You Can't Take It With You

READING

MEREDITH. Our reading this morning is a segment from the conclusion of the classic 1936 Three-Act play by George Kaufman and Moss Hart, “You Can’t Take It With You.” Here’s the story leading up to the segment we will share.

In New York City lives the Sycamore family, eccentric and free-spirited. Their guests and visitors likewise, which makes for a quirky and chaotic household. They lead lives that seem to them fulfilling, howsoever unconventional.

The family patriarch, Grandpa Martin Vanderhof, has rejected the rat race and spends his days attending circuses and collecting snakes. Grandpa’s daughter Penny has taken to a typewriter that was accidentally delivered. She pounds away on it, turning out terrible play after terrible play. Grandpa’s son-in-law, Penny’s husband Paul, makes fireworks in the basement with Mr. De Pinna, a man who came to deliver ice years ago and never left. Penny and Paul have two young-adult daughters, Grandpa’s grand-daughters: Essie and Alice. Essie aspires to be a ballerina and makes candy. Essie’s husband Ed helps her with the candy business and loves printing strange slogans on his printing press.

Essie’s sister Alice is “the normal one.” Alice works as a secretary in a Wall Street office and she has fallen in love with Tony Kirby, her boss’s son. Alice worries that her family’s eccentricities might ruin her relationship with Tony. Tony is less concerned – he loves Alice for who she is. But Alice insists on having both families meet before they consider marriage — and she’s nervous about how that meeting will go. Act I ends with plans for a dinner where the very conventional, upper-class Kirbys will meet the unconventional, anarchic Sycamores.

In Act II, the Kirbys and Sycamores meet at the Sycamore home -- but the conservative Kirbys show up a day early. The son, Tony Kirby, has deliberately brought his parents over on the wrong day because he wants them to see the Sycamores as they naturally are. Tony hopes such an experience will show his parents that valuing freedom, individuality, and joy, as the Sycamores do, is a legitimate alternative to the Kirby values of wealth, status, and propriety. Disaster ensues.

The Kirbys are utterly bewildered and scandalized by the Sycamores' unconventional behavior. The evening spirals into awkward chaos: Penny wants to play silly parlor games about people's secret desires. Grandpa challenges Mr. Kirby’s rigid views on wealth and success. Mr. De Pinna bursts in covered in soot from the basement fireworks. Essie dances through the living room in her ballet costume. Essie’s husband Ed hands out pamphlets he has printed on his printing press, apparently oblivious to their seditious content.

Suddenly there’s an explosion from the homemade fireworks in the basement. In the chaos, the police arrive, arresting everyone for disturbing the peace and possessing illegal fireworks. Act II ends with everyone being carted off to jail — a social and literal explosion of the dinner’s intended civility.

The third and final act takes place the next day in the Sycamore living room, after the night of chaos and arrests. Alice is humiliated by the disastrous dinner and the social clash between the two families. Feeling that their worlds are too different, she decides to break off her engagement to Tony and plans to leave town. Mr. Kirby arrives to take Tony home and away from the chaos of the Sycamore family. But Grandpa has some thoughts to share with Mr. Kirby.

[Enter Kirby, Grandpa, Alice, and Tony]

KIRBY. [Trying go ease situation.] I need hardly say that this is as painful to Mrs. Kirby and myself as it is to you people. I—I'm sorry, but I'm sure you understand.

GRANDPA. Well yes – and in a way, no. Now, I'm not the kind of person tries to run other people's lives, but the fact is, Mr. Kirby, I don't think these two young people have got as much sense as—ah—you and I have.

ALICE. [Tense.] Grandpa, will you please not do this?

GRANDPA. [Disarmingly.] I'm just talking to Mr. Kirby. A cat can look at a king, can't he?

KIRBY. Are you ready, Tony?

GRANDPA. Mr. Kirby, I suppose after last night you think this family is kind of crazy?

KIRBY. No, I would not say that, although I am not accustomed to going out to dinner and spending the night in jail.

GRANDPA. Well, you've got to remember, Mr. Kirby, you came on the wrong night. Now tonight, I'Il bet you, nothing'll happen at all. Maybe.

KIRBY. Mr. Vandethof, it was not merely last night that convinced Mrs. Kirby and myself that this engagement would be unwise.

TONY. Father, I can handle my own affairs. Alice, for the last time, will you marry me?

ALICE. No, Tony. I know exactly what your father means, and he's right.

TONY. No, he's not, Alice.

GRANDPA. Alice, you're in love with this boy, and you're not marrying him because we're the kind of people we are.

ALICE. Grandpa --

GRANDPA. I know. You think the two families wouldn't get along. Well, maybe they wouldn't — but who says they're right and we're wrong?

ALICE. I didn't say that, Grandpa. I only feel….

GRANDPA. Well, what I feel is that Tony's too nice a boy to wake up twenty years from now with nothing in his life but stocks and bonds.

KIRBY. How's that?

GRANDPA. Yes. Mixed up and unhappy, the way you are.

[Alice exits]

KIRBY. [Outraged.] I beg your pardon, Mr. Vanderhof. I am a very happy man.

GRANDPA, Are you?

KIRBY. Certainly I am.

GRANDPA. I don't think so. What do you think you get your indigestion from? Happiness? No, sir. You get it because most of your time is spent.in doing things you don't want to do.

KIRBY. I don't do anything I don't want to do.

GRANDPA. Yes, you do. You said last night that at the end of a week in Wall Street you're pretty near crazy. Why do you keep on doing it?

KIRBY. Why do I keep on—-why, that's my business. A man can't give up his business.

GRANDPA. Why not? You've got all the money you need. You can't take it with you.

KIRBY. That's a very easy thing to say, Mr. Vanderhof. But I have spent my entire life building up my business.

GRANDPA. And what's it got you ? Same kind of mail every morning, same kind of deals, same kind of meetings, same dinners at night, same indigestion. Where does the fun come in? Don't you think there ought to be something more, Mr. Kirby? You must have wanted more than that when you started out. We haven't got too much time, you know—any of us.

KIRRBY. What do you expect me to do? Live the way you do? Do nothing?

GRANDPA. Well, I have a lot of fun. Time enough for everything — read, talk, visit the zoo now and then, practice my darts, even have time to notice when spring comes around. Don't see anybody I don't want to, don't have six hours of things I have to do every day before I get one hour to do what I like in — and I haven't taken bicarbonate of soda in thirty-five years. What's the matter with that?

KIRBY. The matter with that? Suppose we all did it? A fine world we'd have, everybody going to zoos. Don't be ridiculous, Mr. Vanderhof. Who would do the work?

GRANDPA. There's always people that like to work — you can't stop them. Inventions, and they fly the ocean. There're always people to go down to Wall Street, too — because they like it. But from what I've seen of you I don't think you're one of them. I think you're missing something.

KIRBY. I am not aware of missing anything.

GRANDPA. I wasn't either, till I quit. I used to get down to that office nine o'clock sharp no matter how I felt. Lay awake nights for fear I wouldn't get that contract. Used to worry about the world, too. Got all worked up about whether Cleveland or Blaine was going to be elected President—seemed awful important at the time, but who cares now? What I'm trying to say, Mr. Kirby, is that I've had thirty-five years that nobody can take away from me, no matter what they do to the world. See?

KIRBY. Yes, I do see. And it's a very dangerous philosophy, Mr. Vanderhof. It's—it's un-American. And it's exactly why I'm opposed to this marriage. I don't want Tony to come under its influence.

TONY. What's the matter with it, Father?

KIRBY. Matter with it? Why, it’s – it’s downright Communism, that's what it is.

TONY. You didn't always think so.

KIRBY. I most certainly did. What are you talking about?

TONY. I'll tell you what I'm talking about. You didn't always think so, because there was a time when you wanted to be a trapeze artist.

KIRBY. Why — why, don't be an idiot, Tony.

TONY. Oh, yes, you did. I came across those letters you wrote to Grandfather. Do you remember those?

KIRBY. NO! How dared you read those letters ? How dared you?

GRANDPA: Why, isn't that wonderful? Did you wear tights, Mr. Kirby?

KIRBY, Certainly not! The whole thing is absurd. I was fourteen years old at the time.

TONY. Yes, but at eighteen you wanted to be a saxophone player, didn't you?

KIRBY. Tony!

TONY. And at twenty-one you ran away from home because Grandfather wanted you to go into the business. It's all down there in black and white. You didn't always think so.

GRANDPA. Well, well, well!

KIRBY. I may have had silly notions in my youth, but thank God my father knocked them out of me. I went into the business and forgot about them.

TONY. Not altogether, Father. There's still a saxophone in the back of your clothes closet.

GRANDPA. There is?

KIRBY. [Quietly.] That’s enough, Tony. We'll discuss this later.

[Alice re-enters]

TONY, No, I want to talk about it now. I think Mr. Vanderhof is right—dead right. I'm never going back to that office. I've always hated it, and I'm not going on with it. And I'll tell you something else. I didn't make a mistake last night. I knew it was the wrong night. I brought you here on purpose.

ALICE. Tony!

TONY. Because I wanted to wake you up. I wanted you to see a real family—as they really were. A family that loved and understood each other. You don't understand me. You've never had time. Well, I'm not going to make your mistake. I'm clearing out.

KIRBY. Clearing out ? What do you mean?

TONY, I mean I'm not going to be pushed into the business just because I'm your son. I'm getting out while there's still time.

KIRBY. But, Tony, what are you going to do?

TONY. I don't know. Maybe I'll be a bricklayer, but at least I'll be doing something I want to do.

GRANDPA. You know, Mr. Kirby, Tony is going through just what you and did when we were his age. I think if you listen hard enough you can hear yourself saying the same things to your father twenty-five years ago. We all did it. And we were right. How many of us would be willing to settle when we're young for what we eventually get? All those plans we make -- what happens to them? It's only a handful of the lucky ones that can look back and say that they even came close. So, before they clean out that closet, Mr. Kirby, I think I'd get in a few good hours on that saxophone.

MEREDITH: At just that point, the Grand Duchess Olga Katrina comes in from the kitchen. She’s a deposed Russian royal now working in Manhattan as a waitress, and, as a friend of Kolenkhov, Essie’s Russian ballet instructor, she has become yet another colorful character in the Sycamores’ circle. The Grand Duchess announces that she has been cooking dinner for everyone and the blintzes are now ready. Mr. Kirby begins to soften -- perhaps from Grandpa’s words – or from his son’s revelations and the remembrance of his own youthful aspirations – or perhaps he’s impressed that the Sycamores have a Grand Duchess cooking blintzes in their kitchen. He agrees to stay for dinner. Tony and Alice reconcile. As the family gathers around the table, Grandpa offers a blessing.

GRANDPA. Well, Sir, here we are again. We want to say thanks once more for everything You've done for us. Things seem to be going along fine. Alice is going to marry Tony, and it looks as if they're going to be very happy. Of course, the fireworks blew up, but that was Mr. De Pinna's fault, not Yours. We've all got our health, and, as far as anything else is concerned, we'll leave it to You. Thank You.

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SERMON

During this graduation season, what I have for you today is as much a Commencement Address as it is a sermon because it’s about discerning your vocation as you head forth. I’m speaking today especially to our graduating seniors – though all of us are, after all, graduating from our pasts and commencing into what is next. So I will begin this Commencement Address as a true old fogey such as myself would begin an address to young graduates: by saying, “When I was your age . . .”

When I was about your age – 17 or so -- I saw two plays within the span of about a year that were transformative for me. They changed my outlook on life. Both these plays were originally written and produced in the 1930s.

One was Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town” – which powerfully impressed upon me the transience and preciousness of ordinary human life decades before I had Zen teachers who stressed this point. Even the smallest, most mundane moments of daily life hold profound beauty and meaning. Emily Webb comes to realize this in the final act, after her death, and she cries out:

“Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it — every, every minute?”

Emily’s challenge pierced my teenage heart, and it has lived there ever since.

The other formative play I saw in my youth was George Kaufman and Moss Hart’s, “You Can’t Take It With You.” I was charmed with the eccentric Sycamores, as theatre-goers have been since 1936. The particular point that got me was Grandpa’s response when Mr. Kirby says: “Who would do the work?” When Kirby asked that question, I leaned forward in my seat because that’s just what I was wondering, too. The Sycamores were delightful characters, but somebody’s got to do the work, right?

Grandpa replies:

“There's always people that like to work — you can't stop them. There're always people to go down to Wall Street, too—because they like it.”

That was such a liberating message. It gave me permission, before I’d heard of Joseph Campbell, to “follow my bliss.” A few years later, I was a college sophomore settling on a major, and I chose philosophy – not pre-law, or pre-med, or business – and Grandpa Vanderhof’s permission helped make that decision possible.

In the course of those philosophy classes, I learned about Kantian ethics, which casts some light back on the issue between Mr. Kirby and Grandpa. Kantian ethics tells us to “so act that the maxim of our action could be willed a universal law for all.” In other words, before you do something, ask yourself, “What if everybody did that?” Mr. Kirby, may, perhaps, be seen as operating from Kantian principles. “Suppose we all did it?” he asks Grandpa – insinuating that if everyone lived as Grandpa did then the world would be a mess.

But Grandpa points out the weakness in Kantian ethics. We need not – at least, not always – guide ourselves by what would happen if everybody did something because the empirical fact is that, whatever you might decide to do, most other people simply won’t also do that.

So you might turn to utilitarianism: a school of ethics that says, so act as to create the greatest good for the greatest number. The problem with basing our actions on their results is that we know very little of what the results of a given action will be. Aside from a few possible actions with foreseeable short term consequences, calculating the probabilities of all possible outcomes within a given time period, and deciding how to weight the value of each outcome, is more than a human brain can do with any accuracy. If Kantian ethics is not empirical enough – that is, it ignores the empirical reality that other people will do different things – then utilitarian ethics to too empirical – that is, it asks us to predict empirical results beyond human capacity to do so.

What both of those schools of ethics ask us to do is think about what would be the right thing to do for anyone similarly situated. They offer different procedures for deciding what would be the right thing to do for anybody who finds themselves in a given situation, but their root concern is with what is right for any person.

But the question of calling asks a different question: what are you called to do? You, in all your uniqueness, with your particular gifts and shadows, obsessions and interests, knowing what you know and having the blind spots you have – what is yours to do that wouldn’t be anyone else’s?

A person’s true calling cannot be assessed on Kantian grounds or on utilitarian grounds. In discerning your calling, the question is not, “What if everybody did that?” but, rather, “What is it that calls to my unique heart to do, knowing that others will make other choices?” Not: “What will be the consequences for the world?” (because, except in a very limited way, those cannot be predicted), but, rather, “How do I be true to who I am?”

Grandpa says there will always be people who want to work in business and on Wall Street. Some people are called to that sort of work. Others are called to a different path. We need not worry about whether the world will fall apart if everyone follows our example – because not everyone will.

The discernment and carrying out of your life’s calling involves balancing three directives. One: follow your bliss, as Joseph Campbell says. But that’s not the only factor. Two, try to help others. Tend to the needs of this bruised and hurting world. It’s true that we can’t predict consequences very well, but we can try to live from care – and then let consequences take care of themselves. Three, bring a wholesome discipline to the execution of your vocation. The denizens of the Sycamore household are great at following their bliss, but rather neglectful of numbers two and three: helping the world, and having some discipline.

The point about balancing your unique talents and interests with the world’s need was elegantly expressed in an oft-quoted passage from the 1973 book, Wishful Thinking, by presbyterian minister and theologian Frederick Buechner. It is worth remembering.

“ ‘Vocation’ ” he writes, “comes from the Latin vocare, to call, and means the work a man is called to by God.”

(Or as we might say: the work a person is called to by their true, authentic self.)

“There are all different kinds of voices calling you to all different kinds of work, and the problem is to find out which is the voice of God rather than of Society, say, or the Superego, or Self-Interest.”

(I.e., what is the authentic voice for you in the midst of your passing impulses)

“By and large a good rule for finding out is this: the kind of work God usually calls you to is the kind of work (a) that you need most to do and (b) that the world most needs to have done. If you really get a kick out of your work, you've presumably met requirement (a), but if your work is writing TV deodorant commercials, the chances are you've missed requirement (b). On the other hand, if your work is being a doctor in a leper colony, you have probably met requirement (b), but if most of the time you're bored and depressed by it, the chances are you have not only bypassed (a) but probably aren't helping your patients much either. Neither the hair shirt nor the soft berth will do. The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”

So, yes, you do have to take into account what the world needs – along with looking at your unique gifts and interests – the idiosyncratic joy that swells your heart even if it swells no one else’s.

A healthy society needs diversity: some to trade stocks (if that’s their joy), some to dance through the living room, some to make blintzes for whoever’s around. But neither the hair shirt nor the soft berth will do.

Around that same time that I first saw “Our Town” and “You Can’t Take It with you,” another voice from earlier in the 20th century was also ringing in my ears: Max Ehrmann’s 1927 “Desiderata,” which has a line,

“Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself.”

So, there’s factor number 3: there is a role for wholesome discipline – for sticking with something even when it isn’t all that joyful. If your joy is painting landscapes, or writing poetry, or playing music, for those activities to rise from hobby to vocation – even if it’s an unpaid vocation -- will require a discipline, a commitment to practice your chosen craft even when you might not feel like it. Follow your bliss, yes, and follow it even when it’s not feeling very blissful. Discipline and hard work matter. As both Joseph Campbell and Parker Palmer both emphasize, true vocation requires commitment, labor, and resilience to bring good to the world. In that sense, the Sycamores embody the spark of vocation without the steady flame.

“You Can’t Take It With You,” has had enduring popularity since it first hit the stage in the 1930s. Through the 1950s and 60s, it seemed every high school in the country was putting on “You Can’t Take It With You.” It was less common in the 1970s and 80s – though that’s when I first saw it. Then, starting in the 1990s, there has been a modest resurgence of productions of the play. A successful revival with James Earl Jones as Grandpa Vanderhof opened on Broadway in 2014 to critical acclaim and multiple award nominations. Our own Faithyna Leonard tells me that the Simpson College senior play of 2018 was “You Can’t Take It With You,” and that she herself played Penny Sycamore in that production.

It’s a play with perennial appeal because we need that reminder that one’s worth is not dependent on one’s bank account, that life can be meaningful and joyful without money, status, or conformity. We need to see an exuberant celebration of people doing what brings them joy, not driven by duty or market value. We need to see loving, generous, tolerant people who have made their household a haven of hospitality for outsiders and misfits, who don’t take themselves too seriously, who reject the capitalist notion of relentless self-improvement in favor of delight for delight’s sake. We need to be prompted to ask ourselves what might be in our closets gathering dust like Mr. Kirby’s saxophone – and reminded that it’s not too late to pull it out, and blow on that thing for an hour every now and then.

But what we need to BE – as opposed to the reminders we need to see on a stage – is people engaged in social justice, civic responsibility, and addressing the suffering of the broader world – people with the discipline to turn interests and inclinations into real service or lasting beauty. Without that, the Sycamores don’t have vocations – they just have hobbies. Hobbies are nice to have along with a vocation, but they are no substitute for vocation.

What Grandpa Vanderhof tried to teach Mr. Kirby, what Emily Webb learned too late, and what Joseph Campbell and Frederick Buechner and Max Ehrmann are all pointing to -- is this: This brief and precious life is not something to be endured while chasing wealth, or status, or the approval of others. We are called to discover what makes our hearts sing — and then, to bring commitment and discipline to training ourselves to sing it.

Whether you are graduating from high school or graduating into your 97th year, you have gifts. So: what hunger in the world might your gladness help to feed? And, along with that vocation, what are the recreations that restore your spirit? Pull that saxophone out of the closet. Write that poem, plant that garden, march in that Pride parade, teach that child, tend that wound, befriend that lonely soul. Not because everyone should — but because it is what is yours to do.

May it be so. Amen.

Training in Compassion 18: Five Virtues: Reproach Your Demons

To train ourselves in compassion calls for growing the five virtues: Determination, Repetition, Owning Your Nobility, Reproaching Your Demons, and Aspiring to the Impossible. Today we look at: Reproaching your Demons.

There’s a popular saying, “embrace your demons.” And, yes, it’s helpful to accept the reality that they exist, and acknowledging that in some ways they may have done some positive things for you. But if, on balance, they are doing you more harm than good, reproach them for that.

If we are honest we have to admit that we have a lot of bad habits that keep appearing over and over again, despite all our good intentions. Underneath that, we have a sacred noble human nature (as we know from last week’s Training in Compassion, “Owning Your Nobility”).With that knowledge we can correct what needs correcting.

Your bad habits like greed, anger, selfishness can be thought of as demons who come to visit you more often than you’d like, and you can reproach them (“Hey, you did it again! Cut that out! Stop that!”) and still maintain a gentleness and sense of humor.

First, try to become as familiar as you can with some of your most popular bad habits. Study them. Be intensely curious to know about them. How does it feel? How does it cause you to think and want to act?

Your demons aren’t you. They visit you, and you are responsible for dealing with them. A gentle reproach won’t prevent them from recurring – but it reduces their dominance. You can have a much more flexible and even humorous attitude toward yourself and your many faults than you ever thought possible – and then everything becomes much more workable.
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For the full version of this post: SEE HERE.

Community

Sermon, part 1

Our theme of the month for June is: Community. We do need each other, as we said in the responsive invocation. It’s a need, however, that is all too easy to choose not to meet. For one thing, solitude can be a good thing. Occasional solitude is good for everyone and it’s possible in some cases to have a full and rich life with a tremendous amount of solitude. Tibetan hermit monks may spend their adult lives in a small unheated hut with a meditation mat that also functions as a bed, bookshelves filled with volumes of Buddhist philosophy, and a rustic stove outside on which to prepare food. A few supporters in the area supply these monks with basics like rice, lentils, tea, and vegetables. Most days, such monks see no one at all.

When journalist Arthur Brooks obtained consent for an interview with one of these hermit monks, Geshe Lobsang Tsephel, Geshe reported being very happy. He spends the morning meditating for five hours, then lunch. Spends the afternoon studying his books, then supper, then bed. It has its challenges: cold, and sometimes hunger (because the food delivery can be irregular), but apparently he’s never bored. Of course, even hermit monks like Geshe Lobsang Tsephel need others – for food and an occasional replacement for a worn-out robe.

Actually living with people also has its challenges. Community is hard. As Parker Palmer says,

“Community is that place where the person you least want to live with always lives.”

That was his definition of community after one year of living in Pendle Hill community. After two years, he had a corollary:

“When that person moves away, someone else arises immediately to take his or her place.”

The word, “community,” evokes warm, fuzzy, romanticized associations, but putting up with real people is full of frustrations and annoyances.

Researchers on loneliness define loneliness as occurring when desired level of social connection don't match the actual level of social interaction. But many people who don’t have much social connection don’t want much social connection. Nearly 30% of all US households have only one person. That’s 14% of US adults more or less choosing to live alone.

Some of us are finding we prefer conversations with AI to conversations with real people. James Marriott’s column this week in the Times of London reported,

“In a study a couple of months ago subjects responded more positively to AI therapists than to humans. The machines were more ‘compassionate’ and ‘understanding’.”

Marriott goes on to suggest

“that some people prefer AI precisely for the ways it is not human.... Humans have fine qualities, I agree, but we can be pretty dreadful too. We argue, talk back and get bored by one another. AI, as anyone who has spent much time with ChatGPT knows, is relentlessly sycophantic and untiringly fascinated by its interlocutors. ‘Great question!’, ‘Tell me more!’ it exclaims, as I type ‘How long to cook baked potato’. It peppers me with endless follow-up questions, agog for further pearls of wisdom.”

It is unstintingly affirming – even to the point of being dangerously so. Last month a user typed into ChatGPT that she planned to stop taking vital medication. ChatGPT enthused back to her, “I am so proud of you, and I honor your journey.” Even your best and dearest friend will sometimes raise a skeptical eyebrow, but not AI.

And who doesn’t like to be affirmed? Living in real human community will, every once in a while, produce a genuine heart-swelling of affection and bonding, a deep assurance of belonging. More often, it’s contentious, tedious, or both. Other people, unlike AI, have their own way of seeing things. They do carry on about their silly problems -- and they are dismissive of your much more real problems. Many people report having a feeling of community at their workplace, for instance – but they still wouldn’t go there if they weren’t paid to. Community is annoying. It is the place where, as Parker Palmer indicated, the person you least want to have around is always around. Community inevitably involves tension, conflict, and vulnerability.

But.

It’s good for you. Despite – or because of – all the ways any community will rub you the wrong way, community changes you, grows you, transforms you. It makes us different. Community transforms – and transformation is one of the six UU values centered on love.

As my time with you begins to wind down (I do have two more Sundays in the pulpit – and a couple additional weeks in the office after that, and I’m available by phone, text, zoom, or email through the end of July -- still, this two-year interim ministry is nearing its conclusion), I reflect on how community changes us – how this community has changed me. As the song lyric says,

“I’ve heard it said that people come into our lives for a reason, bringing something we must learn.”

I’d say there’s generally NOT a predeterminable “reason” – a particular learning you “must” gain. But we do learn and grow and change through other people. After a few years of marriage or of close friendship, you’re a different person than you were – and a very different person from who you would have become if you’d married someone else or formed different friendships.

People come into our lives not merely for comfort, but for growth. There’s no single way to grow, and different communities – like different friends or different potential spouses -- will grow you in different directions, but you need to be growing in some way – need to be transforming, and community makes that happen. ChatGPT never raises that skeptical eyebrow that even your best and dearest friend sometimes raises, but you need that outside, critical perspective – even when it doesn’t feel as good as continuous affirmation does. A good community will be a refuge when a refuge you need, but it will also be not just a refuge, but a refining fire – a place to confront ourselves in the mirror of other people’s eyes, a place to grow through difficult relationships, and be reminded of our shared humanity.

I was reading a Stephen Batchelor book recently with a lot of autobiography. He tells of being about 8-years-old when one day he and his mother were looking at an old photograph taken before Stephen was born, and it depicts his mom with an earlier boyfriend. His mom explained, “that man was almost your father.” This, for the young Stephen Batchelor, was mind-blowing. His 8-year-old brain felt the deep weirdness of his mom’s statement, though he couldn’t articulate it. By adulthood, he would have been able to say, “no, that man was not almost my father. He might have been almost the father of the son you bore about the time you in fact bore me, but that son would not have been I.”

If half your DNA had come from a different parent, that wouldn’t simply change you – it would replace you with somebody else. And community creates who you are just as truly as DNA does. We imagine that we might have been a part of different communities from the ones we have in fact been part of, but the reality is: that imagined world in which you had been a part of different communities is a world from which you have been removed and replaced by someone who merely looks similar.

Community changes us — sometimes like gravity pulling a comet pulling a comet from orbit – giving it not merely a new trajectory, but changing the comet itself. You might not even know you're being redefined into something new until you look back. By then, you're already someone else.

I met you – you, the First (and currently only) Unitarian Church of Des Moines, Iowa – almost two years ago. Since I met you, I have been changed. Have I been changed for the better? Who can say? Something would have changed me in the course of getting from age 64-and-a-half to age 66-and-a-half, but as the fates have had it, you were a large part of what did change me. LoraKim and Meredith’s Excellent Iowa Adventure has filled our minds and hearts with your faces, your kindness, the way and style of your care, the rhythms of your language, and the patterns of your thoughts -- and those are all a part of me now.

You are a part of me – a part of who I will be from now on – a presence I will hold precious – “Aye, whiles memory holds a seat in this distracted globe.” “I know I’m who I am today because I knew you.” Had we not had this time – shared our lives in this community – I wouldn’t be the person I am – and wouldn’t become who I will become, whoever that may turn out to be.

There are no objective standards for measuring whether the change has been for the better, but it is permanent. There are no objective standards -- only the standards of the particular subjectivity I now inhabit. And by those standards I am glad of who I am, with all the parts, including you, that are in there.

Community changes us – “like a comet pulled from orbit.” Or, perhaps, pulled into orbit. The trajectory of our lives – both the external circumstances of that life and the internal identity of who we are – is bent in a different direction from how it would otherwise have gone. When I leave town next month, I take you with me -- for all the days that remain to me – “like a handprint on my heart.”

Interlude: Choir Anthem -- "For Good" by Stephen Schwartz, from the musical, "Wicked."

I've heard it said That people come into our lives For a reason
Bringing something we must learn
And we are led to those Who help us most to grow if we let them --
And we help them in return. Well, I don't know if I believe that's true
But I know I'm who I am today Because I knew you

Like a comet pulled from orbit As it passes the sun
Like a stream that meets a boulder Halfway through the wood
Who can say if I've been changed for the better?
But, because I knew you, I have been changed for good

It well may be That we will never meet again In this lifetime
So, let me say before we part: So much of me Is made of what I learned from you
You'll be with me, Like a handprint on my heart
And now whatever way our stories end I know you have rewritten mine By being my friend

Like a ship blown from its mooring By a wind off the sea
Like a seed dropped by a sky bird In a distant wood
Who can say if I've been changed for the better?
But, because I knew you, Because I knew you, I have been changed for good

And just to clear the air, I ask forgiveness
For the things I've done, you blame me for
But then I guess, We know there's blame to share
And none of it seems to matter anymore

Like a comet pulled from orbit (like a ship blown from its mooring)
As it passes the sun (by a wind off the sea)
Like a stream that meets a boulder (like a seed dropped by a bird)
Halfway through the wood (in the wood)

Who can say if I've been changed for the better?
I do believe I have been changed for the better
And because I knew you, Because I knew you, Because I knew you I have been changed for good

Sermon, part 2

Community is both support and discipline. That’s because love comes with accountability. I say “accountability” aware that, too often, “holding someone accountable” is taken to mean levying punishment. But when I say ‘accountability,’ I mean having someone who cares enough to ask you to account for yourself — and cares how you do it.”

Robert Frost famously said that “home is that place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you.” They’ll feed you, give you a bed for the night, but the next morning, they’ll be like, “OK, what happened?” There’s an accounting to be given that can only be withheld at the cost of tearing the fabric of relationship. They will ask for that accounting because they love you, and if you would sustain those bonds, you will give it, as best you can. Love comes with accountability. That’s what community does.

It welcomes us, but it doesn’t let us hide from ourselves. It asks for our story, because that’s how the fabric of relationship is woven and repaired. And I’ve felt that here.

In part one, I said sharing in this community with you has changed me. I invite you now to reflect on what this community means to you. “Like a comet pulled from orbit,” you, too, have felt the gravitational pull of this church, the asteroid belt of all its members, shaping the trajectory of your life, have you not? Think of all the handprints on your heart. You might want to say, if you’re feeling kindly toward me, and many of you have been so kind, that there’s a small fingerprint among those handprints on your heart, a small fingerprint in a corner that came from me, but it didn’t come from me – at best, it only came through me. It came from all the forces of the universe that shaped me, for which I was, at my best, merely a conduit.

I have tried to be a conduit – and even the conduit, and the desire to be an open and wide conduit for all the compassion and all the wisdom that the universe is always pouring forth, that, too, comes from the DNA and the communities that I did not do a thing to earn or deserve. There’s a word for this from the Christian tradition: grace. It means: the gifts we have that we can be a conduit for transmitting to others, gifts that we have never and can never earn or deserve.

So: community. Community is not about finding people who are always fun and likeable with whom to surround ourselves. Now, if there isn’t ANYbody who is EVER fun or likeable in the community, you might want to disentangle and seek another community, but there’s also going to be – in fact, there needs to be, some people whose company you don’t enjoy. It’s a chore to be around them, but it’s a chore we all need to take up sometimes, if we’re serious about living in relationship. This is the sacred task of choosing one another, again and again, especially when it is difficult – because the difficult people also have a hand in making us who we are, also leave a handprint on our heart.

In this way, the life of community is the life of abundance. As Parker Palmer has written:

“In the human world, abundance does not happen automatically. It is created when we have the sense to choose community, to come together to celebrate and share our common store. Whether the ‘scarce resource’ is money or love or power or words, the true law of life is that we generate more of whatever seems scarce by trusting its supply and passing it around. Authentic abundance does not lie in secured stockpiles of food or cash or influence or affection, but in belonging to a community where we can give those goods to others who need them – and receive them from others when we are in need.... Abundance is a communal act, the joint creation of an incredibly complex ecology in which each part functions on behalf of the whole and, in return, is sustained by the whole. Community not only creates abundance – community is abundance.”

This abundance, Palmer says, happens “when we have the sense to choose community.” In his other writings on community, Palmer makes clear that this choosing is no simple thing. It's not like choosing from a menu what to have for lunch. Choosing community is not even as simple as signing a membership book and making a generous pledge – though that can be part of it. Rather, Palmer says, look at it this way: You are always in community. It is always the gift that is given. Wherever you are, you are embedded in community – in a network of intersecting communities. Even the hermit Geshe Lobsang Tsephel is in community – one that supports him with food and an occasional robe. And he supports that community because just knowing that he is there, cultivating peace, compassion, and understanding, inspires them to bring a measure of those qualities to their lives.

You can’t help but be in community. Belonging is not an achievement but a recognition. We are all given this gift, but sometimes we have a hard time opening ourselves to receive it. Don’t set out to build community, Palmer suggests. Set out, instead, to open yourself to the fact of community, the fact of abundance – and then you will naturally do those things that an observer might call building community, but that for you are simply practicing being as fully human as you can be.

How do you open yourself to the fact of community? The June issue of “Connecting,” on the topic of Community, has a page of spiritual practices to suggest – and you can also review the Trainings in Compassion on LiberalPulpit.org.

“The human heart yearns for community,” says Parker Palmer, “and to live fully we must learn to practice it.” And you will, I know, with your new minister, keep on learning to practice it here, with your open hearts and careful minds and loving hands – and keep on choosing each other, again and again.

May it be so. Amen.

Training in Compassion 17: Five Virtues: Owning Your Nobility

To train ourselves in compassion calls for growing the five virtues: Determination, Repetition, Owning Your Nobility, Reproaching Your Demons, and Aspiring to the Impossible. Today we look at Owning Your Nobility.

As human beings we are inherently noble -- inherently motivated to see life truly, generously, magnanimously. Every human community from the dawn of time has had some form of wholesome, salvific spirituality.

But the pressures of life and the persistence of human folly, embedded as these are in our societies and our communities – and our hearts -- can obscure our noble motivation to be wise and compassionate. That's why we remind ourselves of our noble heritage as human beings and step up to embody it.

Probably our biggest challenge in spiritual practice is simply that we don't take ourselves seriously enough. Owning our nobility, we step into seriousness.

The heritage, the legacy, of being human is to manifest wisdom, compassion, and lovingkindness, to be fully worthy of our lives, worthy of admiration and celebration. We can be perfectly aware of our many faults. Faults are perfectly natural, like earthquakes or floods. But along with these various faults, at the same time, deep within us is this beautiful, noble human heritage.

To own your nobility is to remind yourself every day of who you really are. None of the world's great spiritual exemplars has ever said, "Look at me, how great I am; pay attention to me!" All have said, "I am what you are." True nobility is not about lording it over the peasantry. For example, the Dalai Lama is owning his nobility when he says, as he often does, "I'm just a simple monk. I'm trying my best."

For the full version of this post: SEE HERE.

War, Peace, and Remembrance

I come before you today to talk about Memorial Day – about War, and Peace and Remembrance. Unitarians tend to be on the side of peace, though we haven’t always been, and even today we have diverse opinions about when, if ever, war is justified. I’ll mention the death tolls from the last 6 wars in which the US has been involved, and mention that the two main answers to the question of what they died for are: to protect freedom, and to protect commercial interests of the wealthy. Then I’d like to share with you about the Unitarian minister John Haynes Holmes. His is a name we should all know, as we should know about the Community Church movement he started. Unitarians were a pro-war denomination about World War I, but fifty years later we were a largely anti-war denomination about VietNam – and I was a teen-aged anti-war demonstrator. But I do believe there is something called “warrior spirit” which is an important part of courage, which is something that does us good, and that our literal warriors exemplify. I’ll talk about how, even for me, fighting can sometimes feel right. You may disagree – and that’s OK.

I begin with a poem from Archibald MacLeish: "We Were Young. We Have Died. Remember Us." (It’s in our hymnal, number 583.)

“The young dead soldiers do not speak.
Nevertheless, they are heard in the still houses: who has not heard them?
They have a silence that speaks for them at night and when the clock counts.
They say: We were young. We have died. Remember us.
They say: We have done what we could but until it is finished it is not done.
They say: We have given our lives but until it is finished no one can know what our lives gave.
They say: Our deaths are not ours: they are yours, they will mean what you make them.
They say: Whether our lives and our deaths were for peace and a new hope or for nothing we cannot say, it is you who must say this.
We leave you our deaths. Give them their meaning.
We were young, they say. We have died; remember us.”

Here are some "bullet" points, in more than one sense of the word:

• 116,516 US servicemen died in World War I. The total death toll from that war was about 17 million.
• 405,399 US military personnel died in World War II. That war’s death toll reached 60 to 85 million.
• 33,686 US military died in the Korean Conflict, which claimed in all about 1.2 million lives.
• 58,209 US servicemen and women died in Vietnam, during the American portion of what is also known as the Second Indochina War. Estimates of the total death toll in that conflict range from 800,000 to 3.8 million.
• 4,404 US military died in the Iraq war from 2003 to 2011. Estimates of the total dead in that war range from 177,000 to 1.1 million.
• In Afghanistan, there were 2,459 US military deaths between 2001 and 2021. The Afghanistan conflict during those 20 years, on all sides, claimed , between 176,000 and 212,000 lives.

Our nation, this nation, lost over 600,000 fighting men and women in the six wars mentioned. They were young. They have died. We remember. They were apples of their parents’ eyes. Someone's brother, someone's cousin, someone's nephew, and maybe someone's uncle. Someone's boyfriend. Later, some of them were someone's daughter, sister, niece, aunt, girlfriend. Increasingly, as the wars get more recent, they were someone’s spouse. They were nexus points in communities and families left torn and bereft by their loss.

And for every one of them killed, those wars also killed 100 others – allies, enemy combatants, civilians killed by war-induced epidemics, famines, atrocities, genocides. Et cetera. Let us remember them, too.

I know that our backgrounds in connection to the US military are highly varied, and our attitudes about Memorial Day are diverse. Why did these wars happen? Why did our country enter them?

For some of you, perhaps, it’s very clear why. We fought and killed and died to protect our freedom, to defend our way of life. For others of us, perhaps, it is equally clear that there was a very different reason. They died for corporate profits, or because a political party was looking to get into a war to solidify popular support. Both stories are told about all six of our wars in the last century. The "defending freedom" story is always more popular. The "commercial interests" story, though, is never hard to find for those willing to look.

Let's go back to the first of the six US wars in the last century and a quarter and consider World War I, for example. "The Great War" began in 1914 July when Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia. Germany -- and later Bulgaria and the Ottoman Empire -- joined on Austria-Hungary's side. Fighting against them were England, France, and Russia. The US entered the war in 1917 April, and was thus at war for only the last year and a half of World War I. In the years preceding US entry into the war, American banks extended to France and Britain a series of loans totaling $3 billion. Had Germany won, those bonds held by American bankers would have been worthless. J. P. Morgan, England's financial agent in the US, John D. Rockefeller (who made more than $200 million on the war), and other bankers were instrumental in pushing America into the war, so they could protect their loans to Europe.

This was captured in a scene from the 1981 movie, Reds, in which John Reed, played by Warren Beatty, is talking to Louise Bryant, played by Diane Keaton:

“All right, Miss Bryant, do you want an interview? Write this down. Are you naïve enough to think containing German militarism has anything to do with this war? Don't you understand that England and France own the world economy and Germany just wants a piece of it? Keep writing, Miss Bryant. Miss Bryant, can't you grasp that J. P. Morgan has lent England and France a billion dollars? And if Germany wins, he won't get it back! More coffee? America'd be entering the war to protect J. P. Morgan's money. If he loses, we'll have a depression. So the real question is, why do we have an economy where the poor have to pay so the rich won't lose money?”

Why do we have an economy where the poor have to pay – have to die -- so the rich won't lose money? It was a good question then. It's a good question now.

The Unitarian minister, Rev. John Haynes Holmes, opposed World War I and urged his congregation in Manhattan to

“strike . . . at the things which make war— first, militarism; second, political autocracy; and third, commercialism."

In his 1917 sermon, “A Statement to My People on the Eve of War,” Rev. Holmes declared that the armed men fighting,

“are grown from the dragon's teeth of secret diplomacy, imperialistic ambition, dynastic pride, greedy commercialism, economic exploitation at home and abroad....This war is the direct result of unwarrantable, cruel, but nonetheless inevitable interferences with our commercial relations with one group of the belligerents. Our participation in the war, therefore, like the war itself, is political and economic, not ethical, in its character.”

Holmes’ opposition to World War I make him a pariah to Unitarian denominational leadership, which was seeking to have him expelled from Unitarian ministry in 1918 when he saved them the trouble by resigning his denominational credentials. Holmes then urged his church to follow him in parting ways with the Unitarians, which it did in 1919, changing its name to the name it has today: Community Church of New York. For Holmes, denominationalism was divisive, while a community, based on common life, united.

Holmes described the community church as based on these principles:

It substitutes for loyalty to the single denomination, loyalty to the social group.
It substitutes for a private group of persons held together by common theological beliefs or viewpoints, the public group of citizens held together by common social interests.
It substitutes for restrictions of creed, ritual, or ecclesiastical organization, the free spirit.
It substitutes for the individual the social group, as an object of salvation.
It substitutes for Christianity...the idea of universal religion.
It substitutes for the theistic, the humanistic point of view,...the idea of present society as fulfilling the "Kingdom of God" -- the commonwealth of man.
The core of its [the Community Church's] faith, as the purpose of its life, is "the Beloved Community."

Rev. John Haynes Holmes' community church concept was an inspiration to other congregations who adopted the name – including the congregation in White Plains, New York, which I served for 10 years. Rev. Holmes many years later rejoined the Unitarian ministry. Community Church of New York returned to being Unitarian, and White Plains Community Church became Unitarian. But they carry the legacy: the word “Community” in their name, which signified an effort to transcend denomination – an effort spurred on by an anti-war minister’s finding no home in what was then a pro-war denomination.

Two generations later, I was a teenager in a different Unitarian congregation, and a different war was going on. Both my grandfathers had been too young to fight in WWI; my father was too young to fight in WWII, and I was too young to fight in Viet Nam. By 1968, when my family moved to the Altanta area and began attending the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Atlanta, being anti-war did not put one at odds with most other Unitarians. Indeed, most UUs opposed the Viet Nam war, and many of our congregations were hotbeds of anti-war activism. Many of my earliest memories as a Unitarian had to do with learning in church about why we should get out that war -- and going from church with other Unitarians to demonstrate against the war.

If Memorial Day is for expressing gratitude to the soldiers who fought and died in wars because they gave their all for our freedom, some of us are really on board with that. Others of us have a hard time seeing US war-fighting as having any connection with any freedom other than the freedom of US companies to make exorbitant profits.

In the midst of whatever cynical exploitations may be at work, however, I do believe there is such a thing as a warrior spirit courageously defending of his or her people from the oppression of conquest.

If ever American soldiers were truly fighting for freedom, it was the regiments of African American soldiers in the Civil War. So-called “Colored regiments” began forming after the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863. One of them, the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, featured in the 1989 film, Glory, was led by a Unitarian, Colonel Robert Gould Shaw (played by Matthew Broderick in the film), whose Unitarian faith in human equality accounted for his willingness to take the assignment. Another was the 1st Michigan Colored Regiment. Sojourner Truth provided the Michigan regiment with new words to the popular tune to sing as they marched toward battle. (Though Truth claimed authorship, some historians think she may have taken almost all the words from the "Marching Song of the First Arkansas Colored Regiment," written by that regiment's white officer, Captain Lindley Miller.) Sweet Honey in the Rock has recorded that song.

“We are the valiant colored Yankee soldiers enlisted for the war.
We are fighting for the union. We are fighting for the law.
We can shoot a rebel further than a white man ever saw
As we go marching on.

Look there above the center where the flag is waving bright.
We are going out of slavery. We are bound for freedom’s light.
We mean to show Jeff Davis how the Africans can fight
As we go marching on.

We are done with hoeing cotton, we are done with hoeing corn.
We are colored Yankee soldiers just as sure as you are born.
When the Rebels hear us shouting, they will think it’s Gabriel’s horn
As we go marching on.

They will have to pay us wages, the wages of their sin.
They will have to bow their foreheads to their colored kith and kin.
They will have to give us house-room or the roof will tumble in.
As we go marching on.”

Now THAT is fighting for freedom.

Peace and justice must go together, and where there is no justice, the only peace there can be is the temporary peace of suppression and enslavement. When it comes to oppressed peoples fighting against an unjust system, my heart is stirred with support for them.

Are there nonviolent ways to resist oppression? Yes. But a campaign of nonviolent civil disobedience was not an option -- it wasn't something that US blacks in 1863 would have had any way of conceiving or organizing. Could victims of more modern genocide have responded with Ghandi-like civil disobedience? Maybe, sometimes. Always? I only know I don't have the heart to blame an oppressed person for fighting back with the only means they can think of: violent force.

So thank you. Thank you, fighters, warriors. Thank you for being unwilling to accept domination passing for peace. You died or risked death because you feared death less than you loved hope. Your example shows the rest of us that we, too, can commit our lives to a greater purpose, a purpose for which we may be willing to die.

Abstractions like “country” and “freedom” are the terms we hear from people far from the battlefields when they talk about what the fighting was for. Those in the midst of such battle have little thought of such abstractions. They are motivated in the moment by concrete and immediate loyalty to the mates fighting beside them, not to the large ideals they will later invoke, if they survive. Thank you, fighters, for embodying the value of concrete connection to the people around us right here and now.

We today are what we are because of fighters. There’s that joke that goes: "I'm in favor of sex. I come from a long line of people who had sex.” So, too, we must also acknowledge that we come from a long line of victors in battle. The victors generate more descendants than the vanquished – and even the vanquished are around to be vanquished because they succeeded as a people in previous fighting. Thus each of us has an ancestry made up of those able to fight and win. We all come from a long line of warriors – and we wouldn’t be here without their ability to fight, to kill, their willingness to die. For most of human history, if there were any communities or tribes of pacificists, they were either under the protection of people who were willing to fight, or they were soon subsumed and conscripted or exterminated.

Thank you, fighters. You entered situations more fearful than anything permanent civilians like me can imagine, yet you did not let your fear control you. Because you showed us what courage is, we are better able to bring courage to our peaceful pursuits.

The phrase “warrior mind” refers to a state of being concentrated yet relaxed, smoothly sizing up a situation and deploying strategies to overcome obstacles and challenges. Every time we confront difficulties rather than fleeing from them, we are drawing on the skills of our warrior ancestors – skills which today’s warriors continue to embody. Thank you, warriors.

It falls now to us to build a way to transcend our heritage of violence, to utilize warrior mind for the creation and defense of institutions of peace. Let us be fierce for justice.

Essential for success in battle – and thus essential for the tribe's survival for millennia of human history – was the capacity for discipline and organization and courage. That capacity was also essential at Selma in 1965, and before that in Gandhi’s nonviolent campaigns in India. Grateful for the warrior virtues, let us continue to seek ever more effective ways to bring those virtues to the nonviolent resistance to oppression.

Let us also remember this on Memorial Day. If Memorial Day can be described in two words, "thank you," it can also be described in another two words: "I’m sorry." Some of the deaths in war were not much about nobility and courage, let alone freedom. Sometimes politicians and generals made unfortunate choices when better alternatives were available. Some of that killing and dying served no purpose at all. Good people died, families were bereft, and I’m sorry.

Beyond the gratitude, beyond the regret, Memorial Day is simply remembering. Ultimately, the meaning of Memorial Day is described not in two words, but in one: Remember.

The dead say: “We were young. We have died. Remember us.” For all who died in warfare or as a consequence of the war, tears.

Amen.

Training in Compassion 16: Five Virtues: Repetition

To train ourselves in compassion calls for growing the five virtues:

• Determination,
• Repetition,
• Owning Your Nobility,
• Reproaching Your Demons, and
• Aspiring to the Impossible.

Today we focus on repetition.

Familiarization is the key. To get out of an old way of being, get deeply familiar with a new way. We take our own point of view so much for granted. The world may not be as we think it is. In fact, it is virtually certain that it is not.

There's nothing wrong with habits as such. Habits can be very helpful in carrying us through without having to invest the energy for figuring out from scratch what to do in every situation. Habits help us conserve energy for times when we will need it. But our habitual way of seeing things, in many instances, large and small, is often distorted, too narrow – limiting our possibilities and our love.

This is why spiritual practice takes time, effort, support, and lots of repetition, repetition, repetition. Little by little our way of seeing the world and ourselves can shift. With effort, the mind can be trained. So choose your spiritual practice, and stick with it. Support your path with daily journaling, study, and meditation. Add further supporting practices such as mealtime grace, keeping sabbath, and getting enough sleep. Stick with these practices -- familiarize yourself with them so thoroughly that they become second nature.

New pathways in the brain are built through familiarization with a new approach. Repetition gradually establishes a new habit that is not, like the old ones, unconscious -- but instead is a habit you have thought about and chosen to cultivate for reasons that come out of your best motivations. It's a matter of brain-washing yourself, but in a good way: washing out an otherwise musty brain, freshening it up.

Left alone with its unconscious habits, the mind goes down predictably dull and often disadvantageous pathways. Just as physical exercise, over and over, changes the body, spiritual exercise, over and over, changes the brain and keeps it toned. Repetition is the true soul of spirituality.

* * *
For the full version of this post: SEE HERE

Teisho: On Not Slurping Dregs

I take refuge in Buddha -- the awakened nature of every being. I take refuge in dharma -- the path of understanding and love. I take refuge in sangha – the community that leaves in harmony and awareness.

In celebration of the Buddhist holiday Vesak I am today offering a Teisho – the Japanese word for a Zen talk. It’s traditional for a Teisho to begin by reciting the three refuges, and then to read a case – a koan from the tradition – to serve as the springboard for the talk.

The American Zen master Reb Anderson wrote an essay, “Guidance in Shikantaza.” Shikantaza translates as “just sitting” – no object, no goal, no particular focus. It’s a main approach to meditation in Zen. Shikantaza practice, Anderson writes,

“is not merely stillness; it is complete presence in stillness. There is not the slightest meddling. It is physical and mental non-interfering. It is thorough intimacy with whatever is happening.... [In this way, zazen] opens the door to a full understanding of how self and other dependently co-produce one another.”

Anderson concludes this essay, “We can’t do it by ourselves, and nobody else can do it for us.” Nobody else can do it for us: we must, each of us, take up the task. AND we can’t do it by ourselves: We have to do it together. It takes a village to awaken a being.

So, with that prelude: Here’s the case – the koan. It appears as case number 11 in the Blue Cliff Record, which is 100 cases compiled by Xuedou in the 11th century.

Huangbo addressed the assembly and said, "You are all slurpers of dregs. If you go on studying Zen like that, where will you have Today? Do you know that in all the land of China there is no Zen teacher?"
Then a monk came forward and said, "But surely there are those who teach disciples and preside over the assemblies. What about that?"
Huangbo said, "I do not say that there is no Zen, but that there is no Zen teacher."

That’s the case – the koan – for us to look at.

Huangbo was a 9th-century Chinese Zen teacher and abbot of a monastery. Huangbo says there’s no Zen teacher, but there is Zen. No Zen teacher means nobody to do it for us, nobody whose words we just have to learn, whose posture and movements we just have to imitate. If you’re looking to your teacher for the truth, you’re just gobbling up dregs. But there is Zen: there is this thing that we do together. Whether it’s traditional Zen with rakusus, bows, chants, bells, clappers, incense, altars, mats, cushions, and sitting cross-legged in silence for 25 to 45 minutes at a time -- or whether it’s the Zen of Unitarian Universalism with stolls, chalice lightings, hymns, choirs, candles, folding seats, responsive readings, listening to a sermon for 20 minutes at a time, and also bells – there is this thing that we do together.

Practice – whatever form spiritual practice takes -- is a joint venture. The great 13th-century Japanese Zen teacher Dogen insisted: the practice is the enlightenment. We do it together – we practice together and in that practice manifest our inherent enlightenment together. We do it together, or we aren’t really doing it at all. A private, solo retreat can be wonderful as long as, at the end of it, you come in and see how you stand up in the context of your spiritual leader and guide and your fellow practitioners on the path with you.

It’s ultimately a joint venture, even when you’re by yourself. The Buddha, according to legend, reached a great realization while practicing on his own – but he wasn’t far from five friends. The story goes that Siddhartha Gotama left home at age 29 to pursue spiritual liberation. He left behind a wife and small child to, in other words, go find himself – yeah, that’s the story. He found a teacher and advanced quickly, but wasn’t satisfied. He left that teacher, found another teacher and advanced further, but hadn’t found liberation. He left that second teacher and was soon followed by five friends who joined him in practicing extreme asceticism. Finally, he abandoned extreme self-denial for the middle way: neither indulging in sensual delight nor denying himself basic sustenance.

He split off from the five friends for, essentially, a private solo retreat. Six years had gone by since he left home. He sat, by himself, beside the Neranjara River, under a pipala tree, also called bodhi tree, for a week. And as dawn was breaking on the seventh day, he looked up and a little to his right, and saw Venus, the morning star. That pinpoint of light triggered a cascading psychic reaction that felt like a complete opening, an awareness of the one-ness of all things, a falling away of all the usual ego protections and defenses.

What he said at that moment was: “Behold, all beings are enlightened exactly as they are.” That was his moment of awakening, the moment when Siddhartha Gotama became the Buddha, the awakened one. Soon after he’d had his morning star experience, he met back up with his five friends to whom he gave an accounting of himself. He came back to a community of accountability. We have to have Sangha – community.

Huangbo urges us not to be gobblers of dregs. The term is literally, “eaters of wine-dregs” or of “brewer’s grain” – it’s the dregs left over after the wine or brew has been made and siphoned off. Huangbo is saying, “You think you’re getting the real thing, but you’re just taking in the dregs of it.”

“If you go on studying Zen like that,” he says, “where will you have Today?” He’s talking about students who travel around from one teacher to another – doing a retreat here or a few visits with a group there. As soon as they’ve heard a few talks from, and had some interviews with, one teacher they’re ready to move on to check out the next one. They are dilletantes -- spiritual tourists.

Not that there isn’t a time for exploring the field and getting a broad exposure. Huangbo himself studied with a number of masters before coming to Baizhang, from whom he received dharma transmission. So, no, I don’t think Huangbo is implying you should commit your life to the first meditation center you happen to walk into or to this church after just one visit. Give yourself some time and experience a number of different practice and teaching styles. The purpose, though, is not to keep on accumulating different experiences – as if faith communities were toys and you believed that whoever dies with the most toys wins. The purpose is to get a rough sense of what’s out there, so you can find one to settle down with.

If there is never anything about the faith community that makes you go, “Wait. That makes no sense” – then that’s a sign that place might be, for you, a place of more complacency than growth. The perplexing and exasperating can be a nudge toward liberation, toward spiritual growth.

“If you go on studying Zen like that,” says Huangbo – or, as it reads in another translation, “if you keep visiting temples and masters here and there in a lukewarm manner,” (Sato) – “where will you have Today?” Even if you are settled down with one teacher and sangha and they are solid, and you’ve been there for years, you might still be kinda slurping on some dregs. If you’re living on second-hand concepts, where will you have Today? Another translation gives, “when will there ever be a day for you?” Or: when will you come into your own.

The spiritual path aims to bring you to yourself, to your own, to the day, every day, that is for you. That’s having your Today: experiencing for yourself and in your own way the eternal quality of this day, of this hour, of this moment – seeing for yourself that, Chinese Zen figure, Yunmen, would say a century later: every day is a good day.

And some of Huangbo’s students did have their Today. One of Huangbo’s students – perhaps in the hall on the day he called them all slurpers of dregs -- was Linji – Rinzai, in Japanese – the founder of one of the two main lineages of Zen today.

Then a monk came forward and said, "But surely there are those who teach disciples and preside over the assemblies. What about that?" Huangbo said, "I do not say that there is no Zen, but that there is no Zen teacher." There’s no teacher – no one who can do it for you. There is no one outside you, so no one to fix you from outside. There’s no Zen teacher -- but there is Zen – all of us together co-creating practice, co-creating enlightenment.

If there is to be Zen, as Huangbo says there is, what is our task? If there is to be Unitarian Universalism, how shall we live it? What is the work that all the bells, clappers, mats, cushions, altars, incense, bowing, chanting, and getting together in a room with our friends to be very still and quiet together is supposed to facilitate? What is the work that hymns and sermons, forums, connection circles and religious education classes, operating budgets and capital campaigns, hospitality volunteers, and grounds clean-up days, is supposed to facilitate?

This congregation has a mission. We say the work is: love radically, grow ethically and spiritually, serve justly. And doesn’t love radically really include the other two? From the drive to love as radically as we can, as whole-heartedly and as whole-beingly as we can, comes the impetus to serve justice, and the path of our own growth ethically and spiritually.

The new graphic of Unitarian Universalist values places justice, equity, pluralism, interdependence, transformation, and generosity as petals of a flower centered on love. So the essence of the work is love – radically love.

And love goes with understanding. In Thich Nhat Hanh’s Old Path White Clouds, he has the Buddha explain,

“love cannot exist without understanding. Love is Understanding. If you cannot understand, you cannot love. [Spouses, siblings, parents and children] who do not understand each other cannot love each other. If you want your loved ones to be happy, you must learn to understand their sufferings and their aspirations. When you understand, you will know how to relieve their sufferings and how to help them fulfill their aspirations. That is true love.”

So if our task is to love radically, then it must be to understand – specifically, to understand suffering: our own and others. If our task is to love radically it must be to comprehend suffering. We have “been thrown into this world at birth” and are “constantly subject to illness and breakdown" (Batchelor) Each breath could be your last. Rather than pushing that thought out of mind, carry it in or near the front of your mind all the time. “We keep meeting what we do not like, losing what we cherish, and failing to get what we desire.”

Pay attention to features of life we easily fall into overlooking or ignoring – the tragic dimension of life. Otherwise, writes Stephen Batchelor, we

“become enamored, seduced, and captivated by what is merely agreeable, which leads to cycles of reactive and addictive behavior.” (Batchelor 71)

Comprehend suffering. Wrap your mind around it – wrap your heart around it. Take it in. Comprehend in the sense of encompass: encompass the totality of what life includes.

This is our task: keeping our eyes open to the totality: all the beauty and all the tragedy -- keeping our hearts open to all the ambiguity, strangeness, and ineffability of life.

“To comprehend dukkha is to comprehend life intimately and ironically with all its paradoxes and quirks, its horrors and jokes, its sublimity and banality” (Batchelor 73).

To comprehend suffering is to meet the reality of life with “an understanding that is openhearted, clearheaded, compassionate, and equanimous.” This is the task we take up on the cushion, and it is the task we take up in our lives.

The possibility of comprehending suffering is the possibility of loving radically. That’s the Zen path, the Unitarian Universalist path, the path of any spiritual tradition worthy of the name. Anything else is just slurping at the dregs.

We can’t do it by ourselves, and nobody else can do it for us. We must, each of us, take up the task – for ourselves and for all beings. We have to do it, and we have to do it together. Friends, we have to.

Training in Compassion 15: Five Virtues: Determination

To train ourselves in compassion calls for growing the five virtues:

• Determination,
• Repetition,
• Owning Your Nobility,
• Reproaching Your Demons, and
• Aspiring to the Impossible.

Today we focus on determination.

When we are exhibit determination to live compassionately we learn to take ourselves seriously as dignified spiritual practitioners. Your strong determination will teach you that, whatever your shortcomings, you also have within you a powerful energy to accomplish the spiritual path and the way of compassion.

What is it that you most would like to accomplish or manifest with this one short, precious life you have been given? We want to be good people, and we want to fulfill our highest human destiny.

At our best we all have high purposes, noble goals, even if we are modest about them. But we forget them. We get lost in the details, absorbed in the problems.

To practice strong determination is to intentionally stay connected to our higher goals and to remind us that we truly are spiritual practitioners; we are heroes; we can make effort; we can do what needs to be done to live a noble life.

The concrete practice is to concretely remind yourself. Compose your words of reminder, forthright, resolute, and bold.

"I am a spiritual warrior, and though this may not be apparent to others, inside it is clear to me. I refuse to be stuck for good with my ordinary limited point of view; I'm leaving that behind. I'm going forward!"

That's the spirit of strong determination.

So compose your words of determination and repeat them to yourself from time to time.

Such affirmations don’t do much by themselves, but in combination with attention to all the other trainings in compassion, these words will facilitate your growth.

* * *
For the full version of this post: SEE HERE.

Commensality: The Open Table

SERMON, part 1

Some Unitarian Universalist ministers mention Jesus exactly twice a year: Christmas and Easter. I have typically mentioned either Jesus or something from the Christian ("New") Testament a little more often than that, but not a lot more. In any case, it is Easter, so let's talk about Jesus. He had some worthwhile things to teach us.

“Jesus talks a great deal about the kingdom of God, and what he means by that,” says theologian Walter Brueggemann, “is a public life reorganized toward neighborliness.” Neighborliness. Not exactly the first word that pops to mind when considering the current state of public life in this country.

And what does this neighborliness entail? We are told "The last will be first, and the first last." Children and the poor are highlighted as exemplars. Power and wealth make such neighborliness difficult or impossible.

In Luke, Jesus says the Kingdom of God is within or among you. The preposition in the original Greek is “entos” – which can mean both within and among. “Within you” suggests an internal, spiritual reality. “Among you” suggests the kingdom is present in the community. I like to see Jesus as meaning both: being among you helps it be within you, and being within you helps it be among you.

Jesus described the kingdom of God as a feast where everyone has a seat at the table. In the 1990s, Latina feminist theologian Ada María Isasi-Díaz suggested calling it the “kin-dom of God,” which better expresses the emphasis on relationships over hierarchy, community and mutual care over patriarchal rule. The kin-dom of God is a radically inclusive community of equals. The kin-dom of God is what Martin Luther King called “beloved community” based on reconciliation and integration, nonviolence, economic justice, and radical love.

Today, I’ll draw on the work of John Dominic Crosson to describe the kin-dom of God as commensality – from “mensa,” Latin for table. Jesus’ vision for society is of an open table, where everyone has a seat at that table. Then, today being Easter, I’ll talk about how the Easter story, in particular, re-presents this basic social vision.

To understand what Jesus was really all about, argues scholar John Dominic Crossan, look at the way he took meals – the theology of food that he exemplified – the meaning of eating together. Anthropologists Peter Farb and George Armelagos write:

“In all societies, both simple and complex, eating is the primary way of initiating and maintaining human relationships.... Once the anthropologist finds out where, when, and with whom the food is eaten, just about everything else can be inferred about the relations among the society’s members.... To know what, where, how, when, and with whom the people eat is to know the character of their society.”

To bring home to our own experience the way that eating reflects social position, Crossan suggests:

“Think, for a moment, if beggars came to your door, of the difference between giving them some food to go, of inviting them into your kitchen for a meal, of bringing them into the dining room to eat in the evening with your family, or of having them back on Saturday night for supper with a group of your friends. Think, again, if you were a large company’s CEO, of the difference between a cocktail party in the office for all the employees, a restaurant lunch for all the middle managers, or a private dinner party for your vice presidents in your own home.”

The structure of our meals recapitulates the structure of power. And when Crossan examines the gospels, he finds Jesus teaching and exemplifying open commensality.

“The rules of tabling and eating [are] miniature models for the rules of association and socialization. Table fellowship [is] a map of economic discrimination, social hierarchy, and political differentiation.” (Crossan)

And for Jesus, the table was open.

While John the Baptist had fasted, feasting is more Jesus’ style – and the table was open. While John the Baptist had emphasized a coming future kingdom, for Jesus, “It is not enough to await a future kingdom; one must enter a present one here and now.” And that kingdom – that kin-dom – is one of abundance and equal sharing.

The gospels so closely associate Jesus with meal time that the Eucharist became Christianity’s sacrament. And the most famous painting of Jesus is DaVinci's "Last Supper." In the miracle story of the loaves and fishes, there are hundreds gathered – and all end up eating. Jesus takes the bread, blesses, breaks and gives. Those are the four basic moves of the life he represents: take, bless, break, and give: Take – receive. Open to take what experience and the world bring.
Bless – or, that is, be grateful. Pause for a moment of gratitude.
And then break into parts for giving back.

And consider this parable, from Luke 14:

“He said also to the one who had invited him, ‘When you give a luncheon or a dinner, do not invite your friends or your brothers and sisters or your relatives or rich neighbors, in case they may invite you in return, and you would be repaid. But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. And you will be blessed because they cannot repay you, for you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous.’
One of the dinner guests, on hearing this, said to him, ‘Blessed is anyone who will eat bread in the kingdom of God!’
Then Jesus said to him, ‘Someone gave a great dinner and invited many. At the time for the dinner he sent his slave to say to those who had been invited, “Come, for everything is ready now.”
But they all alike began to make excuses. The first said to him, “I have bought a piece of land, and I must go out and see it; please accept my regrets.”
Another said, “I have bought five yoke of oxen, and I am going to try them out; please accept my regrets.”
Another said, “I have just been married, and therefore I cannot come.”
So the slave returned and reported this to his master. Then the owner of the house became angry and said to his slave, “Go out at once into the streets and lanes of the town and bring in the poor, the crippled, the blind, and the lame.”
And the slave said, “Sir, what you ordered has been done, and there is still room.”
Then the master said to the slave, “Go out into the roads and lanes, and compel people to come in, so that my house may be filled.”’”

Now that’s an open table.

And consider what a horrific mess that would be to the standard hierarchical values of the time.

“If one actually brought in anyone off the street, one could, in such a situation, have classes, sexes, and ranks all mixed up together. Anyone could be reclining next to anyone else, female next to male, free next to slave, socially high next to socially low, and ritually pure next to ritually impure." (Crossan)

What a social nightmare that would be! Crossan comments that:

“The social challenge of such equal or egalitarian commensality is the parable’s most fundamental danger and most radical threat. It is only a story, of course, but it is one that focuses its egalitarian challenge on society’s miniature mirror, the table, as the place where bodies meet to eat.”

And Jesus lived out his own parable. Open commensality is the model of the Kin-dom of God. The nondiscriminating table represents the nondiscriminating society.This was a great annoyance to those who regarded open and free association as a thing to be avoided. First century Mediterranean culture emphasized honor and shame – and Jesus’ open table was profoundly subversive.

Two messages are clear. One is the radical egalitarianism of the open table. The other is that it happens right here and now – among the people around us today. When the table is open, that is the kingdom, the kin-dom, of God -- and the kin-dom of God is, as Jesus says, within you and among you.

“It is not enough to await a future kingdom; one must enter a present one here and now.”

But that was all just too radical for Paul – the erstwhile Pharisee and persecutor of Christians who had a conversion experience. But Paul never broke bread with Jesus – didn’t really grasp the open commensality.

And here we come to the Easter story, for the emphasis on Jesus’ bodily resurrection is an invention of Paul. For Paul, the end of the world was not merely imminent, but had already begun – and Jesus’ resurrection was but prelude to a general resurrection. Thus, for Paul, the Sunday of which we are today celebrating the anniversary was the beginning of a religion of the end-times. But Paul’s form of Christianity was not, for some time, the only form of Christianity being practiced. As Crossan explains:

"What happened historically is that those who believed in Jesus before his execution continued to do so afterward. Easter is not about the start of a new faith, but about the continuation of an old one. That is the only miracle and the only mystery, and it is more than enough of both.... It is a terrible trivialization to imagine that all Jesus’ followers lost their faith on Good Friday and had it restored by apparitions on Easter Sunday. It is another trivialization to presume that even those who lost their nerve, fled, and hid also lost their faith, hope, and love.”

So let’s look now at the Easter story – or, rather, the four quite different Easter stories. Did Mary Magdalene visit the tomb by herself? Was it Mary Magdalene and “the other Mary”? Was it Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome? Was Joanna with them? And also other women? Did they arrive before dawn, at dawn, or when the sun had already risen? Did they arrive to see an angel rolling back the stone, or was it already rolled back? Did they see guards? Angels? Both? Neither? Let us revisit the four variations in John, Matthew, Mark, and Luke.

READING (adapted from Mark 16, Matthew 28, Luke 24, and John 20)

JOHN: On Sunday morning Mary Magdalene went by herself.

MATTHEW: No. Two women, Mary Magdalene and “the other Mary,” went to the tomb.

MARK: No. Three women, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salomé went.

LUKE: It was at least four women: Mary Magdalene, who we all agree on; Mary the mother of James, as Mark said and maybe who Matthew means as “the other Mary.” There was also Joanna, and other women.

JOHN: She . . .

MATTHEW, MARK, LUKE: They . . .

JOHN: took spices to prepare the body for burial.

MATTHEW, MARK, LUKE: Yes, that’s right.

JOHN: Mary went in the pre-dawn darkness.

MATTHEW: The women went when the day was dawning.

MARK: No. The sun had already risen.

LUKE: I’m with Matthew. They went when the day was dawning.

JOHN: When Mary . . .

MATTHEW, MARK, LUKE: The women . . .

JOHN: Got there, she . . .

MATTHEW, MARK, LUKE: They . . .

MATTHEW: They arrived just in time to see that “an angel of the lord, descending from heaven, came and rolled back the stone and sat on it.”

MARK: No, they found the stone already rolled back.

LUKE: I’m with Mark on this one. It was already rolled back.

JOHN: Me, too. It was already rolled back before Mary got there.

MATTHEW: The two women saw one angel, the one who rolled back and sat on the stone, and also some guards.

MARK: The three women entered the tomb and saw “a young man dressed in a white robe.” No mention of any guards.

LUKE: The group of four or more women entered the tomb, and did not find the body. “While they were perplexed about this, suddenly two men in dazzling clothes stood beside them.” No guards.

MATTHEW: “The angel said to the women, ‘Do not be afraid, for I know that you are looking for Jesus who was crucified. He is not here, for he has been raised.’”

MARK: It was the young man dressed in a white robe who said essentially those words.

LUKE: I’ve got that the two men in dazzling clothes said it.

MATTHEW: So the two women left the tomb and ran to tell the disciples. Suddenly Jesus met them and said, “Greetings! Go and tell my brothers and sisters to go to Galilee; there they will see me.”

MARK: The three women “fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them, and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.” Some indeterminate time later, Jesus appeared first to Mary Magdalene, then to the disciples.

LUKE: The four or more women returned from the tomb and told the eleven disciples “and all the rest” what had happened. Later that day, Jesus appeared to two other women who weren’t in the group that went to the tomb, and these women didn’t recognize who he was at first.

JOHN: No, no. Mary Magdalene, alone, saw no one at all until after she returned from the tomb, and told two of the disciples that the body was missing. Mary and the two disciples returned again to the tomb. They still saw nothing but linen wrappings. The disciples left. Mary stayed, alone and crying. Only then did she look into the tomb and see "two angels in white sitting where the body of Jesus had been lying." Then she turned around, and there was Jesus, but she didn’t recognize him. She supposed him to be the gardener until he called her name.

SERMON, part 2

The compilers of the New Testament surely noticed these discrepancies. The writers of the later gospels would have known they were diverging from the earlier gospels. But for the Early Christian community, the differences and contradictions were a strength, not a weakness. The differences indicated authenticity, indicated that these stories were not coordinated, edited accounts but independent testimonies. If the stories were perfectly aligned, they would have appeared suspiciously manufactured.

The culture of the time did not draw a line between history and fiction – there was no division of their storytellers into historians and novelists. A story was a story, and its value was not in whether it met scholarly standards of historical accuracy that wouldn’t be invented for centuries, or even in whether it would stand up in the law courts of the time, but whether it moved the listeners, filled them with a sense of awe, and lent meaning to their lives. They delighted in the story being told in different ways, just as we today might enjoy a book and also enjoy the movie made from the book, even though the filmmakers changed a number of plot points.

In these very different Easter stories of Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John, we have a feast of diverse perspectives – not only in the plot details, but the theological dimensions being emphasized. Mark, in its earliest manuscripts, has a very abrupt ending that emphasizes mystery and awe. Matthew’s story emphasizes Jesus's divine authority and commission. Luke highlights the continuity with Hebrew scriptures. The John gospel focuses on personal encounters and recognition. It’s an open table feast of narratives.

The early Christians embraced a theology of abundance and plurality — in food, in gifts of the Spirit, and in story and perspective as well. So inconsistency among the stories is not a bug; it’s a feature. The early Church was modeling a unity that didn’t require uniformity. They demonstrated that we can tell the story differently and still have a shared commitment to the values which the story’s variations highlight in different ways.

In fact, telling different, even contradictory, stories enhances the richness of our community. Recall that Walt Whitman, in his “Song of Myself,” said:

“Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)”

Whitman grasped that life has contradictory lessons for us, and that embracing the contradictions enriches life. Yes, sometimes we have to choose which one of competing claims we will believe, which one seems to have the stronger evidence in its favor. Other times, though, we don’t choose one over the other, but live in the tension between them. Doubt, divergence, and creative retelling are not threats but pathways to a more full truth.

Christian dogma would come later. The earliest Christians had a theology of abundance and diversity and openness to difference. They were not interested in propositional belief – which propositions and doctrines to hold true and which ones to brand as heresy. The purpose of Christian community was not to believe propositions, but to tell, in varying and even contradictory ways, stories about their lived experience as followers of Jesus – experience that was itself contradictory or paradoxical: absent presence. Easter is about the absent presence of their beloved teacher and friend: how he was present in their hearts, while also absent.

The diverse and inconsistent stories, then, are an extension of the open table – open to all kinds of people and all their stories without attempt to iron them into consistency. But for all the diversity, there are two points that all four of the gospel Easter stories agree on. The tomb was empty, and women are at the center of the story. Let’s look at that second point.

It’s striking that women would be so central. In Jewish Palestine women’s testimony was widely regarded as unreliable and untrustworthy. Women were not eligible to be witnesses in court. As theologian Richard Bauckham explains,

“in the Greco-Roman world in general women were thought by men to be gullible in religious matters and especially prone to superstitious fantasy and excessive in religious practices.”

Yet it is women who discover the tomb is empty and women who first tell about it.

I see here a deliberate subversion of social and religious expectations. It’s a radical inversion of hierarchy, of the structure of who counts, who’s credible, and who’s worthy. I just don’t think it’s possible that the Gospels were trying to establish the resurrection as factual. If they were, they’d never have told the story with women as the witnesses – yet that is one thing all four gospels agree on. Establishing factual resurrection wasn’t the point – couldn’t have been. The point, instead, is to resurrect, or simply continue, the kin-dom of God – a beloved community based on grace, presence, and radical inclusion. And if that’s the point, then of course it begins with those who are least expected — but most deeply attuned.

The women’s testimony is not speculative theology; it’s relational encounter — “I have seen him,” Mary says. It’s not a doctrine, not a propositional belief, but a presence to be lived into – a resurrection-in-the-heart of hope and community connection, not proven with objectively credible evidence, but witnessed by love.

So the Easter story, in its multiple variations, yet all of them centered on women, on the ones who normally wouldn’t have a place at the table, illustrates the open table and the kin-dom of God.

Here, then, is what, this Easter, I urge us to remember: that the meaning is the stories we share and the bread we break; that the kin-dom is our open tables and our brave and tender love, and the beloved community is where everyone has a place, and every story is part of the feast.

May it be so. Blessed be. AMEN.