious, or creativity. It can be whatever you want to name it... but something shift when we’re willing to let “it” be out there, beyond our human selves. Let’s explore these words more deeply.
Holy One...
For me, Holy One is a good ‘nuff name for the All That Is, which is why it’s the only alteration I made to Father Mychal’s prayer: I changed it from “Lord.” As a Franciscan priest, Father Mychal clearly felt comfortable addressing the Presence in the Void as “Lord.” I don’t. So I changed it. You get to do that when you “connect and reconnect” to Life: do your own naming. That’s one of the rules.
Holy One, take me where you want me to go
The phrase “take me where you want me to go” is not a not a jettisoning of free will; it’s not a handing over of marionette strings to The Great Puppeteer in the Sky. I view these words as a healthy surrender; an acknowledgment that we can’t steer our lives through sheer will (this has been an important lesson for me, these past, oh, let me count... forty years). Take me where you want me to go is an invitation for a Wiser Knowing to be our co-pilot, and counter our willful impulses.
This is what writer Martha Beck hints at when she explains, “My God is... amorphous, more of a universal constant, like gravity or magnetism. This constant doesn’t pick favorites; it simply flows into any opening we make for it.”
Goodness, or Mystery, flows into all openings available to it, including the openings we create in ourselves. That same notion is reflected in one of Taoism’s4 most important concepts: wu wei, which means “doing without doing,” or “no action.”
The idea [of wu wei ] is that when you are aligned with the wisdom in yourself, open to joy without clinging, [you’ll be carried] along like a raft on a river. You’ll end up moving with great speed and power, but all of
that energy is generated by the current, not by you. The only thing you have to do is float.
When I catch myself revving my engines willfully, this prayer reminds me “to ride the current without struggling.” It’s about trusting that, if I get out of my own way, great things will happen. And they do.
Let me meet whom you want me to meet
This just might be the juiciest, ripest line in the entire prayer (for an extravert, at least). Each day delivers unto us surprises; responding to those summons is a form of receiving. Call it “That Which Larger and Wiser Than Ourselves” or call it “the Unconscious,” but Life addresses us, and invites us to respond, to receive, at every turn.
Again, I don’t believe that we live in a puppet master Universe; I don’t believe that our paths are pre-charted and criss-crossed with dotted lines leading us to the people that Destiny wants us to meet. I do believe that when we open and attune to the world, we rest in a current that has its own force and direction.
“It is clear,” says Gregg Levoy, that ‘living means being addressed,’ as the theologian Martin Buber once said,
and whatever or whomever is addressing us is a power like wind or fusion or faith: we can’t see the force, but we can see what it does. If I suspend disbelief and trust that The Current Which Is Larger Than Us carries us
towards people who would teach us, help us, bless us, cheer us... well, it shifts the way I engage with all people, whether stranger or friend.
Tell me what you want me to say
This is where things get trippy. When I began to read and pray this line, it twanged the strings of my growing creative hunger. Months before my sabbatical started, a story began stirring in me, asking to be written. I trusted that creative stirring and decided to find out what wanted to emerge. As soon as my feet were planted in Portland, I sat down and invited the Muse to work with me. Tell me what you want me to say. And boy, did she show up.
At the end of those three months, I’d written – well, not a complete novel, but a 50,000- word second draft of one (the equivalent of twenty-five sermons); it’s a frame that I’ll return to this summer, to embroider it into a finished work. No matter how many hours I spent pulling that story out of the ether, I didn’t write it by myself. The ghosts of my characters knocking on the door, trying to get onto the page, were there all along.
Writer Elizabeth Gilbert says,
I... believe that the world is being constantly circled as though by gulfstream forces, ideas, and creativity that want to be made manifest, and they’re looking for portals to come through to people and if you don’t do it they’ll go find someone else. You have to convince it that you’re serious; you have to show it respect; you have to talk to it and let it know that you’re there.
What you’re hearing is Gilbert’s conviction that if we view the source of creativity – or wisdom or compassion – as coming from inside of us, then we’re doomed. Putting that much pressure on ourselves – to be the Source, to be the fountain – means that eventually we’ll fear falling short, or running dry; we fear burning out or going mad.
But If the source of ideas is outside of us, it becomes possible to get some distance, negotiate, even fight with it, instead of beating yourself up all the time. It’s an it, or a her. It’s not you.
This is how the singer Tom Waits found his artistic liberation: he was driving on the LA freeway and a little fragment of a beautiful song comes to him, but he has no way to record it. He feels the old pressure: I’m not good enough, I’m going to lose it, It’ll haunt me forever. But he backed off, established that negotiating distance, and said:
Excuse me. Can you not see that I’m driving? If you’re serious about wanting to exist, I spend eight hours a day in the studio. You’re welcome to come visit me when I’m at the piano. Otherwise, leave me alone and go bother Leonard Cohen.
That’s another rule: you get to push back and set some terms for the Muse. “You don’t need to prostrate yourself to it, because it’s not fragile,” counsels Elizabeth Gilbert, but you do have to show her that you’re serious, because the Muse rewards “people who are at their desk at six o’clock in the morning, working.”
Tell me what you want me to say. Let me meet whom you want me to meet.
As it turns out, my Muse – my Larger-Than-I – wanted to introduce me to the gaggle of fictional characters riding on her train, asking to be born. Mystery flows into all openings available to it. My job was to show up, willing and waiting, and put in the work.
What an all-purpose prayer: it’s an invitation for the Spirit of Life, and a contract for partnering with the Muse! And then, this sweet ending:
And keep me out of your way
This line, says Kate Braestrup, “is the most important”:
Oh! May I not prove to be an obstacle... May I be transparent, vanish! so
that your light may shine through me. But if I can’t make things better,
[Holy One], please, please, don’t let me make things worse.
That alone, friends, is a darn fine prayer: please, don’t let me make things worse. Some days, that’s the best we can hope for.
Sturdy Grace, take each of us where you want us to go,
Let us meet whom you want us to meet,
Tell us what you want us to say,
And keep us out of your way.
Endnotes:
1. Rev. Kate serves as a chaplain in Maine. Her other books – highly recommended reading, here! – are Here If You Need Me and Marriage and Other Acts of Charity.
2. Rev. Erik Wikstrom, in Simply Pray.
3. Martha Beck, Leaving the Saints, p. 194.
4. In fact, Beck lived in Asia for a number of years and picked up on a lot Asian spirituality. She explores images like being “a leaf in the stream” in Leaving the Saints, and also offers brief reflections on Asian spirituality in Expecting Adam.
5. The words of the Rev. Sarah Moldenhauer-Salazar.
6. In Leaving the Saints by Martha Beck, p. 196.
7. In Callings: Finding and Following an Authentic Life, p. 2.
8. In the years since Eat, Pray, Love was published, Gilbert has turned her attention to creativity – and, in her words, “How you can live a lifetime of creativity without cutting your ear off” – without falling into madness by trying to “top” yourself. Her most vivid thoughts about creativity can be heard in her TED talk (see YouTube) and on the March 8th, 2011 “Help!” episode of WNYC’s Radiolab podcast.
9. This story was related by Gilbert on RadioLab (see previous note).
10. RadioLab again!
11. Beginner’s Grace, p. 112.
Regrets, Do-Overs and Giving Up Hope for a Better Past
Sunday, May 13, 2012
Rev. Erika Hewitt
We’ve all made mistakes, but some of us live with regrets that we can’t quite shake. How do we escape the ghost of “coulda, woulda, shoulda” to make peace with the ways that we’ve severed ourselves from possibility? Is there freedom from regret? Come consider the spiritual richness of choosing where to orient our hope.
(Annual Meeting follows the 11 a.m. service)
Sermon Text:
“Regrets, Do-Overs, and Giving up Hope of a Better Past”
© Rev. Erika Hewitt
UU Community Church of Santa Monica
13 May 2012
“Maybe all one can do is hope to end up with the right regrets.” ~ Arthur Miller
One of the things that’s on my perennial “to do list” is to catch up on movies – not just releases, but the classics I never got to see. Not too long ago I finally saw Casablanca – that iconic film set in the early days World War II. Given the film’s iconic status,watching it definitely counted as...let’s call it “cultural studies.”
“Who can forget the scene at the end?,” asks Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert. (If you’ve never seen “the scene at the end” – or any of this film), this is about all you needto know: Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman are standing on the tarmac as she tries to decide whether to stay in Casablanca with the man she loves or
board the plane and leave with her husband. Bogey turns to Bergman and says: “Inside we both know you belong with Victor. You’re part of his work, the thing that keeps him going. If that plane leaves the ground and
you’re not with him, you’ll regret it. Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow. But soon and for the rest of your life.”
As commentary, Gilbert then remarks, This thin slice of melodrama is among the most memorable scenes in the history of cinema... because most of us have stood on that same runway from time to time. Our most consequential choices – whether to marry, have children, buy a house, enter a profession, move abroad – are often shaped by how we imagine our future regrets (“Oh no, I forgot to have a baby!”).
Regret, in other words, doesn’t just color the past. Regret can be so painful, so haunting, that our experience of it shapes our approach to the future. The word remorse, at its roots, means “to bite back,” and indeed, many of us know what it’s like when your past actions (or inactions) follow you like one of those annoying little dogs, more fur than anything else, nipping at your pant leg as you try to move forward. Once bitten, twice shy, the saying goes.
Regret, remorse, ruefulness – call it what you want – we tend to feel these emotions in situations that center, to some degree, on our own agency: incidents in which we played a role, and wish that the Universe could grant us a “do-over.” In this sermon, I want to examine the scale of potential regrets that we human beings carry within us, and how regret shapes our relationship with ourselves and with other people.
First, although it may be impossible to measure regret, and the degree to which we hunger for a “do-over,” let’s say there’s a 10-point Scale of Regret: ten degrees of kicking ourselves for something we did, or didn’t do.
I find the territory especially fertile at the bottom of the scale (let’s call it “1”), where it’s barely possible to even use the word regret. There’s no self-recrimination, no guilt, just wondering about What Might Have Been. It might not be useful – but personally I find it irresistible – to travel back to moments when, like Ingrid, I’ve stood on the tarmac, making a choice that would cut off a thousand possibilities.
I don’t have to understand quantum physics to believe that there are countless parallel universes out there, discrete threads in the rippling fabric of the space-time continuum, in which other choices were made, and other futures lived into. That wondering – the bittersweet acknowledgment that it might have been otherwise – allows me to be more fully present in this life.
As we move up the scale of regret – from 1 to the 3 or 4 range – it becomes harder to be at peace with the ways that we’ve severed ourselves from possibility. These are the regrets where, in retrospect, we understand that we allowed a small reward to slip away too easily, or we introduced unnecessary friction into our lives. They’re not necessarily mistakes, but coins tossed into the fountain of Life Lessons.
As a college student, I didn’t have the maturity to construct a sense of self around my own needs and wishes. Instead, I allowed myself to be guided by what others thought of me, how they evaluated me. On a scale of 1 to 10, one of my level-5 regrets is that I dropped out of calculus because I was afraid I wouldn’t get an A. Without calculus, I had to drop my pre-med major. Not going to medical school is one of those level-1 regrets:
Would I have made a good doctor?, I wonder. Would I have been fulfilled? And: Would I have found Unitarian Universalism? But over the past two decades, I’ve been bitten from time to time by sharper teeth of remorse: knowing that I sacrificed my own interests & confidence for a number (GPA) that now seems empty.
As we enter the 7 to 8 range on our Scale of Regrets, we’re now entering prickly territory (as maps of yore summarized the gaping ocean between continents, “Here Be Dragons”); my friend Dana calls them “the kind of regrets that make you want a time machine.”
I say, if you’re making jokes about time machines, you haven’t reached the top of the scale yet. The 9s and 10s are nothing to joke about. These are the ghosts that haunt our dreams, as well as our waking hours. Almost certainly they’re the choices or actions that hurt not just us, but people whom we care about. They might even be mistakes that led to losing someone we cared about.
I believe that there are people whose regrets never rise above the midpoint of our imaginary ten-point scale (...which leads me to a parenthetical note: in researching this sermon, I stumbled upon a book called No Regrets, subtitled The Best, Worst, & Most #$%*ing Ridiculous Tattoos Ever. The book cemented my suspicion that a “no regrets” mentality has a strong genetic component. If having a pair of technicolor unicorns copulating on your back or a smiling portrait of Dr. Phil on your behind doesn’t trigger any regrets later in life, then the good Lord bless you and keep you, but we are Very Different People.)
I admire people who cheerfully admit that they don’t regret anything more than, say, a failure to play the piano or speak Spanish. People who aren’t haunted by remorse use forward-leaning language: they “put it behind them;” they “don’t look back;” they’ve “moved on.” Perhaps they just haven’t made many mistakes. (I am not one of those
people.)
I do believe that, at its milder levels, regret can be healthy because it means that we’re willing to examine ourselves for how we led ourselves, or others, astray. Taking wrong turns requires us to recalculate our positions, which matures us, both emotionally and spiritually – especially when we name our wrong turns using active verbs (“I chose to have these technicolor unicorns tattooed on my back, and wish I hadn’t”) instead of the
passive verbs that so many politicians seem to use (“lapses in judgment occurred”). Regret forms a threshold not just for learning, but also for asking forgiveness.
Poet Mark Nepo says,
Everyone in the world personalizes and projects. Personalizing is mistaking what happens in the world as always having to do with you....Projecting is the reverse. It occurs when we place the things that happen in us onto the world around us. Often unknowingly, we attribute our fears and frustrations to others.... The truth is that no one can avoid personalizing or projecting. There are only those of us who are aware of it, and those of us
who are not; only those of us who own it when it happens, and those of us who don’t. But this difference is crucial. Not owning these things can end relationships. Owning them can deepen relationships.
It can take years to do this: to “own” our stuff. Our souls, often, would rather forget, or blame someone else. And that’s a hazard. Regret becomes unhealthy when it soaks us in bitterness, prevents us from forgiving ourselves, or cripples us so that we stand frozen on the tarmac, unable to make any decisions whatsoever. It becomes particularly dangerous when its metastasizes into resentment.
} Many of us here have, through our own choice, parted ways with religious traditions in which the language of “sin” and “confession” figures prominently. To mock that language, or live in reaction to it, is to overlook its potential for spiritual depth. Our Unitarian Universalist tradition has come to center itself on the notion not just of
“covenant” but of “right relationship.” We live in relationship with one another, and on a good day, we do so lovingly. Right relationship is at the heart of why it’s so powerful to reflect on, and admit out loud, that we fall short of our expectations. When our humanness and our mistakes do push us off balance, we can bear witness to the mis-step in a manner that restores balance, not brings more disorder to it. When we can admit, and name, the qualities that make us human, we free ourselves to be more real, and to be more available to one other.
As good as humankind is, we’re meant to keep getting better. Each time we name a regret, we are really naming our hopes. To say, “I didn’t handle that very well” is to say, “I’m not done as a person,” which carries the hope of growing in that direction.
How do we grow, then? In concrete terms, is there any way to outwit regret, and make choices that safeguard against it? Why, yes. And it goes beyond the simple wisdom of thinking carefully before getting a tattoo. Since science has something to teach us about our own psychological blind spots (and since only in a UU congregation could science trump religion), I’m going to return to Daniel Gilbert, the Harvard psychologist. He explains that in making decisions, most of us expect that we will “regret foolish actions more than foolish inactions.” We hold back when an enterprise seems risky; we choose safe inaction rather than plunge ahead. Nine out of ten people, in fact, anticipate that “I shouldn’t have done that” regret will be more painful than “I should have done that” regret.
“But studies also show,” says Gilbert, “that nine out of ten people are wrong... [P]eople of every age and in every walk of life seem to regret not having done things much more than they regret things they did.” Why? It has to do with our “psychological immune system,” which has a more difficult time manufacturing positive and credible views of inactions than of actions....Because we do not realize that our psychological immune systems can rationalize an excess of courage more easily than an excess of cowardice, we hedge our bets when we should blunder forward.
As students of the silver screen recall, Bogart’s admonition about future regret led Bergman to board the plane and fly away with her husband. Had she stayed with Bogey in Casablanca, she would probably have felt just
fine. Not right away, perhaps, but soon, and for the rest of her life. Which of your fears are holding you back from blundering forward? Where, in your soul, is “an excess of courage” hungering to be acted upon? What regrets do you need to let go of, to move through life with greater ease? For what might you begin to forgive yourself?
Where might you repair a broken relationship with others? May we move forward with confidence, both in the Larger Love that holds us, and in our own power to repair and rebuild our hearts.
Endnotes
1. In Stumbling on Happiness, pp. 195-6.
2. M. Curtiz, Casablanca, Warner Bros., 1942.
3. By Aviva Yael and P.M. Chen. Do not go reading this book unless you’re prepared to laugh and be supremely disturbed.
4. Barbara Brown Taylor, in “Before Computers.”Christian Century, July 13, 2010, p. 35.
5. Gilbert, p. 197.
God is Not One
Sunday, April 29, 2012 - 5:00pm
Rev. Erika Hewitt
In his 2010 book, “God Is Not One,” religion scholar Stephen Prothero argues that religious traditions point to profoundly different realities, and thus each tradition explores a problem and poses a solution to that problem. This morning Rev. Erika will explore his premise, challenging the long-standing but often unexamined notion that all religions are “different paths up the same mountain.”
Sermon Text:
“God Is Not One” ~ © Rev. Erika Hewitt
UU Community Church of Santa Monica
29 April 2012
“What the world’s religions share is not so much a finish line as a starting point.
They begin with this simple observation: something is wrong with the world.”
~ Stephen Prothero
Every Unitarian Universalist seminarian has to traverse an enchanted (or maybe haunted?) forest of hoops and red tape before being admitted into ministerial fellowship.
One such hoop is The Required Reading List, which contains – currently – eighty-eight books that every aspiring minister has to digest and, at the gatekeepers’ request, summarize or analyze.
The specific books on The Required Reading List come and go like so many theological flavors of the year, but for a very long time one of the books perched on that list was The World’s Religions written by renowned religion scholar Huston Smith. (My colleague Scott guesses that this book “rests on more UU congregational library shelves than the Bible.”1)
It’s not just several generations of UU ministers who’ve been schooled in Huston Smith’s approach to the religions of the world. You’ve probably heard and even repeated his most famous metaphor without even knowing it: all religions are different paths up the same mountain; at the top, “the same god beckons.”
All religions point to the same God, and to the same goal – what a rosy-hued assertion, born of a lovely open-mindedness and acceptance. It’s a belief that lives strong. Modern religious luminaries like the Dalai Lama and Karen Armstrong have echoed and reshaped this sentiment, spreading a hope-saturated message about the “one-ness” of all religions:2
“Sweet harmony of peace, love, and understanding... [are] at the heart of every religion.”3
If that’s too touchy-feely for you, remember that the so-called New Atheists have their own counterpoint to the cheery “it’s all the same mountain” image: **core of New Atheist thought *** they believe that all religions are equally dangerous and false.4 I disagree with the New Atheists that all religion is poppycock but – well, it’s a good thing that Unitarian Universalists can’t be brought up on heresy charges, because otherwise I’d be put on trial for what I’m about to say – I’ve also come to disagree with Huston Smith, Karen Armstrong, and the Dalai Lama. I don’t believe that all religions share the same goal and the same God. I don’t think that’s helpful to meaningful interfaith dialogue.
“What we need on this furiously religious planet,” says religion scholar Stephen Prothero, “is a realistic view of where religious rivals clash and where they can cooperate.”5 In his compelling book, The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World – and Why Their Differences Matter, Prothero argues that the world’s religions are not alike; that they’re not at all paths winding up the same mountain to the same God, who’s just given different names.
“Godthink” is the label Prothero gives to the impulse to view different religions as either all bad or all alike at their core. The notion that all religions are a fool’s playground, as the New Atheists claim, is “Godthink” – naive in both his eyes, and mine. The notion that the world’s religions are the same is just as naive, he claims, even though it’s born of good intentions because “when it comes to religion, we desperately want everyone to get along.”6
And yet: as he puts it, “the idea of religious unity is wishful thinking and has not made the world a safer place.”7 In fact, it’s “dangerous, disrespectful, and untrue.”8 “Pretending that the world’s religions are the same does not make our world safer... Tolerance and respect are empty virtues until we actually know something about whomever it is we are supposed to be tolerating or respecting.”9
There’s nothing wrong with wanting harmony and religious unity. Every card-carrying liberal wants that more than a Prius in every driveway. We human beings find meaning, especially in times of stress, by seeking common ground. It is a good instinct. And: religions are far more complex and multi-faceted than mere “belief systems,”10 says Prothero, because “odd as this might sound, faith and belief don’t matter much in most religions. Often ritual is far more important. When it comes to religion, we are more often what we do than what we think.”11
How can we understand different religions, then, if it’s unwise to lump them all onto the same mountain? Here’s Prothero’s approach, which he calls “admittedly simplistic.”12
“The world’s religions share... this simple observation: something is wrong with the world;”13 it’s the something” that differs. Each religion – he delves into nine – “attempts to solve a different human problem.” Each religion’s solution to that central problem includes prescribed techniques and exemplars “who chart this path from problem to solution.”14
Here are four examples: in Christianity, the problem is sin; the solution (or goal) is salvation in Buddhism, the problem is suffering; the goal is nirvana, or awakening; the technique is the Noble Eightfold Path in Islam, the problem is self-sufficiency, “the hubris of acting as if you can get along without God;” the solution is 15 obedience and the technique is the Five Pillars of action in Judaism, the problem is exile (“distance from God”16); the solution is to return to God by following the law.
As a thought experiment, my colleague Rev. Matthew Johnson-Doyle17 tried applying this approach to Unitarian Universalism: for him, the human problem – the “something” that’s wrong with the world – is division (or disconnect), and the solution is unity (or connection).
If, as Prothero suggests, every religion has its own technique for solving the problem it sees in the world, then we UU’s create connection through dialogue, respect, understanding, and compassion – all of which our world sorely needs these days.
“At the dawn of the twentieth century,” Stephen Prothero writes, W.E.B. DuBois prophesied that “the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line.” The events of 9/11 and beyond suggest that
the problem of the twenty-first century is the problem of the religion line.18
Last fall, in the lead-up to the 10th anniversary of the September 11th attacks, others far more eloquent and insightful than I offered pages & pages (or gigabytes & gigabytes) of reflections about what it means that The World As We Know It was changed by four hijacked airplanes.
In this sermon, I’m in no way implying that the events of September 11th, 2001 represent “Islam” any more than Mitt Romney’s view of women’s bodies represents Christianity.
Both are corrupted extremes of broad, longstanding faith traditions. Let’s admit it: drama of any kind, including religious drama, turns us all into rubberneckers. Shifting our focus to the drama on the fringe, however compelling, means that we run the risk of overlooking the dignified majority who, devoid of harm, live out quiet, faith-filled lives.
So when I ask you to consider the danger of painting all religions as similar or sharing the same core message, I’m naming “the problem of the religion line.” I’m naming the larger container of what it means to live in a world where religion has become a tool of violence: violence inflicted in many different forms, onto many diverse victims, held in place by a variety of worldviews.
We – not just we Unitarian Universalists, or Californians or even we Americans, but we, the members of the interconnected human tribe – are being called to a new way of engaging with the hurts inflicted by people who use religion as a weapon.
Did radical fundamentalist Muslims use religion as a weapon ten years ago? Sure. But I also believe that when a presidential candidate boasts about how many inmates in his state have been executed – and when the audience applauds those 234 deaths – religion is being used as a weapon.
I believe that when multiple president-wanna-be’s promise to remove support for the most fragile and at-risk people in our communities, claiming that their economic plan pleases God, religion is being used as a weapon.
When loving same-sex couples are told that they don’t matter, that they’re broken and unworthy of the basic rights that heterosexual couples have, religion is being used as a weapon.
I could go on and on, but none of us wants to leave here today with the seeds of despair stuck between our figurative teeth. Suffice it to say that I agree whole-heartedly with Stephen Prothero when he says, “To reckon with the world as it is, we need religious literacy”19 – not just to denounce and judge, but “to know something about the basic beliefs and practices of the world’s religions.”
As UU’s we don’t need people to agree on their beliefs, or share the same practices. Our commitment to the inherent worth and dignity of other beliefs/practices is understanding why those beliefs are so, and why. We UU’s have the tools to keep doing this difficult, **faith-filled*** work.
Something is wrong with the world. What we believe (more or less) is that problem is rupture, division, disconnect. The solution is to connect, to repair, to foster understanding, to try to get along – because the alternative is bleak. The way to connect is through wise dialogue, unwavering respect, a no-nonsense commitment to integrity, and maybe some humor to light the way.
As you move through this interesting and complicated world, keep bearing witness to what you know to be true; to what brings you connection and hope.
Know your own solution to the problems that dog us, as a human family; and never lose faith that you are a vessel for connection, for understanding; for bringing more love and more justice into the world.
May it be so.
Endnotes
1. Rev. Scott Wells, on his “Boy in the Bands” blog: http://boyinthebands.com/archives/summer-reading-huston-smith/
2. See http://dannyfisher.org/2010/07/08/robert-thurman-weighs-in-on-the-all-religions-are-paths-up-the-same-mountain-god-is-not-one-debate/
3. Stephen Prothero, God Is Not One, p. 2.
4. “New Atheists” include Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens.
5. Prothero, p. 4.
6. Prothero, p. 4.
7. Prothero, p. 3.
8. Prothero, p. 2.
9. Prothero, p. 4-5.
10. Prothero, p. 21.
11. P. 69.
12. Prothero, p. 15.
13. P. 11.
14. Prothero, p. 14.
15. Prothero, p. 32.
16. P. 253.
17. On a Facebook discussion thread, long ago.
18. Prothero, p. 11. In his own endnote, Prothero notes, “I first heard this argument from Eboo Patel.” I ask you: is there no shortage to the ways in which Eboo is awesome?
19. Prothero, p. 337.
Faith in a Seed
Sunday, April 22, 2012 - 9:00am
Rev. Erika Hewitt
Happy Earth Day! Although it’s a stereotype that all Unitarian Universalists love nature, you might say that reverence for the natural world is in our religious DNA. The Transcendentalists — our spiritual ancestors — viewed nature as “the face and essence of God.” In Part 2 of her Transcendentalism series, Erika will tell a Tale of Two Trees, inspired by writings of Henry David Thoreau (and others) that reveal a unique legacy: belief in the Divine presence in the natural world.
Sermon Text:
“Faith in a Seed” © Rev. Erika Hewitt
UU Community Church of Santa Monica 22 April 2012
“I am alarmed when it happens that I have walked a mile into the woods bodily, without getting there in spirit.”
~ Henry David Thoreau
The Rev. Victoria Safford serves one of our congregations in St. Paul, MN. One day a child in the Religious Exploration program was at home and his parents overheard him say about church, “I don’t know the name of it, but where we go we’re really interested in trees. All of us believe in trees.”
A few days later, his mother called [the church]... to report this unusual confession of faith, and to see whether [they] thought it was time to supplement her boy’s understanding with a more comprehensive Unitarian Universalist theology.
The thing is, Rev. Victoria says, “I don’t know if there is a more comprehensive Unitarian Universalist theology. All of us believe in trees.”1
You know as well as I that “all UU’s believe...” is a precarious way to begin a sentence.
Rather than hold beliefs in common, UU’s prefer to align ourselves in the how of community: respect, acceptance, encouragement to seek the only piece of truth that you can know through your own living. I know I believe in trees, but it might be more accurate to say that Unitarian Universalists share both a sense of responsibility for the Earth and beings; and wonder and appreciation for its beauty. We can trace that shared
value back to Henry David Thoreau.
Henry was born in 1817 in Concord, Massachusetts – where he lived for most of his life (and where you’ll be corrected if you pronounce his name Tho-REAU). In his short lifetime, Thoreau set to paper some of the most important and best-loved observations of nature. He wasn’t a “joiner,” you could say. He “resigned membership in the Unitarian church of his birth as soon as he became an adult,”2 and ended up identifying with Transcendentalism instead. Perhaps it’s cheating to drag him back under our Unitarian tent, but since Henry David Thoreau’s words and actions continue to inspire us today, he occupies a sentimental spot both in our hearts, and in the host of U.U. “saints.”
Last week I regaled you with – or inflicted upon you, depending on how much you enjoy history – a glimpse into Ralph Waldo Emerson. A full fifteen years younger than Waldo, Henry was “neither son nor brother but something of each.”3 The two men’s lives wove together finely. From Thoreau’s perch in Concord and on the banks of Walden Pond, he lived out his manifesto: “to live deep... to live deliberately.”
Now: on one hand, I feel obligated to remind you that throughout his residence on Walden Pond, Henry sent his laundry home to mama. I mean, if you want to live deliberately, there is nothing like pounding on your laundry with a rock in the woods. (My colleague Elizabeth says: “I bet his mama thought so, too!”)4
On the other hand: when we read Thoreau’s rhapsodies about “living deep” and his years of living intimately among birds, woodchucks, and chestnut stands, we forget that he and his Transcendentalist peers had a radically different view of the natural world than their fellow citizens.
Last week, I described how in 1838, Ralph Waldo Emerson – a former Unitarian minister – became the de facto figurehead of Transcendentalism. Instead of situating his Harvard Divinity School in a Biblical context, Emerson signaled that Nature was the new Scripture:
In this refulgent summer, it has been a luxury to draw the breath of life.The grass grows, the buds burst, the meadow is spotted with fire and goldin the tint of flowers. The air is full of birds, and sweet with the breath ofthe pine, the balm-of-Gilead, and the new hay. Night brings no gloom tothe heart with its welcome shade. Through the transparent darkness thestars pour their almost spiritual rays. Man under them seems a young child,and his huge globe a toy. The cool night bathes the world as with a river,and prepares his eyes again for the crimson dawn. The mystery of naturewas never displayed more happily.
From this moment forward, Transcendentalism was marked by its devotion to, and its reverence for, the natural world.
What made this a “radical” departure from their culture? In the 1800s, most people had a colonial view of Nature: wilderness was threatening and needed to be tamed. As the country expanded, Americans spoke of the frontier, “a blank slate available to anyone with the guts, willpower, and means to [make it ones property].”5
It would be a hurtful omission if I didn’t add this: during Thoreau and Emerson’s lifetime, white Americans and Europeans continued to pursue and occupy nature’s “blank slate” through encroachment on Native land and its peoples. In 1838 – the year that Emerson spoke at Harvard and Thoreau turned 21 – the Cherokee Nation was forced to undertake the horrific “Trail of Tears,” relocating them from Georgia to Oklahoma to make room
for more white settlers. Seven years later, the term “manifest destiny” was coined to describe the belief that the United States was destined to expand from the Atlantic seaboard to the Pacific Ocean.
For Transcendentalists like Emerson and Thoreau, the natural world was neither threatening nor a “tabula rasa commodity.”6 Nature was a gift, a revelation, a web of interconnection. They insisted – far ahead of their time – that “we are linked to all things living and dead.”7
Emerson’s enchantment with nature and its beauty8 verged on the trippy. In 1833, on European tour, Waldo toured he King’s Garden in Paris9 and was intoxicated to observe the interconnections between shells, minerals, fish, snakes, and mammals. “The Universe is a more amazing puzzle than ever,” he noted dreamily, and promptly declared himself a naturalist.
Thoreau, on the other hand, approached nature through a scientific lens. Barbara Kingsolver (who was herself trained as a biologist), notes proudly that Henry understood “that the scientist and the science are inseparable.”10 He “knew Concord’s forests like the back of his hand,”11 recording in his journals meticulous observations of their wonders, watching Nature unfold on her own terms. “I went forth on the afternoon of October
17th,” he cheerfully reports in one journal, “expressly to ascertain how chestnuts are propagated.” (Henry also went to find solitude. Where Emerson claimed12 that nature “must always combine with man,” Thoreau found nature more interesting than people.13)
It’s hard to overemphasize just how prescient and uncanny Henry was, and how deeply he trusted that – with patience and reasoning – Nature’s riddles could be solved. This was a time when, in the scientific community, it was “in dispute that new plants... grow always and only from seeds” rather than springing up spontaneously. (Says Kingsolver: “It’s hard to imagine grown men of science being uncertain of a thing that our firstgraders”
learn from a bean a Dixie cup.”)14 But uncertain they were. Meanwhile, Henry was firm on this point, thanks to his hours and hours spent in the woods.
“Though I do not believe that a plant will spring up where no seed has been, I have great faith in a seed,” he noted in his journal. “Convince me that you have a seed there, and I am prepared to expect wonders.”
In his early 40s, Thoreau got his hands on a copy of a new book called On the Origin of Species. Clearly “influenced by Darwin’s theor[ies],”15 his last writings “anticipate issues in... biology... that did not become fully articulated... until the early 1970s.”16 Imagine what he might have written had he not died at the young age of forty-four.
This, like many aspects of Transcendentalism, is our religious ancestry. It’s the spiritual legacy that each of us has chosen, whether we were drawn to Unitarian Universalism because of an already deep awe for the world, or whether we’ve invited our religious faith to shape that awe within us. We Unitarian Universalists behold the world around us with a combination of reverence and reason.
I’ll say it plainly: UU’s have a different relationship with nature than most people of other faiths. It’s unusual, I can attest, to find other religions that embody this love for nature, this curiosity that embraces and protects.
To prove it, I share with you “A Tale of Two Trees.”
The first tree in my Tale is abstract: in my last semester of seminary coursework, I registered for a theology class. It met a 8:30 a.m. – not a good time for me – but I thought there’d be some good interfaith dialogue, because the class was being taught at a non-UU seminary.
At one of the first class meetings, the professor spoke about images of God: those Biblical metaphors – some poetic, others disturbing – for the Holy. Suddenly my ears perked up.
“God can be a shepherd,” he said, “or take the human form of Jesus. We can speak of God as a potter, or as a King. But we could never say that God is a tree,” he chuckled. “The Bible doesn’t offer that metaphor, so it’s just not possible to compare God to a tree.”
I dropped the class. Like I said, 8:30 a.m. isn’t a good time for me. My intellectual mind could understand and respect his desire to emphasize Biblical authority. My soul, however, couldn’t bridge the gap. There are days, for me, when trees are the only place I do find God, or wonder, or transcendence. Of course God can be a tree.
The second tree in my Tale is more concrete; it’s a eucalyptus tree near my house in Santa Barbara. The
tree towers over a Protestant church – it’s one of the tallest trees in the area – and I’ve been visiting it
weekly for several years. Sometimes I walk past the tree a few times a week, and each time I do I stop to
pat its trunk with both of my palms, craning my neck way, way up to look at its canopy. If there’s no one
watching, I say hello. Out loud. It’s only polite – the tree is a friend.
Last spring, when I was at an interfaith clergy luncheon, I was seated next to the minister of the
church where “my” tree lives. As we ate, I told her, “I admire how well you do outreach with your church
buses, and your campus is beautiful. But what I really love,” I dropped my voice conspiratorially, “is that
tree outside of your sanctuary.”
She wrinkled her brow. “What tree?”
“You know,” I prodded, “that enormous eucalyptus tree right outside of your sanctuary?”
She was shaking her head, confused.
“It’s really, really tall? And has a beautiful, smooth trunk...” I trailed off. Clearly, my colleague had no idea what I was talking about, and the more I waxed poetic about the tree, the more the conversation would falter. I wasn’t concerned about seeming strange, though. People shook their heads at Henry, too; they clucked their tongues about Emerson finding his “Muses” in the woods. I’m in good company.
There’s a final parallel between us and our Transcendentalist forebears that we need to mention. Before he contemplated chestnut propogation, before he caught a bad cold counting tree rings and tuberculosis took his life, Thoreau went to the woods to live. He built his cabin on Walden Pond so that he could “learn what life has to teach, and not, when [he] came to die, discover that [he had] not lived.”
But Henry didn’t stay there, in his cabin, forever. A little over two years after he’d moved to Walden, Thoreau says, “I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one.”
I suspect that there’s another reason Thoreau left the woods. In the words of Robert Fulghum, “He didn’t go very far 17 [to Walden] and wasn’t gone very long...Thoreau walked the two miles into Concord almost every day, and he welcomed visitors at the pond. Henry was lonely. That’s why he finally moved back to town.”
Remember that, the next time you hear someone claim that they don’t go to church because Sunday is their day to hike, or the next time someone asks you why you go to church: Henry David Thoreau, the architect of solitude, was lonely.
This is the poignant postscript to Henry’s rambles in the woods and the wonder that Emerson found in seashells: as lovely as Nature is, as much peace as we find there, it is to each other that we return; it’s in the company of our human companions that we find our ultimate home.
May your heart hold great wonder for Nature, may you find there beauty and comfort, and may your rambles always bring you back to us, your religious community.
Benediction
These are the words of Walt Whitman, from Leaves of Grass:
“When I heard the learn’d astronomer;When the proofs, the figures,were ranged in columns before me;When I was shown the charts and the diagrams,to add, divide, and measure them;When I, sitting, heard the astronomer,where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;Till rising and gliding out, I wander’d off by myself,In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.”
Go out in peace, remembering to look up and remember the stars.
Endnotes
1. “Trees for Starters,” in Walking Toward Morning, pp. 27-8.
2. Dan Harper. See www.danielharper.org/blog/?tag=henry-thoreau
3. Richardson, p. 281.
4. Rev. Elizabeth Harding, personal communication.
5. Brulatour. See www.vcu.edu/engweb/transcendentalism/ideas/nature.html
6. Brulatour.
7. Robert D. Richardson, Jr.’s introduction to Faith in a Seed, p. 17.
8. See Emerson: The Mind on Fire by Robert D. Richardson, Jr., p. 122.
9. Richardson, pp. 139+
10. In “The Forest in the Seeds,” in High Tide in Tucson, p. 239.
11. In Faith in a Seed, page xvi.
12. On September 1, 1850.
13. In In the Eye of the Hurricane by Philip Hallie, p. 122. This thought was offered first
by Bacon, with whom Emerson agreed.
14. Kingsolver, p. 237-8.
15. Gary Paul Nabham’s Foreword to Faith in a Seed, p. xiv.
16. P. xiv.
17.“Solitude” by Robert Fulghum, in What on Earth Have I Done?, p. 6.
We Will Walk on Our Own Feet, We Will Work with Our Own Hands, We Will Speak with Our Own Minds
Sunday, April 15, 2012 - 9:00am
Rev. Erika Hewitt
This declaration, famously made by Ralph Waldo Emerson, reflects the watershed moment in 1837 when Transcendentalism became a major cultural movement in our country. At the time, it was a rejection of Unitarianism — but in this first of a two-part series, Rev. Erika will trace the connections between our two worlds, weaving the lives of our religious ancestors into who we are as modern Unitarian Universalists.
Sermon Text:
“All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.” ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
Excerpt from Emerson’s Harvard Divinity School Address (July 15th, 1838):
I once heard a preacher who sorely tempted me to say, I would go to church no more.A snow storm was falling around us. The snow storm was real; the preacher merely spectral; and the eye felt the sad contrast in looking at him, and then out of the windowbehind him, into the beautiful meteor of the snow. He had lived in vain. He had not one word intimating that he had laughed or wept, was married or in love, had been commended, or cheated, or chagrined. If he had ever lived and acted, we were none the wiser for it.
The capital secret of his profession, namely, to convert life into truth, he had not learned...
This man had ploughed, and planted, and talked, and bought, and sold; he had read books; he had eaten and drunken; his head aches; his heart throbs; he smiles and suffers; yet was there not a surmise, a hint, in all the discourse, that he had ever lived at all...
The true preacher can be known by this, that he deals out to the people his life — life passed through the fire of thought.
But of the bad preacher, it could not be told from his sermon, what age of the world he fell in; whether he had a father or a child; whether he was a freeholder or a pauper; whether he was a citizen or a countryman...
It seemed strange that the people should come to church. It seemed as if their houses were very unentertaining, that they should prefer this thoughtless clamor...
The good hearer is sure he has been touched sometimes; is sure there is somewhat to be reached, and some word that can reach it. When he listens to these vain words, he comforts himself by their relation to his remembrance of better hours, and so they clatter and echo unchallenged.
There ends the reading.
Sermon: “We Will Walk on Our Own Feet,
We Will Work with Our Own Hands,
We Will Speak with Our Own Minds”
Ralph Waldo Emerson delivered the words you just heard, to the 1838 graduates of the Harvard Divinity School – all seven of them. It was July 15th, the height of what Emerson called a “refulgent summer,” when “the mystery of nature was never displayed more happily.” The graduating students had selected Emerson as their speaker themselves – a choice by which they collectively thumbed their noses at more established Unitarian
ministers and teachers. It was a brave choice, and one with resounding consequences.
What those seven seminary graduates didn’t know when they invited Emerson to speak at their graduation, was that he would deliver one of the most poetic, most stirring, and most scandalous speeches, or sermons, delivered in the history of Unitarianism. (I mean, we’re still talking about it today.)
It’s not Emerson’s crabby criticism in this passage that forged his new reputation among his peers and fellow citizens. (The “bad preacher” you heard Emerson describe, albeit anonymously, was the Reverend Barzilai Frost, assistant minister of First Parish Church (Unitarian) in Emerson’s hometown of Concord, Massachusetts. As you heard, Emerson didn’t think much of his preaching abilities.) No, it’s what he did with the rest of his
Divinity School Address that drew vehement attacks: in the words of historian Ann Woodlief, Emerson used the occasion to “calmly and confidently lay siege to some of the Unitarians’ most cherished ideas.”
What were the “cherished” Unitarian ideas that Emerson assailed? What did he say, exactly, that was so upsetting? And why would we still care today? To understand what happened on that July evening, we need weave a few different contextual strands together.
First, Emerson’s cultural context was entirely different from ours. When he entered the Unitarian ministry, for example, the Declaration of Independence was only 53 years old. Our country was so new that it lacked a true identity, with “not much [literature or culture] that could be called distinctively American... The United States was a cultural backwater, and with few exceptions, its culture was derivatively European.”
As far as religion went, this young “backwater” of a country had staunch Calvinist roots, its churches steeped in the theology of original sin and predestination. At the time, the prevailing religious belief was that human beings were “sinners in the hands of an angry God.” During the 1700s, a slow wave of protest against Calvinism arose in New England’s Congregational churches in the guise of Unitarian theology. (Unitarianism was so new – to this country; it had centuries of history behind it in Europe – that there were not yet Unitarian churches, in name.)
As Unitarian theology was preached from Congregational pulpits, however, it was so liberal that it created division within congregations, splitting some churches down the center. Unitarian ministers simply couldn’t risk their standing by being too liberal, and so by the time Emerson graduated from Harvard, in 1821, the Unitarian “establishment” was desperately trying to balance on a hair-thin line: on one hand, they believed in humanity’s goodness and in one God; their reason called them to view Jesus as human rather than divine.
On the other hand, these early Unitarians had only “precarious control” over congregational churches – and they hadn’t had it for very long. To keep their control and to be taken seriously as Christians, they needed to be as in-line as possible with the prevailing dogma: they needed to embrace Jesus as miracle-worker and messiah.
“Unitarians were,” in the words of one historian, “unwilling to cross the line that would deny Jesus divinity.”
These were the nervous ears listening to Emerson at Harvard Divinity School that evening: those of a newborn religious denomination walking a theological balance beam, who needed Emerson to be a spokesperson for their interests.
By 1938, Emerson wasn’t. He couldn’t be – he had already left the ministry and “corpsecold” Unitarianism. Emerson had jumped ship to become the de facto figurehead of a new movement: Transcendentalism.
These young upstarts, most of them educated Bostonians, had bound themselves together two years earlier, in 1836. Unlike the Unitarian establishment, the Transcendentalists weren’t afraid to openly reject all aspects of the prevailing culture: its religious conservatism, its “arid intellectual climate,” its literature and philosophy. They boldly inspired each other to develop a “uniquely American body of literature” and an intellectual school of thought.6 There was also a deep and abiding spirituality at the heart of Transcendentalism, which had a mystic flavor.
Along with a few writers and philosophers, the Transcendentalists were mostly liberal Unitarian ministers; their membership grew to include Bronson Alcott, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Margaret Fuller, Theodore Parker, Henry David Thoreau, and others. But it was Emerson who refined, and proclaimed, this new cultural message. He lived it, and it was this Transcendentalist spirit that filled his talk at Harvard Div Schl.
On that July night, in front of his audience, Emerson came out of the gates swinging... nineteenth-century style. He began his address by glorifying, at length, the beauty of the summer – an opening that was radically out-of-step with what a 1838 religious occasion called for: scripture. A reading from the Bible.
My colleague, the Reverend Rob Hardies, puts himself in the listeners’ shoes: “Why...is he talking about trees and flowers? Why is he talking about the weather?!” Rob then answers his own imagined questions:
The revolution had begun...Emerson was replacing scripture with the natural world. The world is our scripture, he was saying. Nature is the text that I will preach from today. Life is the text I will preach from. Revelation
is not limited to one book written 2000 years ago. All of human life and experience is Revelation.
The “revolution” didn’t get any tamer from there. Emerson then went on to describe the religious impulse in human beings; he pointed to reverence “the basic building block of all religion” – reverence that comes from knowing, first-hand, the wholeness of the world and our divine natures.
Already, his listeners must have been stunned. And still, Emerson continued. He blasted “formal historical Christianity,” and its “distortion” of the life and teachings of Jesus. If all human beings have a divine nature, he said, then calling Jesus the son of God denies our divinity, as humans. When Christianity holds up the Bible as unalienable truth, human beings are denied “our own firsthand revelation and the miracle of every summer day.”
Emerson’s remaining barb, as you’ve heard, was lobbed at poor Barzilai Frost. Remember him? Remember our reading, and Emerson’s withering assessment of this “merely spectral” preacher who was so pallid that Emerson didn’t want to go back to church? Now, keep in mind how many ministers were in that room, listening to Emerson excoriate that anonymous preacher and what a miserable model of ministry he was. It must have started another flurry of furtive questions: Who’s he talking about? Is he talking about me? Who? Merciful Lord, please don’t let him be talking about me!
Helpfully, Emerson did offer his thoughts as to how religion could be saved, and restored to its potential: “Let me admonish you,” he urged, “to go alone, and dare to love God without mediator or veil.”
Don’t let that word stop you from hearing this: Emerson believed that “[people] want awakening,” and that we are each called to be something, to do great things, in this world. And so he attempted to “awaken” the soul of every person in that gathering, saying to them: trust your own heart...deal out to people your life “passed through the
fire of thought.”
“O my friends,” Emerson said to them, “there are resources in us on which we have not drawn...let the breath of new life be breathed by you.”
Not everyone joined Emerson’s revolution...at that time. But you do have a taste of why we Unitarian Universalists love him so (and why I’m devoting next Sunday’s sermon as well to another well-loved Transcendentalist, Henry David Thoreau).
As my colleague, Rob Hardies, puts it: I love [Emerson] for believing in us...I love him for his passionate embrace
of the spiritual journey. For how he encourages us to go out into the world and discover the truth and wisdom we need for our living. I love him for entreating us to throw caution to the wind, to set behind our faint-heartedness, and dare to love God without mediator or veil....But mostly,...I love [Emerson] for his faith in us. For his faith in the inherent goodness of every person...It's such an audacious thing to believe these days, in a world so full of evil. And yet, now more than ever, I believe that it is the only faith that will allow us to overcome the evil and usher in the good. Thank you, Waldo, for believing in us.
Endnotes
1. In “‘Tempest in a Washbowl’: Emerson vs. the Unitarians,” a talk delivered by Ann Woodlief to the First Unitarian Church, Richmond, VA. See www.vcu.edu/engweb/transcendentalism/ideas/onaddress.html
1. In “‘Tempest in a Washbowl’: Emerson vs. the Unitarians,” a talk delivered by Ann Woodlief to the First Unitarian Church, Richmond, VA. See www.vcu.edu/engweb/transcendentalism/ideas/onaddress.html
2. “Transcendentalism” a sermon by Rev. Dr. Daniel O Connell at Eliot Unitarian Chapel, St. Louis, MO.
3. Woodlief.
4. In Emerson: The Mind on Fire by Robert D. Richardson Jr., p. 245.
5. In “What is Transcendentalism?” by Jone Johnson Lewis
6. “Transcendentalism” a sermon by Rev. Dr. Daniel O Connell at Eliot Unitarian Chapel,
St. Louis, MO.
7. Richardson, 288.
8. Richardson, 288.
9. “Emerson: The Soul’s Bard,” a sermon by the Reverend Robert Hardies, All Souls Church, Washington, D.C.
Lifespan Religious Education News - January, 2012
From our Director of Religious Education:
Happy New Year! As I write this, it has not yet arrived — the holidays are staring me in the face, and our Winter Holiday pageant is fast approaching. This is always a busy time, especially in these last few pre-pageant days, but as hectic as the holidays are, what stands out in my memory once they’re over is not the anxious rushing around, but rather a clear vision of what our community is really all about. I love our big, messy pageant every year because it’s one time when our whole church community fully participates in worship together.
Once the New Year arrives, though, my thoughts turn toward the new beginnings I’m hoping for. Resolutions and goals and aspirations, oh my! It is a time of searching for a better path, of seeking to be more fully myself. The life of our congregation mirrors the individual path at this time of year, too. We are midway through the church year, and January is a time when we reassess our programs to see how they’re going. It’s also a time when many new opportunities for connecting and growing are launched. Be on the lookout for signups for many new adult as well as multigenerational programs coming soon!
This month’s ministry theme is Wisdom, a theme that reaches to the heart of our Unitarian Universalist tradition. Hosea Ballou, an influential Universalist preacher in the first half of the 19th century, wrote these words in his 1805 book, “A Treatise on Atonement”: “We feel our own imperfections; we wish for everyone to seek with all his might after wisdom; and let it be found where it may, or by whom it may, we humbly wish to have it brought to light, that all may enjoy it; but do not feel authorized to condemn an honest inquirer after truth, for what he believes different from a majority of us.”
I suspect that the search for wisdom has been a part of human life as long as there have been people. As Unitarian Universalists, though, we are a people who know that wisdom is to be found in many places, and we honor the search for truth and knowledge as one of our core principles. This month, let’s celebrate the search for wisdom together. Think about the things you know now that you didn’t know this time last year, or 10 years ago, or 30 years ago. Reflect on the best piece of advice you were ever given. Remember the elders who were part of your own life when you were a child, and think about what you learned from them. Then share some of your own wisdom with those you see at church on Sunday. And ask them to share some of their wisdom with you.
— Catherine Farmer Loya
January in the Classrooms
We have a very full month planned in the children’s RE program. In January, preschoolers will celebrate some of the wonderful ways in which people differ from one another and will also celebrate the Chinese New Year. Early elementary participants will explore our interdependent web with stories from science and nature and will engage this month’s theme of WISDOM. Upper elementary children will continue exploring the amazing natural world around us in their UUniverse Story class. Middle schoolers in Neighboring Faiths will complete their study of Buddhism with a trip to the Santa Monica Buddhist Center and the Venice Buddhist Temple. And we’ll also take part in this month’s Faith in Action project on January 22 with a visit to the Turning Point transitional housing shelter, where we’ll take a tour and will make bag lunches for the residents. A big thanks to all UUCCSM members for your generous contributions to our Common Ground Faith in Action project in November; RE participants compiled 160 hygiene kits (nearly double last year’s total) and sorted many donations of warm clothing and blankets, including 170 pairs of socks and more than 50 sweaters and jackets!
Children’s Programs subcommittee members welcome your comments and questions.
— Nicole Henderson-MacLennan, Susan Hendricks Richman, Sabina Mayo-Smith, Kim Santiago-Kalmanson.
Patio Chat with Leon Henderson-MacLennan
Monthly UUCCSM Religious Exploration Theme Discussion
January 22, 2012 at 10:10 a.m. — WISDOM
Share UUr Stories
During the Great Depression of the 1930s, under the auspices of the WPA, the Federal Writers’ Project sent writers and historians around the country to collect oral histories of the American people. There was a strong focus on former slaves as well as on immigrants, artists, and musicians. These interviews are archived at the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian, and in the collections of various universities throughout the country.
Today, National Public Radio has a project called Story Corps. A bus travels around the country making audio recordings of people’s stories and broadcasts them on the radio; in Southern California they can be heard on KPCC (89.3 FM). They are archived on the NPR website, www.npr.org. Each of the stories is in some way thought provoking and inspirational.
There is no more powerful tool for building community than sharing our stories. From the pictures drawn on cave walls eons ago to the era of scratchy wire recordings in the 1930s to all of today’s high-tech options, we are blessed to have the opportunity to learn from the wisdom of our ancestors, our peers, and our children.
Our intent is to carry on the tradition of sharing our stories by creating a UUCCSM video archive of the reminiscences of our members and friends. We will launch our project on January 15 during the Sunday morning service when we hope to show a clip from a video of the late John Raiford, made by Jerry and Nathan Gates.
Also on January 15 in the afternoon, Maggie and Ernie Pipes will host a screening of “Sunset Story,” a documentary on the residents of Sunset Hall. Sunset Hall was a senior housing facility for labor activists and political radicals near First Unitarian Church in downtown Los Angeles. The documentary was seen in over 300 cities in the country in 2005 on the PBS series Independent Lens as well as in theaters nationwide and at film festivals throughout the world. It follows Irja (81) and Lucille (95) as they “attend demonstrations, register their fellow residents to vote, and debate everything under the sun.”
Our project is intended to be the primary focus of the Multi-Generational Subcommittee of LRE for the remainder of this church year, and will be ongoing into the future. We’ll focus first on the elders in our congregation and on long-time members who are leaving Southern California. We hope to enlist our youth to be videographers (and interviewers if they are willing), and even the younger children can participate by asking questions of our members during coffee hour. Our video interviews may be conducted by someone from the project, by a family member, or by a friend of the interviewee. We may also video gatherings of groups of peers sharing their stories, and we might also document groups working together, for example doing a newsletter mailing or at a Second Sunday Supper. We hope that the entire congregation will get into the spirit of the project. Visit the Lifespan table in Forbes Hall to check for updates and to make suggestions and sign up to be interviewed. Subcommittee members would love to hear from you.
– Judy Federick, Leon Henderson-MacLennan, Carol-Jean Teuffel, and Larry Weiner.
Photos from the Annual Friendly Beasts Pageant
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Lifespan RE News - February, 2012
From Our Director of Religious Education:
This month, the ministry theme we’ll explore together is PEACE. In services and in classrooms, people of all ages will be thinking about what peace is and how we can help bring it to our communities and to the world. Peace is a really big concept, and we often spend a lot of time thinking about peace on a grand scale: world peace, the end of wars, etc. But I’m interested, too, in thinking about what peace is on a much smaller scale — how can we build peace in our own hearts, and in our individual interactions with others?
We talk a lot about “spiritual growth” here at church, particularly when we articulate our goals for the religious education of the young people in our programs on Sunday mornings. We’re all better people when we try to be our best selves, and that best self is itself growing and changing all the time as we grow and learn more about who we are and how to be in this world. Spiritual growth means growing toward that best self — the you that is happy and healthy and enjoys being part of the world and being around other people and is excited about learning and trying new things and meeting new people. The you that’s at peace and treats everyone the way you would like them to treat you.
But it’s not always easy to know how to cultivate a peaceful self, particularly when we’re busy, or stressed, or aggravated. This certainly continues to be a growing edge in my own life. Each Sunday, elementary children in our Spirit Play classes share the “Gandhi Peace Greeting” as part of their opening ritual. The words of the greeting are a lovely reminder to me for how to cultivate a peaceful attitude toward others: I offer you friendship/I offer you love/I see your beauty/I hear your needs/I feel your feelings/My wisdom comes from a higher source/I honor that source in you/Let us work together.
I invite you to join all of us here at UUCCSM in our month of peace-seeking. Drop in for the bi-weekly Wednesday night meditation class led by Bill Blake on February 1, 15, or 29 at 7:30 p.m., or join the Peacethemed Patio Chat facilitated by Leon Henderson- MacLennan between the services on February 26. Attend services and talk to others at coffee hour about what peace means to you. And most of all, practice being at peace with yourself, and in your relationships with others you encounter this month. May each of us become beacons of peace in our homes and in our communities, not just this month but throughout our lives.
— Catherine Farmer Loya
Wild and Crazy Times for Youth
Go-cart races, Dodger game, picnic/hike, overnight and a pool party are all featured events being planned for COA/YRUU this spring. Fun is our mission! We look forward to bringing our teens together to share good times, to have adventures, and to make some memories. On the line-up for February 4 is an overnight at the Church with pizza and movies and games. In March we’ll be Go-cart racing. April takes us out to the ball park for a Dodger match-up. May brings us back to nature for a hike and picnic. We wrap up the year with a splash at a pool party in June. Dates are subject to change. Please watch your email inboxes for more information. Thanks to parent volunteers Lara Davis del Piccolo (Clelia’s mom) and Karl Lisovsky (Angela’s dad), several youth went for a whirl on the Winter Wonderland ICE skating rink to kick off the new year on January 7. Between laps under the stars, skaters enjoyed hot cocoa and homemade brownies. To find out the latest details on all upcoming excursions, contact Lifespan RE Youth Sub-Committee Head Teri Bond. Don’t miss out.
February in the Classrooms
This month in the children’s RE program, preschoolers will celebrate Valentine’s Day and will explore the many different sorts of emotions we all experience, and how to express them in ways that don’t hurt other people. Early elementary participants will learn about our seventh UU principle (the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part) with stories from science and nature, and will engage this month’s theme of PEACE. Upper elementary children will continue exploring the amazing natural world around us in their UUniverse Story class. Middle schoolers in Neighboring Faiths will learn about Taoism, including a visit to the Taoist temple in Chinatown. We’ll also offer a special peace-themed Faith in Action project on February 26 for grades K to 5 in RE.
And all families are invited to join us for a very special Second Sunday Supper on February 12 from 5 to 7 p.m.; at 5 p.m. we’ll make Valentines for our friends and families as well as church members who could use some cheer and then at 6 p.m. we’ll share a potluck dinner together. We hope to see you there!
Children’s Programs subcommittee members welcome your comments and questions
— Nicole Henderson- MacLennan, Susan Hendricks Richman, Sabina Mayo-Smith, and Kim Santiago-Kalmanson.
Help Wanted
INTERVIEWEES — Share your story on video
INTERVIEWERS — Sit down with interviewee and ask questions, guide the interview — we will train
PROJECT DESIGNERS — Work with the LRE committee to continue with the conceptualization of the project
CAMERA/SOUND RECORDISTS — Operate camera and sound equipment — we will train
PRODUCTION COORDINATORS — Set up interviews, supervise shoots
TECHNICAL CONSULTANTS/TRAINERS — Share your expertise in video production, show team members how to use equipment
VIDEO/SOUND EDITORS — Must have prior experience
ASSISTANT EDITORS — Upload and log footage
ARCHIVIST – Maintain a DVD library of interviews
SET BUILDER – Help to build an “interview booth” at church We welcome your ideas and suggestions.
Stop by the Lifespan table in Forbes or contact members of the Multi-Generational subcommittee: Judy Federick, Leon Henderson-MacLennan, Carol-Jean Teuffel, and Larry Weiner.
Patio Chat -- Sunday, February 26
Monthly UUCCSM Theme Discussion
PEACE
with Leon Henderson-MacLennan
10:00 a.m. on the Patio
New Workshop Starts February 12
"BYOT 3: Ethics" will be facilitated by Bernie Silvers and Ed Field. Bernie is an ordained Zen monk who lived at the Zen Center of L.A. for thirteen years and was president for eight years. He has also been a UU for more than thirty years and has studied ethics extensively. Ed has a Ph.D. in physics and has been a UU for about fifteen years. The class invites participants to apply their believs, values, and convictions to particular ethical situations with scenarios culled from history, literature, current events, and the participants' own lives. A text book is required and is available at our church bookstore in Forbes Hall. Sign up at the Lifespan table on Sunday mornings. The class will meet upstairs in Forbes Hall at 1:00 p.m. on Sunday afternoons.
Lifespan RE News - March, 2012
From our Director of Religious Education:
This month’s ministry theme, “Brokenness,” is one that resonates with me pretty deeply these days, as I continue to recover following the Christmas Eve fall that left me with a broken ankle. Isn’t it amazing that our bones will just heal themselves, given time and rest? I take comfort in knowing that, as living beings, our broken bones will not stay that way forever. We aren’t like toys or teacups — our broken places, sometimes, are really the places where we have the greatest opportunity to grow and develop strengths that we didn’t know were lying dormant within us. My body was ready to mend itself all along, and was just waiting for the need to arise. Astounding. I also have been thinking about the imagery of being “broken open.” Rather than thinking of brokenness only in terms of being damaged, what parallels do you see in your own life if instead you envision being broken open like a seed that has given way to let something new and full of life emerge?
I am mindful though, that there are also times in our lives when we feel just plain broken, when no easy or inevitable fix is on the horizon for us. And in those times, our UUCCSM community can serve as a safe place to bring those broken parts of ourselves to be held in love and compassion. As Unitarian Universalists, part of our covenant with one another is that we will “walk together” as we carry out our individual lives. Certainly I have been buoyed by the care and help that many of you have shown me in the last couple of months as I’ve been on the mend. I am lucky; this time, my brokenness is temporary. But the gifts I have received because of it will stay. If given the choice, I certainly would not have chosen to injure myself in this way, but I am grateful for the good that I can pull out of the experience, even so. What a blessing it is to be in community with one another.
—Catherine Farmer Loya
March in the Classrooms
This month in the children’s RE program, preschoolers will celebrate the beginning of spring, and will explore many different kinds of families. Early elementary participants will explore the fourth Source of Unitarian Universalism with stories from the Jewish and Christian traditions, and will engage this month’s theme of “Brokenness.” A highlight of the month for upper elementary children in the UUniverse Story program will be a field trip to the Natural History Museum on March 11. Middle schoolers in Neighboring Faiths will learn about Sikhism, and will visit the Guru Ram Das ashram on the 11th. And on March 25th, while older children and youth are attending the YRUU service in the sanctuary, younger children will make doggy treats for shelter puppies for this month’s RE Faith in Action project. Children’s Programs subcommittee members welcome your comments and questions
— Nicole Henderson-MacLennan, Susan Hendricks Richman, Sabina Mayo-Smith, and Kim Santiago-Kalmanson.
Youth Score a Home Run with Laser Tag and Ball Park Outings
Grab your lasers and get, set, go to Ultrazone in Sherman Oaks, the ultimate laser adventure, on Saturday, March 3. A futuristic version of Capture the Flag, this game is an adrenaline rush like never before. Watch your in box for details and don’t miss this fun-filled night out organized by parents Erika and Steven Valore with Alicia and Steven Van Ooyen.
Go Dodger Blue! Saturday, April 14, youth head out to Chavez Ravine to cheer on the home team as they take on the San Diego Padres. Advance ticket purchase is required. Please RSVP to parent volunteers, Laura and Larry Weiner, with the number of tickets you need by March 31. Admission is approximately $12 each for seats located in the top deck behind home plate.
Thanks to parent volunteers Liza Cranis, Erika and Steven Valore, a spirited group of kids enjoyed pizza, games, movies and some midnight madness of baking cookies and making sundaes, while deepening friendships during the legendary overnight lock in at the church in February.
To find out the scoop on all upcoming activities, contact Lifespan RE Youth Sub-Committee Head Teri Bond. Fun is our mission!
Upcoming Adult Programs
Faith Like a River — Themes from Unitarian Universalist History.
Faith Like a River explores the dynamic course of Unitarian, Universalist, and Unitarian Universalist (UU) history — the people, ideas, and movements that have shaped our faith heritage. It invites participants to place themselves into our history and consider its legacies. What lessons do the stories of our history teach that can help us live more faithfully in the present? What lessons do they offer to be lived into the future? Join facilitator Catherine Farmer Loya in the mural room (of course!) for four consecutive Wednesday evenings, March 14 to April 4, for an introductory exploration of our UU religious tradition’s roots. To sign up, contact Catherine@uusm.org or visit the Lifespan RE table during coffee hour on Sundays.
Unitarian Universalist Association Common Read
The Common Read is coming — have you started reading yet? All UUCCSM members and friends are invited to join UUs from congregations all over the country this spring in reading “Acts of Faith: The Story of an American Muslim, the Struggle for the Soul of a Generation,” by Dr. Eboo Patel. Why take the time to read a book that someone else has chosen, though? This is one more aspect of our congregation’s new experiment with Lifespan Religious Exploration. Just as all members of our community have opportunities to engage in some way in our monthly ministry themes this year, this is another way in which members of UUCCSM can come together to “go deeper” in our faith as Unitarian Universalists and in our connections to one another.
Why, then, this book in particular? Dr. Eboo Patel’s memoir, “Acts of Faith,” has been selected as the 2011-2012 Unitarian Universalist Association Common Read. Patel is founder and executive director of the Interfaith Youth Core, an international, nonprofit, youth service leadership organization. “‘Acts of Faith,” a beautifully written story of discovery and hope, chronicles Dr. Eboo Patel’s struggle to forge his identity as a Muslim, an Indian, and an American. In the process, he developed a deep reverence for what all faiths have in common, and founded an interfaith movement to help young people to embrace their common humanity through their faith. This young social entrepreneur offers us a powerful way to deal with one of the most important issues of our time.” —President Bill Clinton
We hope that all of you will consider taking part in this special project. Check the book out from the library, buy it for your e-reader, or purchase it from the book cart or the Lifespan RE table right here at UUCCSM during coffee hours this month. Then, once we’ve all had some time to read, we’ll offer a number of opportunities in April to take part in a one-session book discussion. Sign up for one of the two sessions offered at the church, on Sunday April 15 from 4 to 6 p.m. (potluck dinner to follow), or Wednesday, April 25, from 7 to 9 p.m. Or join one of the neighborhood gatherings being hosted by UUCCSM members in their homes — details of those gatherings will be announced soon, though there will certainly be meetings in Culver City, West LA and Santa Monica, and possibly additional neighborhoods. Don’t miss out on it!
Multi-Generational Section
Record Breaking Attendance
The February Second Sunday Supper sponsored by Lifespan RE was a blockbuster! Lots of serious young (and not so young) artists created gorgeous valentines and ate oodles of fabulous food. Fifty people between the ages of about 2 and 90 found plenty to talk about and even sing about, too. Don’t miss the fun on March 11 — no valentines, but still plenty of food and fun.
Share UUr Story
Plans continue to move forward for UUSM’s oral history project. Stop by the Lifespan Table any Sunday to share your thoughts and catch up on what’s new. In addition to interviewing our members, we would like to capture some video chats on the history of committees in the church. If you were one of the founding (or early) members of any of our committees, we would like to hear from you. On a more technological note, we are looking for a microphone that can be connected to a video camera and someone who can show us how to do it. We anticipate that many of our interviews will take place outside the church.
Patio Chat — Sunday, March 11
Monthly UUCCSM Theme Discussion
BROKENNESS
with Leon Henderson-MacLennan
at 10:10 a.m. on the Patio
Home Hospitality Needed For Visiting RE Professionals
On March 22, 23, and 24 UUSM will host religious education professionals and volunteers for a workshop on UU Identity. A few of these folks will need a place to stay in the area. If you are able to offer hospitality to one or two attendees for two nights (Thursday and Friday), please contact Emmy Cresciman for more information. You will not be responsible for meals.
Lifespan Religious Education News -- 2012
September, 2012
From Our DRE
As the summer heads toward its close, we come together once again to launch our 2012-13 program year with our Ingathering Sunday on September 9th. In the Jewish tradition, the New Year is celebrated on Rosh Hashanah, which begins at sundown on September 16th this year. The ten days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur mark a time of self-reflection and making amends to any you have wronged in the last year. Our congregational ministry theme for this month is Forgiveness, something that many of us may struggle with. We live in a culture that does not encourage either self-forgiveness or the forgiving of others. It’s easy to fall into castigating ourselves for small failures and mistakes, to go meekly along with our consumer culture’s prevailing assumption that being wrong or at fault equates with being weak or lesser than we ought to be. Maybe that’s why it’s so very hard, at times, to accept or to offer forgiveness.
It may seem like a funny match, this focus on forgiveness as our theme for the month of our Ingathering celebration. But cultivating a culture of forgiveness fits right in with my understanding of what it means to be part of a spiritual community. And while certainly we as a congregation don’t always get everything right, every fall we join hands and hearts yet again and in the words of UU minister Rev. Rob Eller-Isaacs, “We forgive ourselves and each other; we begin again in love.”
I am so excited about what this year will bring to our educational programs for all ages here at UUCCSM. Take a look at the Lifespan RE page in this newsletter for an overview of what’s in store. I’ve decided that the overarching theme of my year here at UUCCSM is “deepening.” That is the core purpose of our educational ministry to all ages: to provide opportunities for our members to deepen their spiritual lives, to deepen their understanding of our UU history and values, to deepen their ability to live with compassion, integrity and joy. I think we’re going to have a fabulous year together, and I look forward to getting it started.
— Catherine Farmer Loya
LIFESPAN RELIGIOUS EXPLORATION
Children
On Ingathering Sunday, September 9th, we’ll celebrate the beginning of a new church year together as one community of all ages – all will attend the service in the sanctuary. RE Classes will begin on Sunday, September 16th. No matter the age of your child, we have something exciting in store this year. We’re offering some wonderful new programs for our elementary and middle school youth, including the brand new Theme Play program, a hybrid model which integrates the very best components of last year’s Spirit Play and Theme Workshops classes, for 1st-2nd graders. 3rd-5th graders will take part in the second year of our science-based UUniverse Story class, developed by UUCCSM members Ian Dodd and Margot Page; year one of the class received rave reviews from kids and parents alike. In our 6th-7th grade class we’re taking a year off of Neighboring Faiths in order to review and revise that curriculum, and will instead be offering Compass Points, a program designed as a lead-in to Coming of Age which will help young people explore their selves, their beliefs, their UU faith and their relationships with others and the world. Be on the lookout for program materials and registration forms coming your way soon!
Youth
Coming of Age (8th grade) and YRUU (9th-12th grades) will kick off with a special teen movie night and & concurrent parent orientation on Sunday, September 9th at 6pm in Forbes Hall. Bring a pizza or a few dollars to contribute for dinner; we’ll provide the movie and popcorn. Don’t miss it! In the orientation, we’ll discuss the calendar for the year, and how parents can take part in making this year’s youth programs the strongest they’ve ever been. We’ll also introduce our COA and YRUU advisors, as well as the members of the Lifespan RE Committee’s Youth Programs subcommittee.
Adults
There’s a lot to look forward to from the Adult Programs committee during the 2012-2013 church year. Monthly Patio Chats with Leon Henderson-MacLennan will continue in September along with new workshops including a workshop for writers (current or aspiring) with Bettye Barclay and an evening with Patrick Meighan when he will talk about “Stumbling Into Activism.” We can also look forward to another series of discussions with Ernie Pipes, more on UU history and theology with Catherine Farmer Loya, “Lesson of Loss” and a new ethics workshop with Leon Henderson-MacLennan. Back by popular demand, Rick and Peggy Rhoads will reprise “The New Jim Crow.” And that’s just the beginning! You will also be hearing more about vision boards, drum circles and labyrinths, the new UUA Common Read, “Living the Welcoming Congregation” and other ways to make the world a better place.
Be sure to visit the Lifespan Table in Forbes Hall on Sunday mornings for the latest information on what’s happening in Lifespan and to register for the programs that interest you. It’s a good time to tell us about programs you would like to see in the future, too.
-- Emmy Cresciman
Patio Chat
Monthly UUCCSM Theme Discussions
with Leon Henderson-MacLennan
@ 10:10a.m. on the Patio
September 30 -- Forgiveness
Ministry Theme Quotes for September: Forgiveness
Our ministerial theme for September is forgiveness. Bettye Barclay has provided this list of daily thoughts about forgiveness for the month of September.
September 1- Forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it. Mark Twain
September 2 - Forgiveness is the key to action and freedom. Hannah Arendt
September 3 - Forgiveness means letting go of the past. Gerald Jampolsky
Sept. 4 - "When you hold resentment toward another, you are bound to that person or condition by an emotional link that is stronger than steel. Forgiveness is the only way to dissolve that link and get free." Katherine Ponder
September 5 - "There is no love without forgiveness, and there is no forgiveness without love." Bryant H. McGill
September 6 - "A happy marriage is the union of two good forgivers." Robert Quillen
September 7 - "Sincere forgiveness isn't colored with expectations that the other person apologize or change. Don't worry whether or not they finally understand you. Love them and release them. Life feeds back truth to people in its own way and time-just like it does for you and me." Sara Paddison
September 8 - "To forgive is to set a prisoner free and discover that the prisoner was you." Louis B. Smedes
September 9 - "We are all on a life long journey and the core of its meaning, the terrible demand of its centrality is forgiving and being forgiven." Martha Kilpatrick
September 10 - "To forgive is the highest, most beautiful form of love. In return, you will receive untold peace and happiness." Robert Muller
September 11 - "The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong." Mahatma Gandhi
September 12 - "Forgiveness is a funny thing. It warms the heart and cools the sting." William Arthur Ward
September 13 - "Forgiveness does not change the past, but it does enlarge the future." Paul Boese
September 14 - "It is easier to forgive an enemy than to forgive a friend." William Blake
September 15. - "If you can't forgive and forget, pick one." Robert Brault
September 16. -"He who cannot forgive breaks the bridge over which he himself must pass." George Herbert
Sept. 17 - "Without forgiveness life is governed by — an endless cycle of resentment and retaliation." Roberto Assagioli
September 18 - "Forgiving does not erase the bitter past. A healed memory is not a deleted memory. Instead, forgiving what we cannot forget creates a new way to remember. We change the memory of our past into a hope for our future." Louis B. Smedes
September 19 - "Life is an adventure in forgiveness." Norman Cousins
September 20 - "Forgiveness is the key to action and freedom." Hannah Arendt
September 21 - "Forgiveness is a virtue of the brave." Indira Gandhi
September 22 - "Genuine forgiveness does not deny anger but faces it head-on." Alice Duer Miller
September 23 - "As long as you don't forgive, who and whatever it is will occupy a rent-free space in your mind." - Isabelle Holland
September 24 - "Anger makes you smaller, while forgiveness forces you to grow beyond what you were." Cherie Carter-Scott
September 25 - "Only the brave know how to forgive. — A coward never forgave; it is not in his nature." Laurence Sterne
September 26 - Let us forgive each other – only then will we live in peace. Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy
September 27 - “Forgiveness is not an occasional act, it is a constant attitude. Martin Luther King Jr.
September 28 - “I wondered if that was how forgiveness budded; not with the fanfare of epiphany, but with pain gathering its things, packing up, and slipping away unannounced in the middle of the night.” Khaled Hosseini
September 29 - “The willingness to forgive is a sign of spiritual and emotional maturity. It is one of the great virtues to which we all should aspire. Imagine a world filled with individuals willing both to apologize and to accept an apology. Is there any problem that could not be solved among people who possessed the humility and largeness of spirit and soul to do either -- or both -- when needed?” Gordon B. Hinckley
September 30 - Forgiveness is the finishing of old business that allows us to experience the present free of contamination from the past Joan Borysenko
August, 2012
Ministerial Theme for August: Compassion
Our ministerial theme for August is compassion. Bettye Barclay has provided this list of daily thoughts about compassion for the month of August.
AUGUST 1. For me, forgiveness and compassion are always linked: how do we hold people accountable for wrongdoing and yet at the same time remain in touch with their humanity enough to believe in their capacity to be transformed? Bell Hooks
AUGUST 2. As great scientists have said and as all children know, it is above all by the imagination that we achieve perception, and compassion, and hope. Ursula K. Le Guin
AUGUST 3. My experience is that people who have been through painful, difficult times are filled with
compassion. Amy Grant
AUGUST 4. Compassion brings us to a stop, and for a moment we rise above ourselves. Mason Cooley
AUGUST 5. Few things are so deadly as a misguided sense of compassion. Charles Colson
AUGUST 6. For me music is a vehicle to bring our pain to the surface, getting it back to that humble and
tender spot where, with luck, it can lose its anger and become compassion again. Paula Cole
AUGUST 7. A love for humanity came over me, and watered and fertilized the fields of my inner world which had been lying fallow, and this love of humanity vented itself in a vast compassion. Georg Brandes
AUGUST 8. Compassion is the keen awareness of the interdependence of all things. Thomas Merton
AUGUST 9. Some people think only intellect counts: knowing how to solve problems, knowing how to get by, knowing how to identify an advantage and seize it. But the functions of intellect are insufficient without
courage, love, friendship, compassion and empathy. Dean Koontz
AUGUST 10. I believe that man will not merely endure; he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among the creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of kindness
and compassion. William Falconer
AUGUST 11. I can do no other than be reverent before everything that is called life. I can do no other than to
have compassion for all that is called life. That is the beginning and the foundation of all ethics. Albert
Schweitzer
AUGUST 12. I have just three things to teach: simplicity, patience, compassion. These three are your greatest
treasures. Lao Tzu
AUGUST 13. If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion.
Dalai Lama
AUGUST 14. It is not until you become a mother that your judgment slowly turns to compassion and understanding. Erma Bombeck
AUGUST 15. Love and compassion are necessities, not luxuries. Without them humanity cannot survive.
Dalai Lama
AUGUST 16. No, you're not allowed to be bossy when you're married. You have to learn compromise, and
compassion and patience. Star Jones
AUGUST 17. One's life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others, by means of love,
friendship, indignation and compassion. Simone de Beauvoir
AUGUST 18. Our task must be to free ourselves by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living
creatures and the whole of nature and its beauty. Albert Einstein
AUGUST 19. Some people are filled by compassion and a desire to do good, and some simply don't think
anything's going to make a difference. Meryl Streep
AUGUST 20. The dew of compassion is a tear. Lord Byron
AUGUST 21. Compassion for myself is the most powerful healer of them all. Theodore Isaac Rubin
AUGUST 22. Make no judgments where you have no compassion. Anne McCaffrey
AUGUST 23. The individual is capable of both great compassion and great indifference. He has it within
his means to nourish the former and outgrow the latter. Norman Cousins
AUGUST 24. Until he extends his circle of compassion to include all living things, man will not himself find
peace. Albert Schweitzer
AUGUST 25. Whether one believes in a religion or not, and whether one believes in rebirth or not, there isn't
anyone who doesn't appreciate kindness and compassion. Dalai Lama
AUGUST 26. Compassion teaches me that my brother and I are one. Thomas Merton
AUGUST 27. Compassion is not a popular virtue. Karen Armstrong
AUGUST 28. Wisdom, compassion, and courage are the three universally recognized moral qualities of
men. Confucius
AUGUST 29. Compassion is the basis of morality. Arthur Schopenhauer
AUGUST 30. Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle. Plato
AUGUST 31. Give children at least as many chances to be compassionate as they have to be competitive.
Erica Layman
Patio Chat
Monthly UUCCSM theme Discussion with Leon henderson-MacLennan @ 11 a.m. on the Patio
August 26 — Compassion
July, 2012
From Our DRE
On June 3 we held our annual service celebrating the lifespan educational ministry of UUCCSM, now known as “LRE Sunday,” in recognition of the lifelong growth our congregation offers for children, youth, and adults, and the many volunteers whose gifts of time and self make our RE program what it is. The theme of our service this year was “Courage.”
All gathered at our LRE Sunday services were invited to take a moment to write down on small flower-shaped post-its a way in which their lives have blossomed because they took a courageous step, perhaps through participating in our congregation in some way, or in another aspect of their lives. What a beautiful diversity of stories we have in our midst; friends — I am so moved by the depth of your courage. I wish I had room to share them all here, but here is a representative sample of the responses:
· Going to coffee hour the first time took courage.
· At 14 years old, despite my shyness, volunteering at summer camp for adults with disabilities changed my life — gave me a purpose and shaped my career and heart.
· Being a parent.
· Smuggling Draft Resistors into Canada during the Viet Nam War.
· Having the faith to help my family and home be a loving place.
· Saying out loud when a joke isn’t funny; disagreeing with the “crowd.”
· I have had the courage to face my childhood abuser and still love myself.
· A girl in my class wanted to drown my friend’s garden and I stopped her.
· I signed up for a painting class after not painting for 40 years, and now I love to paint.
· I showed courage by being strong for our family during times of challenge.
· I danced with someone with special needs for a play. I thought my friends would make fun of me but I still did it.
· I was brave enough to leave an abusive relationship.
· I took in a 13 year-old girl as my kid.
· Coming out to friends and family.
· I was willing to question, search, investigate, and challenge the beliefs that were dear to me to pursue truth.
· To continue to enjoy life after my child died.
· I participated in the service today.
· RE Volunteer (even though I’m nervous each week).
· Fall 2010: started training for, and then ran, the L.A. Marathon.
· Quitting smoking and getting sober.
· Slept in the dark.
· Really, just joining the church — it allowed me to feed the homeless, march in the gay pride parade, and stand up for gay rights, and tell people I do not believe in God — it all started here.
· Marching in the Pride Parade!
· Courage to be open and loving.
What is your own story of courage? May we all continue to blossom in love, in faith, and in service to one another.
— Catherine Farmer Loya
VOLUNTEERS NEEDED!
Have you ever wondered about the nature of reality?
Have you ever wanted to explore new ways to put our UU principles into practice?
Do you feel that you're still a learner yourself, and always will be?
We need you!
Please consider volunteering in RE.
We are currently recruiting volunteers for the 2012-13 RE program starting in September. We're looking for teachers to lead 1 or 2 Sundays per month, as well as volunteers for many other parts of our large and vibrant program for children and youth.
Do you love spending time with young children as they learn about the world and make friends? Then assisting in our Nursery or Preschool class is the right place for you!
Are you passionate about sharing the core stories of our faith with children as they make meaning of their lives, grow a strong UU identity, and create a spiritual community together that honors multiple learning styles and celebrates beauty in diversity? Then join our Spirit Play team, for 1st and 2nd graders.
Do science and nature fill you with mystery and wonder? Then help our 3rd through 5th graders consider “How Do We Know What We Know?” as they explore the Big Bang and the origins of the Universe, the chemistry of life, the ideas of evolution and change over time, and the interconnectedness of all people from our shared ancestry with each other and every other life form on the planet in our UUniverse Story program.
Does your heart go pitter-patter when you think about helping young people explore their identities, their beliefs, their Unitarian Universalist faith, their relationships with others and their connections to the world? In that case, you'll love being a leader for our 6th through 7th grade Compass Points class.
Is deep exploration of your personal theology, and engaging others in articulating who they are and what their beliefs are within the context of our UU faith most exciting to you? Then join our 8th grade Coming of Age team (9 a.m. only).
Are you a creative, loving, flexible adult who gets a kick out of teens and wants to support them as they grow and develop into young adults? If that sounds like you, consider joining our 9th through 12th grade Young Religious Unitarian Universalists (YRUU) advisor team.
Visit the RE table in the courtyard during coffee hour for more information or to sign up!
Minesterial Theme for July: Creativity
Our ministerial theme for July is creativity. Bettye Barclay has provided this list of daily thoughts about creativity for the month of July.
JULY 1
Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties. Erich Fromm
JULY 2
The things we fear most in organizations — fluctuations, disturbances, imbalances — are the primary sources of creativity. Margaret J. Wheatley
JULY 3
It is the tension between creativity and skepticism that has produced the stunning and unexpected findings of science. Carl Sagan
JULY 4
Conditions for creativity are to be puzzled; to concentrate; to accept conflict and tension; to be born every day; to feel a sense of self. Erich Fromm
JULY 5
Listening is a magnetic and strange thing, a creative force. The friends who listen to us are the ones we move toward. When we are listened to, it creates us, makes us unfold and expand. Shel Silverstein
JULY 6
If I were to wish for anything, I should not wish for wealth and power, but for the passionate sense of potential, for the eye, which, ever young and ardent, sees the possible. Pleasure disappoints, possibility never. Soren Kierkegaard
JULY 7
Creativity is a natural extension of our enthusiasm. Earl Nightingale
JULY 8
The new meaning of soul is creativity and mysticism. These will become the foundation of a new psychological type and with him or her will come the new civilization. Otto Rank
JULY 9
Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something — they just saw something — they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. Steve Jobs
JULY 10
Creativity is piercing the mundane to find the marvelous. Bill Moyers
JULY 11
A hunch is creativity trying to tell you something. Frank Capra
JULY 12
Being creative means: not numbering and counting, but ripening like a tree, which doesn’t force its sap, and stands confidently in the storm of spring, not afraid that afterward summer may not come. Rainer Maria Rilke
JULY 13
I firmly believe that all human beings have access to extraordinary energies and powers. Judging from accounts of mystical experience, heightened creativity, or exceptional performance by athletes and artists, we harbor a greater life than we know. Jean Houston
JULY 14
Living creatively is really important to maintain throughout your life. And living creatively doesn’t mean only artistic creativity, although that’s part of it. It means being yourself, not just complying with the wishes of other people. Matt Groening
JULY 15
Mystery is at the heart of creativity. That, and surprise. Julia Cameron
JULY 16
Make an empty space in any corner of your mind and creativity will instantly fill it. Dee Hock
JULY 17
Our senses are indeed our doors and windows on this world, in a very real sense the key to unlocking of meaning and the wellspring of creativity. Jean Houston
JULY 18
The creative mind doesn’t require logical transitions from one thought to another. It skips, jumps, doubles back, circles and dives, from one idea to the next. Bonnie Goldberg
JULY 19
You must not for one instant give up the effort to build new lives for yourselves. Creativity means to push open the heavy, groaning doorway to life. Daisaku Ikeda
JULY 20.
The chief enemy of creativity is “good sense.” Pablo Picasso
JULY 21
True creativity often starts where language ends. Arthur Koestler
JULY 22.
Whatever creativity is, it is in part a solution to a problem. Brian Aldiss
JULY 23
To create, you must empty yourself of every artistic thought. Gilbert
JULY 24
Creative minds have always been known to survive any kind of bad training. Anna Freud
JULY 25
It is the creative potential itself in human beings that is the image of God. Mary Daly
JULY 26
Surprise is where creativity comes in. Ray Bradbury
JULY 27
But if you have nothing at all to create, then perhaps you create yourself. Carl Jung
JULY 28
Self creation is an art of fire. M. C. Richards
JULY 29
If you are seeking creative ideas, go out walking. Angels whisper to a person out for a walk. Raymond Inmon
JULY 30
To create is to touch the spirit. M. Cassou, S. Cubley
JULY 31
Our creativity does not consist in being right all the time, but in making of all our experiences, including the apparently mistaken and imperfect ones, a holy whole. Matthew Fox
Fun for All Ages
July 21 Crafty Afternoon
Another hot summer Saturday afternoon. Boredom is setting in. You’ve done Disneyland and Knott’s Berry Farm. The beach is too crowded and the Coast Highway traffic is impossible. Come to church! We’re going to spend the afternoon working with clay, making dolls, knitting, sewing, making great structures from wood, creating art from junk, and more. There will be people to teach you how to do it and you can go home with something wonderful. Everyone from toddlers to teenagers to our eldest members is invited to join the fun from 1 to 5 p.m.
Getting Ready For DeBenneville Pines
Watch for the date in the order of service. We’re going to spend a Sunday afternoon in August playing camp games, doing camp crafts, singing camp songs, eating camp food, and making s’mores around a fire on the patio outside Forbes Hall. Join us!
ADULT DOINGS
Now’s the time to stop by the Lifespan Table in Forbes Hall to tell us what workshops, classes and discussion groups you would like to attend or facilitate starting in September. We want to know what you want to know. Help us to plan another exciting year in Adult Programs at UUSM. Talk to us about it at the table or contact one of the committee members: Emmy Cresciman, Judy Federick, Karen Hsu Patterson, or James Witker.
Patio Chat
Monthly UUCCSM Theme Discussion
with Leon Henderson-MacLennan
@ 11:10 a.m. on the Patio
July 2 — CREATIVITY
SHARE UUR STORY
Summer Interviews Now Being Scheduled
Check in at the Lifespan table in Forbes Hall to volunteer to share your story with us or to interview a storyteller.
Share UUr Story volunteer opportunities: 1) Share your story with us; 2) Interview those who want to share their story!
Contact Judy Federick if you'd like to participate.
March, 2012
From our Director of Religious Education:
This month’s ministry theme, “Brokenness,” is one that resonates with me pretty deeply these days, as I continue to recover following the Christmas Eve fall that left me with a broken ankle. Isn’t it amazing that our bones will just heal themselves, given time and rest? I take comfort in knowing that, as living beings, our broken bones will not stay that way forever. We aren’t like toys or teacups — our broken places, sometimes, are really the places where we have the greatest opportunity to grow and develop strengths that we didn’t know were lying dormant within us. My body was ready to mend itself all along, and was just waiting for the need to arise. Astounding. I also have been thinking about the imagery of being “broken open.” Rather than thinking of brokenness only in terms of being damaged, what parallels do you see in your own life if instead you envision being broken open like a seed that has given way to let something new and full of life emerge?
I am mindful though, that there are also times in our lives when we feel just plain broken, when no easy or inevitable fix is on the horizon for us. And in those times, our UUCCSM community can serve as a safe place to bring those broken parts of ourselves to be held in love and compassion. As Unitarian Universalists, part of our covenant with one another is that we will “walk together” as we carry out our individual lives. Certainly I have been buoyed by the care and help that many of you have shown me in the last couple of months as I’ve been on the mend. I am lucky; this time, my brokenness is temporary. But the gifts I have received because of it will stay. If given the choice, I certainly would not have chosen to injure myself in this way, but I am grateful for the good that I can pull out of the experience, even so. What a blessing it is to be in community with one another.
—Catherine Farmer Loya
March in the Classrooms
This month in the children’s RE program, preschoolers will celebrate the beginning of spring, and will explore many different kinds of families. Early elementary participants will explore the fourth Source of Unitarian Universalism with stories from the Jewish and Christian traditions, and will engage this month’s theme of “Brokenness.” A highlight of the month for upper elementary children in the UUniverse Story program will be a field trip to the Natural History Museum on March 11. Middle schoolers in Neighboring Faiths will learn about Sikhism, and will visit the Guru Ram Das ashram on the 11th. And on March 25th, while older children and youth are attending the YRUU service in the sanctuary, younger children will make doggy treats for shelter puppies for this month’s RE Faith in Action project. Children’s Programs subcommittee members welcome your comments and questions
— Nicole Henderson-MacLennan, Susan Hendricks Richman, Sabina Mayo-Smith, and Kim Santiago-Kalmanson.
Youth Score a Home Run with Laser Tag and Ball Park Outings
Grab your lasers and get, set, go to Ultrazone in Sherman Oaks, the ultimate laser adventure, on Saturday, March 3. A futuristic version of Capture the Flag, this game is an adrenaline rush like never before. Watch your in box for details and don’t miss this fun-filled night out organized by parents Erika and Steven Valore with Alicia and Steven Van Ooyen.
Go Dodger Blue! Saturday, April 14, youth head out to Chavez Ravine to cheer on the home team as they take on the San Diego Padres. Advance ticket purchase is required. Please RSVP to parent volunteers, Laura and Larry Weiner, with the number of tickets you need by March 31. Admission is approximately $12 each for seats located in the top deck behind home plate.
Thanks to parent volunteers Liza Cranis, Erika and Steven Valore, a spirited group of kids enjoyed pizza, games, movies and some midnight madness of baking cookies and making sundaes, while deepening friendships during the legendary overnight lock in at the church in February.
To find out the scoop on all upcoming activities, contact Lifespan RE Youth Sub-Committee Head Teri Bond. Fun is our mission!
Upcoming Adult Programs
Faith Like a River — Themes from Unitarian Universalist History.
Faith Like a River explores the dynamic course of Unitarian, Universalist, and Unitarian Universalist (UU) history — the people, ideas, and movements that have shaped our faith heritage. It invites participants to place themselves into our history and consider its legacies. What lessons do the stories of our history teach that can help us live more faithfully in the present? What lessons do they offer to be lived into the future? Join facilitator Catherine Farmer Loya in the mural room (of course!) for four consecutive Wednesday evenings, March 14 to April 4, for an introductory exploration of our UU religious tradition’s roots. To sign up, contact Catherine@uusm.org or visit the Lifespan RE table during coffee hour on Sundays.
Unitarian Universalist Association Common Read
The Common Read is coming — have you started reading yet? All UUCCSM members and friends are invited to join UUs from congregations all over the country this spring in reading “Acts of Faith: The Story of an American Muslim, the Struggle for the Soul of a Generation,” by Dr. Eboo Patel. Why take the time to read a book that someone else has chosen, though? This is one more aspect of our congregation’s new experiment with Lifespan Religious Exploration. Just as all members of our community have opportunities to engage in some way in our monthly ministry themes this year, this is another way in which members of UUCCSM can come together to “go deeper” in our faith as Unitarian Universalists and in our connections to one another.
Why, then, this book in particular? Dr. Eboo Patel’s memoir, “Acts of Faith,” has been selected as the 2011-2012 Unitarian Universalist Association Common Read. Patel is founder and executive director of the Interfaith Youth Core, an international, nonprofit, youth service leadership organization. “‘Acts of Faith,” a beautifully written story of discovery and hope, chronicles Dr. Eboo Patel’s struggle to forge his identity as a Muslim, an Indian, and an American. In the process, he developed a deep reverence for what all faiths have in common, and founded an interfaith movement to help young people to embrace their common humanity through their faith. This young social entrepreneur offers us a powerful way to deal with one of the most important issues of our time.” —President Bill Clinton
We hope that all of you will consider taking part in this special project. Check the book out from the library, buy it for your e-reader, or purchase it from the book cart or the Lifespan RE table right here at UUCCSM during coffee hours this month. Then, once we’ve all had some time to read, we’ll offer a number of opportunities in April to take part in a one-session book discussion. Sign up for one of the two sessions offered at the church, on Sunday April 15 from 4 to 6 p.m. (potluck dinner to follow), or Wednesday, April 25, from 7 to 9 p.m. Or join one of the neighborhood gatherings being hosted by UUCCSM members in their homes — details of those gatherings will be announced soon, though there will certainly be meetings in Culver City, West LA and Santa Monica, and possibly additional neighborhoods. Don’t miss out on it!
Multi-Generational Section
Record Breaking Attendance
The February Second Sunday Supper sponsored by Lifespan RE was a blockbuster! Lots of serious young (and not so young) artists created gorgeous valentines and ate oodles of fabulous food. Fifty people between the ages of about 2 and 90 found plenty to talk about and even sing about, too. Don’t miss the fun on March 11 — no valentines, but still plenty of food and fun.
Share UUr Story
Plans continue to move forward for UUSM’s oral history project. Stop by the Lifespan Table any Sunday to share your thoughts and catch up on what’s new. In addition to interviewing our members, we would like to capture some video chats on the history of committees in the church. If you were one of the founding (or early) members of any of our committees, we would like to hear from you. On a more technological note, we are looking for a microphone that can be connected to a video camera and someone who can show us how to do it. We anticipate that many of our interviews will take place outside the church.
Patio Chat — Sunday, March 11
Monthly UUCCSM Theme Discussion
BROKENNESS
with Leon Henderson-MacLennan
at 10:10 a.m. on the Patio
Home Hospitality Needed For Visiting RE Professionals
On March 22, 23, and 24 UUSM will host religious education professionals and volunteers for a workshop on UU Identity. A few of these folks will need a place to stay in the area. If you are able to offer hospitality to one or two attendees for two nights (Thursday and Friday), please contact Emmy Cresciman for more information. You will not be responsible for meals.
February, 2012
From Our Director of Religious Education:
This month, the ministry theme we’ll explore together is PEACE. In services and in classrooms, people of all ages will be thinking about what peace is and how we can help bring it to our communities and to the world. Peace is a really big concept, and we often spend a lot of time thinking about peace on a grand scale: world peace, the end of wars, etc. But I’m interested, too, in thinking about what peace is on a much smaller scale — how can we build peace in our own hearts, and in our individual interactions with others?
We talk a lot about “spiritual growth” here at church, particularly when we articulate our goals for the religious education of the young people in our programs on Sunday mornings. We’re all better people when we try to be our best selves, and that best self is itself growing and changing all the time as we grow and learn more about who we are and how to be in this world. Spiritual growth means growing toward that best self — the you that is happy and healthy and enjoys being part of the world and being around other people and is excited about learning and trying new things and meeting new people. The you that’s at peace and treats everyone the way you would like them to treat you.
But it’s not always easy to know how to cultivate a peaceful self, particularly when we’re busy, or stressed, or aggravated. This certainly continues to be a growing edge in my own life. Each Sunday, elementary children in our Spirit Play classes share the “Gandhi Peace Greeting” as part of their opening ritual. The words of the greeting are a lovely reminder to me for how to cultivate a peaceful attitude toward others: I offer you friendship/I offer you love/I see your beauty/I hear your needs/I feel your feelings/My wisdom comes from a higher source/I honor that source in you/Let us work together.
I invite you to join all of us here at UUCCSM in our month of peace-seeking. Drop in for the bi-weekly Wednesday night meditation class led by Bill Blake on February 1, 15, or 29 at 7:30 p.m., or join the Peacethemed Patio Chat facilitated by Leon Henderson- MacLennan between the services on February 26. Attend services and talk to others at coffee hour about what peace means to you. And most of all, practice being at peace with yourself, and in your relationships with others you encounter this month. May each of us become beacons of peace in our homes and in our communities, not just this month but throughout our lives.
— Catherine Farmer Loya
Wild and Crazy Times for Youth
Go-cart races, Dodger game, picnic/hike, overnight and a pool party are all featured events being planned for COA/YRUU this spring. Fun is our mission! We look forward to bringing our teens together to share good times, to have adventures, and to make some memories. On the line-up for February 4 is an overnight at the Church with pizza and movies and games. In March we’ll be Go-cart racing. April takes us out to the ball park for a Dodger match-up. May brings us back to nature for a hike and picnic. We wrap up the year with a splash at a pool party in June. Dates are subject to change. Please watch your email inboxes for more information. Thanks to parent volunteers Lara Davis del Piccolo (Clelia’s mom) and Karl Lisovsky (Angela’s dad), several youth went for a whirl on the Winter Wonderland ICE skating rink to kick off the new year on January 7. Between laps under the stars, skaters enjoyed hot cocoa and homemade brownies. To find out the latest details on all upcoming excursions, contact Lifespan RE Youth Sub-Committee Head Teri Bond. Don’t miss out.
February in the Classrooms
This month in the children’s RE program, preschoolers will celebrate Valentine’s Day and will explore the many different sorts of emotions we all experience, and how to express them in ways that don’t hurt other people. Early elementary participants will learn about our seventh UU principle (the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part) with stories from science and nature, and will engage this month’s theme of PEACE. Upper elementary children will continue exploring the amazing natural world around us in their UUniverse Story class. Middle schoolers in Neighboring Faiths will learn about Taoism, including a visit to the Taoist temple in Chinatown. We’ll also offer a special peace-themed Faith in Action project on February 26 for grades K to 5 in RE.
And all families are invited to join us for a very special Second Sunday Supper on February 12 from 5 to 7 p.m.; at 5 p.m. we’ll make Valentines for our friends and families as well as church members who could use some cheer and then at 6 p.m. we’ll share a potluck dinner together. We hope to see you there!
Children’s Programs subcommittee members welcome your comments and questions
— Nicole Henderson- MacLennan, Susan Hendricks Richman, Sabina Mayo-Smith, and Kim Santiago-Kalmanson.
Help Wanted
INTERVIEWEES — Share your story on video
INTERVIEWERS — Sit down with interviewee and ask questions, guide the interview — we will train
PROJECT DESIGNERS — Work with the LRE committee to continue with the conceptualization of the project
CAMERA/SOUND RECORDISTS — Operate camera and sound equipment — we will train
PRODUCTION COORDINATORS — Set up interviews, supervise shoots
TECHNICAL CONSULTANTS/TRAINERS — Share your expertise in video production, show team members how to use equipment
VIDEO/SOUND EDITORS — Must have prior experience
ASSISTANT EDITORS — Upload and log footage
ARCHIVIST – Maintain a DVD library of interviews
SET BUILDER – Help to build an “interview booth” at church We welcome your ideas and suggestions.
Stop by the Lifespan table in Forbes or contact members of the Multi-Generational subcommittee: Judy Federick, Leon Henderson-MacLennan, Carol-Jean Teuffel, and Larry Weiner.
Patio Chat -- Sunday, February 26
Monthly UUCCSM Theme Discussion
PEACE
with Leon Henderson-MacLennan
10:00 a.m. on the Patio
New Workshop Starts February 12
"BYOT 3: Ethics" will be facilitated by Bernie Silvers and Ed Field. Bernie is an ordained Zen monk who lived at the Zen Center of L.A. for thirteen years and was president for eight years. He has also been a UU for more than thirty years and has studied ethics extensively. Ed has a Ph.D. in physics and has been a UU for about fifteen years. The class invites participants to apply their believs, values, and convictions to particular ethical situations with scenarios culled from history, literature, current events, and the participants' own lives. A text book is required and is available at our church bookstore in Forbes Hall. Sign up at the Lifespan table on Sunday mornings. The class will meet upstairs in Forbes Hall at 1:00 p.m. on Sunday afternoons.
January, 2012
From our DRE:
Happy New Year! As I write this, it has not yet arrived — the holidays are staring me in the face, and our Winter Holiday pageant is fast approaching. This is always a busy time, especially in these last few pre-pageant days, but as hectic as the holidays are, what stands out in my memory once they’re over is not the anxious rushing around, but rather a clear vision of what our community is really all about. I love our big, messy pageant every year because it’s one time when our whole church community fully participates in worship together.
Once the New Year arrives, though, my thoughts turn toward the new beginnings I’m hoping for. Resolutions and goals and aspirations, oh my! It is a time of searching for a better path, of seeking to be more fully myself. The life of our congregation mirrors the individual path at this time of year, too. We are midway through the church year, and January is a time when we reassess our programs to see how they’re going. It’s also a time when many new opportunities for connecting and growing are launched. Be on the lookout for signups for many new adult as well as multigenerational programs coming soon!
This month’s ministry theme is Wisdom, a theme that reaches to the heart of our Unitarian Universalist tradition. Hosea Ballou, an influential Universalist preacher in the first half of the 19th century, wrote these words in his 1805 book, “A Treatise on Atonement”: “We feel our own imperfections; we wish for everyone to seek with all his might after wisdom; and let it be found where it may, or by whom it may, we humbly wish to have it brought to light, that all may enjoy it; but do not feel authorized to condemn an honest inquirer after truth, for what he believes different from a majority of us.”
I suspect that the search for wisdom has been a part of human life as long as there have been people. As Unitarian Universalists, though, we are a people who know that wisdom is to be found in many places, and we honor the search for truth and knowledge as one of our core principles. This month, let’s celebrate the search for wisdom together. Think about the things you know now that you didn’t know this time last year, or 10 years ago, or 30 years ago. Reflect on the best piece of advice you were ever given. Remember the elders who were part of your own life when you were a child, and think about what you learned from them. Then share some of your own wisdom with those you see at church on Sunday. And ask them to share some of their wisdom with you.
— Catherine Farmer Loya
January in the Classrooms
We have a very full month planned in the children’s RE program. In January, preschoolers will celebrate some of the wonderful ways in which people differ from one another and will also celebrate the Chinese New Year. Early elementary participants will explore our interdependent web with stories from science and nature and will engage this month’s theme of WISDOM. Upper elementary children will continue exploring the amazing natural world around us in their UUniverse Story class. Middle schoolers in Neighboring Faiths will complete their study of Buddhism with a trip to the Santa Monica Buddhist Center and the Venice Buddhist Temple. And we’ll also take part in this month’s Faith in Action project on January 22 with a visit to the Turning Point transitional housing shelter, where we’ll take a tour and will make bag lunches for the residents. A big thanks to all UUCCSM members for your generous contributions to our Common Ground Faith in Action project in November; RE participants compiled 160 hygiene kits (nearly double last year’s total) and sorted many donations of warm clothing and blankets, including 170 pairs of socks and more than 50 sweaters and jackets!
Children’s Programs subcommittee members welcome your comments and questions.
— Nicole Henderson-MacLennan, Susan Hendricks Richman, Sabina Mayo-Smith, Kim Santiago-Kalmanson.
Patio Chat with Leon Henderson-MacLennan
Monthly UUCCSM Religious Exploration Theme Discussion
January 22, 2012 at 10:10 a.m. — WISDOM
Share UUr Stories
During the Great Depression of the 1930s, under the auspices of the WPA, the Federal Writers’ Project sent writers and historians around the country to collect oral histories of the American people. There was a strong focus on former slaves as well as on immigrants, artists, and musicians. These interviews are archived at the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian, and in the collections of various universities throughout the country.
Today, National Public Radio has a project called Story Corps. A bus travels around the country making audio recordings of people’s stories and broadcasts them on the radio; in Southern California they can be heard on KPCC (89.3 FM). They are archived on the NPR website, www.npr.org. Each of the stories is in some way thought provoking and inspirational.
There is no more powerful tool for building community than sharing our stories. From the pictures drawn on cave walls eons ago to the era of scratchy wire recordings in the 1930s to all of today’s high-tech options, we are blessed to have the opportunity to learn from the wisdom of our ancestors, our peers, and our children.
Our intent is to carry on the tradition of sharing our stories by creating a UUCCSM video archive of the reminiscences of our members and friends. We will launch our project on January 15 during the Sunday morning service when we hope to show a clip from a video of the late John Raiford, made by Jerry and Nathan Gates.
Also on January 15 in the afternoon, Maggie and Ernie Pipes will host a screening of “Sunset Story,” a documentary on the residents of Sunset Hall. Sunset Hall was a senior housing facility for labor activists and political radicals near First Unitarian Church in downtown Los Angeles. The documentary was seen in over 300 cities in the country in 2005 on the PBS series Independent Lens as well as in theaters nationwide and at film festivals throughout the world. It follows Irja (81) and Lucille (95) as they “attend demonstrations, register their fellow residents to vote, and debate everything under the sun.”
Our project is intended to be the primary focus of the Multi-Generational Subcommittee of LRE for the remainder of this church year, and will be ongoing into the future. We’ll focus first on the elders in our congregation and on long-time members who are leaving Southern California. We hope to enlist our youth to be videographers (and interviewers if they are willing), and even the younger children can participate by asking questions of our members during coffee hour. Our video interviews may be conducted by someone from the project, by a family member, or by a friend of the interviewee. We may also video gatherings of groups of peers sharing their stories, and we might also document groups working together, for example doing a newsletter mailing or at a Second Sunday Supper. We hope that the entire congregation will get into the spirit of the project. Visit the Lifespan table in Forbes Hall to check for updates and to make suggestions and sign up to be interviewed. Subcommittee members would love to hear from you.
– Judy Federick, Leon Henderson-MacLennan, Carol-Jean Teuffel, and Larry Weiner.
Photos from the Annual Friendly Beasts Pageant
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March, 2012
Cheryl Walker
Windows and Watercolors: Light, Color, and Improvisation
This exhibition will include a colorful, transparent window installation and watercolor landscape paintings of the
surrounding Santa Monica, Venice, Culver City, and West Los Angeles areas. Please join the artist for an opening reception on Sunday, March 4, at noon, as well as a closing reception on Sunday, March 25, at noon. Cheryl Walker
teaches at Santa Monica Emeritus College and at Long Beach City College, and is an educator at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Los Angeles. Her work has been shown in over 100 exhibitions and is collected internationally. Additional artwork and information about the artist can be seen at www.cherylwalkerart.com.