"You Can Be Its Master"

Two readings, one ancient and one modern. First, Genesis 4: 1-16, New JPS Translation, 1985.

Now the man knew his wife Eve, and she conceived and bore Cain, saying, ‘I have gained a male child with the help of the Lord.’ She then bore his brother Abel.

Abel became a keeper of sheep, and Cain became a tiller of the ground. In the course of time Cain brought an offering to the Lord from the fruit of the soil, and Abel, for his part, brought the choicest of the firstlings of his flock. The Lord paid heed to Abel and his offering, but to Cain and his offering He paid no heed. Cain was much distressed and his face fell.

And the Lord said to Cain, ‘Why are you distressed, and why has your face fallen? Surely, if you do right, there is uplift. But if you do not do right, sin couches at the door. Its urge is toward you. Yet you can be its master.’

Cain said to his brother Abel, ‘Come, let us go out to the field.’ And when they were in the field, Cain set upon his brother Abel and killed him.

Then the Lord said to Cain, ‘Where is your brother Abel?’

And he said, ‘I do not know; am I my brother’s keeper?’

Then He said, ‘What have you done? Hark, your brother’s blood cries out to Me from the ground! Therefore, you shall be more cursed that the ground, which opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood from your hand. If you till the soil, it shall no longer yield its strength to you. You shall become a ceaseless wanderer on earth.’

Cain said to the Lord, ‘My punishment is too great to bear! Since You have banished me this day from the soil, and I must avoid your presence and become a restless wanderer on the earth -- anyone who meets me may kill me.’

The Lord said to him, ‘I promise, if anyone kills Cain sevenfold vengeance shall be taken on him.'And the Lord put a mark on Cain, lest anyone who met him should kill him.

Cain left the presence of the Lord and settled in the land of Nod, east of Eden.

That last phrase, “east of Eden,” John Steinbeck used as the title of his 1952 novel. In one passage from that novel, the Chinese servant, Lee, is talking to Samuel about those first 16 verses of the fourth chapter of Genesis.

“Well, the story bit deeply into me and I went into it word for word. The more I thought about the story, the more profound it became to me. Then I compared the translations we have—and they were fairly close. There was only one place that bothered me. The King James version says this—it is when Jehovah has asked Cain why he is angry. Jehovah says, ‘If thou doest well, shalt thou not be accepted? and if thou doest not well, sin lieth at the door. And unto thee shall be his desire, and thou shalt rule over him.’ It was the ‘thou shalt’ that struck me, because it was a promise that Cain would conquer sin....

Then I got a copy of the American Standard Bible. It was very new then. And it was different in this passage. It says, ‘Do thou rule over him.’ Now this is very different. This is not a promise, it is an order. And I began to stew about it. I wondered what the original word of the original writer had been that these very different translations could be made....

I respectfully submitted my problem to one of these sages, read him the story, and told him what I understood from it. The next night four of them met and called me in. We discussed the story all night long.... Every two weeks I went to a meeting with them, and in my room here I covered pages with writing....

You should have sat through some of those nights of argument and discussion. The questions, the inspection, oh, the lovely thinking—the beautiful thinking. After two years we felt that we could approach your sixteen verses of the fourth chapter of Genesis.

My old gentlemen felt that these words were very important too—‘Thou shalt’ and ‘Do thou.’ And this was the gold from our mining: ‘Thou mayest.’
‘Thou mayest rule over sin.’...

The American Standard translation orders men to triumph over sin, and you can call sin ignorance. The King James translation makes a promise in ‘Thou shalt,’ meaning that men will surely triumph over sin. But the Hebrew word, the word timshel—‘Thou mayest’— that gives a choice. It might be the most important word in the world. That says the way is open. That throws it right back on a man. For if ‘Thou mayest’—it is also true that ‘Thou mayest not.’...

Now, there are many millions in their sects and churches who feel the order, ‘Do thou,’ and throw their weight into obedience. And there are millions more who feel predestination in ‘Thou shalt.’ Nothing they may do can interfere with what will be. But ‘Thou mayest’! Why, that makes a man great, that gives him stature with the gods, for in his weakness and his filth and his murder of his brother he has still the great choice.
He can choose his course and fight it through and win....

It is easy out of laziness, out of weakness, to throw oneself into the lap of deity, saying, ‘I couldn’t help it; the way was set.’ But think of the glory of the choice! That makes a man a man.... Confucius tells men how they should live to have good and successful lives. But this—this is a ladder to climb to the stars.... It cuts the feet from under weakness and cowardliness and laziness.

I have no bent toward gods. But I have a new love for that glittering instrument, the human soul. It is a lovely and unique thing in the universe. It is always attacked and never destroyed— because ‘Thou mayest.’”

What is Lee so excited about? Why does he get hooked by one verse from Genesis 4, plunge into two years of intense exegesis about it, and conclude that ‘thou mayest’ is humanity’s ladder to the stars?

The story of the conflict between Cain and Abel reflects the real conflict in the Ancient Mid-East between the tillers of the ground and the keepers of sheep. It is also one of many times in the Hebrew Scriptures that a parent or parental figure’s real or apparent preference for one sibling over another causes trouble.

The key verse, Genesis 4:7, comes before Cain kills Abel. Cain is feeling sad because Yahweh “had regard for” Abel and his offering, but not for Cain and his offering.

Yahweh says, Why so sad?

“If you do right, there is uplift. But if you do not do right, sin couches at the door. Its urge is toward you. Yet you can be its master.”

You can be its master.

The King James Version says, “Thou shalt rule over” sin – which Lee reads as promising that humans will triumph over over sin.

The American Standard Version says, “Do thou rule over” sin – which Lee reads as a command, an order to triumph over sin.

Of the 20-odd major translations into English, the only one that uses “thou mayest” is the JPS (Jewish Publication Society) Translation, 1917, of the Tanakh.* This would be the one in use by English-speaking Jews of Steinbeck’s time. If Steinbeck consulted with a Rabbi -- and apparently he did -- the phrase they would have talked about was, “thou mayest rule over” sin.

"You can be its master," is from the New JPS Translation, 1985.

“Thou mayest rule over it” – which Steinbeck takes to mean, “You are allowed to choose; you have free will” -- sounds to me more like, “You might prevail (thou mayest rule over). Go ahead; give it a shot. You might win against sin.” So I went with the New JPS, "You can be its master." It’s a mix of “you’re allowed” and a sort of “Si, se puede” (yes we can) encouragement. You can be sin's master.

* * *
This is part 1 of 3 of "Timshel: Thou Mayest"
See also
Part 2: Determinism Is Beside the Point
Part 3: Can't Get To Freedom By Ourselves

*The Tanakh consists of 39 books: the same 39 books which, in a
somewhat re-arranged order, constitute the Protestant "Old Testament."

A Few Mom Reflections

My Mom, Lucille Burnett Garmon, died on Sat Oct 17. From Obituary:

Lucy is remembered as extraordinarily devoted to helping others gain the empowerment of greater scientific understanding. She was driven by faith that the world could be made better through wider participation of an engaged and scientifically literate citizenry. The history of science, she well knew, like human history generally, is replete with missteps and the distortions of ego, yet science, more than any other endeavor, she believed, is ultimately self-correcting, continually teaches humility, and represents our best hope for expanding knowledge and, thereby, human freedom.

She inspired a number of the reflections which I have blogged about in the last few years.
From "Walls and Fridges," Lake Chalice, 2012 May 5:

I have come to recognize how certain of my childhood lessons both cut to the heart and have been taken to heart. Sitting seems to be significant. I sat on a wall. I sat on a refrigerator. Now I sit on a zafu (round cushion).

The wall. When I was about four-and-a-half, at the end of our front yard was a 3-foot wall going down to the sidewalk. My Mom was then working on her PhD in Chemistry. I was very sad about something, and I went outside, sobbing, to wait for her return from the lab. I sat on that wall and cried for her. She didn't come and didn't come and didn't come. After my distress had passed on its own, after my psyche had hardened a bit because sources of comfort could not be counted on, she finally did.

I understood she was committed both to me and to something called “work.” Not just any work. Both Mom and Dad were academics, scholars, college teachers. The unspoken lesson of their example was that the only sort of work that was truly worthy, that was worth being away from family, was learning. And teaching others. Expanding and transforming ourselves and helping others be expanded and transformed.

From "The Force of Levity," The Liberal Pulpit, 2013 Dec 16:

When tribal identity is at stake we become rigid, inflexible, dogmatic about "speaking correctly" -- and this is just as true for those who call themselves "atheists" as for those who call themselves "theists." When our tribalism is not at stake, almost all of us, whether we call ourselves "atheist" or "theist," are flexible, creative, open, and charitable in the ways we use and respond to nonstandard language. The question then arises: What's more important, defending our tribal identity or connecting with other people where they are?

For instance, here's a story from my childhood. A couple Thanksgivings ago, Mom recounted to me a story from my childhood. I had no recollection of ever having heard this story before – nor do I have any recollection of the incident itself, which occurred when I was about five years old. We were back at home after my first visit to some fair or carnival where I had seen helium balloons. I had evidently been turning over the experience in my five-year-old brain, and I asked: “Mom, why do they go up?”

Mom, rational scientist that she was and is, answered, “Why wouldn’t they go up?”

“Things go down,” I said.

“Uh-huh,” said Mom. “Why do they go down?”

“Because of gravity,” I said.

“Ah,” she said. “Well, the balloon goes up because of levity.”

And this satisfied me.

When Mom told me this story a couple years ago, I did NOT think, “Egad, my mother lied to me!” After all, why not call it levity? She might have tried explaining that gravitational attraction is proportional to mass, and that stuff that’s more dense has more mass for a given volume, and helium is less dense than air, so gravity pulls the air harder than it pulls the helium in the balloon, so gravity pulls the air down and under the balloon, pushing that less-dense object upward. Mom wasn’t ready to explain all that – or, rather, she knew I wasn’t ready to follow such an explanation – so she gave me this word, “levity” as a sort of placeholder. With wisdom and quick wit, she used language to connect with me where I was, rather than to leave me behind.

I delight in this new family story -- not because Mom’s answer was false, but because it is, in fact, so true. I love knowing again what apparently I was first taught at age five but forgot: there is a force called levity that makes things rise.

The world is full of wonder. At times when I might think gravity makes everything go down, I recall that some things go up.

Language is full of wonder, too. The words we select to express our experience give the experience meaning -- and sometimes delight.

From "Which Is To Be Master?" Lake Chalice, 2011 Apr 27:

Can we say that the cosmos, then, is God – even though the cosmos is neither supernatural nor person-like? May reality thus described reasonably be called God? May we call “God” a cosmos that has “most” of the qualities traditionally associated with God – or must we insist that supernatural and person-like necessarily must be a part of the definition? How shall such a question be answered?

'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.'
'The question is,' said Alice, 'whether you can make words mean so many different things.'
'The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, 'which is to be master — that's all.' (Through the Looking Glass, Lewis Carroll)

My mother was a physics and chemistry professor. My father was an English professor. Once, at dinner, Mom posed a question to my sister Alizon and me, as she was sometimes wont to do.

“If you throw a rock into the air, straight up – perfectly vertical – it will reach its topmost point, and then start to come straight down. At that instant at the top, is the rock accelerating?”

“No,” my father interjected. “For just an instant, it’s not moving at all.”

“At that instant it is stopped,” agreed Mom. “But it’s still accelerating. Acceleration means that its velocity is changing, and the rock’s velocity is changing throughout its trajectory – on the way up and on the way down.”

“No,” said my father, “that is not what 'acceleration' means.”

Since Dad’s specialization was 18th-century British literature, perhaps Dad had in mind Dr. Samuel Johnson’s dictionary of 1755. Dr. Johnson defines accelerate as:

"To make quick, to hasten, to quicken motion; to give a continual impulse to motion, so as perpetually to increase."

“You scientists,” fumed Dad, “don’t get to change the English language.”

Actually, scientists do get to change the meanings of words. Sorry, Dad. Sometimes scientists even do so through an explicit and formal process, as when the International Astronomical Union, on 2006 August 24, adopted a new definition of “planet” for our solar system. Their definition excluded Pluto, which had been within the definition of planet since its discovery in 1930. More often, the shift in meaning disseminates slowly and informally.

Words change their meaning as we learn more about the things they point to. As we learned more about motion, we saw that all regular changes in velocity were mathematically describable, and we needed the word “accelerate” to refer to all such changes, not just to speeding up.

From "Drawing the Line," Lake Chalice, 2012 Sep 14:

A couple years ago my mother had a point to make about my environmental concerns and the actions I take out of that concern. She clipped out and mailed to me a Sunday comic strip of “Zits.”

Jeremy asks his friend, Pierce, “Why aren’t you wearing your boots today, Pierce?”
Pierce: “Can’t. I’m boycotting leather in support of animal rights.”
Jeremy: “Then couldn’t you just wear your sneakers?”
Pierce: “Nope. The rubber soles are made with petroleum-based plasticizers, and I’m against arctic drilling.”
Jeremy: “What about your wooden sandals?”
Pierce: “And support deforestation? Not likely. I’m an activist, Jeremy. I have to set an example to show others that there is a better way to live.”
[In the last panel, we finally see Pierce’s footwear: goopy blocks of tofu]
Jeremy: “Hence, the tofu shoes.”
Pierce: “Teriyaki flavor. Want some?”

Sometimes the quest to do the right thing with our purchasing decisions can just seem silly.

I wrote back to Mom:

"It’s worse than that. Tofu is made from soybeans, and if the soybeans aren’t organic, there’s the harm of nitrogen-based fertilizers, and there’s pesticides. Even if it’s all organic, there may have been monoculture growing, without proper crop rotation and variation. Finally, even if you fix all that, there’s almost certainly some oppressed labor somewhere along the way. So, Mom, where do you draw the line? Do you so thoroughly trust your government as to figure that anything they haven’t outlawed has got to be morally and environmentally OK to participate in?”

She never answered. When I saw her some months later at Christmas, I asked her about it.

"I assumed the question was rhetorical," she said.

I can imagine my children writing to me with that question: “Well, OK, Dad, where do you draw the line?” I don’t know if I’d answer either.

From "Falling Apples," Lake Chalice, 2012 May 20:

The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. – German Proverb

Newton himself often told the story that he was inspired to formulate his theory of gravitation by watching the fall of an apple from a tree. – “Isaac Newton,” Wikipedia

My mother was, and still is at the time of this writing, a scientist. Since her research was at the boundary between chemistry and physics, her teaching career has included some years on the chemistry faculty, and other years on the physics faculty. In 1960, women scientists, and, in particular, mom scientists, were still a novelty. The Richmond, Virginia Times-Dispatch that year ran a human interest story about a mom and her little boy: me, age 15 months.

Along with the brief article the paper ran a photo of Mom, Dad, me, and her electron microscope. The captions says: "Gerald Garmon [Dad], and Steven [my first name; "Meredith" is my middle name] pick mother up at her office. Electron Microscope Mrs. Garmon uses is much bigger than Steven."

My perch is not steady. An electron microscope is not firm grounding. But Dad's holding me, and I am holding on to the microscope. In my short pants and toddler shoes, I'm looking at Mom, and she's looking at me, while she has a finger on the control panel.

Mom looked for truth, in the way that scientists do. With the then-high-tech electron microscope, she looked for tiny, tiny truth to contribute to a grand edifice. She investigated the structure of nickel electrodeposits on copper monocrystals.

Mom wanted to know, to understand – and not just for her own sake. She was called – called by the cosmos, ancient and infinite, immediate and infinitesimal – to toil in orchards where Newton and so many other scientists had plucked fruits of empirical knowledge. Her life has been dedicated to service to future generations, to participation in the processes of unfolding truth so that those who come after will understand this world better than our brief lifespans will allow to us.

As the years rolled by, I grew, a product of my times, my parents, and my own predispositions. I went not into science, but into philosophy. For several years of young adulthood my primary interest was in philosophy of science. I explored questions about how science works, what legitimates its claims. Does it discover truth, or invent fictions of ever-increasing convenience? And how would we know?

Scientists, like the rest of us, are apes descended from apes, built to be social animals, learning from each other as we must, and learning biases and prejudices as we do. The direction of science is set by its leaders; they become leaders through some mix of social skills and charisma as well as scientific brilliance. Is this a regrettable condition that we should strive to overcome as much as we can? Or does the scientific enterprise in some essential way depend on the very humanity that "skews" it? (If so, what would "unskewed" even mean?)

Our brains are flukes of evolution. Animal brains are selected for ability to do three basic things: find food, avoid becoming food, and find a mate. Primate brains have the special challenge to do these three things in a fantastically complicated social context that requires, on the one hand, intricate cooperation, and on the other hand, complex intrigue and competition. How is it that a brain thus produced can do theoretical physics? Can build, and peer through electron microscopes? Can discover the structure of nickel electrodeposits on copper monocrystals? In doing these things, are we mirroring reality, or projecting our own brain functions upon nature? And, again, how would we know?

These are some of the philosophy of science questions that captivated my attention for some years as a graduate student. Scientists gaze in wonder through telescopes and microscopes, and I gazed in wonder at the scientists -- just as I gazed at Mom in that Times-Dispatch photo.

Many of us spend much of our adult years coming to terms with our relationship with our mothers: consciously working it out, or unconsciously playing it out. For me, this relationship involved a relationship to the entire scientific enterprise, from Isaac Newton on down.

I came to stand – the apple finally landed – upon the conclusion that science is for controlling and predicting. Mom says science seeks to explain. There are, however, many forms and functions of explanation, and the sort of explanation that is “scientific” is the sort that affords prediction and control – for prediction is the only test of an explanation in science, and ability to control is a product of ability to predict.

The powers of prediction and control, steadily growing from Newton’s time to ours are truly impressive. They made possible our modern world of cars and computers, cell phones and internet, CAT scans, artificial hearts, serotonin re-uptake inhibitors, and food production and distribution that sustain a world population orders of magnitude beyond Thomas Malthus’ wildest imaginings. Yet I want to do more than predict and control my world. I want to befriend it. Our story and picture of reality must be consistent with the well-confirmed conclusions scientists reach, yet provide also for awe and wonder, humility and gratitude, moral grounding and aesthetic bliss. The truth we need is not merely the truth about which observable causes yield which observable effects. We need also the truth that each cause is a sacrament, and each effect a revelation of divinity. We need also the truth of love and connection. We need also the truth that control, along with the ego that believes itself to be in control, is an illusion.

Sense of Place

There are a number of ways to renew. I mentioned, first, there may be something we need to get back. Second, there may be something we need to turn away from. Third, we find renewal through service – for others, for justice.

Which leads us to fourth, we find renewal through place: through being rooted in our location, grounded in our literal ground.

We are made to be a part of our environs, our identity intertwined with our geography. Yet we can become unmoored, either through moving every few years – and in the US about 12 percent of the population relocates in any given year – or through spending most of our days in geographically neutral experiences. For many of us, our workplace has the same layout and look it would have in Utah, or Louisiana. The architecture and décor of our homes could just as well be in California or Kentucky. In between home and work, we go past, and maybe stop in at strip malls that look the same in Oregon as they do in Maine. We watch the same TV and movies that people in Minnesota and Florida watch.

A strong sense of place is something we might not recognize that we’re missing, yet it affects our sense of the meaning of our lives. J. B. Jackson writes:

"It is place, permanent position in both the social and topographical sense, that gives us our identity."

Or as Wendell Berry put it,

“if you don’t know where you are, you don’t know who you are.”

Sense of place emerges from long and intimate experience of a particular landscape, and from knowledge of its unique history, its folklore, its local knowledge and crafts. Kent Rydon writes:

“A sense of place results gradually and unconsciously from inhabiting a landscape over time, becoming familiar with its physical properties, accruing history within its confines."

Few of us have the deep grounding in place that was common a few generations ago – what Wallace Stegner described as

“the knowledge of place that comes from working in it in all weathers, making a living from it, suffering from its catastrophes, loving its mornings or evenings or hot noons, valuing it for the profound investment of labor and feeling that you, your parents and grandparents, your all-but-unknown ancestors have put into it.”

Most of us don’t have that. Robert Frost’s poem, "The Gift Outright," notes that

“The land was ours before we were the land’s . . .
[The land] was ours in Massachusetts, in Virginia, but we were England’s, still colonials . . .
She was our land more than a hundred years before we were her people.”

That deep rooted sense of place takes more than one lifetime to emerge on its own. Still, if we intend to do so, we can consciously cultivate that sense of belonging to our place. I am a transplant to Westchester County, New York; I've only lived here a little more than two years. Walking along the Hudson River or the Long Island sound, traipsing about in our wooded areas, among the old stone walls that the European settlers of this area had such a mania for building two to three hundred years ago -- reading and learning local histories and local stories, getting out in it through every season of the year, winter and summer, fall and spring, has begun to cultivate a sense of place here for me. Doing these things over many years will deepen that sense of place.

If life is stale, flat, in need of renewal, it may be that we are unrooted. For those of us who are now living in an area different from the one we were raised in, strengthening our rootedness is a two-fold practice. First, there's developing your connection to the local area where you are now. Second, you might return to a place where you used to live, and that still lives in your heart.

I was born and raised in the southeast: born in Virginia and grew up there and North Carolina and Alabama until, when I was nine, we settled in Carrollton, Georgia. I was back in Carrollton for a week this summer: visiting my Mom; remembering the streets of my youth, the topography, the soil that is red from so much iron, the many Baptist churches dotting the rural country side; remembering the part of me that is a product of that landscape and that land.

We are our place, and when we’re in touch with it, it renews us. When we are grounded in some actual ground, renewal grows up from that ground like the small and tender plant pictured.

If you can’t go there in person, perhaps you have a scrapbook or old photos you can pull out to take you back imaginatively to the ground in which your roots are. Either way, it might help to bring someone along on the journey. Sometimes a friend sees things we can't.

Renewal is a rhythm, but maybe sometimes the rhythm is missing some of its beats. Maybe you weren’t even noticing the missed beats.

Is there something to get back?

Is there something to turn away from?

Is there a way you could serve more?

Is there a way to strengthen your sense of place?

May we find the paths of renewal that we need.

* * *
This is part 3 of 3 of "Renewal"
See also
Part 1: Rhythms of Renewal
Part 2: Paths of Renewal: Turning Away & Serving

Paths of Renewal: Turning Away & Serving

How does renewal happen? What does it take to be renewed? In the last Liberal Pulpit, we considered asking ourselves, "Is there something we need to get back?"

Second, is there something we need to get away from – to lose – to turn away from? Instead of getting something back, maybe we need to drop something we’ve picked up along the way. Maybe there’s some part of our world or our culture that does not serve, that could be renounced.

There are many levels and forms and degrees of renunciation. You don’t have to go all the way to becoming a mendicant monk to spiritually benefit from renouncing some aspect of worldliness. As Albert Camus said,

“In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion.”

What might need to be removed in order to help you be renewed?

Removing speed and just slowing down might be profoundly renewing. Removing the distraction of cell phones from, say, dinner until the next morning – would that be renewing? Removing habits that aren’t serving your well-being – whether it’s too much caffeine consumption, too much alcohol consumption, too many computer games. Can you find another way to relax or give yourself a break?

Some people find it renewing to break from the patterns society pushes. What are you buying that you really don’t need? Is there some area of your consumerism that you could curtail? Maybe, for example, cut your clothing budget in half. Go ahead and wear the same clothes for several days in a row. It might be exhilarating. (See one blogger's reflections: "Same Dress. Different Day.") What cultural trap might you turn away from and thereby be made new? Is there something we need to turn away from?

Third, how can we serve? It's one of the most important insights along the spiritual path: Renewing the world is often the best path to renewing oneself. Let me share with you a number of examples.

James Arthurs found renewal in music, and he magnified that by bringing it to others. James founded the Guitars for Good program. Guitars for Good uses music therapy in order to make life a little brighter and fun for the children at Sick Kids Hospital, where James volunteers. James was able to get funding for ipods for many of the kids so they could have their music more available.



Benji Chu found renewal in running, and he magnified that by bringing it to others. Benji has run more than 30 marathons and found that running transformed his life. So Benji founded Run for Change, a bi-weekly running group and annual 5k road race for the homeless and lower income individuals in Vancouver's downtown east side. He’s arranged for running shoes to be donated and he organizes the group runs so that the disadvantaged can experience the power of running.



Mark DeMontis found renewal in playing ice hockey. But then he developed a condition that left him legally blind. Unable to pursue his dream of playing professional hockey, Mark learned about a form of hockey for the blind. He started Courage Canada, an organization that gives visually impaired kids the opportunity to learn to ice skate and play hockey.



Laura Armstrong found reneweal in making works of art, and she magnified that by using it to serve others. Laura founded Work of Heart, a not-for-profit organization that raises money for kids in Kenya by selling her art works as well as art from other local artists in Toronto.



Jim Power, a homeless Vietnam War vet in Manhattan’s lower eastside, found a creative outlet in creating hand-crafted mosaic artwork that he started posting on lampposts all over the lower eastside, transforming the streets into the “Mosaic Trail." The “Mosaic Trail” became Jim’s expression of self. His mosaics told stories about the area and thereby strengthened the identity of the neighborhood. When the city threatened to destroy his work, the community rallied around Jim to protect the “mosaic trail," now a legacy for the residents.




Aziza Chaouni finds renewal in her work as an architect, and she magnified that by using it to serve the town of Medina in Fez, Morocco. The Fez River winds through the mazelike medieval city. The river, once the soul of the city, succumbed to sewage and pollution, and in the 1950s was covered over bit by bit by slabs of concrete. Aziza’s 20-year project has been to restore this river to its former glory, and to transform her city in the process: uncovering the river and designing and implementing beautiful plazas and public spaces along its banks.



Angela Haseltine Pozzi used her art to serve the renewal of our oceans. Angela’s Washed Ashore Project collects tons of garbage washed up on beaches and turns the trash into large and colorful sculptures that draw attention to the problem of plastic pollution. She does some cutting and shaping but leaves the plastic pieces intact enough that they can be recognized as what they are: bottles or Styrofoam packaging or plastic bags. Viewers of the art recognize that they purchase items like those, discard them, and they often end up in our oceans.



Whether it is working for world justice or finding a way to bring a bit more beauty to your neighborhood, renewing our world renews us. During this season of repentence, let us also remember that social justice includes an aspect of repenting for the wrongs of our past, and the wrongs of our ancestors. For those of us with white privilege, the work of repenting through being devoted allies of the Black Lives Matter movement offers healing and renewal.

Next: Renewal through sense of place.

* * *
This is part 2 of 3 of "Renewal"
See also:
Part 1: Rhythms of Renewal
Part 3: Sense of Place

Rhythms of Renewal

Yom Kippur – the day of atonement: the holiest day on the Jewish calendar. And it’s all about acknowledging the things we have done wrong, seek forgiveness, atone. That way we can be renewed as we head into the new year.

Renewal is our topic today.

We renew our magazine subscriptions, renew our memberships. Sometimes renew just means repeat: if you renew your appeal for assistance, then you repeat it. But today let’s reflect on the kind of renewal that is the opposite of that: renewal as what we need when we have grown stale from too much repetition.

Life is a continuous cycle of renewing, isn’t it? Every day winds down, wears out, and we need rest – and wake up in the morning, at least in some sense, renewed. Fatigue seeks the renewal of sleep. And when the body is tired of sleeping, it seeks the renewal of waking up and getting moving. A nice meal refreshes and renews us. At the same time, too much food will make us lethargic. We need exercise, working it off, to again renew us. Every breath in refreshes and renews, then grows stale. Then the exhale, returning to the world the air that, for us, has grown stale, renews again.

There’s a renewing rhythm of breathing several times a minute, of eating and moving several times a day, of wakefulness and sleep daily. There’s the weekly renewing rhythm several days of mostly work and a day or a weekend of Sabbath, of rest and recreation. Rev. Peggy Clarke and I are now offering a Friday evening meditative worship service. At the end of many people’s work week, this 45-minute service is a chance to restore, refresh, and renew heading into the weekend. This is a new thing – the first one was Fri Sep 18 in Hastings, and I myself was surprised at how lovely and renewing it was. The service alternates between here and Hastings, so the next week, Fri Sep 25, the service is at CUUC. Mixed into the annual rhythm are periods of vacation.

Many of these cycles of renewal take care of themselves. Yet in the midst of them, there can be levels of renewal that somehow got left out. Maybe your breathing is fine, your sleeping, eating, and exercising is all fine, you work effectively at work and you enjoy your weekends, Sabbaths, and vacations – and yet there’s something missing. Life feels somehow flat, stale, tired, banal. How can renewal happen? Many of us just recently had vacation and are feeling renewed. As one of our Journey Group facilitators pointed out, it’s around about February that we need to talk about renewal. Perhaps so.

We need renewal at various times – and not always on schedule. When we need renewal beyond what normal rhythms provide, what can do it? There are a number of things one might try.

First, is there something we need to get back? Maybe there’s a relationship that needs repair – forgiveness for whatever it was that strained that relationship. This, of course, is the kind of renewal that goes to the crux of yom kipper. Is there a way to restore right relations with someone with whom relations aren’t right? It may require working out a plan toward forgiveness – either for you to be able to forgive or for you to be forgiven. Our spirits are renewed by the restoration of relationship.

Or: remember that thing that you used to do – that was great. You stopped doing it because – well, who knows? Things just got more hectic, more busy – or it didn’t seem like it was all that important at the time, so you let it stop. But now, looking back, maybe you realize that there was a quality of life cost.

Setting aside time for some fun or enriching thing is also a path to renewal. Movie night, game night, walk in the woods day, quiet time, novel reading time. Is there some activity that used to renew you – and you could get back to? Is there something we need to get back?

Next: is there something we need to get away from – to lose – to turn away from?

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This is part 1 of 3 of "Renewal"
See also
Part 2: Paths of Renewal: Turning Away & Serving
Part 3: Sense of Place

This Week's Prayer

“O God, root and source of body and soul, we ask for boldness in confronting evil. When you are within us, we have the power to countenance all that is untrue. O Father and Mother of all humankind, may we redeem our failings by the good work that we do. In the name of the one, the only God.” (Khasi Unitarian Prayer, SLT #516)

O Father and Mother of all life,

We ask -- for in articulating what we want, we direct our hearts and our energies toward it. We ask for boldness in confronting evil. We ask to awaken from our complacency. We ask to be agents of awakening our nation from its complacency.

We ask for the strength to stand against the complacency that allows 33,000 gun-related human deaths per year in this country, including over 11,000 gun homicides, over 21,000 gun suicides, and over 500 deaths from accidental gun discharge.

On this day when we bless the nonhuman animals with which we share our planet and many of us share our homes, we ask to awaken from our complacency about cruelty. Let us, for starters, stand against CAFOs – Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations. CAFOs constitute only about 5 percent of all U.S. animal operations, and they produce more than 50 percent of our food animals. CAFOs inflict unconscionable cruelty on beings as intelligent and sensitive as the beloved pets among us today.

There is no reason to eat meat at all, we know, but let us at least put an end to the operations of most intense and most prolonged misery. We ask to awaken from our complacency. We ask to take to heart the words of Mahatma Gandhi when he said, “The measure of a society can be how well it treats its animals.”

Wonder Hinders

Wonder is the kind of thing that visits you – or that you actively seek out – when there’s not a lot else going on. The barriers to wonder include distress – hunger, pain, illness, bereavement – and stress – busy-ness, tension, anxiety.

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

A focus on caring for others, doing good in the world, requires solving the problems that need solving, focusing on the practical needs. This reduces the world around you to two categories. Everything is either an instrument that will be helpful for your purpose or an obstacle that threatens to thwart your purpose.

It is a noble thing to have goals, purposes, to pursue accomplishment – at least, it is when those goals and accomplishments involve making the world better, easing suffering, improving the overall quality of life of the inhabitants of this planet. We need, and we take, breaks from our work – and that’s where we can cultivate a wonder that might even linger when we return to work, coloring our tasks with an abiding background radiation of peace and delight.

Unfortunately, modern life encourages us to make our leisure as busy as our work. We line up the most high-quality diversions we can and then make our free time as rushed as our work time. There’s hiking, kayaking, bicycling, tennis or some fun form of exercising. There are things to see: a play, a concert, an art exhibit, movies. There are novels to read and whole seasons of intriguing television shows to binge watch.

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

We work frenetically and then play frenetically because if we don’t we might be . . . bored.

Ah, boredom. The three main barriers to wonder are the purposive focus of work, a similarly purposive focus on the quality of our diversions, and, when neither of those is happening, allowing ourselves to be bored. Boredom says that

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

We speak of child-like wonder, and though we sometimes say nice things about child-like wonder, most of us secretly would rather be known as a serious adult: productive, on the one hand, and erudite, on the other. Boredom is for serious people, who expect or want or need life to give them serious work and serious play. Boredom makes that demand and signals that it is not being met.

But if Boredom is an obstacle to wonder, then the cultivation of wonder is the antidote to boredom. We can’t make ourselves have experiences like Thomas Merton had at the corner of 4th and Walnut. We can only cultivate – nurture the slow growth of the wonder plant, not knowing what shape it may take as it grows, facilitating a power that, though we nurture, we do not control.

I could tell you that the way to cultivate wonder is with a spiritual practice, but that would only be tautological because a spiritual practice is anything that cultivates wonder. I’d only be saying that the way to cultivate wonder is to do something that cultivates wonder.

Continual mindfulness of death, Raymond Tallis points out, is conducive to wondering at life. (A point The Liberal Pulpit has also made -- SEE HERE.) It raises the question, though: how does one become able to sustain continual mindfulness of death? Perhaps that is not a question for a definite answer – but a mystery to be lived.

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This is part 3 of 3 of "Wonder of Wonders"
See also:
Part 1: Two Kinds of Wonder
Part 2: The Point of Wonder