Vow

Happy New Year! It's a time of starting fresh -- a time of making resolutions for the new year. New Year's resolutions are famously short-lived. I want to suggest something different: not a resolution, not a specific goal, but a vow. Not a destination, but a direction in which we point our lives. Our resolution, then, every day, is to go as far in that direction as we can.

I want to begin this exposition on life vows with some thoughts about hope. I have wrestled with the question of what hope is. Is it just wishful thinking? In common usage, that's all it is. But if hope is wishful thinking, then I don't see how that would count as a significant spiritual quality.

Yet hope often is so counted. Hope is listed with faith and love as the three theological virtues, as Paul says in 1st Corinthians: “And now faith, hope, and love remain, these three, and the greatest of these is love.” In the Christmas season, see we often see peace and joy added to make five: peace, hope, faith, joy, love. Those five words are emblazoned on many a Christmas card. What is hope doing on this august list?

The 17th-century Dutch-Portugese-Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza said that “Fear cannot be without hope nor hope without fear.” I think he meant that hoping things get better involves fearing that they might not – and fearing things will get worse involves hoping they won’t. It’s basically the same feeling. It’s worrying about the future. Whether we call it hope or fear, it’s a function of living in the future instead of living in the present, and also entails a certain judgmentalism: things SHOULD be this way, and SHOULD not be that way.

In Buddhist teachings, it’s called attachment if we want it and aversion if we don’t want it, and spiritual practice helps loosen the grip of both attachment and aversion. So aren’t hope and fear just other names for attachment and aversion -- forms of nonacceptance? If hope is no more than wishful thinking – simply a wish for something to happen in the future – then how does that warrant being in there with peace, love, and joy? And if hope is more than wishful thinking, what more is it?

Then about 10 years ago, I came across this passage from the Czech writer and statesman, Vaclav Havel. It gave me a way to understand hope as more than mere wishful thinking and as something spiritually valuable. Havel said:

“HOPE in this deep and powerful sense is not the same as joy that things are going well or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously headed for early success, but rather an ability to work for something because it is good, not because it stands a chance to succeed. HOPE is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but certainty that something makes sense regardless of how it turns out.”

I like that. Hope is understanding that things make sense – this life, this existence, this earth and cosmos. It all has a sense to it – it is not meaningless. In support of this interpretation of hope, one might point to the fact that the opposite of hope, despair, does seem connected with a pervading feeling of meaninglessness.

So for a number of years I have been preaching Vaclav Havel’s line, whenever the topic came up, that hope is the “certainty that something makes sense regardless of how it turns out.” This Christmas season, however, I find myself lighting more on something Havel said a couple sentences earlier – that bit about

“an ability to work for something because it is good, not because it stands a chance to succeed.”

To work for something because it is good – not because it stands a chance to succeed. Ah!

So last month, as I reflected with you on the Advent candle of Hope, I said: “Hope is the energy that allows us to make commitments, to engage in projects that bring love and justice into fuller flower. The voice of hope tells us that there is a place in this world for our intentions. There is no certainty – no guarantees. Our passions and efforts may never yield the results we pursue, but we and our pursuits belong, whatever they may yield. Hope is the assurance that trying matters, our intentions and efforts belong -- whether we accomplish our aim or not. Hope, then, is the assurance that engagement in life matters – it makes a difference, whether or not it makes the difference we intended. Our energies are worth it – though perhaps in ways we cannot foresee. Even if it doesn’t matter in quite the ways that we intended, it matters that we did intend something, and we did act on that intent. This is hope."

And there we have our introduction to our January theme: Vow. It matters that we intend something, and act on that intent. Hence our question: what do you intend?

In the middle of winter, let us recall the closing lines of Mary Oliver’s poem, “The Summer Day.”

“Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?”

What is your vow?

“Vow” is our word. “Goal” is not quite the right word for what we’re talking about. It’s fine to have goals, and in some areas of life you need them. The thing is, when you select a goal, you need to have an eye on what you have a chance to succeed at. But a vow is a commitment to work for something because it is good, not because it stands a chance to succeed. It is the direction in which you point your life – not a destination. A goal may have a time frame: expand the business X percent in 2025, or lose Y pounds, or bench press Z pounds by the end of this year. A vow is the never-completable work of your life.

Goals can suck you into always working for the next accomplishment – as if the purpose of life were to accomplish things. We are human beings, not human doings. We need time to just be, to appreciate the wonder of this moment, to drink in the joy we are always submerged in if we only notice that we are. Remember that before it asks its concluding question, “what are you going to do with your one wild and precious life?” Mary Oliver’s poem, “The Summer Day,” begins with other questions:

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean —
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down —
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?”

These are not the thoughts of someone goal-driven – but they are joyful and deeply wise. We need sometimes to stroll idly and blessedly through fields all day, for this is how we connect with our inherent wholeness and completeness, how we release the demons that tell us we are never enough, never sufficient.

And at the same time, there needs to be a rhythm in our lives. We then bring that grounding back from the field into our daily work. Mary Oliver’s work was being a poet – bringing to the world the insight and the joy that poems can bring. Her idle stroll was the grounding for her to give the world this poem – one of her most beloved. So from the grounding in your human being, what sort of human doing particularly calls to you? What will you vow?

You must know that you are enough – that you are whole and you are perfect, just the way you are. And that is not easy to know. Our culture is so oriented toward accomplishment. We are bombarded with the constant message to do more and get more. To undertake to really know the truth that you are whole, complete, and perfect exactly as you are is deeply subversive and countercultural. And if you do glimpse this truth for a moment, the insight quickly slips away again. Re-remembering it is the ongoing work of the rest of your life. You need to know that you are enough.

And, second, you need to serve – serve something higher or wider -- bigger -- than yourself. But since serving is also a path to remembering your inherent wholeness and sufficiency, let us say that the rhythm is one of inner work and outward manifestation. There needs to be that rhythm in our lives. We cannot bring the wholeness of our self forward to bless the world unless we are engaged also in growing deeply familiar with who we are.

The great Christian theologian Howard Thurman, born in 1899, advised:

"Don't ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive, and go do that, because what the world needs is people who have come alive."

What I’m saying is that the ongoing process of coming alive has a rhythm: the inner work, which might look like meditation, or might look like idling in a field all day just noticing stuff, and the outward manifestation which looks like some form of service.

Finding your rhythm might not be easy. Another writer, coincidentally born the same year as Howard Thurman, E.B. White, commented on this difficulty.

“I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve (or save) the world and a desire to enjoy (or savor) the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.”

The rhythm of savoring the world and saving the world can be challenging – but keep at it, and you’ll get the hang of it.

A little over a year ago, in December 2023, I gave a sermon here called, “What is your great vow?” Some of you might remember. I talked about the wisdom of recognizing that you’re not in control. I mentioned Benjamin Libet’s experiments in the mid-1980s that showed that the motor signal is headed to the muscle several hundred milliseconds before we become conscious of it. We have already begun the action before the apparatus of conscious decision-making comes on line. For most of day-to-day life, consciousness isn’t deciding what to do. Rather, consciousness’s job is to come along after the fact, notice what we’re doing, and make up a story about how what we’re doing is what we meant to do. All day long, it’s going: "I meant to do that. Oh, yeah, I meant to do that, too." But the meaning-to-do-it trails behind the beginning of doing it.

Our brains create a running commentary on what it notices we are doing, even though the interpreter module has no access to the real causes or motives of our behavior. It seems to you that your intentions precede and determine your actions, but that is an illusion.

Why, then, did evolution bother to give us consciousness at all? One plausible suggestion, offered by Janet Kwasniak, is that

“the conscious feeling of intent is simply a marker indicating that we own the action....This marker is very important so that our episodic memory shows whether actions were 'ours' or just happened.”

The memory of an event that came from me influences my neurons for the future -- we do learn from our actions and their results. If I get a pain from something I did, my neural wiring makes me less likely to do that again. But if the pain “just happened” – if it was apparently not a result of some particular behavior of mine -- the effects on my wiring are different. What we call “volition” is not a generator of behavior but only a perception that a behavior is ours. This illusion that intentions precede and determine action, then, arose as a by-product of the way the brain learns from experience.

Conscious brain has no idea what’s going on in the subconscious, so conscious brain just makes up a story. And yet, the subconscious is listening to that story – and starts taking it into account. It listens with a skeptical ear at first, but if the story is referenced repeatedly, the subconscious wiring adjusts.

Say one time you did a favor for someone. Maybe you did it for purely self-interested reasons. But you happen to have been asked why you did it, and you fabricated a story – not from any intent to deceive, but because it’s the job of conscious brain to invent rationalizations – and say your story was that you care about the well-being of others. Sub-conscious brain was listening to that story. It was not entirely sure whether to believe what it heard, but it made a note – a sort of little, “huh!” If it so happens that you have other occasions to tell that story about yourself, then the story gets reinforced a little more. What began, as all our explanations of our own behavior do, as an after-the-fact rationalization, can eventually become an authentic driving force.

And, get this: you can give thought beforehand to the sort of story you want to tell. So what is your vow – the mission of your life? This is the story you can train yourself to follow -- the story you can build into an unconscious habit of action.

The first task to discern your vow. Take your time, reflect on it. Zen teacher Jan Chozen Bays writes that

“You cannot discover your vows by thinking. Your vow lies within you.”

It lies within you. How can you bring it out, articulate it, and make it conscious? You can’t just think it out, Chozen is saying.

There are some exercises included in this month’s “Vow” packet. These are exercises I’ve selected and adapted from Chozen Bays’ book, The Vow-Powered Life: A Simple Method for Living with Purpose. These are exercises for exploring your self – your background. What sort of sense of the purpose of a life to you pick up from significant adults in your life as you were growing up? What strong reactions against the behaviors of significant adults helped form you? What tragedies or injustices made a powerful early impression on you? Who were your heroes in childhood, in youth, in young adulthood? What were the values they represented? How would you want to commit to serving the world if you knew you had exactly and only five years to live? Thinking about the mission statements of businesses, what mission statement might you make for the business of you?

Exploring these questions, what overarching primary vow emerges for you? These exercises are in the packet. Each of them asks you to do some writing. I recommend handwriting it – in your journal, or on a legal pad or notebook paper. There’s something a little more potent about seeing it there on the physical page in your unique handwriting that came from your unique body. It’ll also help to share the process with others. You’ll have a chance to do that in your Connection Circle this month – and it’s not too late to sign up to be in a Connection Circle. If you’re not in one, or don’t make it to your Connection Circle this month, find others to share it with. When you articulate what feels like the Great Vow of your life, repeat it to yourself every day. For instance:

I am here to love and understand this world and the beings in it, that thereby they might be helped to grow in understanding and love.

That’s mine. Whatever yours turns out to be, once you have it, use it. Repeat it to yourself, and use it to explain to yourself why you did certain things you did. Let it be the compass needle that points your way. Sub-conscious brain will be listening to that story. I wrote this sermon, and have now delivered it, because I am here to love and understand this world and the beings in it, that thereby they might be helped to grow in understanding and love.

What starts as after-the-fact rationalization can gradually become an authentic habit of action. And you, and the world (as if there were a difference), will be better for this. May it be so.

Advent

First Sunday of Advent

Overview: On the Christian Calendar, today is the first Sunday of advent. Advent is a time of anticipation or expectation – of preparation and reflection for something new, for the coming of love made flesh to dwell among us. In the Christian tradition, it is a time of spiritually preparing for the coming celebration of Jesus’ birth. Our Unitarian Universalist tradition teaches that love is made flesh and dwells among us every day, in every act of caring. By longstanding tradition, we set aside December 25 to particularly celebrate this fact. In preparation for that celebration, the Advent season invites us to reflect on the incarnations of love in our lives – and how we can participate in a new birth of compassion and kindness. For the first Sunday of Advent, the theme is Hope.

And as we light our chalice, we also light the first candle of advent, a purple candle signifying hope.

Reflection: We enter Advent – the season of preparation, of expectation, of reflection on the celebration which is to come. This first Sunday of Advent the theme is hope. Hope is the energy that allows us to make commitments, to engage in projects that bring love and justice into fuller flower. The voice of hope tells us that there is a place in this world for our intentions. There is no certainty – no guarantees. Our passions and efforts may never yield the results we pursue, but we and our pursuits belong, whatever they may yield. Hope is the assurance that trying matters, our intentions and efforts belong -- whether we accomplish our aim or not. As we reflect in these days about what Christmas means for us, what it could mean, we consider in what ways we see love becoming incarnate and in what ways we can lend our intentions to those incarnations. Where can our hopes combine with hopes of others to promote love, and build justice, for justice is what love looks like in public?

Second Sunday of Advent

Overview: On the Christian Calendar, today is the second Sunday of Advent -- a time of anticipation, expectation, reflection, and preparation for Christmas. Our Unitarian Universalist tradition teaches that love is made flesh and dwells among us every day, in every act of caring. By longstanding tradition, we set aside December 25 to particularly celebrate this fact. And in preparation for that celebration, the Advent season invites us to reflect on the incarnations of love in our lives – and how we can participate in a new birth of compassion and kindness. For the second Sunday of Advent, the theme is Peace.

And as we light our chalice, we also light the first and second candles of advent – the first purple candle signifying hope and the second purple candle signifying peace.

Reflection: The invitation of Advent is to reflect and spiritually prepare for the celebration which is to come. This second Sunday of Advent, with the second purple candle now lit, the theme is peace. Also, the first candle is re-lit. The first one is hope, the assurance that engagement in life matters – it makes a difference, whether or not it makes the difference we intended. Our energies are worth it – though perhaps in ways we cannot foresee. Now the second purple candle is peace. The peace at issue is conveyed in the Hebrew word, "Shalom," which implies wholeness, harmony with oneself and others and with the universe; healing of damaged relationships; and justice, fairness, and equity for all. We set our intention to what we can do to contribute to worldwide shalom, yet none of us can, by ourselves, make peace real. The path to peace calls for coordinating with others, revising our intention in light of their intentions and their needs. We cannot do it by ourselves, yet no one else can do for us what is our part to do.

Third Sunday of Advent

Overview: On the Christian Calendar, today is the third Sunday of advent: a time of anticipation, expectation, and reflection for something new, for the coming of love made flesh to dwell among us. For some of us, it is a time of spiritually preparing for the coming celebration of Jesus’ birth. Our Unitarian Universalist tradition teaches that love is made flesh and dwells among us every day, in every act of caring. December 25 is our day to particularly celebrate this fact. In preparation for that celebration, the Advent season invites us to reflect on the incarnations of love in our lives – and how we can participate in a new birth of compassion and kindness. For the third Sunday of Advent, the theme is Joy.

And as we light our chalice, we also light the first three candles of advent – the first purple one signifies hope. The second purple one signifies peace. And today’s candle, the pink one, signifies joy.

Reflection: The invitation of Advent is to reflect and spiritually prepare for the celebration which is to come. This third Sunday of Advent, with the pink candle now lit, the theme is joy. Also, the first two candles are re-lit. The first one is hope, the assurance that engagement in life matters – it makes a difference, whether or not it makes the difference we intended. Our energies are worth it – though perhaps in ways we cannot foresee. The second one is peace: the letting go of attachment to results, the assurance that all will be well, and all will be well, and all manner of thing will be well. Now out of that hope, and that peace, emerges joy. Not happiness, which is a passing mood, which comes and goes according to circumstances, but rather abiding joy. Joy is the fulfillment that comes from connecting with something beyond ourselves. Some of us conceive of it vertically – something higher, or something deeper. Or we might conceive it horizontally – not a higher power, but a broader power. Joy is the connecting with a wider reality than our narrow self-interests. It is the embrace of common cause with all beings. Happiness is mutually exclusive with sadness, but joy abides even in the midst of sadness. Indeed, a sharp awareness of the world’s pain, its griefs and losses, is essential to the complete connection and identification with the interdependent web of all existence – a connection and identification that is the ground of joy. We are one.

Fourth Sunday of Advent

Overview: On the Christian Calendar, today is the fourth and final Sunday of advent: a time of anticipation, expectation, and reflection for something new, for the coming of love made flesh to dwell among us. Our Unitarian Universalist tradition teaches that love is made flesh and dwells among us in every act of caring. By longstanding tradition, December 25 is our day to particularly celebrate this fact. And in preparation for that celebration, the Advent season invites us to reflect on the incarnations of love in our lives – and how we can participate in a new birth of compassion and kindness. For the fourth Sunday of Advent, the theme is love.

And as we light our chalice, we also light all four or our Advent Candles – the first purple one signifies hope. The second purple one signifies peace. The third candle, the pink one, signifies joy. And the final purple one signifies love.

Reflection: Dear Spirit of Love, We have lit your candle, the candle of love, on this fourth Sunday of advent. We know love is continuously becoming flesh and dwelling among us – in the birth of every beloved child, and in every act of caring and kindness -- yet this is the time of year that we, by convention, direct our attention to celebrate that fact: the fact that thou, love, art born, and born again and again, and that thou art what saves us. The advent season invites us to grow toward this celebration of love, to grow into that celebration over several weeks, preparing ourselves, deepening our appreciation of the message. We have lit again today, as we first did three weeks ago, the purple candle of hope: the assurance that it matters what we do. Even if it doesn’t matter in quite the ways that we intended, it matters that we did intend something, and we did act on that intent. This is hope. We have lit again today, as we first did two weeks ago, the purple candle of peace: the acceptance that comes to us when we let go of attachment to results. We offer up to the world what we are. We do what we can. We then leave it up to the world what to make of it. This is peace. We have lit again today, as we first did last week, the pink candle of joy: for out of hope and peace emerges joy, which comes from connecting with something beyond ourselves, whether something higher or something wider. Happiness is a passing mood, but joy may abide even in the midst of sadness. And now, as the culmination of advent, we have lit the purple candle of love. “And the greatest of these is love,” for love is the fruition of hope, peace, and joy – yet also the ground from which hope, peace, and joy grow, in an ever-widening virtuous cycle.

Christmas Music

"Sing a song of Merry Christmas"
Wolfgang A. Mozart; arr. Walter Ehret

Sing a song of Merry Christmas
Put care away this holiday.
Sing a song of Merry Christmas.
Put care away this holiday.

This is the time to sing Noel.
This is the time to sing Noel, Noel, Noel!
This is the time to sing a bright Noel, so
Sing a song of Merry Christmas,
a joyous song of Christmas --
Put care away this holiday.

When I was a kid, at this time of year, I heard the usual carols on the radio. Intermixed with them, however, in our house, we played Tom Lehrer albums. To some of you, I dare say, this will also be familiar – and for some of you, perhaps, not – after all, it’s been more than 65 years since Tom Lehrer’s Christmas Song was released. It goes, in part, like this:

Christmas time is here, by golly
Disapproval would be folly
Deck the halls with hunks of holly
Fill the cup and don't say when

Hark, the Herald Tribune sings
Advertising wondrous things
God rest ye merry merchants
May ye make the Yuletide pay
Angels we have heard on high
Tell us to go out and – buy!

The holidays can be stressful. Christmas – and Hanukkah, too – have been so thoroughly Commercialized for so long now that we don’t even think to complain about anymore. It’s just how things are. The shopping and the preparations – maybe the travel, or the hosting of relations that travel to you: so much to do!

“Merry Christmas” we say. But it’s easy to find ourselves with no time for merriment. Our Choir’s opening song urged us to “Put care away this holiday.” I hope that’s possible. May you have time for merriment. May you have time to put care away this holiday.

As I looked over the five choir pieces for our Music Sunday, I noticed that there are two, in some ways opposite, ways to put care away this holiday. One of them is merriment, cheer, gaiety – a little bit rowdy, a little bit loud – a time for raucous belly laughs. But this is also a season for peace. To find the calm assurance of inner peace -- this, too, is putting care away – and relishing a calm and peaceful delight. Not the belly laugh, but the quiet smile.

Christmas is for both the boisterous and the peaceful. More on the boisterous side of Christmas, the next Choir piece is about Wassailing. Why do they call it wassail? Because it’s good for wassails ya. Actually, “wassail” comes from the Old Norse for “be healthy” – used as a drinking salutation, like, “to your health.” Nowadays, wassail denotes a beverage made from mulled cider, ale, or wine and spices. The verb wassailing has two traditions: there’s the house-visiting wassail, and the orchard-visiting wassail.

The orchard-visiting wassail comes from cider-producing regions of England. People would go to apple orchards and recite incantations and sing to the trees to promote a good harvest for the coming year. They called this wassailing.

The house-visiting wassail is the practice of people going door-to-door, shlepping an enormous wassail bowl with them, and singing and offering a drink from the wassail bowl exchange for gifts – traditionally, food, drink, or money. Both the house-visiting wassailers and the orchard-visiting wassailers were there to confer blessings – a blessing on the trees, in one case, and a blessing on the house, in the other case, to protect it from evil spirits.

I have seen carolers – and have even been a caroler – but I’ve never seen people actually wassailing – either the orchard-visiting kind or the house-visiting kind. At least, if they were carrying around a large bowl, I didn’t see it. I understand actual wassailing still goes on in western England and Wales. Americans: not so much. But we do like to sing about it. Wassailing has become, for most of us, a metaphor.

Our lives, lived day to day, are indeed a "wandring so fair to be seen" – as we traverse our days giving and receiving the blessings of life and companionship. And as we go through life, our interactions are a mix of marketplace transactions and nonmarket values. On the one hand, I’ll trade you a drink for some gift from you. There’s that transactional way of viewing it. On the other hand, there’s love and joy being shared – and the human bonds that transcend markets.

"Here We Come A-Wassailing"
Traditional English Carol; arr. Ryan O'Connell

Here we come a-wassailing
Among the leaves so green;
Here we come a-wand'ring
So fair to be seen.
Love and joy come to you,
And to you your wassail too;
And God bless you and send you
a Happy New Year
And God send you a Happy New Year.

We are not daily beggars
That beg from door to door;
But we are neighbours' children,
Whom you have seen before.

God bless the master of this house
Likewise the mistress too,
And all the little children
That round the table go.

Christmas is indeed heavy on the music. No other holiday is submerged in its music the way Christmas is. There are a few Easter songs – not many. For the 4th of July, we have a number of paeans to patriotism, but they don’t inundate the air the way that Christmas songs and carols do every December.

Almost every recording artist feels the need at some point in their career to put out a Christmas album. Even Bob Dylan, bless his heart, put out one. I like Bob Dylan, but after hearing his Christmas album once, I have not wanted to hear it again. The record labels are not, however, cranking out Halloween albums, or Labor Day albums.

Think of all the Popular Christmas songs written in the 20th century: “Santa Claus is Coming to Town,” “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” “Frosty the Snow Man.” “All I want for Christmas is You,” “Winter Wonderland,” “Let it Snow, Let it Snow,” “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year,” “A Holly, Jolly Christmas,” “The Christmas Song (Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire,” “Silver Bells,” “Dreaming of a White Christmas.” New ones come out every year.

Those are fun. I like them. But in my mind the real Christmas Carols are the ones from the 19th Century. These are the ones that seem to me to get under the surface of Christmas and speak to a more fully resonant meaning. “Joy to the World,” “The First Noel,” “Silent Night,” “Do you hear what I hear?” “In the Bleak Midwinter,” “Deck the Halls,” “Hark, the Herald Angels Sing,” “Angels we have heard on high,” “It Came Upon the Midnight Clear” “O Little Town of Bethlehem” – you know – the ones in our hymnal. I mean, a 20th-century song like, for instance, “I’ll be home for Christmas,” may be catchy, and even kinda poignant, but it’s not hymnal material.

Of course, the 19th-century also produced some very popular tunes that were just for fun: Jingle Bells, for instance – which is also not in our hymnal.

The thing is, Christmas, as I was saying, has these two very different moods: on the one hand, the merry and festive -- and on the other hand, the peaceful, the quiet bliss. If you were going to pull off a holiday that pulls together such opposite moods, how would you do it? With music. You sing Jingle Bells, and you sing Silent Night – you sing about laughing all the way, and you sing about “all is calm” – and you keep going back and forth until the two moods start to seem like one thing after all. And maybe they are.

Sing to us about the Carols of Christmas.

"Carols of Christmas (Love is All Around)"
Clark William Lawlor

Christmas is coming, the air is dark and cold.
We gather together, the young and the old,
Singing carols of Christmas, ‘round a warm fire's glow,
Sharing stories and laughing, as we shelter from the snow,

CHORUS: Singing, "Joy to the world", "The First Noel",
As we sing on this "Silent Night," knowing all is well.
"Do you hear what I hear?" Listen to the sound,
For even "In the Bleak Midwinter," love is all around.

The frost on the windows, the snowflakes drifting down,
We all build a snowman, there's magic all around.
The kids open presents: pajamas or a train,
Then we circle 'round the piano, and start a new refrain,

CHORUS

Oh, come, let us “Deck the Halls,” “The Herold Angels Sing,”
Oh, “What Sweeter Music, can we bring?”
This Christmas time (this Christmas time),
This Christmas time (this Christmas time),
Oh, “Have Yourself a Merry little Christmas.”

CHORUS

The next piece, in a few minutes, will be "Now the Holly Bears a Berry," which is a variation on "The Holly and the Ivy." This evocation of the natural world in connection has me reflecting on the ways that Christmas may be taken to be about something beyond nature. And yet, this particular carol embeds the Christmas story completely within nature.

As we noted earlier, our Unitarian Universalist tradition teaches that love is made flesh and dwells among us every day, in every act of caring. By longstanding tradition, we set aside December 25 to particularly celebrate this fact. And yet the holiday is called Christmas. It’s a Christian holiday – and isn’t the Christian story about love being made flesh and dwelling among us is a bit more... specific?

Sometimes we use the word “supernatural” to describe the difference between the traditional Christian account of Christian and a more “naturalized” version. Some people believe in supernatural stuff going on, and some people don’t, and there’s the difference. Some people tell a supernatural story about Christmas – and some people don’t go in for that. The thing is, the distinction between natural and supernatural isn’t as clear as we sometimes imagine it is.

That distinction is a cultural product, and it has shifted over time. The very idea of supernatural – that is, the sort of line we draw between what we call “natural” and what we call “supernatural” -- is all fairly recent. And it’s not always clear where or how the line is to be drawn.

For instance, it has occurred to me – and might have occurred to you -- that the ghosts depicted in the movie "Ghostbusters" are not supernatural. You might think that if anything counted as an example of a supernatural entity it would be ghosts – and that people who don’t believe in the supernatural, therefore do not believe in ghosts. But if “ghost” means the sort of entity fictionally depicted in Ghostbusters, then ghosts are entirely natural.

Why do I say this? The ghostbusters use nuclear-powered backpacks to shoot a stream of protons at the ghost, and then they contain it within a metal box. If something is susceptible to physical protons and a physical box, then that something is a physical thing. The entities are fictional – and the physics involved is fictional, too -- but it’s still recognizable as physics.

There is a history of uncertainty about where to draw the line between natural and supernatural. There was a boom in seances in the 1920s and into the 1930s. This was the time when radios were first coming out. If invisible disembodied voices could speak to us from afar through the medium of a box, then why couldn’t the spirits of the dead speak to us through a medium? If radios were natural, then maybe seances were, too. Or if seances depended on something supernatural, then it sure seemed as if radios did too.

A lot of people were unsure about where to draw that line between natural and supernatural. Today, our physicists propose that there might be something called dark matter. The way that galaxies curve in their rotation, the way galaxy clusters form, and the tiny fluctuations in the cosmic background radiation seem to require a lot more mass out there than we can see or detect – so physicists hypothesize that the mass is there, but it’s a different kind of mass that’s invisible, undetectable – dark matter – which they estimate, has a total mass of more than 5 times the mass of all the visible matter in the universe. Is dark matter supernatural? If you say “no,” then why not?

Physicists are divided on the question of whether quantum indeterminacy is irreducible – but if it is, that would mean there’s no natural law that determines certain quantum phenomena. Would that make them supernatural?

They more you look at this notion of supernatural, the more elusive it becomes. It’s not at all clear what, if anything, it could mean.

There are, in fact, a number of approaches to Christmas that quite explicitly ground the basic story in nature. "The Holly and the Ivy" is quite an old Carol – one of the few that might go back to before the 19th century, though the earliest known publication was in 1833. "The Holly and the Ivy" - and Doughlas Wagner’s riff on that carol -- “Now the Holly Bears a Berry” -- seem to emphasize the continuity between the natural and the human. The holly brings forth berries – and Mary brings forth her babe. There is wonder there – a kind of awe inspiring magic – in the way that life brings forth life, but there’s nothing we could call supernatural, unless we called everything supernatural.

It’s all natural, through and through. And that’s just super!

"Now the Holly Bears a Berry"
Traditional English Carol; arr. Douglas E. Wagner

Now the holly bears a berry, as red as the rose
And Mary wrapped her baby in warm swaddling clothes.
And Mary bore her baby, for all to come and see,
And the first tree in the green wood, it was the holly.

Now the holly bears a berry as white as the snow,
And Mary held her baby in her arms long ago.
And Mary shared her baby with all who came to see,
And the first tree in the green wood, it was the holly.

Now the holly bears a berry as black as the night,
And Mary laid her baby in tghe moon's crystal light.
And Mary shared her baby with all who came to see,
And the first tree in the green wood, it was the holly.

Our Choir began this morning with “Sing a Song of Merry Christmas” which urged us to put care away this holiday. And may you indeed make time for merriment this holiday season. But I’ve been saying there are two ways to put care away: one is with boisterous merriment, and the other is with a calm and blissful peace. With the choir’s closing number for this special music service, we circle round to the peace theme. Peace, peace, peace on earth, good will to all. Joy, love, singing together. The choir will invite us, at a certain point, to join in a chorus of "Silent Night."

"Peace, Peace"
Words and Music Rick and Sylvia Powell; arr. Fred Bock

Peace, peace, peace on earth - and good will to all.
This is a time for joy. This is a time for love.
Now let us all sing together of Peace, peace, peace on earth.

Peace, peace, peace on earth -- and good will to all.
This is a time for joy. This is a time for love.
Silent night! Holy night!
All is calm, all is bright.
Round yon virgin, mother and child
Holy infant so tender and mild;
Sleep in heavenly peace, sleep in heavenly peace.

Now let us all sing together of
Peace, peace, peace on earth.

Awe and Wonder

It is December. The holiday season descends upon us. It’s a good time to experience wonder, and even maybe a touch of that intensified sense of wonder that we call awe.

Sometimes when you think you are out of fuel – running on empty or running on fumes, it turns out the fuel you have keeps you going -- for eight days. Sometimes some energy comes out of you that leaves you wondering: where did that come from? You didn’t know you had it in you. Hanukkah invites us to consider that sort of wonder.

And then there is the number one source of awe. When psychologist Dacher Keltner asked people all over the world to submit accounts of their experiences of awe, he found that experiences of awe tend to come from one of what he calls the eight wonders of life.

Big ideas or epiphanies tend to trigger awe. That’s one.

Two, being present at a birth, or at a death brings awe.

Three, mystical experiences of transcending wonder and mystery are awesome.

Four, art and visual design can inspire awe, as can, five, music.

Six, nature can awaken awe in us, and we experience awe in, seven, collective movement like in dance or team sports.

But Keltner found that the number one source of awe was not any of these. The thing that most often inspires awe in people, more common than nature, or spiritual practice, or music, or losing yourself in a whirling dervish: is seeing people unself-consciously display the goodness they are made of. Witnessing human strength, courage, kindness, perseverance against difficulty is what most commonly leads people to feel awe. “Around the world,” writes Keltner, “we are most likely to feel awe when moved by moral beauty.”

And what is Christmas all about? Well, it’s about a baby. The story carries us in our imagination to a poor woman, away from home, giving birth to a little baby. Being present to a birth is one of Keltner’s 8 sources of awe, but Christmas is also about the birth of love in human hearts. It’s about love becoming flesh and dwelling among us. And when we see that happen – and it’s happening all the time: people doing something good, something loving, something kind, something courageous and difficult – that’s the most common source of awe we have. The wonder and awe of love becoming flesh and dwelling among us – even within us – that’s what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown.

Wonder is itself a wonder. What an amazing thing that we should be beings who get amazed, a wondrous thing that these animal bodies – yours and mine – should be built to experience wonder and even awe. The capacity for wonder is apparently not unique to humans. The chimpanzees – whose branch on the evolutionary tree split off about 7 million years ago from the branch that eventually led to homo sapiens – also seem to experience wonder. Jane Goodall noticed the wonder or awe that chimps seemed to feel in the presence of a waterfall. There doesn’t seem to be any utilitarian purpose for this. It doesn’t seem to confer any reproductive advantage, so how did natural selection select for the capacity for wonder? For these chimps it looks actually risky. They could slip on the rocks. Chimps can’t swim, so the risk of falling in could be life-threatening. Jane Goodall explains:

“The chimpanzee's brain is similar to ours. They have emotions that are clearly similar to those that we call happiness and sadness and fear and despair and so forth. So why wouldn’t they also have feelings of some kind of spirituality? Which is, really, being amazed at things outside yourself.”

She goes on to say:

“I think chimpanzees are as spiritual as we are, but they can’t analyze it, they don’t talk about it; they can’t describe what they feel.”

Hmm. Being amazed at things outside yourself is part of spirituality -- as is, for that matter, being amazed at things inside yourself. The larger part of spirituality, it seems to me, is the making meaning of things, of life, of this existence. So describing the feelings of wonder or awe – which is how we place those feelings in a context of meaning – is itself a big component of spirituality. If the chimps can’t describe what they feel, then I’d say they have a seed of spirituality, but that seed hasn’t sprouted into spirituality. That seed is wonder, and it does seem that the chimps are experiencing wonder. It’s true we don’t know what’s happening in a rain-dancing chimp’s mind. Let’s remember, we don’t know what’s happening in a rain-dancing human’s mind. We don’t know what’d going on in each other’s minds – or even in our own mind. We are mysteries to ourselves.

It turns out various loud stimuli – machinery, boisterous people, or waterfalls -- can elicit chimpanzee displays. But what about that sitting quietly and staring at the waterfall afterwards? That’s just what I – and most people – would do at the foot of a waterfall: quietly gaze.

Philosopher Jesse Prinz identifies three components of wonder. There’s the sensory.

“Wondrous things engage our senses — we stare and widen our eyes.”

That part, we have in common with chimps, and some other animals. Then there’s the cognitive. Wondrous things are beyond what we can cognitively comprehend. There’s something perplexing about them. Whether the chimps experience this component is less clear.

Finally, there’s the spiritual. “We look upwards in veneration;” our heart swells. Wonder is what we experience when we confront mystery.

Dacher Keltner’s definition of awe is similar. Awe, he says, is

“Being in the presence of something vast and mysterious that transcends your current understanding of the world.”

This is not mystery like a whodunit. It’s not the kind of mystery you can figure out. This kind of mystery, you don’t solve. You live the mystery. Who am I? Who is asking that question? What is this world? What is matter?

The more we attend to the details of what the physicists say about it, the weirder and more mysterious it gets. For instance, physicists say that matter is whatever occupies space and has mass. That's handy for scientific purposes, but from a wider standpoint, it simply replaces one mystery – the mystery of matter -- with two mysteries -- space and mass. Why is there me? Why is there anything? Why is there something rather than nothing? Where am I – what is the meaning of this geographic location, or this stage in the arc of my life?

These are the questions that admit of no settled answer. You might have provisional partial answers, but it might be better to not even have that much. Just be in the mystery, without grasping after an answer. What sort of place is the universe? What is life, and how does it happen? What is consciousness, and how does it happen?

Scientists seem to have a lot to say about these, so maybe they are in the category of things to figure out. On the other hand, the scientist's stories leaves us with just as much mystery as ever. When the physicists say that, you see, there are 11 dimensions, and billions of parallel universes made possible by different pathways taken by photons – or when biologists tell us about the chemical equations of the reactions inside a cell, reactions which, they say, constitute and define life – or when neurologists say that consciousness is an emergent property of 100 billion neurons firing across 100 trillion synapses – one may reasonably feel that such steps toward solving the mystery don’t really clear up any of the mysteriousness we must live.

Knowing the science merely gives us a particular sort of language for expressing what is, at bottom, the same wonder. Before the science, there were elaborate theologies. Knowing the theology, likewise, merely gives us a particular sort of language for expressing what is, at bottom, the same wonder. Wonder and awe are, we might say, a kind of falling in love: with our world, with ourselves, with the experience of being alive.

Wonder is typically expressed in the form of a question, which might fool us into thinking an explanatory answer is being sought. It is not. The point of love is to love, not to explain it, figure it out, or solve it. The point of wonder is likewise not to get an explanation, solution, or answer. The point of wonder is to wonder – to be filled with admiration, amazement, or awe -- bounded by humility, by gratitude, and by joy.

What is your number 1 source of wonder? Is it a starry sky? A mountain top view? Charlie Parker’s saxophone playing? A murmuration of starlings? There are contexts we can place ourselves in that encourage wonder. And then sometimes wonder descends upon us in the midst of the perfectly ordinary.

Thomas Merton wrote about an amazing experience of wonder he had in 1958 on a street corner in Louisville. Merton, then age 43, was a Trappist monk who had spent most of the previous 17 years at the Abbey of Gethsemani near Bardstown, Kentucky – most of that in silence. On a rare trip to Louisville, about an hour’s drive from the Abbey, he had a sudden and stunning experience of wonder. He described it in his journal:

“In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness,... The whole illusion of a separate holy existence is a dream.... This sense of liberation from an illusory difference was such a relief and such a joy to me that I almost laughed out loud. And I suppose my happiness could have taken form in the words: ‘Thank God, thank God that I am like other men, that I am only a man among others.’ It is a glorious destiny to be a member of the human race, though it is a race dedicated to many absurdities and one which makes many terrible mistakes:... A member of the human race! To think that such a commonplace realization should suddenly seem like news that one holds the winning ticket in a cosmic sweepstake. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun. They are not ‘they’ but my own self. There are no strangers! Then it was as if I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, the depths of their hearts where neither sin nor desire nor self-knowledge can reach, the core of their reality. If only they could all see themselves as they really are. If only we could see each other that way all the time. There would be no more war, no more hatred, no more cruelty, no more greed ... I suppose the big problem would be that we would fall down and worship each other.”

That’s a powerful wonder. How did that happen to Thomas Merton?

I raised the question earlier: Why do we have experiences like that? What practical function could they serve? Why would natural selection favor a capacity for such experience? We might also ask the opposite question: Why doesn’t it happen to more of us more often?

Writer Raymond Tallis wonders why wonder isn’t a constant, or at least greater proportion, of life. Why am I not “for the greater part of my life transilluminated with awe?” he asks. Why do I not “pass through the world open-mouthed with amazement and joy”? We are surrounded by, submerged within, wonders of sight, and sound, and smell, the wonder of every single thing, and of all things together – of what Philip Larkin called “the million-petalled flower of being.” Is not our proper state of mind one of “metaphysical intoxication”? So many wonders and yet so little wondering.

We perish for want of wonder, thought Chesterton, though we are surrounded continuously by wonders. Whatever the mysterious process by which we became the sorts of beings with the capacity for wonder, why aren’t we exercising that capacity ALL. THE. TIME? Well. Daily life presents barriers to wonder. The barriers to wonder include distress – hunger, pain, illness, bereavement – and stress – busy-ness, tension, anxiety. As Raymond Tallis writes:

“No one chasing after a bus has the time to be astonished at the intricate coordination of everyday life that ensures that buses run to timetables and that we can act in accordance with goals that are at once singular and abstract.”

A focus on caring for others, doing good in the world, requires solving the problems that need solving, focusing on the practical needs. This reduces the world around you to two categories. Everything is either an instrument that will be helpful for your purpose or an obstacle that threatens to thwart your purpose. It is a noble thing to have goals, purposes, to pursue accomplishment – at least, it is when those goals and accomplishments involve making the world better, easing suffering, improving the overall quality of life of the inhabitants of this planet.

We need, and we take, breaks from our work – and that’s where we can cultivate a wonder that might even linger when we return to work, coloring our tasks with an abiding background radiation of peace and delight. Unfortunately, modern life encourages us to make our leisure as busy as our work. We line up our diversions and then make our free time as rushed as our work time. There’s hiking, kayaking, bicycling, tennis or some fun form of exercising. There are things to see: a play, a concert, an art exhibit, movies. There are novels to read and whole seasons of intriguing television shows to binge watch. Tallis writes that

“Even the most elevated pleasures, designed to open us up to the world in such a way that we might wonder at it, may be assimilated into the flow of unthinking dailiness.”

We work frenetically and then play frenetically because if we don’t we might be . . . bored. Ah, boredom. These, then, are the three main barriers to awe and wonder:
(1) the purposive focus of work;
(2) a similarly purposive focus on our diversions, and, when neither of those is happening,
(3) allowing ourselves to be bored.

Boredom says that

“indifference is the appropriate response to things around us. The ordinary is indeed ordinary. To take it for granted is precisely the way to take it. There is the uneasy sense that, though we urge it on ourselves and on others, wonder is somehow insincere, fake, sentimental. After all, a state you can enter only when it’s convenient, and which is convenient only when there’s nothing serious or important going on, must itself seem nonserious or unimportant.” (Tallis)

We speak appreciatively of child-like wonder, but most of us would rather be known as a serious adult: productive, on the one hand, and erudite, on the other. Boredom is for serious people, who expect or want or need life to give them serious work and serious play. Boredom makes that demand and signals that it is not being met. But boredom precludes wonder – just as wonder precludes boredom.

We can’t make ourselves have experiences like Thomas Merton had in Louisville at the corner of 4th and Walnut. We can only cultivate – nurture the slow growth of the wonder plant, not knowing what shape it may take as it grows, facilitating a power that, though we nurture, we do not control.

The way to cultivate wonder is with a spiritual practice. Indeed, what makes a practice a spiritual practice is that it cultivates wonder. Continual mindfulness of death, Raymond Tallis points out, is conducive to wondering at life. Over many centuries – as the development of human civilization afforded the leisure to pursue wonder, that wonder led us to create art, as a way of expressing our wonder. Wonder led us create religion, as way to tell a story about awesome creation, and to have rituals to reinforce the wonder. Wonder led us at last to create science – the exploration of nature’s wonders. Writes Jesse Prinz:

“For the mature mind, wondrous experience can be used to inspire a painting, a myth, or a scientific hypothesis. These things take patience, and an audience equally eager to move beyond the initial state of bewilderment.... Art, science, and religion, are inventions for feeding the appetite that wonder excites in us. They also become sources of wonder in their own right, generating epicycles of boundless creativity and enduring inquiry.”

That’s a long way from a Chimp staring at a waterfall with no way to describe it.

From time to time we all need to reconnect with that original experience, the seed from which art, religion, and science all grow – and just sit at the foot of a waterfall. Just sit and gaze.

May we all find or take time to do so.

There Is No God, and She Is Always With You

READING

The living tradition we Unitarian Universalists share draws on many sources. In 1961, the Unitarian Universalist Association was formed from the consolidation of the American Unitarian Association and the Universalist Church of America. The first UUA bylaws, adopted that year, 1961, identified sources of our living tradition and included mention of one of those sources as:

“Humanist teachings which counsel us to heed the guidance of reason and the results of science, and warn us against idolatries of the mind and spirit.”

In 1985, revisions of the principles and sources were adopted, but that language about humanist teachings was retained without change from the 1961 bylaws.

Today we celebrate our Humanist heritage. A key document of American Religious Humanism is the Humanist Manifesto of 1933. The entire manifesto is relatively brief -- just a couple pages. Here are some excerpts which will give you the flavor of the document (including the male-dominated language of the time). This is about one-third of the entirety (See the full "Humanist Manifesto I" HERE):

"The time has come for widespread recognition of the radical changes in religious beliefs throughout the modern world....

In every field of human activity, the vital movement is now in the direction of a candid and explicit humanism....

Today man's larger understanding of the universe, his scientific achievements, and deeper appreciation of brotherhood, have created a situation which requires a new statement of the means and purposes of religion....

We therefore affirm the following:
Religious humanists regard the universe as self-existing and not created. Humanism believes that man is a part of nature and that he has emerged as a result of a continuous process....

Humanism asserts that the nature of the universe depicted by modern science makes unacceptable any supernatural or cosmic guarantees of human values....

Religion must formulate its hopes and plans in the light of the scientific spirit and method....

We are convinced that the time has passed for theism, [or] deism,...

Religion consists of those actions, purposes, and experiences which are humanly significant. Nothing human is alien to the religious. The distinction between the sacred and the secular can no longer be maintained....

In the place of the old attitudes involved in worship and prayer the humanist finds his religious emotions expressed in a heightened sense of personal life and in a cooperative effort to promote social well-being....

We assert that humanism will:
(a) affirm life rather than deny it;
(b) seek to elicit the possibilities of life, not flee from them; and
(c) endeavor to establish the conditions of a satisfactory life for all, not merely for the few....

Man is at last becoming aware that he alone is responsible for the realization of the world of his dreams, that he has within himself the power for its achievement.”

SERMON

There is no God, and she is always with you. What do I mean saying this?

Our reality – the reality that we live our lives in, the only reality possible – is populated with concepts. Reality has houses, streets, cups, chairs, trees, stars, ourselves, and other people in it – which is to say, we have concepts of all those things. Reality also has abstract things, like the number 7, abstracted out from any particular collection of 7 objects and just there before our minds in its pure seven-ness. Reality has abstract things like freedom and love, like greed, anger, and ignorance, like music and the rule of law – also abstracted out from any particular example and present to mind as a concept of what all members of a set of examples have in common.

Reality has some things even more abstract, like the square root of negative one – which is not a real number. It’s an imaginary number, but it’s part of our reality. Other imaginary things, like unicorns and dragons and Harry Potter are also among the concepts that populate our reality. Most of us know who Huckleberry Finn and Anna Karenina are. We understand that our concepts of them are in the category of “fictional characters,” but they exist for us as concepts nonetheless.

But part of the concept of God is that God is way beyond the capacity of our limited, finite human minds to conceive. Whatever your concept of God is, it’s wrong, because it’s just one more limited, finite, human concept. The concept of God thus cancels itself out as a concept. If I ask you to think something that’s unthinkable, you can’t do it. Think something that, not only can you, now, today, not think, but that no human or collection of humans jointly will ever be able to think. You can’t do that, of course – because, if you could, it wouldn’t be unthinkable. So we can have no concept of such a thing.

Reality is populated with concepts – even concepts of fictional and imaginary things – but the concept that can’t be conceived is not among them. It can’t be part of our reality – can’t be invoked as an explanation, can’t be prayed to or cursed, can’t interact with us or our world. That’s how I would unpack, “there is no god.”

At the same time, there is always something with us that is just outside our capacity to think it. We might want to call it the mystery, but even the name “mystery” is a concept. For that matter, “always with you” is a concept, too – yet I think it is inescapable. If, as noted, our thought – our understanding, our awareness, our love – is limited, and finite – yet also growing, or, at least evolving, changing – then there is always that toward which our aspiration may be pointed, even if we can’t quite conceive of what it is.

It's a something, and it’s always there.

And it is fertile and fecund, it bears new life, so I call it “she.” So I wanted to put that out there at the outset. I’ll be circling back as we explore today our fifth source:

“Humanist teachings which counsel us to heed the guidance of reason and the results of science, and warn us against idolatries of the mind and spirit.”

First, then, I want to celebrate our humanist tradition which continues to inform who we are as Unitarian Universalists. The 1933 Humanist Manifesto, a portion of which is included in the above Reading, was very much a product of developing Unitarian thought. A key moment – perhaps we might say the beginning of American Religious Humanism – or, at least, the first coming together of the people who, working together, would systematically develop and spread American Religious Humanism – happened 15 years earlier, in 1918 – and it happened right here in Des Moines, Iowa.

The minister of this congregation back then was Rev. Curtis Reese. He had been preaching from this pulpit I am now honored to occupy some of the ideas that would later come to be identified as humanist – though Reese wasn’t calling it that then. This Des Moines congregation hosted the 1918 gathering of the Western Unitarian Conference, and a minister from Minneapolis named John Dietrich came down for the event. Dietrich and Reese got to talking and discovered that they had each been developing a conception of religion without God. Dietrich called it humanism, and that’s the name that stuck. Through the years that followed Dietrich and Reese collaborated in developing, promoting, and organizing the humanist movement that culminated in the 1933 Humanist Manifesto.

The Humanist Manifesto of 1933 had 33 original signatories, 15 of whom were Unitarian ministers, including Dietrich and Reese. One Universalist minister was a signatory, as were 17 other prominent public intellectuals who had been brought on board with the project.

When I re-read that manifesto, I am stirred and moved by the boldness of these Humanists 91 years ago – by their vision and their hope. The implicit critique of traditional religion – which, for them, pretty much meant Christianity – is valid. The West's religious tradition has often not harmonized well with the understandings emerging through the work of scientists. The West's religious tradition has sometimes obstructed rather than aided progress in addressing modern social problems. It has often separated people rather than bringing them together. So the Humanists said, “Let’s do religion. Religions have always been means for realizing the highest values of life, and we need that. But let’s have religion without God."

Today we still live in a world where people plant bombs – on themselves, in cars, in buildings – and fly jet airliners into buildings – and are led to do so in a way that is enmeshed with their understanding about something they call God.

Today we still live in a world where people want to take away women’s reproductive freedom, and punitively stigmatize gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people, and their thinking makes heavy and frequent reference to something they call God.

Today we still live in a world where our children are liable to be told by their classmates that they are going to hell.

Today we still live in a world where a few people make it their life's mission to devise elaborate refutations of evolution, and where more than a few people work to change the public school science curricula to present as science their views about something they call God.

Today we still live in a world where our own experience of many religious institutions is that their devotion to something they call God goes hand in hand with authoritarianism: they don’t allow questioning; they don’t allow critical thinking; they demand uncritical acceptance of authority. They say that the authority is a book, but the perceptive quickly see the authority really is a community of human leaders who have settled on one interpretation of that book, when the book itself equally well – or better -- supports very different readings.

Today we still live in a world where we see that “faith” so often means “believe what the authority figure tells you to believe and pray what the authority figure tells you to pray.”

Today we still live in a world where countries that social scientists measure as “high on religiosity,” venerating something they call God, also measure higher on violence, drug and alcohol addictions, teen pregnancies, imprisonment rates, and high school drop-out rates.

No wonder it would seem important to Humanists 91 years ago as well as today to call for a religion that doesn’t have this thing called God in it.

In recent years we have seen a real renaissance in religious humanism – even though it’s often not labeled that. Try typing “Spiritual Atheism” into your favorite search engine. You'll find there's a LOT out there exploring and developing the idea of religion and spirituality without God. It’s a New New Atheism, much of which sprang up in the wake of the New Atheism.

“The New Atheism,” as it’s called, refers to a spate of books grouped together that came out about 20 years ago now. This included:

• Sam Harris, The End of Faith (2004)
• Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (2006)
• Daniel Dennett, Breaking the Spell (2006)
• Christopher Hitchens, God is Not Great (2007)

These books derided belief in God and also despised faith, spirituality, religion, and religious institutions. Soon, however, books started appearing that also touted atheism, but didn’t want to deride anything. While still disbelieving in God, these authors explicitly valued faith, spirituality, and religion. These included:

• Andre Comte-Sponville, The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality (2008)
• Chris Stedman, Faitheist: How an Atheist Found Common Ground with the Religious (2013)
• Alain de Botton, Religion for Atheists: A Non-believers Guide to the Uses of Religion (2013)
• Nick Seneca Jankel, Spiritual Atheist: A Quest To Unite Science And Wisdom Into A Radical New Life Philosophy to Thrive In The Digital Age (2018)
• Todd Macalaster, Looking to Nature: Exploring a Modern Way of Being Spiritual Without the Supernatural (2020) -- and just this year appeared:
• Brittney Hartley, No Nonsense Spirituality: All the Tools, No Belief Required (2024)

If that first round of books constituted “The New Atheism,” then these books that followed may be called, “The New New Atheism.” The New Atheists came and went in the middle of the aughts, but these New New Atheists just keep cranking.

The New New Atheists argue that atheists, instead of deriding religion should steal from it because, as de Botton says: “the world’s religions are packed with good ideas on how we might live and arrange our societies.”

“Faith,” as Karen Armstrong points out, in the New Testament, is the Greek word psistis, which means trust, loyalty, engagement, commitment. When Jesus calls for greater faith, he’s not calling for people to cling harder to a set of propositional beliefs. He’s calling for engagement and commitment. “Spirituality,” as growing numbers of spiritual atheists are saying, isn’t about spirit-stuff as opposed to material stuff. It’s about claiming the depths of awe and wonder, serenity and compassion, abundance and acceptance, indissoluble union with the great All, and of belonging to the universal.

This idea of connecting with the religious impulse rather than denying it is just what the Humanist Manifesto called for 91 years ago. And speaking of good ideas that we can draw from the traditional faith traditions, one of those ideas, which is, in fact, a staple of Christian Theology going back centuries, is that there is no God. Yes, that’s right. John Scotus Eriugena, a 9th-century Christian theologian, made an argument somewhat similar to the one with which I started this sermon. Eriugena wrote:

“We do not know what God is. God himself doesn’t know what he is because he is not anything. Literally, God is not, because he transcends being.”

Got that? This is a Christian theologian saying that God does not exist. Eriugena doesn't mean that God is nonexistent in the way that, say, my Ferrari is nonexistent. Rather God transcends the categories of existence and nonexistence, being and nonbeing.

To understand this, let’s look again at that fifth source of the living tradition we Unitarian Universalists share:

“Humanist teachings which counsel us to heed the guidance of reason and the results of science, and warn us against idolatries of the mind and spirit.”

It might seem a little strange that this reference to idolatry is in there. “Warning against idolatry” is probably not among the first things that come to mind when you think of humanism. Or when you do think of the repudiation of idolatry, your first thought probably wouldn't be humanism. Your first thought would more likely be the first of the Ten Commandment (or the first two Commandments, depending on which tradition is doing the counting):

"Thou shalt have no other gods before me. Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them:" (Exodus 20:3-5, KJV)

What’s the big deal about graven images? you may wonder. Historically, it seems to have been a tribal thing: the neighboring tribes made statues that represented their deities, so the Hebrew people, to be distinctive, insisted on having no deity statuary. Nor, for that matter, any angel statuary, nor thing-in-the-earth statuary, nor thing-in-the-water-under-the-earth statuary. No figurines of elephants or parrots or fish: none of that. For the ancient Hebrew people, this was part of how one affirmed one’s loyalty to the tribe. They said: “We’re the people who don’t do that – so don’t do that.”

It may have started that way, but then a funny thing happened on the way to the Temple. The sanction against idolatry ended up pointing the Hebrew people toward something more important than statuary. Just as a statue is fixed and static and unchanging, a person might also have certain ideas, beliefs, concepts that become fixed and static. The commandment against idols evolved so that it was understood to be not just about statues, figurines, or graven images. It’s about any concept or thought-pattern that has become fixed and rigid. By abjuring graven images, the Hebrew people were subtly reoriented toward a conception of God as dynamic, unfolding, and always beyond whatever you can imagine, always other than anything you think.

The divine creative movement of the universe is dynamic, changing. Human understanding is ever unfolding. Idolatry means clinging to a fixed, static conception; closing ourselves to new learning. Thus we see that it actually is quite apt for this mention of idolatry to be included in our humanist source. The guidance of reason and the results of science continually overturn our idols, challenge what we think we know. Moreover, this is really the point that I think John Scotus Eriugena was on about.

Any time someone says God exists, she has some idea of what this God is that exists. This is problematic because any concept at all, if you’re stuck on it, is an idol. As soon as you have an idea of God – any idea – smash that idol and return to a stance of total openness to whatever the world might present to you without forcing it into one or another of your preconceived conceptual categories. This is humanist teaching warning us against idolatries of the mind and spirit.

Don’t even make an idol of your own past statements or beliefs. If you find yourself saying things that contradict other things you’ve said, that’s OK. Emerson said, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” And Whitman said: “Do I contradict myself? Very well, I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes.”

In a sermon I gave last March called, “The Ontological, The Semantic, and the Tribal,” I suggested that, the core uses of the word ‘God,’ were to point to any or all of the following:

• community-forming power;
• love;
• the greatest source of beauty, mystery, or creativity;
• the widest or deepest inspiration to gratitude, humility, wonder, and awe;
• origin;
• any ultimate context and basis for meaning, value, ethics, or commitment;
• the widest reality to which our loyalty is owed;
• the cosmos.

But those, too, are concepts that could become idols. By saying “God” we are also saying more than all of these definitions. Or rather, maybe, less. We’re saying THAT – while at the same time whispering “but remember, also not THAT.” By saying “God,” we are invoking a tradition which, for all its abuses and its nonsense, also includes the reminder that all our ideas are inadequate, a tradition which calls us to smash our idols, a tradition that says there is more there than our words can say – so much more that even our truest words are also false to the fullness of the mystery within which we live and breathe and have our being.

There is no God – that is, there is no possible concept that can encapsulate all of the wonder and the paradox that is this dear life – the wonder and the paradox that is directly staring us in the face every moment, saying, “hey you, knock over the idols of what you think you know and wake up.” Whatever you think you know, this moment has something new and fresh to teach you. Are you listening? Are you looking? Always. For there is no God, and she is always with you -- whispering: “Pay attention.”

Amen.

Pardon, Forgiveness, and Reconciliation

I hear there is a Unitarian Universalist church out west somewhere, in a downtown area where parking is at a premium. People not coming to the church would sometimes park in the church parking lot. The church put up a sign:

Church Parking Only.
Violaters Will Be Forgiven.

The congregation didn’t really mind people parking there through the week – and I’ve always thought that was a clever way to advertise the forgiving nature of the church.

We’ve all been harmed, and we’ve all committed harm. I am mindful of Jean-Paul Sartre’s line that hell is other people, yet I also know that heaven is other people – that existence itself IS relationship. Homo sapiens is not merely a social species, but a hyper-social species, and our identity is formed not merely IN relationship but AS relationship. George Herbert Mead taught us that the self is a generalized other. We ARE our relationships, which is why they sometimes hurt so much.

Even with strangers, an offence is so much more than the physical effect. Imagine this scenario. You’ve been grocery shopping and are carrying three brimming-full paper grocery bags as you cross the street from where you parked to get to your apartment. Your field of vision is now somewhat limited as you cross, and then some clod walking by the other direction bumps into you. Your groceries spill in the middle of the street. Your body floods with that anger reaction. You spin around, clutching the one bag of groceries that didn’t spill, angry, loud words about to come out. In that moment you see . . . the white cane. It was a blind person. The anger drains away as you see the truth of the situation with clarity. It’s not the spilled groceries themselves that bother us so much – it’s another person treating us with disregard, whether negligent or intentional.

As the hyper-social species we are, we constantly monitor relationships – with strangers and especially with those we know well. Those relationships are continually being torn, and continually in need of repair. As Reinhold Niebuhr said, in a passage we used as this morning’s chalice lighting,

“No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as from our own. Therefore, we are saved by the final form of love, which is forgiveness.”

Forgiveness.

This word, “forgiveness,” is used in such a broad range of situations. There’s the casual forgiveness as a social courtesy, like forgiving people for parking on your lot, forgiving them for being a few minutes late. There are also those situations of much deeper emotional hurt, where forgiveness is hard to ask for and hard to give. Then there are horrific atrocities like the Charleston shooting on Jun 17, 2015, when 21-year-old Dylann Roof entered a predominantly black church and shot 9 people dead. At the sentencing hearing a year and a half later, Felicia Sanders, mother of one of the slain, told Roof, “I forgive you.” This was not a meaningless thing to say. It meant something. But what? What did it mean for Sanders? For Roof? For the audience of the media who covered it?

Sometimes we are able to unilaterally decide to stop carrying the weight of some resentment. The other person might not have asked for your forgiveness, might not have apologized, might not know that you are releasing your resentment, yet letting go of the anger is something you do for your own sake because the burden of your own resentment has been weighing you down. Do we call that forgiveness?

Other times there’s a bilateral process of two people working together toward reconciliation, intentionally engaged in an extensive process of rebuilding of trust. The forgiveness that might emerge from such a process would be more substantial.

Sometimes there’s something there that’s easy to choose to do. All it takes is saying the words, “I forgive you,” and those words are easy to say, easy to mean, and that’s all it takes.

Other times, in other cases, the heart isn’t ready. The head might compel the mouth to say the words, “I forgive you,” but the heart feels the emptiness of the words because the heart is not ready to forgive. If you say it, and your head means it (or thinks it does), but the heart doesn't, does that constitute forgiveness?

Forgiveness cannot be demanded, cannot be not required – no one has a right to say to you, “you should forgive,” say, an abusive partner or parent. Sometimes, though, victims might feel, unbidden, a forgiving grace descend upon them. No reason they should – but a feeling like that sometimes happens, and that, too, may be called “forgiveness.”

In all of these scenarios, there is some sort of shift in your relationship with another person – or with the memory of another person. It would be handy if we had an agreed-upon vocabulary to distinguish the different kinds of relational shift that may go by the name forgiveness. There are more than two distinguishable experiences that get called forgiveness, but today we’ll just be looking at two: from Danya Ruttenberg’s book, On Repentance and Repair. The book – which is the Unitarian Universalist Common Read for 2023-24, and which is the subject of our forum after the service – has eight chapters: the next to last one is on forgiveness.

There are two Hebrew words: Mechila and Slicha. “Mechila,” Ruttenberg suggests

“might be better translated as ‘pardon.’ It has the connotation of relinquishing a claim against an offender. The injured party acknowledges “that the perpetrator no longer owes them, that they have done the repair work necessary to settle the situation.”

Ruttenberg explains:

“You stole from me? OK, you acknowledged that you did so in a self-aware way, you’re in therapy to work on why you stole, you paid me back and you apologized in a way that I felt reflected an understanding of the impact your actions had on me. It seems that you’re not going to do this to anyone else. Fine. It doesn’t mean that we pretend that the theft never happened, and it doesn’t mean that our relationship will return to how it was before or even that we return to any kind of ongoing relationship. With mechila – pardon – whatever else I may feel or not feel about you, I can consider this chapter closed. Those pages are still written upon, but we’re done here.”

Pardon requires sincerity, but not a lot of emotional display. Pardon may be undertaken in a matter-of-fact, businesslike way: The debt is considered paid, or, at least, written off. It’s closing the book on the matter – a closing of accounts. There is no further obligation.

Pardoning isn’t quite the same thing as forgiving. The Hebrew word that that would come closest to forgiveness is slicha. With slicha there’s the idea of a step toward eventual reconciliation and restoration of the relationship. As Ruttenberg explains, slicha

“includes more emotion. It looks with a compassionate eye at the penitent perpetrator and sees their humanity and vulnerability – recognized that, even if they have caused great harm, they are worthy of empathy and mercy.”

Reinhold Niebuhr called forgiveness the final form of love – and there’s a little of that flavor in the Hebrew slicha. The injured party doesn’t merely close accounts, but beholds the perpetrator with a higher level of compassion and empathy for their vulnerability.

We can say that there might sometimes be an obligation to pardon. There is never an obligation to forgive. “Forgive” is from the Old English word forgyfan – “to give, grant, or bestow.” It’s a gift. It cannot be required. If it is forced or coerced or pressured, then it’s not a gift.

Pardon, on the other hand, can be an obligation – the pentitent harm doer may, under certain circumstances, have a right to be pardoned. And what are those circumstances? It requires the five steps of repentance and repair as indicated by the 12th-century Jewish rabbi and philosopher Maimonides.
1. Naming and owning harm
2. Starting to change
3. Restitution and accepting consequences
4. Apology
5. Making different choices
An obligation to pardon arises, as Danya Ruttenberg says,

“in the context of a sincere penitent who has come to apologize – to appease, ask, make amends, implore, seek to meet the full human being they have hurt to the best of their ability. And if they didn’t do a good enough job, they came back later with their support people to help them figure out how to do it better. And after doing that, this person came back two more times, trying, and trying again, to truly see and speak to their victim’s pain.”

If they have named and owned the harm, they have committed to changing and begun to change, they have provided restitution and have accepted consequences of what they’ve done, then comes the apology. “A true apology” says Ruttenberg,

“is about trying to see the human being in front of you, to connect with them and communicate to them, to make it clear – abundantly, absolutely, profoundly clear – that you get it now, and that their feeling better matters to you. Your apology is a manifestation of genuine remorse. It demands vulnerability, and it is a natural by-product of all the work of repentance and transformation that you’ve been doing up until this point. . . . You don’t apologize at a person. You apologize to them. It’s not, of course, a petulant, 'But I said I was sorry!' It’s also not about crafting the perfectly contrite words of regret and remorse. There’s a difference between saying you’re sorry because you realize that a thing you did had a bad consequence, and doing so because you really understand that you hurt someone – and that person’s feelings, experience of the world, safety, and self all matter profoundly.”

Suppose you offer a true apology, but the person who was hurt isn’t able to accept it, cannot pardon, even after the asking and imploring. You might not have done as good a job as you think you did. The harm might be more serious than you thought. Maybe something else. At this point Maimonides says you bring backup with you – three supportive friends whose job is to help you make sure you are doing this right. They aren’t there to gang up on your victim, but as observers for your contrition and your guides to help and ensure that your contrition is clear. Here’s what Maimonides says:

“If the other person does not wish to pardon, they should bring a line of three people who are their friends and they will approach and ask for pardon. If the victim still refuses, the perpetrator must bring people a second and a third time.”

So that’s four separate apologies – the first one by yourself, and then three more with friends. At that point, if all has been done sincerely, there is an obligation to pardon – to close the books on the matter. If the victim is still not appeased, she or he has failed at that obligation and is unreasonably holding a grudge. The perpetrator should simply leave them alone at that point.

Maimonides was concerned about the victim and their wholeness. As Ruttenberg says,

“even if we’re hurt, we must work on our own natural tendencies toward vengefulness, toward turning our woundedness into a power play that we can lord over the penitent, or toward wanting to stay forever in the narrative of our own hurt, for whatever reason.”

So Maimonides injunction of an obligation to pardon is for the victim’s own good.

Granting of pardon – closing the accounts – releasing our grudge -- “can be profoundly liberating in ways we don’t always recognize before it happens.”

Indeed, even without a true apology, or any apology at all, or any of the steps of repentance, I believe that if there isn’t actual trauma, then you have some responsibility for your hurt. You can’t decide what will be traumatic for you, and you can't decide to make trauma go away, though you can decide to seek therapy and treatment. Injuries that are less than traumatic afford you some room to decide how offended you want to be. We all learned as children that “sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never hurt me.” We know, of course, that names do sting, and that in extreme circumstances the hurt might even rise to the level of traumatic -- but what that little jingle taught us as children is that at least some part of how we respond to a hurt is in our own hands. We can decide whether to focus on vengeance, or to, as Ruttenberg put it, turn “our woundedness into a power play that we can lord over the penitent,” or to dwell, brooding, in the narrative of our own hurt.

And we can decide not to – decide simply to let go of the burden of our resentment. It helps if the perpetrator is penitent, but this sort of letting go of nontraumatic injuries is possible even if the perpetrator is not penitent. Lutheran minister Rev. Nadia Bolz-Weber described this letting go as “actually a way of wielding bolt cutters and snapping the chain that links us.” It’s freeing – and Bolz-Weber goes on to say:

“Free people aren’t controlled by the past. Free people laugh more than others. Free people see beauty where others do not. Free people are not easily offended. Free people are unafraid to speak truth to stupid. Free people are not chained to resentment.”

So this obligation to pardon is an obligation to ourselves to be free of chains that may be dragging us down. Close those books so you can move on for your own good.

For forgiveness, as opposed to pardon – in Hebrew, slicha as opposed to mechila, there is an orientation toward a reconciliation. Forgiveness can happen without reconciliation, but forgiveness is pointed in the direction of getting to reconciliation. Even where reconciliation might not be a good idea, might not be appropriate, might not be desirable to one or the other or both parties, forgiveness can happen.

It can happen – though it is often not easy. We might say the words “I forgive you,” – and say them sincerely – yet our limbic system may still be attached to rehearsing the narrative of its hurts – in which case forgiveness hasn’t really happened and the path to reconciliation remains blocked.

Another way that forgiveness may fail is the forgiver coming off as superior. Saying, “I forgive you,” may cast me as the magnanimous one, all superior. Rather than return the parties to equality, it maintains a reversed inequality.

Forgiveness may also fail due to forces outside of the ostensive forgiver. If there’s a context of the forgiveness being expected or demanded, then the mouth may say, “I forgive you,” yet the path to reconciliation and wholeness remains blocked.

Situations of abuse require an intentional and extended process if the relationship is to be repaired at all. Yet a certain concept of "forgiveness" -- as if it were easy and instantaneous -- short-circuits the process that is needed. We also have to consider the possibility that no plan or process for repairing the relationship may have enough chance of success to be worth pursuing, and that getting out of the relationship needs to be the priority.

Something Ruttenberg doesn’t mention, but that Unitarian Universalist minister Rev. Rebecca Parker does, is that grieving for the injury is part of the process. Parker writes:

“The capacity to grieve unlocks the psycho-magic of passing the pain on to someone else. Grief allows the pain to pass through one with its full power. The ability to mourn is the foundation of the capacity to forgive, and it is strengthened by those operations of grace which mediate comfort and consolation to us.”

Both pardon and forgiveness release the violator from the obligation to suffer – or suffer any further -- for their violation. This is not a release from accountability. Forgiveness involves, Rebecca Parker says, "calling another to accountability, but relinquishing the desire for retribution.”

When I say accountability, I mean accounting for ourselves to one another – a relation in which we accept the task of trying to make our selves make sense to another human being – who has seen our past behavior as making no sense. The harmdoer must accept the call to accountability if forgiveness is to be genuine.

Forgiveness is a form of love – the final form, per Niebuhr -- and like love generally, it is a need. We need it in both directions. We need to love; and, in general, we need to forgive. We don't need to forgive everything -- some injuries are unforgivable -- but in general we need a capacity to forgive and to sometimes exercise that capacity. We need to be loved; and we need to be forgiven.

Sometimes, though, we may fail to do the work required to earn a meaningful forgiveness. For the fabric of relationship is all we have and all we are. Reweaving that fabric from all the ways it is rent and torn requires ongoing attention to effect accountability, and repentance, and repair. Let us attend skillfully to that work. May it be so. Amen.

Election Decompression Reflection

We are here, in the wake of an exhausting election, to process our feelings, regain our grounding, and re-orient ourselves to move forward in love. Love is at the center of what we are about as a people of faith – and so we resist the temptation to give in to hate. Our watchwords are the ones from Martin Luther King Jr. that we often quote. It’s from a sermon he seems to have delivered in 1957 in Montgomery titled called “Loving Your Enemies.”

“Why should we love our enemies? The first reason is fairly obvious. Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. Hate multiplies hate, violence multiplies violence, and toughness multiplies toughness in a descending spiral of destruction.”

I know it is hard to think of loving our enemies when we feel disempowered – as though our neighbors have decided that everything we learned to hold most dear is of no account -- doesn’t matter anymore: caring about other people, trying to tell the truth and live with integrity, justice, equity, rule of law. It is hard right now to say yes to the world as it is. A poem by Rosemerry Watola Trommer posted late last night is titled: "When You Ask Me If I Can Say Yes to the World as It Is -- November 5, 2024"

Today yes is made of lead.
You look at me
and I nod —
and together
we carry the weight.

The president-elect has promised mass deportations. He has promised retribution against the enemy within – which, in his mind, is you and me and people like us. The people he will appoint will set to work implementing Project 2025 which will:

• Gut enforcement of civil rights laws
• Appropriate the Department of Justice to go after its enemies.
• Seek to exclude noncitizens from the census count.
• Attack Reproductive Rights, ban mifepristone, and prosecute people who send medication abortion drugs in the mail.
• Expand Digital Surveillance to enforce laws against women seeking to exercise their reproductive rights.
• Proliferate Online Misinformation and Disinformation by ending ongoing federal efforts to combat online disinformation.
• Enact “Schedule F” reforms, that would force tens of thousands of civil servants — including in agencies that protect civil rights — to serve the president’s political aims instead of serving the public interest.
• Erase the very existence of communities by deleting the terms sexual orientation, gender, and gender identity — as well as diversity, equity, and inclusion — out of “every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists.
• Weaken the Fair Housing Act and scale back affordable housing.
• Weaken key provisions of Affordable Care Act which helped millions of people gain health care coverage.
• End to American climate leadership on the international stage, which would harm Americans and prevent the global community from achieving climate goals necessary to maintain a livable planet.

Will the coming administration succeed at these things? We don’t know. Comedian Jon Stewart:

“Here’s what we know: we don’t really know anything. We’re going to come out of this election and we’re going to make all kinds of pronouncements about what this country is, and what this world is, and the truth is we’re not really going to know. This isn’t the end. I promise you, this is not the end. And we have to regroup and we have to continue to fight and continue to work day in and day out to create the better society for our children, for this world, for this country that we know is possible. It’s possible.”

Tom Nichols writing in the Atlantic, said:

“The first order of business is to redouble every effort to preserve American democracy.... Nothing is inevitable, and democracy will not fall overnight.... If there was ever a time to exercise the American right of free assembly, it is now — not least because Trump is determined to end such rights and silence his opponents. Americans must stay engaged and make their voices heard at every turn. They should find and support organizations and institutions committed to American democracy, and especially those determined to fight Trump in the courts. They must encourage candidates in the coming 2026 elections who will oppose Trump’s plans and challenge his legislative enablers....Trump’s victory is a grim day for the United States and for democracies around the world. You have every right to be appalled, saddened, shocked, and frightened. Soon, however, you should dust yourself off, square your shoulders, and take a deep breath. Americans who care about democracy have work to do.”

We are called to love – to live from compassion. Let’s remember the broader context.

For much of the last 3,000 years, much of humanity lived under autocratic rule. The briefest flash of a partial democracy appeared in ancient Athens amidst an otherwise constant crush of Pharaohs, Kings, Emperors and their vassals. Three thousand years is a long time, but this does not mean that autocratic rule is somehow "natural" for our species, nor did it become inevitable once agriculture generated surplus resources that were taxable to support standing armies. Actually, archeologists and anthropologists have been uncovering details of earlier civilizations and ways of living that exhibited all sorts of diverse political arrangements, hundreds of thousands of people living without a ruling hierarchy, peoples without kings, or kings that were purely ceremonial, or kings for a season, and then the duties rotated -- and many of them had developed some form of agriculture.

Nothing about the way humans are built, nor about the contingencies of grain agriculture, makes autocracy inevitable. For much of humanity’s time on the planet, we didn’t live under autocratic rule. Then, for a few thousand years, much of humanity did. We were beginning to work our way out of it – and if we take a step backward for a century or so, we can nevertheless return to working our way out of it. That's the broad context.

For us here today, our work is very much the same, whichever candidate had won the White House. Our task is compassion. Our task is empathy and understanding. Our task is to help one another. Our task is respect for every being’s worth and dignity. Our task is to forthrightly and creatively rise to meet all the challenging realities of modern society.

These are tough tasks no matter who is the President, or who is in the US Senate and House, or who sits on the Supreme Court. Our task is the same.

And so we gather because we draw strength from each other – and we need a little boost right now to carry out our task. We gather because we draw joy from each other – and joy is a subversive activity – joy is resistance to injustice. Let me share these words from Rebecca Solnit, and then I’ll want to hear from you.

“They want you to feel powerless and to surrender and to let them trample everything and you are not going to let them. You are not giving up, and neither am I. The fact that we cannot save everything does not mean we cannot save anything and everything we can save is worth saving. You may need to grieve or scream or take time off, but you have a role no matter what, and right now good friends and good principles are worth gathering in. Remember what you love. Remember what loves you. Remember in this tide of hate what love is. The pain you feel is because of what you love. The Wobblies used to say don't mourn, organize, but you can do both at once and you don't have to organize right away in this moment of furious mourning. You can be heartbroken or furious or both at once; you can scream in your car or on a cliff; you can also get up tomorrow and water the flowerpots and call someone who's upset and check your equipment for going onward. A lot of us are going to come under direct attack, and a lot of us are going to resist by building solidarity and sanctuary. Gather up your resources, the metaphysical ones that are heart and soul and care, as well as the practical ones. People kept the faith in the dictatorships of South America in the 1970s and 1980s, in the East Bloc countries and the USSR, women are protesting right now in Iran and people there are writing poetry. There is no alternative to persevering, and that does not require you to feel good. You can keep walking whether it's sunny or raining. Take care of yourself and remember that taking care of something else is an important part of taking care of yourself, because you are interwoven with the ten trillion things in this single garment of destiny that has been stained and torn, but is still being woven and mended and washed.”

In this time we need to hear each other’s voices. We need the help of each others’ words to make sense of what happened. I will invite your reflection on two questions:

• One: What is going on? As best as you can figure, how do you account for how this election went the way it did? And
• Two: What will you be doing about it?