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Congregation Unitarian Universalist
En Español
Prelude and Opening Words:
May its flame lead us to greater knowledge and tolerance.
May its warmth lead us to deeper love and compassion.
And may its light lead us toward greater wisdom and understanding.
Yes, each of us is but a tiny flame.
But together we can enlighten the world!
-submitted by Lene Lund Shoemaker
Danish Unitarian Church
Prayer: ( followed by a moment of silent meditation)
Joys and Concerns: : (We throw a small stone into this bowl filled with water, to symbolize our thoughts, which move in circular rings eternally, like concentric waves.)
Hymn::
Responsive Reading: STLT # It Matters What We Believe
Sophia Lyon Fahs
Sermon: Living with SoulBy Reverend John A. Buehrens
When I was running around as President of our Association, one of the many things I, and my family and friends, had to
put up with was hearing me referred to as the "evangelical rabbi of liberal religion." Which caused my daughter Erica to send
me a postcard, depicting a fellow about my girth, wearing a well-traveled, patched robe, a prayer shawl, and a yalmulke —
with the caption, "The Velveteen Rabbi," and the question, "So when do I get to go out and play with the real rabbis?"
This weekend I’m out here to play with the real rabbis at Starr King, and I’m pleased that Rabbi Lilia here has given me
the chance to be with a real congregation.
"Real isn’t how you are made," says the Skin Horse. "It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real."
"Does it hurt?" asks the Rabbit.
"Sometimes," said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. "When you are Real you don't mind being hurt."
"Does it happen all at once, like being wound up," he asked, "or bit by bit?"
"It doesn't happen all at once," said the Skin Horse. "You become. It takes time." I don’t know about you, but for me the past ten days have seemed both painful and strangely unreal. Actually, I take that
back. For some time now I have felt myself living in a society where what I know really matters — the very soul of society —
seems increasingly neglected, in favor of a delusional system that takes only money, image, power, and violence as real.
And I ask myself, what is happening to our collective soul?
"Corporate soul searching," reads a headline. But the article goes on to describe how the chair of the governmental body
overseeing corporate accountability was forced to resign, followed by his nominee to correct lying in corporate accounting,
because he withheld information from his fellow commissioners: that the nominee in question had been chair of a corporate
audit committee that had fired its auditors for telling the truth.
"The very soul of democracy is threatened," says eminent journalist Bill Moyers, by the pervasive corruption of our politics,
who describes how the late Senator Paul Wellstone once stood on the Senate floor and described a typical interaction between
an office holder and a potential source of re-election money:
"What do I get if I give you $500?"
"Just government."
"If I give you $1000?"
"Good government."
"And if I can show you the way to $100,000?"
"Then, my friend, you get any kind of government you want!" But what shall it profit any one to gain the whole world and lose one’s own soul? What shall it profit our nation to win an unjustifiable
war and lose the respect and support of some of our oldest friends around the world? There may be only one military
superpower left. But as the New York Times put it recently, there is a second less visible superpower, called world opinion.
When I think of this war, I’m reminded of what Thomas Jefferson once said: "I tremble for my country when I consider that
God is just." America today, as one of our hymns puts it, is "rich in things but poor in soul." No wonder the soul, as
Szymborska says, seems to come to go. Mine surely does. Yours too, I’ll bet. Not to mention other souls we try to connect with,
to be real with.
Often I’ve come home from my efforts at trying to connect more deeply, at a soul level, with people in the world of power
brokering and self-interest saying to my good wife, "It’s getting harder and harder to save souls dear; fewer and fewer seem
to have ‘em!"
But I know that’s cynical. Our universalism reminds me that underneath all the selfish, short-sighted, greedy, even
paranoid and violent defensiveness humans display, there is a soulful, human, real part to each of us. It reappears whenever
we can share some human vulnerability.
The author Nancy Mairs, who has MS and writes about these matters in a very down-to-earth way from her wheelchair,
puts it simply: "The soul," she says, "is that part of the human psyche that is capable of transcending mere self-interest."
And that exists in all of us. For all of his prideful self-reliance, Emerson knew it: "It comes to the lowly and simple; it comes to
whosoever will put off what is . . . proud; it comes as insight; it comes as serenity and grandeur. The soul’s health consists in
the fullness of its reception. . . Within us is the soul of the whole . . . When it breaks through our intellect, it is genius; when it
breathes through our will, it is virtue; when it flows through our affections, it is love." So did Thoreau, who wrote in his journal
that "Silence is the communing of a conscious soul with itself. If the soul attend for a moment to its own infinity, then and there
is silence. She is audible to all [of us], at all times, in all places, and if we will we may always hearken to [the soul’s]
admonitions." But we don’t.
And my mission here isn’t really to convince you of something about the soul. Like the transcendentalists who said they
were more interested in the religion of Jesus than any religion about Jesus, I am far more interested in the life of the soul --
living with soul -- than in any abstract teachings about the soul. As the Buddha once said, whether the soul exists or does not
exist, whether God exists or does not exist, may quite miss the point entirely. Or as another poet expresses it:
It doesn’t interest me if you believe there is one God or many gods.
I want to know if you belong or feel abandoned.
If you know despair or can see it in others.
I want to know if you are prepared to live in the world
with its harsh need to change you.
If you can look back with firm eyes saying this is where I stand.
I want to know if you know how to melt into that fierce heat of living
falling toward the center of your longing.
I want to know if you are willing to live, day by day,
with the consequence of love
and the bitter unwanted passion of your sure defeat [in death].
I have been told, in that fierce embrace, even
the gods speak of God.
And even the soul-less speak of soul. No, my mission, like that of this church, isn’t to convince or convert you, but to invite
you -- to live in the deeper questions of the soul. For what is required of us is not speculative beliefs, but real, soulful human
living — serving justice, loving mercy, walking humbly on this earth with others of differing cultural and experiential
backgrounds.
We do have a mission, however, you and I. If I ever doubted that I was reminded of it quite dramatically on a trip to India,
three years ago, after the devastating earthquake in Gujarat, and I had gone to bring material aid and spiritual support to the
human rights groups there we partner with through the Unitarian Universalist Holdeen India Program. At the Bombay airport I
was met by a courageous activist. Vivek won the World Anti-Slavery Award for freeing thousands of poor tribal people from
bonded labor.
Emerging from customs, he welcomed me warmly. But within minutes we were surrounded by a menacing crowd, including
policemen, asking angry questions. India, you may know, is now ruled by the Hindu equivalent of the Christian Coalition, and
they not only scapegoat Muslims and poor minorities, but despise Western "missionaries." Shouting in the local language, they
were demanding to know if I was a missionary. Soon my friend began yelling back: "Yes! Yes! He is a missionary! But you
have not asked what his mission is! His mission is human rights! His mission is justice for the poor! His mission is democracy!
Not conversions! Now, tell us, if you dare, what is your mission?" And before what Gandhi would have called the ‘soul force’ of
this man, the hostile mob simply melted away.
"Life," said the great Unitarian minister A. Powell Davies, "is just a chance to grow a soul." And the older I have become,
even the more I’ve sensed the body to be frail, the more I have become aware that our mission, yours and mine, must
emerge from the soul and be aimed at the soul -- to help others, and indeed the whole of society, to grow in soul; to grow in
the capacity to transcend mere self-interest.
When I was first considering becoming a minister, I’m not sure I understood that. In fact, I couldn’t quite figure out why
people even came to church, week after week. Was it just conformity? Social habit? So I asked the most faithful churchgoer I
knew — my own grandmother.
"Why I go to church?" she replied. "Oh, Janni, you will learn, if you don’t already know: sometimes soul get very empty;
faith small, like mustard seed." I knew enough about her life to have some hint of what she meant. Born in Eastern Europe,
she had been orphaned there at the age of ten. At fifteen she came through Ellis Island all alone, with only an older married
sister to meet her once she got to Chicago. There she met and married another Slovak immigrant, my grandfather, who had
also been orphaned, and began a family. But by the end of the influenza epidemic that followed World War I, they had buried
their first four children. Soul get very empty indeed.
That’s when my grandfather stopped going to church. When the priest wouldn’t come to the house to give his wife last rites
, when it seemed she was dying too. Then during the Depression, when he lost his factory job, and there were three more
children to feed, they had to leave their home, and tried scratching out a living on a spinach farm in Texas for two years that
were so hard my mother still can’t talk about.
"I go to church," said my grandma, "and in my soul I know I have to be grateful, just to be still alive. I am there with
other people. I pray with them and for them. I know many of them have sorrows just as real as mine. So my thoughts go
wider, deeper, higher. Faith comes back. Sometimes," she said to me, "does not even matter if the priest’s sermon is not so
very good! I pray for you, and for your cousins, for all young people, and hope comes back. I pray for your grandfather,
because is no good in life to stay bitter, and I think how to show him, not just by words, what love is. Then I go home and get
him to join me in doing something nice for a child, a friend. That’s why I go to church."
And I ask you, my friends, isn’t that why we are all here? My grandmother knew implicitly what I now am free to preach
more explicitly. That faith is not a matter of believing some ancient assertion in spite of the evidence. It is more like living with
courage and integrity in spite of life’s inevitable challenges, losses, and temptations to despair. And hope is not a matter of
believing that everything will turn out all right. It is more like aiming one’s life toward a point on the horizon beyond which none
of us can see, but toward which we know we had better move, together, if there is going to be a worthwhile future for our
children and our children’s children. And love is no mere Hallmark greeting card sentiment, is it? It is more like living in the
here-and-now, serving the social form of love known as justice, practicing compassion, and walking humbly on this earth, in
the time that is ours, with others, before a mystery that transcends us all.
It’s like living with soul.
This is our calling, yours and mine: to tend and serve the fragile flame in all our souls, until they burn with the steady flame of
mission — to heal the soul of democracy and the soul of our world.
Amen.
Benediction:
*Closing circle of hands: (Holding hands or link arms as you read the closing words together)
Extinguish Chalice:
*Hymn:
Lighting the Chalice:
Let this flame symbolize the divine spark of light
embedded in all living beings.
In the quietness of this place and in the Spirit of this Community in which we share and find strength let us pray. Prayer cannot bring water to parched land, not stop a roaring flood, nor mend a broken bridge, nor rebuild a ruined city, but prayer can water an arid soul, change the tide toward,
righteousness mend a broken heart and rebuild a weaken will. Let us pray.
We invite you to share your joys and concerns since our last meeting
Story for All Ages: (the children go to Religious Education at the end of the story and the adults sing "Spitit of Life" )
# 123 (STLT)
"Spirit of Life" by Carolyn McDade (adapted)
Spirit of Life, come unto us,
Sing in our hearts all the stirrings of compassion.
Blow in the wind, rise in the sea;
Move in our hands, giving life the shape of justice.
Roots hold us close; wings set us free;
Spirit of Life, come to us, come to me.
Some beliefs are like walled gardens. the encourage exclusiveness, and the feeling of being especially privileged.
Other beliefs are expansive and lead the way into wider and deeper sympathies.
Some beliefs are like shadows,cloouding children's days with fears of unknown calamities.
Other beliefs are like sunshine, blessing children with the warmthe of happiness.
Some beliefs are divisive, separating the saved from the unsaved, friends from enemies.
Other beliefs are bonds in a world community, where sincere differences beautify the pattern.
Some beliefs are like blinders, shutting off the power to choose your own direction.
Other beliefs are like gateways opening wide vistas for exploration.
Some beliefs weaken the selfhood of a person. They blight the growth of resourcefulness.
Other beliefs nuture self confidence and enrich the feeling of personal worth.
Some veliefs are rigid, like the body of death, impotent in a changing world
Other beliefs are pliable, like the young sapling, ever groeing with the upward thrust of life.
"What is REAL?" asks the Rabbit in Margery William's children’s classic.
If, here, you have found freedom, take it with you into the world. If you have found comfort, go and share it with others. If you have dreamed dreams, help one another, that they may come true! If you have known love, give some back to a bruised and hurting world. Go in peace.
And now we extinguish our chalice but not:
The warmth of community,
The light of hope, hope for change that brings new blessings into our lives and the lives of those around us continues to burn brightly, we carry hope in our hearts until we are together again. The spirit of gratitude,
Or
The fire of commitment and shared compassion of this community.
Go now in Peace
Go now in Peace, Go now in Peace,
May the Love of God surround you
Everywhere, everywhere, You may go
