First Unitarian Congregational Society Brooklyn » Patrick O’Neill

Pride and Prejudice in the Multi-Ethnic Society

Rev. Patrick ONeill — Sun, 13 Mar 2011 16:59:46 +0000

I was born 64 years ago today – just yesterday, really. I was born only about seven or eight miles from here – or about six stops away on the A Train, as New Yorkers like to measure distance, on the West Side of Manhattan. Legends and stories about my birth quickly spread, as you might imagine. My mother used to say that I was an Irish Catholic baby delivered in a Lutheran Hospital by a Jewish obstetrician. “I should have guessed then that you’d grow up to be a Unitarian minister,” my father would later say.
I was born the seventh and last child of an Irish immigrant household consisting of my parents, Bill and Betty O’Neill, both of whom immigrated to America in the 1920’s; my paternal Grandmother, Katie O’Neill; and my siblings, John, Harry, Mary, Margaret, Catherine, Nora, and myself.
One story has it that my mother and my grandmother had a rather vehement argument on the day I was born about what I should be named. They were told to expect my arrival on March 17, St. Patrick’s Day, which pretty much pre-determined what a boy named O’Neill would be named. But then they were told to expect me closer to March 7th, which I’m sure you all know, on the Catholic liturgical calendar is the feastday of St. Thomas Aquinas, the great medieval theologian. When I arrived in between on the 13th, my mother thought I should therefore be named Patrick Thomas. But my Grandmother, however, warned that this would be a terrible burden for an immigrant boy born in America. “Call him Thomas Patrick,” my Granny argued. “The name O’Neill will be hard enough for him to overcome; don’t make it harder for him by calling him Paddy.” She said this to my mother in Gaelic. My mother answered her (in English) “If the name is good enough for the patron saint of all Ireland, it’s good enough for my boy.”
And that is how I came to be Patrick Thomas Aquinas O’Neill, and not Tip O’Neill like that fellow up in Boston.
Lest you begin to think that my Grandmother was not proud of her Irish heritage, let me assure you she was, immensely so. But like millions of immigrants to this country before her and after her, my grandmother’s vision and dream for her family is that they would become thoroughly “Americanized” as quickly as possible; this, in order to make possible their fullest participation in what used to be understood as “the American Dream.”
For my parents and my grandmother this pursuit of the American Dream was their singular vision from the day they sailed past the Statue of Liberty into New York harbor. America was the dream for them, the land of opportunity where their children and grandchildren would have no limits to where their own talents and education and ambitions might call them. It sounds corny to us today from our comfortable privileged cynical place in an America where such notions seem a hundred years out of date – if you are lucky enough yourself to be of a generation and an economic class that has never known deprivation or class discrimination or racial oppression or social exclusion. If your own family is now far enough removed from the immigrant experience that you can barely relate to what poor working-class people have been willing to endure and sacrifice in order to provide their children and their grandchildren with a better life – if your own experience has never included the first-hand encounter with hatred and bigotry because of the mere color of your skin or the faintest accent of your family’s native language or the religious background of your family’s heritage – if you really cannot imagine the insult to one’s soul that comes with ethnic slurs or stereotyping of any kind – then my sermon today may hold very little for you.
But if you feel as I do, that our great national experiment called America may currently be in need of some reclamation of what I was taught were the basic values that made this nation exceptional in its vision and extraordinary in its potential, if you feel uncomfortable, as I am uncomfortable watching the entire religion of Islam now come under Peter King’s Congressional inquiry for the actions of an extremist few – if you are made uncomfortable, as I am uncomfortable with the passage of state laws like Arizona’s where any person who even looks to be Hispanic can be stopped by police and required to produce proof of citizenship – if that feels just a bit more like Apartheid South Africa than like the United States of America to you – then maybe you can understand why I feel compelled to speak to this today.
You see, this is my St. Patrick’s Day sermon today. I write this sermon today for my grandmother, Katie O’Neill of County West Meath, Ireland, who spent more than a few years teaching me about pride and prejudice in a multi-ethnic society and how to distinguish between them. She showed us by personal example how to carry oneself with dignity and pride, and she taught us by personal example to respect the pride of others. But looking back now I appreciate most of all my grandmother’s profound understanding of the fine balances required for a multi-ethnic society to succeed. She understood, it seems to me, in a way that we don’t hear being voiced by enough of our leaders today – by enough of our Congressmen and Senators, by enough of our Governors or by our Supreme Court – my grandmother understood, she got it, that the whole sacred experiment of a multi-ethnic nation can’t work unless it is grounded in that most demanding and difficult of human virtues, namely, Tolerance.
I remember when I was still a pre-schooler walking with my Granny down Amsterdam Avenue to the market, and Granny would play a game with me, to see how many different languages we could hear along those few blocks. “That’s Spanish, Patrick. That’s Yiddish. There’s German. And that’s Italian there. Isn’t New York great, boyo…” She herself spoke with a brogue you could cut with a knife, but the truth is I could never hear my grandmother’s accent. And I could never hear my parents’ accents either. When I was in first grade I got into a schoolyard scuffle one day and came home with a bloody nose. ‘What happened,?” my Granny asked. “That boy said you talked funny, Granny,” I explained. She laughed and said, “Darlin Boy, but I do talk funny!”
Do you know that according to the 2010 Census there are now altogether more than 300 languages spoken in the United States. 300! Do you know that the New York City school system offers classroom instruction in 115 different languages today? One-third of all the children in urban schools across America today speak a language other than English at home. The state of Massachusetts offers drivers license tests in 24 languages. In California voting ballots are offered in six different languages. We are one nation in law and in definition, but we have always spoken in many different tongues. It is only one way in which we are a diverse society.
The term ethnic is derived from the Greek word ethnos, normally translated as “nation”. The term refers currently to people thought to have common ancestry who share a distinctive culture.
An ethnic group (or ethnicity) is a group of people whose members identify with each other, through a common heritage, often consisting of a common language, a common culture often including a shared religion and an ideology that stresses common ancestry and connected with a specific geographical area, with common traditions, including food preferences.
We ought to be clear that “Ethnicity” and “Race” are completely different categories altogether. It is primarily because of our country’s sad history of importing and later having to painfully excise the practice of African slavery that the artificial category of “race” ever became a hallmark of American self-understanding. Nor is the term “ethnic” exactly synonymous with “nationality.” Nation states in many parts of the world are lines drawn on a map for purely political purposes, often throwing in together ethnic groups that have never traditionally gotten along as neighbors, let alone as countrymen. Witness the terrible “ethnic cleansing” warfare in modern Serbia and Bosnia and the former Yugoslavia. Witness the ethnic warfare between Sunni and Shiite tribes in the Middle East, or the Hutu and Tutsi tribal warfare in Rwanda. Not to mention the most horrifying ethnic holocaust of all in Third Reich Germany, when millions of people were slaughtered simply because of their Jewish heritage.
Near the end of her life in 1977, the anthropologist Margaret Mead was asked in an interview, “If we human beings are truly social animals, why do we seem to have such a difficult time getting along with one another in this world? Why so many wars, why so much hostility and aggression and intolerance among people?”
Mead’s answer was very enlightening. “99% of the time humans have lived on the planet,” she said, “we’ve lived in groups of 12 to 36 people. That is to say, we’ve lived in small groups of people probably related to us; people who looked just like us, thought like us, ate and behaved like us, worshipped like us. We simply never needed to learn how to tolerate anyone who was different from us. But in the last 300 years, the population of the world rocketed from 500 million to 4 billion. We simply haven’t had enough time,” said Margaret Mead, “to learn how to get along in such a crowd of strangers.”
Since Mead gave that interview in 1977, by the way, the world population has grown by roughly another 2 billion or so. There are about 6-to-7 billion people on earth in 2011. The world is not getting any roomier, and we do not seem as a species to be growing any more adept at getting along with each other. According to World Almanac, at any given moment, there are some 72 different armed conflicts, civil wars, and/or international aggressions going on between major groups of people somewhere in the world.
In our own country today we are engaged in an endless cultural conversation about the challenges and problems we face in learning to adapt to a “Multicultural” and “Multi-ethnic” society. “Diversity” is a watchword now in virtually every aspect of American life. New realities are upon us, and learning to get along with groups of people who are quite different from ourselves is no longer optional. Shifting population within our country, as well as the international linkage of economic destinies, world trade, and an Internet globe where information is massively and instantaneously accessible – all these factors are at work making this world in our lifetime a place of startling interaction and breathtaking possibility.
The problem is we no longer have the luxury of time – in the evolutionary sense that an anthropologist like Margaret Mead referred to – to perfect the behavioral virtues required for graceful coexistence in such a brave new world.
In evolutionary terms, we are still challenged to act kindly and trustingly toward anyone beyond our own family campfire. And here we are suddenly at a point in history when our sheer numbers on the earth and our accelerated technology now throw whole cultures up against each other for better or worse. And the irony – and the tragedy – is that these social animals called humans are still learning how to get along with each other, how to tolerate each other’s mere presence in the world.
I realize that my Irish American family had many advantages compared to many other ethnic groups in America. Having Patrick for a first name was never really a disadvantage, as my grandmother worried it might be. We got Americanized right enough, my family at least. Accept for their having brogues, my family at least understood English as their primary language. My grandmother stopped using Gaelic in America and did not teach it to her grandchildren. And as fair-skinned Caucasians, we at least did not suffer the indignities of racial discrimination. As Catholics we fitted in with mainstream Christian culture in America. And as members of one of the largest ethnic immigrant groups in America we soon enough had sufficient numbers in the general population to control political power in major American cities and eventually see an Irish American elected president.
Oh, I will admit there have been times when I’ve not been proud to be Irish. When I was younger I was embarrassed by the stereotypes of the Irish as drunkards, for example. I was ashamed of the terrorist bombings carried out by the IRA in the name of British political oppression. I was embarrassed by the hatred in the faces of South Boston Irish during the school integration busing crisis in the 1960’s. I was embarrassed by Mayor Daley’s public disrespect of Martin Luther King in Chicago. I was ashamed of the history of the Irish riots in New York City lynching blacks in the 1860’s. But there was much more that I was proud of about being Irish and proud of Irish contributions to American society and to the world. And most immediately, I’m proud of the family I come from. I come from a loving home, great parents, a wonderful grandmother, the best brothers and sisters. Whatever I know about faith and hope and charity and tolerance, I learned first from them.
The American Dream did come true for more and more Irish, as the sons and daughters of laborers and longshoremen like my dad became college educated and entered into the middle-class as teachers, lawyers, social workers, nurses and artists. Other groups in America have had a much harder route to endure, with more violent oppression and bigotry continually poured down upon them. Racism is still the most corrosive social cancer of all, the one America has never and may never successfully eradicate.
Here is the point I am conscious of on my 64th birthday as another St. Patrick’s Day parade is about to form up on Fifth Avenue. Being an American is the most privileged position anyone in the world can occupy in this time of history, and I’m grateful that my parents made sure their children had this privilege. I’ll honor them this week by being proud of my ethnic heritage and proud of my name. But I’ll honor them most directly by always trying to promote the kind of tolerance that they themselves dreamed for their children when they came here ninety years ago. May you be proud of your heritage as well.
Happy St Paddy’s day to you!

If You Meet the Buddha on the Road

Rev. Patrick ONeill — Sun, 13 Feb 2011 18:07:27 +0000

At the time of the account, 2,500 years ago, it was excitedly whispered from town to town across the Ganges Plain of India when the Buddha was coming. It was considered a marvel to see an Awakened One and hear his teachings.
“More marvelous,” writes one scholar (Jack Kornfield), “his ancient and wise understanding has lasted and is still with us. We now have the teachings of the Buddha translated into nearly every language, and in the past generation they have spread throughout the world. Today there are hundreds of thousands of Buddhist monks and nuns, and hundreds of millions follow this path of awakening. The teachings of compassion and generosity, of quieting the mind and opening the heart are as relevant today as they were in the community around the Buddha…. They illuminate the universal questions of human suffering and find our own Buddha nature in response.” (Jack Kornfield in Before He Was the Buddha: The Life of Siddhartha, by Hammalawa Saddhatissa, Seastone Press, Berkeley, 1998.)
His story, such as we know it and such as scholars have pieced together from ancient writings and from the legend of the centuries, is that one night toward the end of the sixth century before the birth of Christ, a young man called Siddartha Gotama walked out of his comfortable home in the foothills of the Himalayas and took to the road. We are told he was twenty-nine years old, though we have absolutely no historical basis for any of the facts of his life. He lived and died a full century before any writing of his life was recorded. And as with the legend of so many other holy men and prophets in history, his life story is embedded with legend and tales of miraculous happenings meant to illustrate his unique standing as a human incarnation of divine enlightenment.
At the time of his birth, holy men and seers were said to recognize this baby as the “perfect one, the greatest human being ever born.” As a child growing up, his complexion was said to “shine as golden metal, his eyes a radiant blue, his intelligence and athletic ability causing him to stand out above all other children.” His mother died while Gotama was still an infant, and his father, shaken by the prophecies of the seers concerning his gifted son, protected the boy throughout his growing years, keeping him confined within the idyllic setting of his palace, where the child would never be touched by the harsh realities of the outer world. So long as he was innocent of knowing about the real world, Gotama was content to live the life his father had chosen for him. He married a princess who had been chosen for him, and they had a young son.
But eventually there came the day when, restless, the young prince ventured forth from the palace and saw four sights that forever changed his consciousness. He saw for the first time the realities of old age, sickness, death, and enlightenment – the first three being the universal and inescapable lot of all living creatures, and the fourth condition, enlightenment, being a vision of human possibility that was attainable by all those who were willing to pursue it through practice and discipline.
Gotama left his wife and a son only a few days old, and renouncing all his worldly goods and possessions, and donning the yellow robes of a monk, he took up the life of an itinerant ascetic. Dependent on the alms and charity of others, he would wander the countryside as a teacher and holy man. For the first six years of his wandering, Gotama engaged the rigorous practices of extreme fasting and meditation to a point where he nearly died. And finally came the day, when sitting under the Bodhi tree and facing the East, Gotama began the great seven-day trance from which he was said to emerge as a Fully Enlightened One, a Buddha. He was thirty-five years old when he attracted his first followers. His ministry as a teacher would last more than forty years.
Princeton scholar Karen Armstrong, who published a wonderful study of Buddha’s life (Buddha. Viking Penguin Books, New York 2001) explains how Buddhism emerged during an amazing historical era called the “Axial Age,” which extended from about 800 to 200 years before Christ. During this period of time, for whatever reasons, she writes, “an impressive array of prophetic and philosophical geniuses” addressed the human condition and offered unique insights that changed the course of history and have continued down to our time. “Gotama would become one of the most important and most typical of the luminaries of the Axial Age, alongside the great Hebrew prophets of the eighth, seventh, and sixth centuries; Confucius and Lao Tzu, who reformed the religious traditions of China in the sixth and fifth centuries B.C., the sixth-century Iranian sage Zoroaster; and Socrates and Plato in the third century BC, who urged the Greeks to question even those truths that appeared to be self-evident.” (Armstrong, p.11)
“The Axial Age marks the beginning of humanity as we know it,” says Karen Armstrong. “During this period,” she says, “men and women became conscious of their existence, their nature, and their limitations in an unprecedented way. Their experience of utter impotence in a cruel world impelled them to seek the highest goals and an absolute reality in the depths of their being. The great sages of the time taught human beings how to cope with the misery of life, transcend their weakness and live in peace in the midst of this flawed world. The new religious systems that emerged during this period – Taoism and Confucianism in China, Buddhism and Hinduism in India, monotheism in Iran and the Middle East, and Greek rationalism in Europe – all shared fundamental characteristics beneath their obvious differences.
Thus, during this one era spanning only a few centuries, the Chinese, Iranians, Indians, Jews, and Greeks all experienced new religious horizons and embarked on a quest for enlightenment and salvation. It was a general movement forward from the ancient age of magical religion to an age of ethical religion. “In the Axial countries,” Karen Armstrong says, “a few great teachers sensed fresh possibilities and broke away from the old traditions. They sought change in the deepest reaches of their beings, looked for greater inwardness in their spiritual lives, and tried to become one with a reality that transcended normal mundane conditions and categories.” (Armstrong, p.12)
The basis of the Buddha’s philosophy is the Four Noble Truths. The First Noble Truth is that life is full of suffering because of illness, aging, discontent, and the awareness of death. Second, the cause of this suffering is desire, or attachment to the world in such a way as to become liable to suffering – i.e. desire for sensual pleasure, desire to go on living, etc. Buddha’s Third Noble Truth is that therefore, the way to eliminate suffering is to eliminate desire. The Fourth Noble Truth reveals the way to achieve this removal of desire: Buddha called it the Middle Path.
The Middle Path, Buddha explained, is the avoidance of the two extremes of self-indulgence on the one hand, and self-mortification on the other. The Middle Path is an eight-fold path of Right Understanding – seeing life as it is, Right Thought – a pure mind, Right Speech – speaking in a truthful, kindly, tolerant manner; Right Action – charity and kindness in all things; Right Livelihood – earning your living in a way that does not conflict with the conduct of your life; Right Effort – fostering noble qualities of generosity, wisdom, and patience; Right Mindfulness – developing awareness of what is highest and most important; and Right Concentration – the practice of meditation that leads to a full understanding of the impermanence of things. This meditation requires discipline and training.
The Buddha taught very clearly that this eight-fold path, the great Middle Path, was available and attainable for all who would practice it. It is the practice, the journey itself and not the destination, that is the heart of his teaching. It is in the practice of the Middle Path that individuals attain the fullness of being, the state of Awakeness or “Buddhahood” that frees the human personality from being mired in suffering. The Buddha never professed belief in a great overarching Divinity and never preached the existence of the human soul. And therefore it is questionable whether Buddhism should properly be considered a religion in the formal sense at all. Nor is it strictly speaking an organized philosophy of life.
The Buddha abhorred such categories themselves as being diversions from the path to individual enlightenment. Nor did he ever claim for himself any status of divinity, just the opposite. He preached avoidance of any cult of personality, especially the kind of divinization that arose around such prophets as Jesus in Christianity. No authority, he taught, should be revered, however august. Buddhists must motivate themselves and rely on their own efforts, not on a charismatic leader. One ninth-century Zen Master went so far as to command his disciples, “If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him!” to emphasize the importance of maintaining this independence from authority figures. Karen Armstrong says that “Gotama might not have approved of the violence of this statement, but throughout his life he fought against the cult of personality, and endlessly deflected the attention of his followers from himself. It was not his life and personality but his teaching that was important. He believed that he had woken up to a truth – a dharma – that was inscribed in the deepest structure of existence.
Buddhism, as one scholar puts it, is not for those who like to be told how to order their lives, who look constantly for guidance to an outside authority; whether in the form of priest, scripture, or ritual. Throughout the Buddha’s teaching, along with his insistence on balance and common sense, there is an implied obligation on each individual to think things for oneself, for each to make up his or her own mind and own moral decisions. We are each ultimately responsible for our own karma, our own salvation. I suppose this the reason Buddhist teachings have a fair amount of appeal to Unitarian Universalist sensibility. Many UU’s have found in Buddhist practice and meditation a method of access to the inner life that honors their individuality and encourages their search for inner peace and meaning. It is a rich pathway for the sincere searcher. A pathway worthy of your exploration.

An Introductory Bibliography on Buddhism and Buddhist Practice
By Patrick T. O’Neill

Armstrong, Karen. Buddha. Lipper/Viking/Penguin. New York. 2001. The definitive biographical treatment of Buddha by a Princeton scholar.
Batchelor, Stephen. Buddhism Without Beliefs: A Contemporary Guide to Awakening. Riverhead Books, New York. 1997.
Epstein, Mark. Going On Being: Buddhism and the Way of Change. Broadway Books, New York. 2001. The interaction of Buddhism and psychotherapy.
Kornfield, Jack ed. Teachings of the Buddha. Barnes and Noble Books, New York. 1993. See other titles by Buddhist monk and teacher Jack Kornfield.
McCleod, Ken. Wake Up to Your Life: Discovering the Buddhist Path of Attention. HarperSanFrancisco, 2001. (A good introduction to Buddhist practice.)
Mizuno, Kogen. Basic Buddhist Concepts. Kosei Publishing paperback,
Tokyo, 1999
Pauling, Chris. Introducing Buddhism. Windhorse Publications paperback, Birmingham, England. 1999 edition.
The Pocket Buddha Reader edited by Anne Bancroft. Shambala Press, Boston, 2001. Contains texts from Pali Canon of Buddha’s writings.
Ruhala, Walpola. What the Buddha Taught. Grove Press paperback, New York, 1974.
Saddhatissa, Hammalawa. Before He Was Buddha: The Life of Siddartha. Seastone Press paperback, Berkeley, CA. 2000.
Thich Nhat Hahn. Living Buddha, Living Christ. Riverhead Books paperback, New York1995. (See also many other titles by Thich Nhat Hahn on Buddhism.)
Willis, Jan. Dreaming Me: An African-American Woman’s Spiritual Journey. Riverhead Books, New York, 2001. (An African-American woman’s Tibetan Buddhist journey by a professor of religion at Wesleyan University. Interesting!)

In Between Memory and Hope

Rev. Patrick ONeill — Sun, 06 Feb 2011 18:10:11 +0000

This morning, as we do every Sunday morning at the beginning of our worship service, we lit three candles. The Candle of Memory, the Candle of Hope, and the Candle of our Flaming Chalice. In our beloved community of faith that now extends back one hundred and seventy-nine years here in Brooklyn, we hold dear the heritage of the generations that precede us in these pews. And we take seriously the legacy of Free Faith that we in turn pass along to those who will come after us.
Somewhere here – in between Memory and Hope, you might say – you and I together represent the present reality of First Unitarian. By that I mean that whatever this congregation has been in years past, in generations past, whatever fine people have lived here before us, whatever good folks have occupied these pews and this pulpit in years gone by, we here today – you and I – are the only First Unitarian congregation that exists today. However wonderful the memories that live in this place and which comprise our legacy as a congregation, it is now completely in our hands- yours and mine – to have and to hold. We are Unitarian Universalism in Brooklyn, precious as it might be, fragile and imperfect as it might be as a faith and as a community, whatever we dream of this faith becoming for our children and for all those who will follow us here, we are the temporary keepers of this small albeit proud legacy. That’s what the Candle of Memory is lit to remind us every Sunday.
And the Candle of Hope is our symbol of the responsibility that the current members of this congregation feel towards all those who are only now or yet to find here a community where their personal faith can someday blossom. The Candle of Hope is to remind us every week that you and I are placeholders for some wonderful people that we have yet to meet, but who are all the future leaders and members who will inherit this church from us. Do you ever think of it that way? I do. I love the notion that right now there are a couple of young parents somewhere near here, with one or two pre-schoolers to raise, who are looking for just this kind of church for their family, and some Sunday soon they’re going walk in here on a Sunday morning not knowing what to expect, and they’re going to find here a church they love, that will become part of their family life for the next twenty years. I love that idea.
I love the notion that maybe next Sunday or the Sunday after, or maybe even today, someone is going to come to worship here who is a future President of the Board of this church. They don’t know it yet, but coming to worship here may turn out to be one of their most life-changing decisions they ever make. They may not even believe that a church like this exists anywhere – a church where their freedom to believe, and their freedom to think religiously for themselves, where their freedom to doubt and to question and to explore religious ideas for themselves is honored and encouraged; a church where their children will be taught tolerance and respect for other traditions; a church where individual difference is expected not merely tolerated; a church that holds we need not think alike to love alike. I love the notion that the newcomer you welcome to church this morning or next Sunday might walk in these doors feeling like an exile or a orphan from the tradition in which they were raised, and they just may be overwhelmed to discover that we’ve been keeping a space just for them, because so many of us here today know exactly how they feel because for so many of us here their story is our story too.
The young professionals who have just moved to New York and are trying to establish themselves in a city far from their family home and their friends, and who come to church of a Sunday morning looking for something like community, something like grounding, something to touch their spirit a little.
The Gay or Lesbian couple that has become wary of churches where they have felt isolated for so long, and who have heard somewhere from someone that the Unitarian Universalists really seem to mean it when they talk about “standing on the side of love,” for everyone, and they walk in our doors still a little skeptical because their church experience to date hasn’t exactly filled them with trust. I love the notion that First Unitarian has been getting ready for one hundred and seventy-eight years to welcome them into this room and into this fellowship of free faith.
I love that the congregation calls both these notions of the beloved Community of Memory and the Community of Hope to mind every Sunday in our worship. It means, of course, that we are mindful of the place where we reside in the history of the congregation. We live here, in between Memory and Hope. We live here, in the Present, you and I.
This is a wonderful place. But I would remind us that it isn’t so much what we find here on Sunday, as what we bring here every day of the week that makes this place special. Surely, I don’t need to tell you that First Unitarian will continue to be a vibrant community only as long as we here in the present are willing to contribute our gifts and resources to help it thrive.
This is the Sunday of the year – the one Sunday of the year, to be precise – when we ask each of you to consider making a financial commitment of support to the church for the coming year. It’s a fairly straightforward proposition we bring to you this morning, and one which we certainly want to present to you in a straightforward and no-nonsense kind of way. This church is completely self-sustaining, dependent entirely on the contributions of its members and friends for its existence and its programs. What this church is able to do and be in the coming year is largely shaped by, and limited only by, the funding and gifts we each contribute.
If First Unitarian is important to you or to your family, if you think Brooklyn is a better place to live for what this congregation means to the community and stands for in this community – if you think what this congregation offers to the education of its children is valuable – if you think what this church offers to senior citizens and elders in the way of community and education and caring in times of crisis –
if you feel that the quality of pastoral care provided in this church is worthwhile – if you are enriched and nourished and challenged by the weekly worship life of this church – if ever you have had your afflictions comforted here and your comforts afflicted here – if you appreciate the aesthetic beauty and quality of the music programs of this church – if you enjoy the social life of this circle of friends – then you have more than enough reason to support this church generously and gladly.
And if you feel, as I do, that there is so much more that we can do and create together in the coming years, then you understand why I do not hesitate to ask you to make every effort to increase your support over last year’s gift.
The energy level and the activity level in the church is high. Our average attendance is higher than it’s ever been. So the signs of life are good for our congregation. But it is also true that we’ve been hit hard by the economic setbacks of the past couple of years. Our endowment was severely impacted, and you know that we’ve had to pare our operating budget to the bone, and still we face another round of budget reduction and possible staff reductions yet again this year. And this is in spite of the fact that our level of annual pledges has gone up both years. But we are paying for endowment problems going back years. And so we must come back to you to help see us through a difficult year ahead.
I say to you in all sincerity, if your financial pledge to the church has been level for a couple of years now, and that is best you can do for your congregation, I thank you most sincerely. We have no church without you. But I tell you this in all honesty: to the extent that you can see your way to increasing your personal pledge this year, it would be a very effective and symbolic year for you to do so.
Here is what we know, this house of Memory and Hope is a gift from those common people who love it and who work for it and who support it as they are able. It is the love of its congregation that ultimately sanctifies any church or temple or meetinghouse and makes of it a sanctuary, a holy place, a place which transcends time.
First Unitarian, finally, is nothing more than its people and what we all of us bring to it: our faith, our vision, our collective hopes and dreams, our memories and our customs, our history, our prayers, our good works, and our values. And what community we are able to create here for ourselves is always pieced together with painstaking love and unending patience, each one of us adding our gifts to the whole.
Thank you for the gifts you continue to bring here!

Emerson’s Refulgent Religion

Rev. Patrick ONeill — Sun, 30 Jan 2011 20:29:37 +0000

Occasionally, I like to highlight from the pulpit some of the great figures and leaders from Unitarian Universalist history who by their ministry or by their writing or by their individual examples and witness helped to shape our liberal faith and bring it where it is today. This morning I want to tell about one of the true giants of American Unitarian thought, Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Bard of Concord.”
It would be difficult indeed to overstate the importance of Emerson’s place in the history of Unitarianism.
“In a religious association distinguished by so many prominent leaders, thinkers and reformers in American history, Emerson’s legacy to Unitarian Universalism is unparalleled. Even today, two hundred years after his birth, Emerson is the most widely recognized and revered figure in our movement and continues to attract many to our congregations.
Through his career as minister, lecturer, writer, reformer and public citizen, Emerson was instrumental in shaping both American culture and Unitarian Universalist theology.” (Emerson Bicentennial Committee, 2003)
One biographer, Frank Schulman, says of Emerson that
“He made everyone feel taller. A washer woman who always attended his lectures at Faneuil Hall was asked by a reporter if she understood Mr. Emerson’s elegant prose. ‘Not a word.’ She replied. ‘But I love to see him standing up there thinking everyone else is just as good as he is. He makes us feel at home with greatness, does Mr. Emerson.’”
Emerson’s moment as the dominant Unitarian thinker of his day arrived as he rose to deliver what came to be known as the Divinity School Address of 1838.
“In this refulgent summer,” it begins, “it has been a luxury to draw the breath of life. The grass grows, the buds burst, the meadow is spotted with fire and gold in the tint of flowers.”
With these lovely words, flowing in the sometimes purple prose of nineteenth century New England, one of the undisputed masters of the language, Ralph Waldo Emerson, began one of the most important sermons in the history of American Unitarianism.
These words were delivered in the tiny chapel of Divinity Hall at Harvard College in Cambridge. The chapel seated scarcely more than three score of people, and on that particular day, Sunday afternoon, July 15th, 1838, the chapel was filled to overflowing. The occasion was the commencement ceremony for the graduating class of Harvard Divinity School, and besides the six graduating student ministers, there was present that day a virtual Who’s Who of American Unitarianism in New England.
The entire faculty of the Divinity School was there, of course: all of them Unitarians, the intellectual flower of American liberal Protestantism. Henry Ware, Jr. was there, who held the Chair in New Testament Studies. Andrews Norton was there, Dexter Professor Emeritus of Sacred Literature at Harvard, who had been a central character in the Unitarian revolution at the Divinity School in the 1820′s. The Reverend Theodore Parker of Boston was there, only two years out of Harvard himself, and not yet become the most famous Unitarian preacher in the country.
Elizabeth Peabody of Concord was there, too. She was one of the most prominent educators in New England, an early leader of the kindergarten movement in this country; she was also a writer and publisher of Dial magazine, the voice of the Transcendentalist Movement. She was a family friend of Emerson, and personal secretary for many years to William Ellery Channing, the Father of American Unitarianism. Edward Everett Hale and his sister Sarah of Worcester arrived late to the ceremony, and had to take chairs out in the hallway of the chapel. Mr. Hale would later write that he was appalled by what Emerson said that day.
As we sit here in a Unitarian Universalist church in Brooklyn one hundred and seventy-three years later, it may be a bit difficult for us to appreciate fully what that kind of occasion meant, in general, to the budding Unitarian movement of the day, and what this particular sermon would eventually signal and symbolize for the development of our liberal brand of religion. In fact, our Unitarian congregation here in Brooklyn was only five years established when Emerson gave the Divinity School Address, and this congregation and its minister at the time was much too conservative to have approved of Emerson’s words that day. Ours was still in practice one of the old-school Channing Christian Unitarian churches, and Emerson was in the beginning of his career as an evangelist of Transcendentalism, a school of religious thought that would eventually revolutionize the entire Unitarian denomination, including our congregation here. But in 1838, that was a revolution not yet arrived.
I smile to think that Plymouth Church just a few blocks away from here proudly displays a plaque commemorating the occasion when Ralph Waldo Emerson spoke from their pulpit. Ironically, our own pulpit would never invite Emerson to speak here, so radically was he regarded by Brooklyn Unitarians of his day.
Today, of course, there are over 1100 Unitarian Universalist congregations in North America with upwards of 200,000 members. There are more than 1200 ordained Unitarian Universalist ministers today, and some 500 ministry students in training this year.
But as that small group of people gathered in Divinity Hall at Harvard that summer day in 1838, the American Unitarian Association was only thirteen years old. There were at that time fewer than two hundred Unitarian ministers in the entire country, virtually all of them within a day’s horseride from Harvard Divinity School, which was then the only Unitarian seminary in America. So the occasion of six young men graduating and entering their ministerial careers was a vitally important event for which the elders and leaders of the movement turned out in force.
The graduating members of the Divinity Class of 1838 had asked the Reverend Ralph Waldo Emerson of Concord to deliver the Address to the Graduates. He was a natural choice, the kind of speaker that any graduating class loves to pick. Emerson was already widely known as a brilliant and mesmerizing orator, colorful in language, gifted in the use of imagery and metaphor.
But even more interesting to the graduating class, Mr. Emerson was known to be something of a theological radical, even by Unitarian standards. They expected that he would have something provocative and stirring to say to the assembled high company. Yet, few could have guessed that Emerson’s words that day would literally drive a wedge into the fledgling Unitarian movement and change unalterably the course of Unitarianism forever after.
Ralph Waldo Emerson himself had graduated from Harvard College in 1821 and from the Divinity School in 1826. He accepted a call to the pulpit of Second Church of Boston in 1829, where he served as pastor for a little over two years before he resigned. For the next six years, from 1832 to 1838, Emerson made his living as a supply preacher at various Unitarian churches around Massachusetts, and more and more turned his attention to the lecture platform and to the writing of essays which were widely published and praised.
And although his lecturing career was blossoming, the truth is Emerson was greatly torn over his decision to move away from his calling of ministry. His father, his grandfather, and his wife’s father were all ministers, and from the beginning Emerson seemed to have a love/hate affair with the profession. One of his friends remarked that Emerson loved the idea of ministry, while he hated having to practice it in real life.
It was the pastoral demands of ministry, and the expectations of endless parish calling typical of Emerson’s day that eventually drove him out of ministry. He had become restive and critical of his profession even before he resigned from Second Church. He felt inauthentic and hypocritical distributing communion in his church, knowing that its symbolism meant something much more to his people than he himself could believe. It was easier for his ego to blame the profession and the institutional church for shortcomings than it was for him to accept his own inability to be happy in the ministry.
In truth, what Emerson loved most about ministry was preaching, and he was an extremely harsh critic of colleagues who were not gifted in the pulpit. He wrote in his journal, “…the next best thing to good preaching is bad preaching. I have even more thoughts enduring it than at other times.” Returning from one particularly poor pulpit performance by the pastor at First Parish in Concord one Sunday, he wrote in his journal the now-famous line, “I like the silent church before the service begins more than I like any preaching.”
It is hardly surprising then that Emerson would have some strong things to say to the graduating ministers about the kind of preaching then prevalent in the Unitarian pulpits of New England. He told the graduates that day that “historical Christianity destroys the power of preaching, that tradition characterizes the preaching of this country, that it comes out of books and not out of the soul, that it aims at what is usual and not at what is necessary and eternal.” It was the doctrinal gauntlet that Emerson threw down in the next section of his Address that most disturbed them.
Up to this point in the development of American Unitarianism, the movement had been absolutely identified strictly within the confines of traditional Christianity. With the exception of the doctrine of the Trinity, which most New England Unitarians were only tangentially vague about (like most all other Christians, incidentally, who really don’t begin to understand this mysterious doctrine either) the Unitarians of the day were hardly very radical theologically. Jesus Christ was accepted in most Unitarian churches as the one true Son of God, the divinely appointed Savior of humankind. And while the Unitarians certainly valued reasoned approach to interpreting the Scriptures, the older generation of Unitarians did accept the miracle stories of the New Testament as a sign of Jesus’ divinity.
By 1838, however, a newer, well-educated, and more theologically adventuresome generation of Unitarians was ready to challenge the miracle stories of the New Testament as being unprovable and unnecessary interpretations of Jesus’ life. Furthermore, this new generation of Unitarians did not accept Jesus as necessarily divine, but rather as a prophet of the divine, a model of moral perfection – perhaps the greatest model of selfless love in history – but no more than a model. And moreover, they claimed that God’s revelation of moral principle to humanity did not end with the Bible. It continued in the life of every living creature, in the mind of every thinking person, in the sentiments and conscience of every living human soul.
If these do not sound to us to be very radical propositions (that Jesus is but one model of moral perfection, that revelation did not end with the Bible, and that the natural human conscience is capable of moral decision unaided by divine rule) be assured they were radical indeed in 1838. And every one of these points was in fact hammered home by Emerson in the Divinity School Address.
Most of the young divinity students who heard him that day were enthralled, and most of the faculty and parish ministers present correctly understood that Emerson was giving eloquent voice to a new and powerful doctrine that would take American Unitarianism beyond the boundaries of mere liberal Christianity.
Unitarianism, as Emerson enunciated it that day, called for a religious vision and a religious understanding that included more than just the Christian view. Among those present in that elite and sophisticated Cambridge audience that day were a number who would eventually lead the Transcendentalist Movement of the 1840′s, and that movement forever implanted a Trans-Christian, Universalist, non-creedal, free-thinking tenor to Unitarianism.
In the year following the Divinity School Address, a storm of controversy broke between the old-line Christian Unitarians of Channing’s generation and the New Age Unitarians who looked to Emerson and Parker as their poets and theological champions.
The Transcendentalist circle of Emerson, Parker, Fuller, et al. found truth and wisdom in other traditions besides Christianity, and claimed place for them in our Unitarian reverence. For the first time, our theology reached out to embrace the concept of religious truth found in many places, in many cultures, in many styles.
Unitarian theology began to expand from a strictly Christian base to a more eclectic and inclusive theology in the rich climate of scholarly Boston in the 1830’s, with the flowering of the new Biblical linguistic analysis of the day, and the opening up to Eastern mystical traditions and languages, the poetry of the Upanishads, the meditation disciplines of Hinduism, the publishing of Koranic and Tibetan sacred texts for the first time in America.
It shocked orthodoxy when Unitarians first did this. It still shocks some that we would look anywhere beyond the boundaries of Judeo-Christian tradition and Scripture for inspiration and truth. Historically, Unitarianism did not see itself as rejecting Christian tradition by honoring other theologies. It saw itself as a Trans-Christian tradition, including a reverence for our Christian roots and reaching beyond that to be nurtured and enlightened by the truths of other great faiths, as well.
Interestingly enough, the Divinity School Address marks the end of Emerson’s active personal involvement in the Unitarian movement itself, though his influence would be felt in Unitarian churches for decades.
But the Divinity School Address itself seemed to resolve something for Emerson, and his vocational crisis was finally decided. He gave up preaching formally, and he eventually even resigned his membership in the First Parish in Concord (probably because he just couldn’t stand the sermons anymore) although his wife and children remained faithful Unitarians for their lifetimes, and he continued to pay his church pledge even after he resigned. When he was in the very final years of his life, he did attend church again. He died in Concord in 1882.
Eventually, the Transcendentalist movement, with its mystic and intuitional elements, was itself later replaced in Unitarian outlook by the ascendance of a scientific and critical attitude. But by challenging the Christian orthodoxy of its day, the Transcendentalist movement and its great prime mover, Ralph Waldo Emerson, made this forever after the church of the open mind and the open heart.
When I was a divinity student in preaching class, a friend of mine memorized much of the Divinity School Address for recital in class. However, he misspoke Emerson’s opening sentence in this interesting Freudian way: he said, “In this refulgent religion, it has been a luxury to draw the breath of life.” May ours be ever a religion that is indeed “refulgent”: the word means “blooming, open, full of life.” That is a prayer that Ralph Waldo Emerson would have prayed with gusto.
So be it.

The Differences That Unite Us

Rev. Patrick ONeill — Sun, 23 Jan 2011 20:10:52 +0000

If you grew up in any kind of organized religious community – whether a church or synagogue, mosque or meetinghouse, makes no difference – sooner or later at some point along the way you probably heard your pastor or Sunday school teacher explain the etymology of the word “religion.”
As you may recall, it comes from the Latin word, “religio,” meaning a “tie” or a “binding.” The religious impulse, at its root, refers to a sense of our being bound together, connected, conjoined in a circle of community, a circle of mutual support and love.
It is a positive sense of feeling joined in community, In harsher times and places in history, say, in Colonial America for example, or on the frontier prairies where survival against climate and starvation was dependent on being part of a reliably bound community – to help bring in the harvest or protect against the extremes of nature, – that was a comforting notion. Thus in the words of the old hymns, “Blessed be the ties that bind…” and “Bringing in the Sheaves” – the wheat tied in bundles for harvest.
Unfortunately, all too often in history we have seen organized religion forget the full context of the word’s etymology. And hence, too many churches have forgotten the positive notion of religion as providing a sense of connectedness of the whole human family, and emphasize instead the more constrictive negative notion of “binding” their small circles of believers, – tying them off, literally, – against all non-believers and everyone else outside of their closed off circles.
And so, religion, which at its best ought to invite us to an inclusive and unifying celebration of human connectedness and commonality, too often becomes instead a divisive, exclusionary, and partial distortion of the sacred.
It’s easy to see how it happens. We human beings are quick to notice and articulate all the differences that distinguish “me” from “thee,” “us” from “them,” “our people here” from “those people over there,” “this tribe” from “that tribe,” “the saved from the unsaved.” It was precisely to make these distinctions and define who the “true Believers” are from the “non-Believers” that formal Creeds were invented.
And once that practice was established, once Christian churches, beginning at the Council of Nicaea in 325, decided that membership in the Christian faith could be determined by a willingness to conform oneself to the exact wording of doctrine, that was the moment when the Christian faith turned from appealing to the universal bonds of love to the narrower ties of exclusionary faith.
Paul wrote, “Faith, Hope, and Love abide, these three, but the greatest of these is Love.” The greatest of these is Love, not the specifics of faith, not doctrine, not the recitation of a fixed Creed. Paul had it right for once. He missed a lot, but this one he nailed, he got it.
But the Church beginning in the fourth century took a different path, a political path, an exclusionary path. Emphasizing Faith over Love. Choosing the parochial over the universal. Establishing Theology over practice, structure over community, obedience over freedom as the foundational values of the organized church.
What is too often overlooked in church history is the fact that the whole notion of the Christian Church changed profoundly and permanently with that historical moment when the fourth century church leaders froze church doctrine in the wording of the Creed. The enforcement of that rule of membership in the church made possible everything that followed.
It made the church a political institution, a hierarchical power institution, changed it from being a suffering church to being the persecuting theocracy of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, a trior of heretics, a militant church embattling the Crusades and later setting Catholic against Protestant, and Christian against any other religion, none more so than the very Judaism which Jesus himself practiced and from which the Scriptures sprang.
The legacy of that chosen pathway, the brainchild of St. Augustine in the fourth century, is that churches in the West forever after have been defined through the requirement of conformity of belief, not affinity of spirit and quality of loving practice. No one was ever burned at a stake for not having enough Love. But millions died down through history for refusing to accept proper doctrine, or for refusing the bow in obedience before ecclesiastical courts for articles of belief that defied rationality or which contradicted reason.
The old world is used to focusing on the negative spaces between people. New forms of religion, new frameworks are needed if religion is to be an agency of hope in this modern, more dangerously flammable world of ours today, if it is to be any kind of redeeming force, literally, then churches and synagogues, the mosques and meetinghouses all need to refocus their vision and get their eyes back on the prize.
Medieval religious structures of hierarchy will simply not serve in this age. Religion should be about preaching service, not separation. It should be about making peace between nations, and calling the nations and cultures to connection, not blessing wars or condoning policies that make war inevitable.
Let me tell you what I love most and value most about the Unitarian Universalist church more than anything else: it says something that I have never heard in any other church. It says that what you are and how you act and how you love other beings and treat the planet we share is more important than any common definitions of faith we might ever invent together.
It says how and what you love is more important than your belief in any definition of god or any savior in history. It says that this church is not threatened by your agnosticism or your questions of faith or your heretical tendencies to distrust organized religions. It says it is not threatened by your religious imagination.
Unitarian Universalism is not a collection of tenets or articles of belief that can be memorized and digested and produced on demand. And this is a serious frustration to many people who think that religion must be so defined. We say something different. And if perchance this Sunday happens to be your one and only visit ever to a UU church, I hope this is the one thing you come to understand about us.
We say that a church is a community wherein people are empowered to live and grow and develop as spiritual individuals. This kind of church can never be a passive activity; it is a participative process. In our tradition, one’s faith is not an inherited gift that can be handed down to anyone. One’s faith is the product of one’s own journey. It is fashioned out of the sum and substance of our living. One’s faith is a combination of all the values that we have learned in our lives, all that we have experienced; all that we have celebrated, suffered, enjoyed, or endured.
Our Unitarian Universalist church takes a different approach to religion, and indeed, to the whole theological enterprise. It is an approach that values connection over conformity; diversity over division; reasoned ethics over blind doctrine.
We simply do not ask those who would join our church “What do you believe?” We know there is a much more important question for us all to engage on our journey, the root question upon which any personal theology (or church community) must be based. We ask of those who would walk with us, “What do you love?”
You can spend as much time as you care to distinguishing the fine points of theological difference that divide Christian from Humanist, Unitarian Universalist from Catholic, from Episcopalian, from Methodist, from Jew, from Hindu, from Moslem. But as long as you focus on what divides those great traditions, you will miss what it is that makes them all – at their best – pathways of the sacred. Truthfully, this is a church that does not presume to define for the rest of humanity such sacred notions as God, divinity, faith, church, truth, love, goodness, ethics, mystery. It is a church where theist and non-theist sit side-by-side, because they know they do not need to agree on all these things, and they are comfortable in the knowledge that what unites people is not conformity of belief.
We echo John Murray’s Universalist truth from the 18th century when we say, “We need not think alike to love alike.” What unites people, according to this radical tradition, is an affinity of spirit, mutual respect, a deep love for truth as each life uncovers and discovers truth in each person’s journey.
Making plain the fragmentary music of our dance of connectedness, it seems to me, is exactly what we come to church hoping to discover– our connectedness to one another in this room, our connectedness to our wider community, and beyond that, our fundamental connectedness to the entire circle of life on this fragile and fractured planet, and our connectedness to the grand mystery that is ever our source and our sustenance.
I call all of us this morning to that foundational faith that makes everything else we attempt possible, and without which nothing we do has lasting meaning or meaningful promise. I call us to a faith in that holy connectedness that joins us one to another; that faith – to use Mark Belletini’s wonderful Universalist image – that sees written “in every leaf a Torah, in the eye of every Robin a gospel, on every blade of grass a new Sutra, under every stone a word calling us to a serious peace” and to our rightful place in the divine order of things.
Amen.

The Man Called Jesus

Rev. Patrick ONeill — Sun, 09 Jan 2011 14:36:31 +0000

Like most of the people in this room, I suspect, I was raised a Christian – in my case it was in a Catholic family – and from that upbringing and from the faith of my parents I gradually began to expand my religious viewpoint and my religious horizons. Like many of you, I would guess, I was raised to believe that the man called Jesus of Nazareth was the Christ, the Messiah, whom God had sent at a given point in history to redeem a sinful world, and who by his death on the cross made possible our salvation after death.
All that is of course fraught with mysticism that most of us never really understood as children any more than most of us understand it now. But I was raised hearing the Gospel stories of Jesus and the parables he taught and the Sermon on the Mount, and for the most part those images were benign and positive, and they provided a sense of religious grounding for me as I groped my way to maturity. They gave me a sense of right and wrong, a sense of conscience and ethics, a sense of standards, a direction of meaning in life.
Over time, as I sought to clarify and articulate my own adult beliefs, I took issue with many of the specifics of traditional Christianity. I took exception to its claims of exclusive truth and priority over all other teachings. As I explored other teachings and other traditions and other cultures, I found in them many other expressions of truth that spoke to my soul and touched my experience. I discovered other models as inspiring as Jesus had been to my youth, and I began to incorporate these into my personal theology. This is what the Unitarian Universalist way has been for me for the last fifty years of my life – an expansive way of religion, a base from which I could expand my religious understanding, where I have added to and supplemented that early Christian wisdom provided by my parents.
At some point, I suppose, in the process of adding to and expanding my religious viewpoint, at some point, I suppose, it ceased being important to me that I be labeled a “Christian” as such. If by that word you mean an exclusive allegiance only to the teachings of Christianity alone above all others, then at some point I suppose that esteemed title no longer applied to me.
If by the word Christian, you mean someone that Jesus of Nazareth is the Christ, the Messiah, the savior and Redeemer of a sinful humanity – if that is what you mean by the word Christian, then at some point along the way, I stopped being a Christian.
If by the word Christian you mean someone who can sit still through the mind-numbing narrowness and manipulative, shoddy Biblical exegesis of a pat Robertson exhortation, then I most certainly do not qualify.
At some point along the way, I opted for another way, a wider way of being religious, a more inclusive way. In the eyes of some, that makes me a non-Christian, but if I am forced to label my beliefs, I think it more accurately might be called Trans-Christian, or Post-Christian. That is, my personal theology builds upon elements of Christian teaching and seeks to join those elements with truths incorporated from non-Christian sources. I have spent fifty years of my life putting that personal theology together, and it makes sense for me, it works as a personal Credo for me.
And yet, in the process of constructing this wider theological path for myself, I’m aware that my view of Christianity and of Jesus himself has become increasingly skewed. In truth, I have increasingly allowed my view of Christian faith to be defined by the likes of the Falwells and Robertsons and their Fundamentalist cohorts in Bible-pounding pulpits of the Christian Right Wing who claim to have complete interpretation rights to the life of Jesus and his tradition. I find their kind of religious demagoguery so utterly toxic to the human spirit that in a sense I have often ceded the field to them, and I think a lot of religious liberals and a lot of Unitarian Universalists have done the same thing.
The Fundamentalists will tell you that if you don’t accept Jesus as your Lord and Savior, and if you don’t accept being Born Again, that you have no right to any part of Christian heritage. And we, by our silence, have allowed them to get away with that virtually unchallenged. And it is claptrap. Utter nonsense. We have people who come into a Unitarian Universalist church looking for escape from that kind of religious oppression, and we, by our silence, by our failure to name the differences that distinguish this welcoming haven of liberal faith from the kind that separates the whole world into the “Saved” and the “Unsaved.”
There are parts of the New Testament that sing to my soul of truth and beauty and grace. And there are parts of the New Testament that strike me as contradictory or silly or incredible or just plain wrong. Who says I’m not free to make those judgments for myself? There are parts of the story of the man Jesus that lift my spirit and edify my soul. And there are images of Jesus that I simply do not believe. Must one be a Baptist to appreciate the Sermon on the Mount? Must one be Born Again, really? Before one can appreciate the parable of the Talents or the Good Samaritan or the Prodigal Son? I think not, but I had almost forgotten that, and I’ll guess that some of you had almost forgotten that too.
In our haste to claim religious independence for ourselves in our efforts to push away from the constrictions of Christian communities where many of us felt like orphans or captives growing up, how many of us felt compelled to throw the baby out with the bathwater, felt compelled to reject Jesus the Teacher, Jesus the Man, Jesus the extraordinary model of compassion and prophet of justice, because we failed to separate the Jesus of history from the Christ of Faith that he was turned into over the centuries?
I think we have been almost embarrassed as Unitarian Universalists, many of us, to make legitimate claim to those parts of the Christian heritage that are part of our story, as though we should be apologetic for celebrating Christmas, or for using a Reading from the New Testament, or for loving an old standard hymn that doesn’t have exact politically correct, or theologically current, language.
The man called Jesus has changed repeatedly, in image and in reference, down through the ages as the institutional Church and as cultural bias has demanded. Each age has applied to Jesus images and emphases consistent with that age, expressive of its own philosophy and development. The Jesus that Pat Robertson reveres is a Jesus that St. Paul would hardly recognize in the first century or that Erasmus might even have contemplated in the 16th century.
Indeed, there is some question in Scripture as to how jesus wanted to be viewed by others. In one famous passage in the Gospel of Mark, Jesus and some of his disciples are resting at a place called Caesarea Philippi, and Jesus turns to Peter and asks, “Peter, who do people say that I am?” Peter’s response is, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.”
But down through history there have been many different responses to Jesus’s question. Some called him the “King of Kings,” an image the once served a useful purpose in the age of Caesars and the ensuing Divine Right of Europe’s monarchs. Later he came to be revered as the Son of Man, the Word of God, the Light of Light, the Cosmic Christ, the Kyrios. In the age of monasticism Jesus was imaged as a monk who urged “give all to the poor and take up thy cross.” To the generations of monks following the Crusades, the imitation of Jesus meant following the way of Francis of Assisi. John Calvin preached of Jesus the crucified Judge of Humanity, while the Pacifist sects of the latter Reformation held up Jesus as the Prince of Peace. The early American Unitarians (who founded this congregation in 1833, by the way) sought to emphasize a more human image of Jesus as a great ethical teacher, while Emerson’s contemporaries in the liberal pulpits offered a more Romantic image of Jesus as a poet of the spirit.
If Jesus of Nazareth were today to ask “Who do people say that I am?” he would receive an amazing array of answers. We know that the Fundamentalists have their answer to that question. I’ve got mine, too. And I suspect you’ve got your answer to that question as well.
The modern-day searcher who sincerely seeks to inquire about who this man Jesus really was, and what he really did, and what he really said when he was alive, has to travel through a tremendously complicated labyrinth of layer upon layer of myth and obfuscation, historical distortion and inaccurate legend, centuries-old misreading and mistranslating and mishandling of Scriptures and oral traditions in order ever to arrive at anything resembling an accurate picture of the man Jesus himself.
From the beginning of any such inquiry one quickly discovers the necessity of distinguishing between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith.
It is only in the last two hundred years, in general, and then only in the last twenty-five years in particular, that formal Biblical scholarship has had either the academic freedom or the linguistic and scientific archaeological tools and technologies to dissect, compare, and examine the original Scriptural sources to discover that the Jesus of history and the Christ of Faith are not completely synonymous, and in fact, not even completely compatible when all the evidence is laid out.
But of course, even to say this much is to tread on very tender and threatening ground for many many people whose faith is not dependent on such sophistication or scholarship, but comes instead out of an unreasoned belief in the inerrant literalness of Scripture as the divinely inspired Word of God. There simply is no discussion or debate to be had with such a viewpoint. For once you claim that Scripture is inerrant or infallible, you instantly put the Gospels out of reach and beyond all critical review. The Christ of Faith is safe behind such a wall, but unfortunately the Jesus of history is out of reach, as well.
The inquiry into the distinction between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith is not about proving or disproving the “truth” of Christianity, it is about distinguishing the religion of Jesus from the religion about Jesus.
One of the most significant developments in recent Biblical scholarship was the establishment in 1985 of the “Jesus Seminar,” an American gathering of 125 authoritative scholars, linguists, biblical historians, archaeologists, and cultural anthropologists who have undertaken an intensive comparative examination of the New Testament scriptures, line by line, in the original Greek texts. Their group is the largest inter-disciplinary study of the New Testament ever done, and their findings have been provocative.
The Seminar found, for example, that of all the sayings and quotations attributed to Jesus in the New Testament, only about 20% could be authentically traced back to the time of Jesus. The other 80% are demonstrably not historic. The Seminar held all of the sayings in the entire gospel of John to be inauthentic, definitely not the sayings of Jesus himself. The seminar does not think Jesus spoke of himself as “messiah” or “son of God,” does not think Jesus saw his own death as the purpose of his life. (see, Marcus J. Borg, Jesus In Contemporary Scholarship. Trinity Press International, Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. 1994, p.164.)
So, the question comes, what do we really know about this man called Jesus? Based on the gospels and gospel fragments that have survived from antiquity, what can we say with relative certainty about the historical Jesus?
The short answer, according to the Jesus Seminar, is that we don’t know a great deal. There are some few assorted facts to which most critical scholars now subscribe. The historical evidence is that Jesus was an actual person who lived sometime between 6 or 7 B.C. and 36 A.D. He lived in the area we know as Palestine. We are fairly certain he was a follower of John The Baptist before his own public career.
His hometown was Nazareth, and he was probably born there as well, contrary to later legends that assign his birth to Bethlehem to satisfy an ancient prophesy. His father, as well as Jesus himself, may have been a carpenter or a craftsman. His mother’s name was Mary. Jesus had four brothers whose names were James, Joses, Judas, and Simon. He may also have had sisters.
His native tongue was Aramaic, a Galilean dialect; he may have been bilingual in Greek or in Basileia, common languages in the market towns of his region. We do not know whether he could read or write. We do not know whether he knew Hebrew, in his day only a literary language. He was evidently an itinerant sage, wandering from town to town and living on handouts. We are not certain that he deliberately gathered a group of disciples, but it is clear that followers gathered around him. He was popular with the people, but he was opposed by some religious authorities, in both Galilee and Jerusalem.
His career was brief, one to three years and as a final act he went to Jerusalem, either spoke or acted against the temple authorities, and was executed by the Romans. In addition to these meager facts, we have a compendium of teachings consisting of parables, aphorisms, and dialogues. The authentic words of Jesus can be isolated to a greater or lesser degree from other words borrowed from the old scriptures or common lore or the poetic license of the evangelists and storytellers. (See, Robert W. Funk, Honest To Jesus: Jesus For a New Millennium. HarperSanFrancisco, 1996. p.33-35.)
He was neither the founder of Christianity, nor himself the first Christian. That distinction more appropriately belongs to Paul, whose writings precede any of the gospel accounts, and whose inventive and creative abilities as a preacher and theologian and founder of Christian communities are what put the religion about Jesus on the map in the first century.
That’s about it. That’s about all we can say for sure. The historical Jesus was a healer and a teacher whose stories called his hearers to greater compassion for the poor and the needy, a deeper life of the spirit, an impatience with and distrust of formal and legalistic religion and its trappings and authorities, and material simplicity.
All the rest – the miracle stories, the fabulous embellishments around his birth, his death, his resurrection and his appearances after Easter, the whole business of the Second Coming and the Apocalypse – those belong with the Christ of faith, those are the teachings of tradition and creedal matters of theology, not history. If those things inspire you and lead you to a relationship with God and the sacred, so be it. But I respectfully suggest that the man called Jesus was both more accessible and more understandable than all that. Someone worthy of meeting again, worthy of some serious study and reflection. Don’t be surprised to find that he may have changed a bit since last you met.
A Suggested Bibliography by Rev. Dr. Patrick T. O’Neill
New Testament text studies from The Jesus Seminar:
The Five Gospels: The Search for the Authentic Words of Jesus; New Translation and Commentary by Robert W. Funk, Roy W. Hoover, and The Jesus Seminar. HarperSanFrancisco, 1997.
Funk, Robert J. and The Jesus Seminar. The Acts of Jesus: The Search for The Authentic Deeds of Jesus. HarperSanFrancisco. 1998.
Other books from Jesus Seminar Scholars:
Borg, Marcus J. Jesus: A New Vision. Spirit, Culture, and the Life of Discipleship. HarperSanFrancisco, 1991
Borg, Marcus J. Meeting Jesus Again For The First Time: The Historical Jesus and the Heart of Contemporary Faith. HarperSanFrancisco. 1995.
Borg, Marcus J. Jesus In Contemporary Scholarship. Trinity Press International, Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. 1994,
Borg, Marcus J. and Wright, N.T. The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions. HarperSanFrancisco, 1999.
Borg, Marcus J. The God We Never Knew: Beyond Dogmatic Religion To A More Authentic Contemporary Faith. HarperSanFrancisco. 1997.
Jesus at 2000, ed. by Marcus J. Borg. Westview Press, Boulder, CO 1997.
Funk, Robert W. Honest To Jesus: Jesus For a New Millennium. HarperSanFrancisco, 1996.
Other Source Books:
Cahill, Thomas. Desire of The Everlasting Hills: The World Before and After Jesus. Nan A. Talese Doubleday. New York. 1999.
Pelikan, Jaroslav. Jesus Through The Centuries: His Place in the History of Culture. Yale University Press, New Haven, 1985.
Spong, John Shelby. Rescuing The Bible From Fundamentalism: A Bishop Rethinks The Meaning of Scripture. HarperSanFrancisco, 1991.
Spong, John Shelby. Why Christianity Must Change Or Die: A Bishop Speaks to Believers in Exile. HarperSanFrancisco, 1998.
Wilson, A.N. Jesus: A Life. Fawcett Columbine, New York. 1993.
Reading:
What Jesus Really Said
by Alla Renee Bozarth
Not much.
I am
here
now
with you.
I see you,
God-in-you.
I need to touch you.
I need you to touch me.
I need to be alone.
I will not leave you alone.
Respect all beings.
Be compassionate.
Take risks to help others
and to become your whole self.
Be present in every moment.
Love as fully as life allows.
Live as fully as love allows.
I love you.
Let yourself be loved.
Accept acceptance.
Remember me.

Reflections on Janus and the Dancing Particle

Rev. Patrick ONeill — Sun, 02 Jan 2011 20:52:32 +0000

The world, as Plato or Gertrude Stein should have said, is generally divided into two groups of people: those who spend the week after Christmas looking ahead to the new year, making brave resolutions in hopeful expectancy; and those who spend the week after Christmas reviewing the old year, reminiscing in joy or in sadness the days that will not come again.
It seems only appropriate that January is named for the Roman God Janus. One of the oldest in the pantheon of Roman gods, Janus is portrayed as a two-faced god, looking in opposite directions, seeing both the past and the future at the same time. To the Romans, Janus was known as “the spirit of the opening” whose aid was invoked at the beginning of every new enterprise. They regarded him as the god of gateways and doorways. In Rome his temple stood next to the gate through which the Roman legions marched off to war, and the custom came to be that the gates remained open in times of war and closed in times of peace.
In doing a little background reading this week, I started to find Janus a pretty attractive god – and I could see how the Romans became fond of old Janus. I am a Pisces, after all, and you know about Pisces, we’re usually depicted as fish swimming upstream and downstream at the same time. So old Janus looked for a while there to be a natural theological option for me. But then, the more I thought about it, like almost every God I’ve ever pondered, Janus presents at least one serious theological problem. How does one prevent a two-faced god from becoming a schizoid god? Not easy.
Janus looks back at the past and looks ahead to the future. So far, so good. One of the classic Unitarian Universalist definitions of church, after all, is “the community of memory and of hope.” Every Sunday we light two candles as part of our standard liturgy, one candle of memory for the beloved community we have been in decades past, and one candle of hope for the community we hope to evolve in years to come. You will find reference to that “Community of memory and Hope” through all UU writings, and through much of mainstream Christian theology as well. A kind of Janus-ism, likewise, does indeed address my concern for a hopeful expectancy and my nostalgia for what has been – my personal impatience for the fullness of life to come (someday) and my stubborn insistence in holding on to the hard (sometimes painful) lessons learned yesterday.
But there is this problem, there is a price exacted by the two-faced god of January. Janus, alas, is not a god for the present. The price exacted by the two-faced god of past and future is exile from the present moment.
That’s the dilemma of Janus, and that’s the dilemma of this time of year for too many of us. Torn between summing up where we have been, and plotting a path for where we want to be going, the immediacy of our lives – the life we’re engaged in living right now, right here – tends not to get a whole lot of examination. We invest so much energy onto looking back to the “once-upon-a-time” where we came from and into the “someday” where we hope to be going, that sometimes we fail to appreciate where we are now. As Sam Keen puts it in “To a Dancing God,” we live, far too many of us, as exiles – sojourners – in the present, “consumed with longing for a homeland which lies in the past or in the future. Fulfillment is always contingent upon return to the mythical golden age of ‘once-upon-a-time’ or residence in the alabaster city of tomorrow, longing for what was or what will be, in memory or in anticipation.”
Check this against your own experience, but I think I’m beginning to realize for myself that at those times when I am most dissatisfied and unhappy with my own life, it is usually because I get stuck in one of Janus’s two orientations. When I’m stumbling it is usually because I’m not looking where my feet are. Somewhere in that parenthesis between fond memory and hopeful daydreams is the present path of my life. And the challenge is to live in this moment with as much grace and intentionality and mutual appreciation and mutual caring as we can muster.
To negotiate that parenthetical pathway with grace is no small challenge, for it requires of us an ability to integrate a past that is often illusory and a future that is often a fantasy.
Four years ago, in one of my very first sermons here I shared with you one of my favorite little stories. It’s a true story that could serve as a parable to illustrate the graceful integration of one’s past. It’s a story told by the late anthropologist Loren Eiseley in his autobiography.
In the last year of his life, an old man dying of cancer, Eiseley sat by the fire one winter afternoon and he half-remembered, half-dreamed of a day long ago, when he was a boy in the small Nebraska farm town where he was raised. And he remembered his father planting a tree in the yard behind the picket fence, and he remembered his father’s words: “When you are an old man, you can come back here someday, and you can sit with your back against this tree and bask in its shade, and you can recall the day you planted it with your dad.”
The vision remembered, nothing would do but that he take that trip – a dying man’s foolish pilgrimage – back to that town on the Nebraska prairie, to that yard behind the picket fence, where by now he imagined that young sapling must surely be a great sheltering maple – or was it an oak? He could scarce contain himself as the plane landed and the bus brought him at length to that little town which looked surprisingly still almost exactly as he remembered it. To the street where he once lived and the house – yes, with a picket fence, a new one, still out front.
He rounded the corner and looked at the spot where his father has planted the tree, and he saw there…nothing. No tree. No maple or oak. And he walked to the spot where his father’s tree had failed to take root. And he sat down in the snow and leaned his back up against the air and he cried. But not for long. For soon his tears turned to laughter, and his sorrow turned first to appreciation and gratitude, and then to joy. “For over sixty years,” he said to himself, “I have basked in the real shade of an imaginary tree.” His father’s gift to him was a metaphor, an illusion. But for a lifetime of travels and struggles and journeys, his father’s tree had served as a compass point for home, a reminder of who he was and where he came from.
Were we able, each of us, to test our romanticized visions of the past, if we could each of us return to the picket fence yards of our youth – we would probably find like Eiseley that our visions of the past are a bit distorted in the backward gaze of Janus. But I wonder if we would have the grace he had, to lean our backs up against the air and give thanks for the shade-giving, protective illusions of the imaginary trees that grow there.
To negotiate our present pathways with grace requires of us the ability to integrate a past that is often illusory, but nonetheless a compass point for home.
The equal danger to living life locked in an illusory past is the tendency of some to postpone the enjoyment of life in favor of some future day that never comes.
You see, the trouble is that we are “starstuff,” as Carl Sagan called it, and starstuff is very unpredictable.
I have a great friend, a former parishioner of mine in Delaware, a gifted chemical engineer for many years with the DuPont Corporation, who once helped me understand one of the great secrets of the physical universe. He was describing how scientists seek to isolate and examine sub-atomic particles of various elements. These particles are so tiny, and they move at such fantastic speeds, that they cannot be seen even with the most sophisticated instruments.
It turns out that the best method yet devised for examining these particles involves somehow shooting one of these particles through a phosphorescent cloud chamber and photographing the process. The picture you get when you do this shows what looks like the trail of a shooting star where the particle has passed….except that at the point of the trail the particle itself remains invisible.
We can see where the particle has been, but we cannot see exactly where it is. But no matter, the scientists reasoned, by piecing together a series of these photographs they expected they could predict where the particle would go.
But there’s a glitch….it seems that some of these particles, for no apparent reason we can figure out, sometimes take random radical turns in direction. Rather than move in smooth predictable patterns, some of these particles jog. And some of them…dance. And these particles we now know make up all the matter of the universe. Carl Sagan’s starstuff. And very unpredictable stuff, it is.
If we stop for a moment to remember that we are starstuff – that we ourselves are composed of dancing particles, creatures of that which forever jogs, skips, turns, leaps, dances, sings, bounces, crashes, and zig-zags – sometimes for no discernible reasons, sometimes out of sheer impulse that we ourselves fail to fully understand – if we pause long enough to contemplate that fact for a moment – I wonder what that knowledge would do to those of us who count on planning solely for some future dream? You and I are like that particle shot through the cloud: take enough photographs and we know where we’ve been…but best be careful about trying to predict exactly where we’re headed. Somewhere in between a trailing phosphorescent cloud and a projected path of hope, our human particles continue to dance.
My wish for you and for all of us as we stand at the threshold of a new year and a new decade is the gift of a past which is sheltering and a future which is enriching – here and now, and in all the Januaries of our lives. Amen.

Gifts and Givers

Rev. Patrick ONeill — Sun, 12 Dec 2010 18:33:11 +0000

Some gifts are more important than others.
Sam Keen writes a bold statement about the value of gift-giving in our lives, and then he tells a story to illustrate his point. It’s in his book, To a Dancing God (Harper Row, NY, 1970. p.101). His statement is this: “Each of us is redeemed from shallow and hostile life only by the sacrificial love and civility which we have gratuitously received.
And then he tells this story:
Once upon a time when there were still Indians, Gypsies, bears, and bad men in the woods of Tennessee where I played and, more important still, there was no death, a promise was made to me. One endless summer afternoon my father sat in the eternal shade of a peach tree, carving on a seed he had picked up. With increasing excitement and covetousness I watched while, using a skill common to all omnipotent creators, he fashioned a small monkey out of the seed. All of my vagrant wishes and desires disciplined themselves and came to focus on that peach seed monkey. If only I could have it, I would possess a treasure which could not be matched in the whole cosmopolitan town of Maryville! What status, what identity, I would achieve by owning such a curio! Finally I marshaled my nerve and asked if I might have the monkey when it was finished (on the sixth day of creation). My father replied, “This one is for your mother, but I will carve you one someday.”
Days passed, and then weeks and, finally, years, and the someday on which I was to receive the monkey did not arrive. In truth I forgot all about the peach seed monkey. Life in the ambiance of my father was exciting, secure, and colorful. He did all of those things for his children a father can do, not the least of which was merely delighting in their existence. One of the lasting tokens I retained of the measure of his dignity was the manner in which, with emphysema sapping his energy and eroding his future, he continued to wonder, to struggle, and to grow.
In the pure air and dry heat of an Arizona afternoon on the summer before the death of God, my father and I sat under a juniper tree. I listened as he wrestled with the task of taking the measure of his success and failure in life. There came a moment of silence that cried out for testimony. Suddenly I remembered the peach seed monkey, and I heard the right words coming from myself to fill the silence: “In all that is important you have never failed me. With one exception, you kept the promises you made to me – you never carved me that peach seed monkey.”
Not long after this conversation I received a small package in the mail. It was a peach seed monkey and a note which said, “Here is the monkey I promised you. You will notice that I broke one leg and had to repair it with glue. I’m sorry I didn’t have time to carve a perfect one.”
Two weeks later my father died. He died only at the end of his life.
For me a peach seed monkey has become a symbol of all the promises which were made to me and the energy and care which nourished and created me as a human being. And even more fundamentally, it is a symbol of that which is the foundation of all human personality and dignity. Each of us is redeemed from shallow and hostile life only by the sacrificial love and civility which we have gratuitously received.” (Sam Keen, To a Dancing God, p.100-101.)
Some gifts are more important than others. “Some gifts are enabling and confirming. Some gifts bestow understanding and self esteem,” as Clark Wells, one of our pulpit poets, once put it. “Some gifts give help in times of trouble and delight for ordinary days.” (From “The Nicest Gifts I Ever Got” by Clark Wells.) Clark Wells and Sam Keen have a message for us that bears repeating this time of year. It isn’t anything we don’t already know intuitively: some gifts are more important than others.
There is a fundamental mythology around the whole business of giving and receiving in our culture that this holiday season really hammers home to us, and I suspect it’s the reason we have trouble with the whole notion of “gifting.” The truth is we often find gift-giving and gift-receiving a bit embarrassing; it makes a lot of us vaguely uncomfortable. It’s difficult in our culture to be graceful givers and graceful receivers of gifts. We tend to be quite self-conscious about giving and receiving, and many folks are awkward about being on either side of such transactions. We’re not very good at it, many of us. Considering just how dependent we are on others as we go through life – beginning with our infant dependency on our parents for basic nurture and protection, through our growing years and our dependency on teachers and social circles for instilling in us the basic knowledge and civility code of our culture, through our physical dependency on loved ones for companionship and emotional support in life – considering all the ways we must rely on what we give and receive every day, it’s a wonder that some people never seem to become comfortable with all the exchange. Ironic.
We have a cultural myth that giving is extraneous to human behavior and not inherent to it, not vital to it, not central to it. The myth of the culture is that giving gifts is a social amenity and not something actually essential to our survival. The myth is that giving gifts is mere largesse, altruistic surplus, pleasant and fun perhaps – but extra, not to be assumed, not to be counted on or taken for granted.
We get embarrassed and awkward when giving and receiving is called for, whether it’s in one-on-one personal encounter or in institutional transactions or in societal transactions. How often do you hear people say they have trouble in relationships because they don’t know how to ask for what they need? Or because they don’t know how to receive gracefully what another would willingly give them in joy? Why? Because they see such giving as extra rather than as central and vital to their well-being and happiness.
Contrast that attitude with Sam Keen’s statement that “each of us is redeemed from shallow and hostile life only by the sacrificial love and civility which we have gratuitously received.”
Giving and receiving gifts is how we survive. It’s how we stay alive. It’s how we tell each other that we are loved, that we are important, that we are connected, that our existence is tied together. That isn’t some social nicety – that’s redemption, that’s blessing, that empowerment.
The gift is a peach seed monkey. The gift is a father’s empowerment of his grown son, the keeping of a promise. The gift is an honoring of a parent’s duty to his child – the duty to impart to his child the knowledge that he is important and special and lovable and worthy of his father’s time and effort and work. The gift is a small symbol, a trifle really, a silly-looking, glorious reminder of who he is and where he comes from. Is that extra?
Some gifts are more important than others. But the important gifts always carry the same message, always have the same impact. By their giving they convey to another, “Be well, be strong, be happy and secure, be empowered because you are loved.” And love is the engine of life. It isn’t extra or extraneous or superfluous – no one lives well or lives long without it.
I’ll close with a piece written by Robert Fulghum entitled, “What a Child Knows and I Keep Learning.”
Sam, the 35 year old magic Martian midget (who lived with us and was also seven years old) delivered the Christmas goods to me once again. “Wish Lists” were due at our house on December 1st.
The task was to divide up $50 between self and family and friends.
Christian (the younger brother) has a long and detailed list –exactly $50. But Sam’s list had one item only. “Please,” the note said, ‘I wish to have $50 worth of comic books. Thank you All. Sam”
Dialogue:
“Sam, that’s 433 comic books.
“Really? Wow!”
“Sam, what about friends and family?”
“Oh, they can read the comic books after I’m done. It’s sharing, isn’t it?”
Now, $50 worth of comic books is an irrational extravagance, right? But I ask you, what else is Christmas about if not irrational extravagance? The ancient myth of a God giving his only son as a sign to a world of people of hope. What’s more irrationally extravagant than that? On a winter’s night, in a time of fearful trouble, a gift of life, a child.
And the angels sang – of the most incautious and outlandish hope of all – Peace. On earth. Goodwill. Toward all – each and every one.
If that’s not irrational extravagance, I don’t know what is. A gift of Hope out of all proportion and sense. A vision of Jerusalem, the Holy City, the Kingdom of God. Extravagance.
And what shall we of the twenty-first century give one another at this season of the spirit as a token reminder of that ancient covenant woven of yearning and glory?
Stretch socks? Handkerchiefs? House slippers? Knickknacks for the kitchen, soap, electronic doo-dads, clocks, pens, magazine subscriptions?
How about a thousand balloons, wind-up toys, a year’s supply of bubblegum, tambourines with ribbons, kites, a case of chicken soup, 365 fortune cookies, 50 feet of fine licorice, ten tickets on a merry-go-round, a quart of jumping beans, a turtle dove or two, a partridge in a pear tree, a thousand sparklers, a hundred pounds of chocolate chip cookie dough – all wrapped in bright orange silk and thrown grandly around someone’s life with abandon and laughter.
$50 worth of comic books is a genuine Christmas gift. In the name of the spirit of Christmas – in the name of hope and peace and joy – in the spirit of the irrational and mysterious and wondrous unbelievability of it all.

Hope and Good Will and a Place for the Passing Bird

Rev. Patrick ONeill — Sun, 05 Dec 2010 19:00:18 +0000

In the novel East of Eden, John Steinbeck has one of his characters ruminate on the possibility that certain key passages of the Bible have been mistranslated for centuries, and these mistranslations have caused inestimable heartache and unnecessary spiritual damage to millions of faithful down through the ages. Suppose, for example, as Steinbeck’s character tells us that the Ten Commandments were slightly changed in translation – say, one key word in each Commandment was even slightly off – suppose the phrase, “Thou shalt” should have been translated as “Thou Mayest.” What a difference it would make! Thou shalt honor thy father and thy mother would become Thou mayest honor they father and thy mother. It would be but a small grammatical nuance, easily miscarried from one ancient language to another, but think of the ramifications! Instead of the Ten Commandments, we’d have the Ten Suggestions.
What a difference a word makes. Or a comma, or a misplaced modifier. Over the centuries we’ve had several dozen translations of the Bile into English, of course, and comparing translations of the same passages turns up some very interesting linguistic twists, sometimes changing the whole meaning of a passage. Bible scholars love to play and argue over these passages, and entire scholarly careers are spent tracing a single sentence through the nuances of Aramaic, Hebrew, Greek, Latin, and old English. Not very exciting stuff to most of us since we Unitarian Universalists have long been accused to seeing them as the Ten Suggestions anyway.
I was reminded of Steinbeck’s speculation again last week when I was rereading the Christmas story in Luke’s gospel and came to the passage in Chapter Two where the angels appear to the shepherds on Christmas night. Now I’m going to demonstrate to you how easy it is to change certain words to keep the same meaning. I’m going to use the word “people” instead of the word “men” here – but that isn’t really what I want you to notice in this passage. In the King James version the angel is quoted as saying “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward people.” But in the Douay-Rheims Catholic scripture, the angel’s words are just slightly changed. It reads, “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to people of good will.” The words are close, but in one version the good will comes from God, and in the other version, the good will comes from the people.
Personally, I like the version that says peace to people of good will, because it seems to me that those are the people who deserve peace.
Well, that’s by way of a rather long sidetrack introduction to my topic this morning. I want to talk to you this morning about Good Will and about Hope – and I want to talk especially today to all those folks (now don’t raise your hands) who find themselves getting a bit depressed this time of year. You know the kind of depression I’m referring to here, it’s the kind that starts the day after Thanksgiving and lasts until about noon on January third. The holiday blues. This sermon is about preventative pastoral care this morning, and it offers a challenge to all those people who find themselves (sometimes with good reason) becoming inexplicably sad around the holidays.
If you are one of those people – or if you live with one of those people – who feel it is your personal duty to be depressed for twenty-six days every December, I want to suggest what I think it takes to maybe break that cycle this year and maybe turn it around for yourself.
As I alluded to last week, the arrival of Chanukah and Winter Solstice and the season of Advent and Christmas all in the same month is a challenge in a diverse congregation, not only theologically but emotionally, as well. The holiday season is so loaded down with cultural symbolism, with personal memory, with religious profundity, and with trite platitudes.
To keep our balance, we must be honest with the tensions inherent in the holidays. The season is neither pure nor simple for any of us. On one level, the season is a perennial call to our hearts to find reason to celebrate here in the darkest time of year: to sing a familiar carol or two, to give a gift or two, to put a light in the front window, to try seeing the world – for a few days at least – through the eyes of a child again.
And on another level, amidst these calls to observance and celebration, the world we know continues to live in precarious and ever-present dangers.
This year again, the aspiring notes of Joy and Good Will, Faith and Love do not rise so easily in our throats. Our eternal human yearning after Peace on Earth continues unfulfilled, and on many days indeed it feels unreachable, a dream frustratingly forever beyond humanity’s grasp.
But here we are at the First Sunday in December already. Winter seems reluctant to arrive this year, but you know it’ll be here any day now. It gets dark early now, and one of these nights you just know the temp is going to drop and not get up again in the morning. Hannukah is here early, an ancient festival of lights celebrating the miracle of fires that lasted eight days instead of one, and is now a holy reminder not to lose hope even in the darkest of hours. And Advent in the Christian calendar today marks the second week in a four-week season given entirely to the religious notion of Hope, that most human of human virtues.
It has always been amazing to me, as a counselor and as a minister, to notice how much ill-will some of us insist on carrying around with us even as we wonder why our lives don’t feel more peaceful and joyful. See I think the Douay-Rheims angels are on to something that is worthy pondering. I think peace comes to people of good will. I think that good will, that is, good intention, still counts for something in the search for a peaceful spirit. And it is amazing to me how many people can expect to achieve inner peace without first building good will into their lifestyle.
Think about this for a moment. Good will means having good intention toward others. It means wishing good toward others. People of good will are not tied up in harboring ill feelings toward other people. People of good will don’t spend their energies harboring resentments and hurts and old wounds. People of good will are people who have found ways to move beyond such crippling feelings and attitudes. They have found ways to move through their anger to a more constructive and positive place in their lives. People of good will have come to terms with life’s sometimes unfairness, and they have refused to let it strangle their happiness or the happiness of those around them.
The opposite of good will, of course, is cynicism and distrust, and nothing is more lethal to a joyful peaceful spirit than these. Cynicism and distrust shut the heart down: shut it down to the possibilities of love from others; shut it down to joy; shut it down to renewal, to healing, to sharing, to touching and being touched. And people of good will, by definition, do not have “shut down hearts.” They have open hearts, open channels to the people around them.
That’s the ultimate definition of what good will is, an open heart. A heart that isn’t shut down with all the stuff that closes us off from loving others and being loved in return. Whether we’re talking here about interpersonal relations or international relations, good will is the necessary first ingredient of a peaceful life.
Counselors and pastoral counselors this time of year hear so many people say how they find this season depressing and sad, how it raises up surprising feelings of anger and loneliness and alienation. Those feelings are very real for many good people and I do not mean to minimize them in any way. It’s hard for people in pain to summon up good will.
But my first question to such folks is always this: Do you want to do anything about these feelings? Because it’s the easiest thing in the world to keep your heart shut down if that’s what you want to do this time of year. That takes no work and no imagination whatsoever. It’s letting go of such feelings that may take a little work. It’s putting down all this negative excess baggage that might require some honest confrontation with yourself. A shut-down heart is easy to defend, it’s an open heart that involves some risk if that’s what you seek.
My theory is that there’s no such thing as a “little” good will. You either have it or you don’t. You can’t be in conflict with yourself and be at peace with the world. You can’t carry in your heart unforgiven resentments towards some and expect to be absolutely open towards others. To the extent that you haven’t resolved the wounds of past broken relationships, to that extent you will be fearful and defended from new ones.
So here’s the second question I ask of people who tell me they want to get beyond their annual holiday depression syndrome. “What do you need to forgive in order to move on?” What do you need to forgive? Try it on. You just might find to your surprise that a little forgiveness goes a long way toward opening up the constricted heart.
Forgiving yourself for not being perfect. Forgiving others for the same imperfections., for the hurts they caused you, for the failures and letdowns they gave you, for the loss they inflicted on your life. Forgiving the random universe that should have been more fair than it has been to you, but isn’t.
What do you need to forgive? What do you need to let go of? An amazing array of clutter just might reveal itself if you take a look inside your heart. If you’re willing to risk opening your heart.
Well now, how is all this related to Hope, and what is Hope anyway? Someone once gave me a poster that says, “Faith is how you know where you’re going. Hope is what keeps you going. And Love is how you get there.”
Hope is what keeps you going…. The Christian Advent season bespeaks of the active nature of Hope that most of us tend to forget. Namely that Hope is not a passive virtue. Whether we are awaiting the arrival of the Messiah or the Age of Aquarius, Hope requires some action on our part if it is to be realized. Our ability to participate in the joyful renewal in our lives, whatever form it takes, will depend on the extent to which we have prepared a place in our hearts for renewal to grasp us.
Hope is an active business, not a passive gift from heaven It is shaped by our ability to dream; it is built by the work of our hands. Hope is that thing without which we cannot live.
Attack a person’s sense of hope, and you attack the engine of their humanity, the ground of their being, the one essential attribute on which everything human hinges. The poet Dante, you will remember, in his epic poem inscribes the Gates of Hell with a single phrase: “Abandon Hope, All Ye Who Enter This Place.” Why this phrase above all others does the poet choose to mark the territory of hell?
Because that’s what hell is for a human being: Hell is a place without Hope. A place of no possibilities. No love. Nothing to give or to gain. Hell is having nothing to dream or wish for, nothing even to imagine.
Hope is that sacred and fragile notion that pulls us forward in life – toward our dreams, toward all that is healing and inspiring, creative, growing, and developing, all that is waiting to be born in our lives.
Considering how important Hope is to our mental and spiritual sense of well-being, it’s interesting how little we understand about the nature of Hope and its vital role in our lives. A lot of people confuse Hope and Optimism, for example. But Hope and Optimism are not the same thing at all.
Optimism is the expectation of the best, or optimal, outcome to things. Hope is an attitude that preserves possibility in our lives. Hope is not about living in the future. Hope always operates in the present tense, here and now, as it looks to the future and builds possibility for the future. Hope is recognizing that life is a process, a fluid movement. Hope is seeing your life as moving towards your dreams, but having the capacity to appreciate living and loving in the present.
People confuse Hope with Optimism, and they also confuse Hope with Naivete. There’s nothing naïve or immature about Hope, despite what cynics would have you believe. Just the opposite. Hope is born out of realistic assessment of life’s possibilities and then choosing to move in the direction of those possibilities.
Hope is a way of being in the world, but it is also a way of acting and doing in the world. Hope is a way of looking and believing and relating in the world. Hope sees the connection of action and consequence in this life. We keep hope alive for ourselves and for a weary world by working to establish the conditions where hope thrives.
Here’s the thing about Hope – Hope is a contact sport. You get it from others and you give it to others. It’s one good reason to come to church, honestly. Because church, if we’re doing it right, is one of those places where hope lives.
We are all of us constantly in need of refilling our souls with hope on occasion. We’re all of us in need of a declared holy season now and then, a time to face down the chaos that has been accumulating in the back rooms of the soul, clear it out, clean it up, make some room inside for new hope, new attitudes, new possibility waiting to be born in our lives.
Someone sent me a holiday card last week. I like what it said. It said, “Be Hopeful. Keep a place in your heart for the passing bird, a room for the unexpected guest, and an altar for the unknown god. They may all yet appear.”

The Need For Giving Thanks

Rev. Patrick ONeill — Sun, 28 Nov 2010 17:53:00 +0000

Tell me the truth – is it just me, am I just getting old?, or does it feel to you too that this year especially for some reason that everything about the holidays is suddenly all speeded up and pushed ahead so that Thanksgiving has come and gone barely a day ago, and here it is the First Sunday in Advent already and Hannukah begins on Wednesday this week and Christmas will be upon us before we have time to catch a breath, and all this against an incessant white noise of Christmas advertising that began on Halloween this year to a point where I feel almost unpatriotic if I don’t personally save the economy by buying a new television or laptop or smart phone whether I need one or not. Is it just me?
I’m really having trouble this year. I mean to a point where I really couldn’t decide what I ought to preach about this week, and that almost never happens to me. But my calendar is all crazy this year. I’m not done with Thanksgiving yet, I’m not ready to engage meaningfully with the next three holidays yet. Next week. I promise. But this week, I’m still thinking about Thanksgiving. It’s always been my favorite holiday.
I want to share with you a lovely piece written some years ago by the NY Times columnist Verlyn Klinkenborg. It’s entitled, “At the Grown-Up Table.”
This is the week, I know, when we are likely to hear every cliché there is about “thankfulness” and the meaning of this uniquely American holiday. I like what my UU colleague Peter Fleck once wrote about Thanksgiving. He said,
“Many sermonizers assume that the Pilgrims, following their tragic first winter in their new home, were thankful for having survived. But it seems to me,” he says, “that they were able to survive because they were thankful.” (Quoted in a sermon by Daniel Budd.)
Thanksgiving is one of our great cultural mythic stories for us in America. My goodness, what we have done to mythologize the story of the Pilgrims and their Thanksgiving feast. And consequently, how gleefully we love to debunk that story and expose those poor Pilgrim forbears for the hopelessly human and flawed characters they really were.
In William Bradford’s History of Plymouth Plantation we read details of that first winter in Plymouth which Bradford called “sadd & lamentable.” Only 55 of the 102 Pilgrims lived through that winter of 1620-21. In that first terrible season, in their makeshift cabins, sometimes two or three of them died in a day.
After the fortunate harvest of 1621, the 55 who survived gave themselves a three-day feast of thanksgiving. (It was not until President Lincoln issued the first “Thanksgiving Proclamation” in 1861 that the day became an official American holiday.)
I think we moderns have a difficult translation to make here if we are to understand the Pilgrim notion of Thanksgiving, their notion of a thankful spirit, because we trip over the double trap our own cynicism and our own relative view of appropriate thankfulness.
The cynic in us is forever weighing and balancing our blessings and our banes, bemoaning our sorrows as undeserved, distrusting our benefactions as accidental and impermanent. We know that we are singularly blessed among nations, blessed with good fortune and prosperity, blessed with abundance of resources and of riches. And we know how fortunate we are. We compare our privileged place on the earth with the less fortunate, and it is hard to offer modest thanks in a world where so much misery abides, where the divide between the haves and the have-nots is so vast.
As Peter Fleck puts it, in years of plenty we are thankful for our bounty. And in years of merely modest blessings, we’re thankful that life wasn’t worse. But what of those other years, should we have equally thankful spirits in those years when we go through life “with our wants unsupplied, when we carry with us unfulfilled wishes, unsatisfied desires?” (See sermon, “On Giving Thanks” in G. Peter Fleck’s The Mask of Religion, Prometheus Books, Buffalo, 1980).
So far removed are we from the Pilgrim’s habit of a thankful spirit, from the religious habit of gratitude, from the daily acknowledgment of the gift of life itself, that we make thankfulness a relative term rather than the religious absolute that it ought to be.
A thankful attitude, that is, thankfulness for life itself – not after the fact, but during the fact, in the midst of life, thankfulness in the midst of the struggles, trials, tribulations, and disappointments that are part of every life. That’s what the myth of Thanksgiving is really about, don’t you think?
That’s what the lesson of Thanksgiving is: that we are all of us very human, very flawed Pilgrims. We have good years and we have bad years, and we have all kinds of years in between. But gifted as we are with the privilege of life for yet one more year, participating as we do in this fragile, fleeting, precious and precarious process of life, we have reason to be thankful every day. Every day!
We are the children of life, the product of the most mysterious and complex processes of the universe. Reason to be thankful? Oh yes! We are blessed with the ability to love others; to be bringers of joy and justice; to be bearers of hope and peace in the world. But we must learn anew each year to speak out the love and the gratitude we feel for our lives, we must take courage to voice what hides in our hearts and what withers unless we breathe it forth.
Here’s the thing, though, about that which resides deepest in the human heart: such things must be spoken, they must be given voice, they must be expressed if they are to live. Love is like that. Gratitude is like that. I suppose it is possible to hold love in the heart unexpressed in silence for a long time – but if love is to blossom, if it is to bloom, if it is to bear fruit – love must become a word, it must be breathed out to someone if it is to live. Faith is like that, too. Truth is like that. Gratitude, Love, Faith, Truth – all demand testimony, all require of us witness. These can be spoken, or they can be sung, danced, painted, or sculpted, but they must be expressed if they are to live. When we fail, for whatever reasons, to put our love, our gratitude, our faith and our truth into expression, the world is made that much poorer, that much colder, that much lonelier.
This is why we need to give thanks. It is the evidence that we are alive, conscious of our blessings, all that makes us human.
Reason to be thankful? Most certainly, yes! Within us, within our hearts we carry the stories of all the pilgrims who ever lived through all the harsh winters and bright springtimes that ever were. Have we reason to be thankful? Have we reason to sing in gladness for the life within us? Have we cause to dance in the face of our mortality? Oh yes! Yes, indeed we have.
I’m suggesting this morning that gratitude for life, a thankful spirit, is something more than just a possible response to life when it is going well, when fortune is smiling upon us. A thankful spirit is rather the continuing invitation that we extend to life itself to inhabit our hearts and thus keep possibility alive within us and about us.
Attitude. The medieval Christian mystic Meister Eckhart suggests that if the only prayer we ever say in our lifetime is “thank you,” that would suffice.
“For what do you have that you did not receive as a gift?” the Scripture says. “And if then you received it, why do you boast?” We participate in a great mystery, you and I. Every one of us is the recipient of the unfathomable gift of Life, a gift beyond all our ability fully to comprehend or appreciate. I believe that the appropriate human response to the gift of Life is that of abiding Gratitude. Let us not allow this idea of a Day of Giving Thanks to pass us by without making this our framework for all the holidays that are to come.
The words of the hymn have it correct: For all that is our life, we sing our thanks and praise. For all life is a gift which we are called to use to build the common good, and make our own days glad. Amen. And Happy Thanksgiving to you all!