Author: Deanna Lack

I call myself Renaissance Girl. Technically this is the place on the web for Deanna Lack, writer... but I do a little of everything creative and I'm going to lay it all on you.
Posted in A Day In The Life, Daily Writing

Spring Teaser

Posted on by Deanna Lack
The daffodils in my garden and a very blue sky.

I want to write about spring. 

Gag me, right? People have been writing about spring since Shakespeare. “April hath put a spirit of youth in everything.” Well, he was right. I am getting old, but after a series of cloudy, rainy, cold February days, a sunshiny not-quite-March day that’s warm enough to put on a sweater and sit outside soaking it up is enough to make anyone ready to tackle anything.

Especially since I did my yoga this morning. 

I’m a little further south than Shakespeare, so it’s March that sings to the soul, sprouting daffodils and crocuses and spring beauties, the little frogs singing at night, robins hopping through my yard looking for the grubs my dog already dug up and ate. Hakuna matata. I have a box of plants purchased on an even earlier sunny day, waiting for ADOLF (average date of last frost) to get potted up, but I brought them out to enjoy the sun, too. 

Shakespeare has advice about gardening, too. “Now ‘tis spring, and the weeds are shallow-rooted; Suffer them now and they’ll o’ergrow the garden.” I don’t know if I’ll get to gardening today, but I’m pulling weeds here, writing. And planting. And hoping something will grow that’s not weeds. This might not be it, who knows? This seems more journal entry than anything, but I have to start somewhere. It has a tone that is not the same as a journal entry, so it might grow into an essay. Sometimes you have to suffer the weeds until you know what they are. That’s Jesus, not Shakespeare. 

Tarot said to fill my well this morning. The uplifting music in my headphones, my fingers on this keyboard, the sunshine (the sunshine, the sunshine!) are filling it. The friend time I have planned tonight will fill it. 

Janus looked backward and forward at the new year, but for me, spring, this last day of February, feels backward and forward. I look around. Some things make me sad. A few days ago was the anniversary of the death of one of my best friends. My good neighbor has a sign outside his house that says it’s for sale, he’s leaving and I’ll have to build a new neighbor friendship. I haven’t even met the new neighbors on the other side, but I’m outside, I guess I’m ready for new friendships. That’s backward and forward. Is there a forward to friends that are gone for good, besides new friends? You can’t just put a Band-Aid on it and look for a replacement, not even three years later. You can’t only look forward to spring days. You have to honor the winter days behind, at the same time. I think this is my yoga practice talking, a practice of holding tension in two different directions at once, grounding and reaching for the sky together in my one body.

I’m counting down the twenty-one days on my fingers and toes, as of tomorrow, till it’s spring for real, but I’m not waiting for it. I have a sweater and the sun is shining.

Posted in Uncategorized

Singing to Chaos: Reading N.K. Jemisin

Posted on by Deanna Lack

        

Image by Greg Razosky

I wish I could go to the book store and browse the shelves for “Fiction That Makes You Think.” But then maybe what has me thinking wouldn’t show up there, because not everyone thinks what I think. Not only that, but I discovered this year in my Mythology, Literature, and Fantasy Fiction courses that you can apply literary theory and Jung and Campbell to everything from The Wizard of Oz to The Hunger Games. So now the literary world is literally my oyster.

Related, and bear with me for a moment: last year I had an epiphany. A good deal of my reading has been about social justice because I want to educate myself better about race issues and undo some of the harm that our racist society has done in my mind, so that I can do less harm in the world. Reading is my answer to everything, so I read: White Fragility, The Color of Law. And some fiction, too: The Invention of Wings about abolitionists Sarah and Angelina Grimke. The epiphany was this: a large portion of the reading I’d been doing about people of color was not written by people of color. I recommend all of these books, because they are all amazing, but at the same time, even on issues of race, I was unconsciously centering white voices. Yikes.  

So over on Goodreads I made a shelf for Authors of Color and started being intentional. Over the last year I’ve read Ross Gay, Michael Eric Dyson, Solomon Northrup, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Richard Blanco, Ibram X. Kendi, Fareed Zakaria, Linda Hogan, Austin Channing Brown, Ijeoma Oluo. Fiction: Tomi Adeyemi, Ibi Zoboi, Toni Morrison, Angie Thomas, N.K. Jemisin, and St. Octavia Butler (I imagine she wouldn’t like that characterization, but given her army of converts old and new, and my discipleship, she is stuck with it). I challenge anyone reading this to make a point of reading more authors of color.  

I’ve learned a whole lot from Coates, Kendi, Brown and Oluo. But it seems weird to me that what resonates the most when I think of it is the fiction. Butler, of course. God is Change… But today I want to talk about N.K. Jemisin. 

Have you found theology in fiction? Hear me out. 

I am three quarters of the way through Kingdom of Gods, Jemisin’s third book in the Inheritance trilogy. This is fantasy. Butler is fantasy/sci fi. These genres have long been regarded as a “fluff” genre in which there is not much “meat”, something you read purely for escapism, and a lot of it is that, but speculative is my brain food. Butler is pretty plainly intending to speak on issues that deal with African American history, in addition to questions of immortality and Godhood (Wild Seed). Jemisin is much less obvious, b1ut there are topics of slavery and immortality here, too. 

I’m thinking about her theology and cosmology. Let me give you a brief rundown. (Trigger alert: there is a good deal of sex in these books, and occasionally suggestions, but not scenes, of rape. If you are okay with that, I can heartily recommend them. I am not dealing with any of that here).

The Three are the founding gods of the world. They mated to create godlings, and one of them, Enefa, created mortalkind. When gods mate with mortals, they make demons, who are mortal. Demons have been abolished because their blood is lethal to gods and godlings and deemed too dangerous to the cosmos to live. If one of the Three is killed, the mortal realm ceases to exist. 

Much of high fantasy has a pantheon of gods. A good bit of it deals with mortals’ relationship to gods. What is fascinating about Jemisin’s trilogy is that the gods and godlings are themselves characters in the novels. In the first book, four of them have been chained and made mortal, and made to serve the mortal (human) ruling family. In the second and third book, the tables are turned and the one who imprisoned them is himself imprisoned in a mortal body. By making the immortal mortal, Jemisin is able to bypass the difficulty of making the immortal, the deity, a character we can relate to. 

The Three are, in order of their birth from the unknowable Maelstrom: 

Nahadoth. He (he can manifest as male or female but is generally male/father) is darkness, chaos, change (…. God is change….). He can never stick to one thing for long. He is firstborn from the Maelstrom and spent millennia alone. He is lethal and capricious and often malicious. 

Itempas. Itempas is the perfect foil to Nahadoth. He is light, order, changelessness. Surprisingly, Itempas is dark-skinned and Nahadoth is light-skinned, in manifest form. Itempas killed Enefa and imprisoned Nahadoth and three of his children when they rebelled. He is presented as the villain in the first book, then becomes human, imprisoned himself, in the second and third books. And he thereby becomes interesting. His worshipers, of course, are rigid law-givers, whom we find not at all sympathetic. 

Enefa. She is balance, life, and death, the scales that keep the other two in check. She created mortalkind. Itempas used the blood of his demon offspring to kill her out of jealousy over her relationship with Nahadoth. She was re-manifested. I’m not going to go into details about that because of spoilers. It’s mostly the other two I want to talk about, anyway.

Let’s parallel these two, for the sake of a theological argument, with the God of the Bible (Itempas: light, order, changelessness), and Satan (Nahadoth: unpredictability, chaos, darkness). Jemisin makes no delineation that one of these gods is “good” and one of them “evil”. They have natures, and they have to be true to their nature. Even Lil the Hunger, horrific as she is, is not really judged. But from the beginning Nahadoth, a character in the first book while Itempas is a vague deific non-personality, is the more sympathetic of the two. All the world worships Itempas, while Enefa is dead and Nahadoth in chains; worship of them all but vanishes. 

This has me thinking (intentional on the author’s part, I am sure) about our ideas of light=good, dark=bad. First of all, she flips their avatars’ skin color. She flips our sympathies toward them. 

Humans do not like change. We do not like chaos. We think we like “freedom” but when we define it, it turns out that what we often mean is liberty to impose our own order on others, rather than having someone else’s order imposed upon us. We also, being diurnal and with poor vision and not easily able to defend ourselves without tools, do not care much for darkness. These are the things that make us feel secure: light, predictability, numbers (as in community). Is it surprising that we worship light and order in the person of Yahweh? Is it surprising that we make Satan, personification of chaos, temptation, and darkness, our villain, in our theology? The Fallen is dark. In this mythos, it’s not shocking that people who are dark become villains, as well. I’m not saying it’s excusable, of course. But even Yahweh sat in darkness for millennia before he decided there needed to be light, and he created both light and darkness, no? 

If we think of Yahweh as Itempas and Satan as Nahadoth, in which we do not judge either of them as good or bad before examining their deeds as we know them in the scriptures, what would change? Which characters would we find most sympathetic? If we took out every scripture that offered a judgment – “The Lord, the Lord God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abounding in goodness and truth.” (Ex. 34:6) – “The whole world lies in the power of the evil one.” (1 John 5: 19) – and left us only with the power of story, what would be left? Who would the characters be?

It’s an interesting mental exercise I invite you to do. I am not trying to tell you that Satan is Good and God is Bad (or even, necessarily, that neither is neither, though that is part of the exercise). I am inviting you to examine your own mythos without prejudgments. Read your mythos as if you’d never heard it before, as if you were telling it to someone who was born on another planet. When I was explaining my fading theology to a therapist who had never heard it before, I suddenly realized: this is not who I want to be anymore. It took me five years at least before I found another answer. Sometimes you have to say No before you can find your Yes. 

I learned that the truth you believe because someone else told you to believe can never be your Truth. But I suggest, too, that No is not enough and can never be enough. You cannot define your life by rejecting a theology or a personal philosophy without replacing it with something that is True for you. 

Ask Why and What If, and find your Yes.

Posted in A Day In The Life, mindfulness

Thanks be to… ?

Posted on by Deanna Lack

Once upon a time I prayed every day to thank Jehovah for everything I had. Today is Thanksgiving 2020, a year of incredible difficulty for every single person I know, and also the 400th anniversary of Plymouth Rock, and therefore a time to think about the narrative we’ve been told about Thanksgiving, gratitude, and the Native Americans.

Once, a few years ago, shortly after Anthony died, I told mom I was thankful for … something, I don’t even remember what it was. She asked me, who was I grateful to? I’m not sure what prompted this question. She almost never asks me about my beliefs or my spiritual life or much of anything else.

At any rate, on this particular occasion she did. I stumbled around the unexpected question and said, “God,” and though that is not a lie, there’s so much more to my answer than that. So I want to revisit this question this Thanksgiving and talk about God and Gratitude. 

Every day in my journal I write three things I’m grateful for. This might even have been what mom was asking about, because I’ve recommended a gratitude practice for both her and dad, and once, to my surprise, she told me she took our advice and that it went well. Even when I don’t have time for my full journaling practice, which is rare, I try to at least include gratitude. 

Today, on this Thanksgiving, I wrote that I am grateful that I practice giving thanks every day. When I was a Jehovah’s Witness we did not technically celebrate Thanksgiving and our reasoning was that, “we give thanks every day.” But I do not think that I can say I practiced gratitude then. It was more a matter of, “you are required to pray, and this is how you pray: thanks for our food and our family and (fill in the blank and sometimes get creative) and all the things you give us. We ask that you bless (fill in the blank and sometimes get creative). In Jesus’ name, Amen.” You thank, you ask, amen. It was a plug and play recipe. 

The gratitude I practice now is different. When you begin this practice, you name all the same things you would if you were sitting around the Thanksgiving table doing the ritual of naming what you are grateful for: food, family, shelter, love, friends, health, abundance. But when the ritual is daily, you can’t keep naming those seven things, so you start to get creative. You name the spiderweb glistening in the slanting morning sunlight. The quiet you’ve been waiting for for a week. Puppy dog eyes. Children’s laughter. The smell of baking bread. The peaceful ring of wind chimes. Having transportation. Being able to work from home. The excellent tea latte you’re drinking this morning. Hugs, for which you have always been grateful but which are so much more meaningful in this year of hug deficiency. A true practice of gratitude makes you notice more things for which to be grateful, and therefore, in my opinion, is the secret to happiness. The happiness is in the noticing. 

That does leave the question of “to whom”, though, and for those of us who are religious we often don’t get past God. But here is my answer: I am thankful for the humans who work so that society functions, in so many ways, most of whom I will never meet, and especially this year I am thinking of people who are deemed “essential” but who at the same time we are more or less throwing to the wolves in putting them on the front lines without mask mandates, at least in my state. I am grateful to those people who fill all those functions. The grocery store clerk, the butcher, the mail lady who brings so much extra stuff this year, the farmer, the veterinarian, the workers in far-off lands who make the products that make my life possible and better. I thank Russ, who works hard for our family and for the people he serves. I thank the Earth for her bounty and for so many of those little things that I notice every day that make me happy and get written in my journal. I thank mom and dad for giving me life and raising me well. I thank my family at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Cookeville for believing in me and giving me a chance to serve. I thank all my ancestors. I thank my in-laws for adopting me and being my family in ways my family can’t, especially on holidays, but also in everyday ways, all year. I thank the sun and the rain and the rich soil. And yes, I thank the Divine that is in all of these things. 

I know that many of us are missing normal so much right now. May this Thanksgiving be a true time of giving thanks, of finding your center by remembering what is, even now, so very good about life. May you give thanks for the loved ones you are missing. May we all be blessed with better days ahead. 

Amen.

Posted in A Day In The Life

Fragile

Posted on by Deanna Lack
These homes look rough, but they are still standing, and that’s more than you can say for some that are not far away.

I just got home from my son’s apartment. He called me at 3 am last night, asked if I was okay. Yeah, what’s up? There’s a tornado, he said. Oh, yeah, fine, I slept through it I guess (we barely got anything in Sparta). It took me a few groggy minutes to ask if he was okay. He said, “Yeah, I’m okay, but it blew the windows out of my apartment and tore the roof off the apartments behind me.” What?!

We took him some battery powered lights and a battery to power his electronics, checked on him. The closer we got the more anxious I was to get to him; full mama bear mode. Russ drove, looking for somewhere to park. I finally said, just let me out, I’ll walk to him. That’s ultimately what I did, through wreckage strewn all over in ridiculous ways. Tornadoes make no sense, there is no logic to them, the embodiment of chaos.

And there he was, on his balcony. It was like something out of a movie, seeing him across a distance full of shattered remains, relief washing over me even though I’d known he was okay. I went to him. He’s fine. Thank God he’s fine.

Bran’s building

In the photo, the back of his building, you can see the tarps flapping in the wind, covering the destroyed parts of the roof over every unit in his complex except his. Every other apartment has windows blown out; in each of his windows only one of the double panes was shattered; other tenants had water pouring in shattered windows or shorn roofs. The man next door said the sky was green, and the massive electric lines were down right next to the building. If your power was out, it was probably because of those lines right there.

The view from his balcony…


I have only been to the edge of the devastation; his apartment is right on the easternmost edge of the worst part of the destruction, but it is breathtaking. Forlorn-looking stuffed animals in trees amidst pieces of houses maybe miles away. Trees shorn as though a giant-sized lawn more went over them. Apartments gutted, everything having been sucked out of them. Homes and businesses flattened to the foundation. Everything coated with a bizarre paper mache looking stuff. Pieces of 2×2 lumber stabbed into a wall as though they were thrown like a spear.


Trauma’s a funny thing, not until I was away from my only child did the full force of this hit me: I could have lost him last night. Also, the full force of this: many mothers did lose their babies. Nineteen dead in this county alone, more across the state.


The fragility of our infrastructure hit me with the force of a tornado, too. Electricity gone, our connection to one another gone. It took all day before I heard from some of the church friends I checked in with. How very temporary we are. How powerful we think we are, and how quickly we are reduced to rubble, sticks, and the bits of fluff with which we insulate ourselves against the cold world.

But I’m also amazed by the way we come together in the face of it. The lines of people waiting to donate blood. My son’s land lady, who couldn’t get a car close to his apartment so she ran several blocks there at 3 a.m. with another wave of storm coming on to check on the mostly students who live in her complex. My friends who went around Cookeville dropping off water, canned goods, and pet food to places that were distributing it. And so many other stories I’m sure we’ll hear in the weeks to come. “Look for the helpers,” Mr. Rogers said, when things are scary. They are always there, and I’ve never been more grateful for them, professional or civilian. There are a lot of heroes in Cookeville tonight.

Brandon said he thought he could use a walk, so we did, strolling among the strewn wooden skeletons and siding skin and puffed fiberglass and paper mache guts of people’s homes lying all around us. As we walked away from where the workers were smashing the remnants of a twisted electric tower to bits, that human noise receded and the chorus of spring peepers filled the air. Little frogs who had no doubt literally been outside in a tornado less than 12 hours before, filling the air with their urgent songs to create more of them, celebrating life in its most elemental form, maybe singing gratitude, too. I understand that song, and this one: Life Goes On.

Posted in Sermons

Sermon: Sacred Rest

Posted on by Deanna Lack

My cat Otto, right now. Cats KNOW how to rest.

This sermon was given at Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Cookeville on December 15, 2019.

Last year, for our Yule sermon, I talked about rest. Several people have mentioned to me that they really took that message to heart and have started to rethink how they spend their energy in the winter. But that’s not always easy. Our Christmas Carols talk about hustle and bustle, and that’s often what this time of year is like.

There’s a list of demands placed on us. I can’t not send Christmas cards, grandma gets upset when she doesn’t get an update about the kids. I can’t not wrap all of my presents, everyone loves tearing into the paper on Christmas morning. I can’t not bake, I always bake. I can’t not participate in the office gift exchange, what would people think? I can’t not put up a tree, what’s Christmas without a tree? And, unfortunately, it’s pretty common that a significant portion of the mental, emotional, and literal work of the holidays falls on the women in the family.

So, let’s back up and reevaluate. Instead of having Christmas photos taken for cards, maybe pick a few that are on your phone to email all at once instead of addressing dozens of cards. Maybe put your presents in pretty boxes that don’t need wrapping, or gift bags. Maybe let someone else bake this year. Maybe don’t worry about what you coworkers think. Maybe let the kids put up the tree. The point is to figure out what parts of the holidays bring you and your loved ones joy, focus on those, and let the other things go. And, instead of telling this story: “I just don’t have the energy this year,” which sounds like you failed somehow, tell this story: “I thought about what was important and what brings us joy, and I’m giving my energy to those activities.” Because why are you spending your energy on expectations of others that don’t enrich your life?

We talked last year about how we are, ultimately, human animals, and animals’ instinct drives them to reduce their activities and conserve their energy at this time of year. Yet, because of the fact that we have artificial light, we extend our working time way past what nature would dictate for us. Sometimes we feel guilty doing things that aren’t productive. If you go to sleep at 10, then there are five hours of darkness between sunset and when you allow yourself to rest. Think about that. Nature says, “go to sleep early,” and we decide to put in almost a full workday after that.

So let’s do a quick visualization. Feet on the floor, eyes closed or relaxed gaze. Take a nice slow breath. Another. Think of yourself as a human animal, and think of the coziest place in your den. The sun has gone down, it’s barely 5:00. What does rest look like? It doesn’t have to mean sleep, though it might. It might mean curling up with a novel, or snuggling on the couch with your pets, spouse, and/or kids to watch some TV, or sharing a homey meal with some special people, or spending some time alone, crafting, or making art, or journaling, or whatever activity fills your well. Imagine the coziest, homiest hibernation time you can think of indulging in, and picture yourself doing it ……… Also pay attention to how you are feeling when you think about this. Are you feeling guilty for not checking things off your to do list, or getting more stuff done? Are you enjoying yourself? Where in your body are you feeling what you’re feeling? …… And, gently come back to the room and open your eyes.

So, what does rest look like for you? What about “self care”? That’s a word that gets throw around a lot, often to promote some kind of product. The concept has been around a lot longer than the term, as a part of commercialism. Remember McDonald’s jingle, “You deserve a break today.” “Calgon, take me away?” Maybe I’m dating myself, I bet some of you have no idea what I’m talking about. The point is, companies know we’re tired, and use it for marketing.

But self-care isn’t really something you can’t buy. It’s the old advice from your stewardess about putting on your own respirator mask before trying to help someone else put on theirs. If your well is empty, you won’t have reserves to serve others. And a bubble bath or a special chocolate or a bottle of wine might be part of self care, but it’s not all of it. Let’s take a look at something most of you are really familiar with: Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

So these are our needs, according to psychologist Abraham Maslow, and they’re structured in a pyramid like this because the ones toward the bottom are foundational. So we can’t meet our need for safety until our basic physiological needs are met, and we can’t meet our need for love and belonging until we feel safe, and we can’t build esteem until we feel we belong, and we can’t meet needs for self-actualization or personal growth until we’ve built our confidence, so each one builds on all the ones below it.

So how’s the bottom of your pyramid? I’m guessing your need for air is being met or you’d look a lot less calm. If you currently have a need for food or water you’re definitely Invited to partake of ours. But most of us have municipal water, and we’re not starving. Since you’re all currently clothed, I’ll assume that you have clothing, and probably also shelter. If you don’t, that’s a crisis, please ask for help. We’ll do whatever it takes to help you find resources.

That leaves sleep. Rest can be taking a break from activity, but friends, if you’re not getting enough sleep, you’re harming yourself on all these levels above the base of this pyramid, and you don’t have enough to give anyone else, and you’re probably a lot less fun to be around than you are when you’re well rested. Whatever other stress you have in your life is compounded in exponents. How’s your sleep?

If you’re anything like a typical American, frankly, it sucks. We are bombarded with this message that we have to be constantly more productive, that if we’re not pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps 24/7, we deserve what we get. We have popular phrases like “You snooze, you lose,” and “I’ll sleep when I’m dead.” When we feel like there aren’t enough hours In a day, and who of us doesn’t, the first place we cut is those precious rejuvenating hours of sleep that fuel our days. The Protestant Work Ethic, which I intend to give an entire sermon on at some point in the future, is alive and kicking. And it’s not serving us.

If you type “Why am I” into a Google search bar, the top result is “so tired” and the second one is “always tired,” which means that’s the most common thing typed into that bar after those three words. If you type Sleep into a search bar on your iPhone App Store or Google play, you’ll come up with FIVE THOUSAND apps that are meant to help you sleep. If we were to type a relationship status with sleep Into our Facebook profiles, most of us would say, “It’s Complicated.” We have a love-hate relationship with sleep. It feels so good sometimes, and at other times, like SUCH a waste of time, when time is so precious. Hardworking students study until late hours. Struggling working parents squeeze in a few precious moments of alone time after their little ones have gone to bed. Housewives remember one more thing they have to do before they finally sleep. We get home late, and find that it’s really hard to wind down enough to sleep after a day full of activity pushes almost up to bedtime. Then when we finally collapse into bed, exhausted, some of us find we’re staring at the ceiling unable to silence the whir of our thoughts or the to do list for tomorrow already tapping on our shoulders. Sometimes the problem with sleep isn’t that we are forsaking it for the sake of some work or much-needed me-time, but that we literally cannot fall asleep. It’s not something you can force, and a large percentage of us struggle with it.

So, I want to spend some time talking about healthy sleep habits and what we can do to improve the quality of the sleep we get. Most of us need around seven hours, and few of us are getting that much. So, a couple of tips to help us get more and better zz’s, some of which you probably already know, but some others maybe not:

1. Reserve your bed for sleep and snuggles. Don’t read in bed, don’t look at your phone in bed, don’t watch TV in bed, especially If you struggle at all with insomnia. If you can’t sleep, get up, do something that is relaxing, and try again. I know this Is really difficult advice because I don’t listen to it myself.

2. Turn the temp down in your room to around 65 degrees. This is another Instance of imitating nature… the temperature drops at night, our bodies think it’s time to sleep.

3. A couple of hours before bed, turn off your overhead lights and turn on bedside lamps and table lamps, preferably with warm hued bulbs, not cool white or daylight bulbs. Excessive light suppresses melatonin secretion and can make it hard to get to sleep. And, when you’re ready to actually go to sleep, have It as dark as you can comfortably stand it in your bedroom. Related,

4. Also limit blue light a few hours before bed. This, I’m afraid, includes almost anything with a screen. TV, computer screens, phone and tablet screens. If you’re having trouble sleeping, this is ground zero in the battle for sleep. If you must use your phone or tablet before bed, most of them have a nighttime mode that limits the harmful blue light, so check your settings or Google how to set that up on your particular device. A 2015 survey showed that 71 percent of Americans sleep with or next to their smartphones. Blue light Is a stimulant. Best case scenario: buy a regular old-fashioned alarm clock and ban your phone from the bedroom entirely. Definitely put it on Do Not Disturb if you choose to keep it in the bedroom.

5. Exercise. There’s a direct relationship between exercise and the ability to sleep.

6. Skip caffeine and limit sugar. We’re often dragging ourselves through the day caffeinated and sugared, but studies link both to inability to sleep. It disrupts our circadian rhythms. On the other hand, some kinds of herbal tea can be a great part of a bedtime routine.

6. Speaking of routine, it’s good to have one. Turn off the phone, read for half an hour, meditate, take a hot bath, sleep. Or whatever works for you. But having a routine where you do the same series of things before bed each night can signal your brain that It’s time to wind down.

7. Avoid sleeping pills, drugs like Benadryl that are meant for other things but have side effects of drowsiness, and alcohol to help you sleep. All three can actually help you fall asleep, but they affect the quality of your sleep and some of them have other serious side effects. One thing that my doctor recommends for difficulty sleeping is supplemental melatonin, but I suggest you talk to yours about what’s good to take and what’s not, if you struggle with insomnia.

8. You knew I was going to say this… meditation is great for sleep. Since I talked pretty extensively last week about how meditation is good brain training for when you’re overthinking at night, I’ll leave it at that. If you use an app for meditation, all of them have tons of sleep tracks, both guided meditations and just music, meant to help you drift off. But, of course, that means keeping your phone in your room, so use with discretion.

9. This Is something that helps me but might not help everyone, and that’s a planner. If I know I have everything written down that needs to be done, I don’t have to mentally rehearse everything on my list when I’m ready to drift off to sleep. And, I’ve added “7 hours of sleep” to my habit tracker in my planner so I can pretty readily see where I’m short-changing myself.

But as Americans, we are getting this mixed message: science shows that we desperately need rest, and our bodies are telling us the same thing. Even religion gives us mixed messages. That Protestant Work Ethic again. And, as Unitarian Universalists, the roots of our theology are Calvinist. We rejected strict Calvinist theology a long time ago, but its message lingers. Our first principle — the inherent worth and dignity of every person — that principle tells you more than just ‘welcome every person and treat them as worthy.’ It tells you than you, I, and everyone else, are inherently worthy. That means, by implication, that we don’t need to EARN that worthiness by doing anything at all. Some of us are still struggling to earn that worthiness through right works and through working. Are we doing enough for social justice? Are we working at self improvement often enough? What “shoulds” are you flogging yourself with in this regard? What guilt are you Inflicting on yourself because you are not doing enough in one respect or another? We have this narrative about our heroes, “He worked tirelessly for the cause,” but no one works tirelessly. My friends, do what you can, and then rest.

We don’t observe a Sabbath as UUs, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t consider rest as sacred. We are built for rest, and honoring the way we are made is sacred attention. For me as a Pagan, honoring this portion of the wheel of the year as a time of rest is sacred time. Honor the call of your physiology. Working counter to it, forcing yourself to work past your capacity, actually decreases your productivity.

Author Saundra Dalton-Smith wrote a book called Sacred Rest. In It, she focuses on 7 areas of rest: spiritual, physical, mental, emotional, sensory, and social. Rest isn’t one-sided, It doesn’t mean only sleep, and it doesn’t mean just stopping. It’s many faceted. Her book is Christian-focused, but I thought I’d adapt those seven kinds of rest a bit so that we can figure out exactly what kind of rest we need.

1. Spiritual rest. This includes practices like prayer, meditation, mindfulness, and worship.

2. Physical rest. This means sleep, eating what your body needs and stopping when your body doesn’t need any more, and keeping our bodies active so that when the time comes for rest, we’re ready for it.

3. Mental rest. The practice of unloading my to-do list on paper is mental rest. Sometimes we need to give ourselves permission to stop striving for self-improvement, and Indulge in activities that we call “mindless.” There’s nothing wrong with watching or reading or listening to things purely for entertainment. Give yourself a break, but don’t get stuck there. Mindless activities can be addicting when we’re not fulfilling our other rest needs.

4. Emotional rest. A gratitude practice is a good way to give ourselves some emotional rest. Journaling, or therapy, or confiding In a friend, are good ways to find some emotional rest. Knowing what activities fill your well, and making time for those things, can be emotionally restful.

5. Sensory rest. We’re so bombarded with sensory overload. I remember when my local Wal-Mart started putting little screens all over the store with ads talking at me from nearly every aisle. I felt deeply resentful. The practices I mentioned earlier about turning off devices before bedtime can give us some sensory rest. Some experts recommend doing regular device-fasts In which we turn off and tune out for a day or a weekend. Another way to get some sensory rest is to try to do more monotasking. We’re a multitasking addicted society. We eat while we watch TV or read, we text while we drive, we juggle three things at once. Pay attention to how often you are doing more than one thing at a time, and try dialing it back. Try just listening to the birds when you go for your morning run instead of listening to a productivity podcast, try tasting your food, try listening completely to the person you’re having a conversation with. Try ONLY watching TV. You don’t always have to fold laundry at the same time. And finally, my favorite mode of sensory rest, go outside. Nature is the 100% antidote to sensory overload. Go for a walk, watch a sunset, hug a tree. You’ll feel better.

6. Social rest. This one is tricky because typically, extroverts thrive on social interaction and introverts recharge their batteries best alone. So, know yourself. I know when my fuse is short, it’s time for Introvert Hibernation Time. I need alone, and I need quiet. If that’s you, that’s a basic need, and learning to honor it is the way to sanity. If you’re an extrovert, know the kind of social that energizes you, maybe coffee with a close friend or a movie night at church, or family time. Maybe combine another kind of rest — like your nature time, or your spiritual fellowship — with time other people who get you.

My blessing for you today is a poem by my favorite blessor, John O’Donohue, titled, maybe al title ironically, For Work:

May the light of your soul bless your work
with love and warmth of heart.

May you see in what you do the beauty of your soul.

May the sacredness of your work bring light and renewal
To those who work with you
And to those who see and receive your work.

May your work never exhaust you.

May it release wellsprings of refreshment,
Inspiration, and excitement.

May you never become lost in bland absences.

May the day never burden.

May dawn find hope in your heart,
Approaching your new day with dreams,
Possibilities, and promises.

May evening find you gracious and fulfilled.

May you go into night blessed,
sheltered, and protected.

May your soul calm, console, and renew you.

Sources/Further Reading:

To Bless the Space Between Us by John O’Donohue

Sacred Rest by Saundra Dalton-Smith

The Sleep Revolution: Transforming Your Life One Night at a Time by Arianna Huffington

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs (Video)

Posted in Sermons

Sermon: Bodhi Day

Posted on by Deanna Lack

This sermon was given on December 8, 2019, at Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Cookeville.

Sermon #5

Bodhi Day

December 8, 2019

Happy Bodhi Day! This day, Rōhatsu in Japanese, is the Mahayana and Zen Buddhist celebration of the anniversary of Buddha’s day of enlightenment, but not all Buddhists celebrate it on December 8. The year of Buddha’s enlightenment is not something agreed upon, but if the date I saw is correct, it is the 2547th anniversary of that day. It’s a low-key holiday, celebrated mostly by meditation. Some Buddhists spend the entire night of Bodhi day in meditation. Some Buddhists decorate a ficus or fig tree with colored lights and strings of beads and three ornaments to represent the three jewels of buddhism: the Buddha, the Dharma or teachings, and the Sangha, or community.

I know that I told you that I was going to change the practice of reading stories to you, but as I reflected on how to present this information to you about what Bodhi Day is, I couldn’t think of a better way to tell you the origin of this holiday than to read you the story out of this little book, Sacred Stories. So, you get a story today. But don’t worry, you’re going to get a brief meditative moment, as well, a little bit later.

Summary of story: The prince Siddhartha Gatauma lived in a palace. His parents protected him from witnessing any kind of suffering, to ensure that he led a happy life. They didn’t let him out of the palace. But he got curious about what was outside the walls, and one day, when he was an adult, he snuck out of the palace and saw the suffering in the world, and was shocked. How could anyone be happy? He decided to leave his family behind and seek the answer. He tried various religious and ascetics paths for several years, but one day, starving, he decided that asceticism was not the way. He came to a huge Bodhi (fig) tree, and sat beneath it, determined that he would not rise until he attained enlightenment. The Master of Illusion, Mara, and his hideous minions, grew concerned that Siddhartha would find the answer to suffering, so they attacked him, coming at him one after another. But Siddhartha’s light was his shield, and they could not harm him, and eventually they ran away. Siddhartha continued to sit, and eventually attained enlightenment and became The Buddha.

This reads as a fable, doesn’t it, with the monsters and sort of Demonic/Satanic Mara coming at the Buddha as he sat trying to attain enlightenment. And of course, it is that, it surely has undergone some mythification in the 2500 years since Siddhartha Gautama was alive. But many Buddhists believe that Mara is not a literal demon in the way a Hindu or those of us who come from a Christian background understand a demon, but that he exists in the mind. He is the mental torments that plague us.

And doesn’t that one fact, that Mara is in the mind, change the meaning of the story entirely? Now, suddenly, we can relate to what the Buddha endured. Because I don’t know about you, but I have mental demons. Buddhism, which loves lists, calls these plagues 5 hindrances: 1) craving or clinging 2) anger or ill will 3) sloth and torpor 4) restlessness, worry, anxiety, and 5) doubt and inner critic. I know you know these demons as well as I do. In fact, a 2014 study at the University of Virginia administered to hundreds of subjects showed something fascinating: We don’t like being alone with our thoughts. Participants were put in a sparsely furnished room with blank walls and no devices or things to fidget with. There was only one thing in the room besides table and chairs: a button that would administer a harmless electric shock to them, if they chose to press it. Rather than sit and think quietly for 15 minutes, the duration of the experiment, the majority of participants chose to shock themselves, even though they’d said before the study that they’d p pay money not to be shocked. The way it’s divided by gender is interesting, as well: 65% of men self-administered shock, compared with 25% of women. So I’m not surprised that for the last several years, 100% of the participants in our Tuesday meditation sessions have been female or nonbinary. That’s an interesting little phenomenon I’ll leave for another day’s study.

But now we imagine the Buddha sitting, swearing that he will stay there until he attains enlightenment. And if you’ve ever spent more than two minutes sitting in meditation, you’ll relate completely to the thoughts coming at him like swarming hordes of multi-headed beasts, because the minute you try to get quiet, your mind tends to go crazy, and you end up saying to yourself, Dude, seriously? We’re thinking that right now? The Buddha’s answer: keep sitting. Stay with it. His light was his shield. His sitting was his battle plan. If you’ve sat and had a cramp in your leg or anxiety that you thought was going to drive you mad, you’ll completely understand the fear that Mara — our thought-demons — is going to KILL YOU.

But the Buddha sat, and he prevailed, and he attained enlightenment. And he gifted the world with this religion/teaching/dharma/philosophy/psychology/practice that can have really positive effects on our lives if we learn how to apply it skillfully, even 2500 years later.

So what is this teaching? I have about 10 minutes to give you the highlights, which, obviously, is not enough, but I’ll be drawing on Buddhism in sermons again and again, so this will give us a good foundation.

As I said earlier, the Buddha loved lists, and there are two that are foundational for the practice. You can’t talk about Buddhism without discussing the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path.

Buddha sat under the Bodhi tree with the intention of learning the answer to this fundamental question: Why is there suffering? It could even be said to be the central question of most of our world religions. And he came away with this list to answer that question, which is called the Four Noble Truths.

1. To be human is to suffer. The Sanskrit word for this is Dukkha, and it is commonly translated suffering. But some think it should be, instead, “dissatisfaction.” This seems obvious to us, maybe, but the Buddha’s situation was unique, having been protected from any knowledge of the existence of suffering for most of his life and then going out into the world and being struck by the universal ness of it.

2. The second Noble Truth is that the cause of our suffering is not the event that we’re reacting to, but our reaction to it, our desire. I’ll put that in a practical context in a minute.

3. The third NT is that it is possible to overcome that desire, to change our thoughts about the thing.

4. The fourth NT is the way to do that: the Buddha gave us an eightfold path to show us the way to change our thoughts. Again, more on that in a minute.

So let’s put this in practical, everyday terms. Let’s say you are driving down the road and someone cuts you off. You’re already in a hurry, and a bit anxious because you have to give a presentation when you get where you’re going. So he cuts you off, and you have to slam on your brakes and narrowly avoid an accident. You start telling yourself a story about what an idiot that other driver is, and that people like him are responsible for people dying every day, and that you’re going to be even later now because of him, and it’s going to be hard to focus because you’re all worked up about this near miss. So you go ten miles down the road muttering and swearing to yourself, and then you think, This is NOT helping. It’s having zero effect on the other driver, and I’m just getting myself all worked up about what happened, and I could use my energy more skillfully by thinking about my presentation or even just being in the moment driving so that I can pay better attention, be a better driver, and have better reaction time. You then take a deep breath, settle your hands on the wheel, and try to get present.

The driver in our example had an inciting incident that caused suffering. The suffering could have been momentary, but because they chose to ruminate on it and tell themselves a story about things that they had no actual knowledge about, they suffered for ten miles instead of one moment. Then, they saw that all of this rumination was unhelpful, and instead chose right mindfulness and to be in the present moment, or perhaps right effort and to be thinking about their upcoming presentation.

For our meditative moment, we’re going to find in our recent history an incident that we had a strong reaction to. Get yourself grounded with feet on the floor. You don’t have to close your eyes, but kind of unfocus them in the middle distance, or close if you’d rather. Think about something that upset you in some way in the past week or so, and how you dealt with it in real time. Rather than judging how you dealt with it, think about how your reaction contributed to or eased your suffering in connection with the incident. Is there some way you could have reacted more skillfully?

You’ll notice that I keep using the word Skillful. Buddhism’s dichotomy isn’t sinner versus saint, but usually it’s a foolish person versus a sage or wise person. We don’t look at it as right or wrong, but what would have been the more skillful or useful way to react. You’ll maybe have noticed that Buddhism’s tree of knowledge is a blessing, whereas Christianity’s Tree of Knowledge was forbidden.

If we look back at Buddhism’s Noble Truths, they’re almost a scientific process. Some even speculate that the Buddha built this concept on ancient Indian medicine. The first is the illness, the symptom: suffering. The second is the diagnosis: suffering is caused by desire. The third is the prognosis: it can be healed. And the fourth is the healing.

So let’s meet the eightfold path. The fourth step on the path of noble truth is the Eightfold Path itself. Maybe you’ve seen the eight-spoked Wheel that is one of the few symbols of Buddhism, and the spokes represent this path. Once again, we have some issues with translation. These are often translated: right understanding, right intention or resolve, right speech, right action or conduct, right livelihood, right effort or diligence, right attentiveness or mindfulness, and right samadhi, translated concentration or meditation. And the word “right” might be a bit misleading in this context. We’re not talking about right as in, versus wrong, a moralizing. Few Buddhist sects make rules about what lay practitioners can and cannot do. We could put the word “skillful” here, as well, and say skillful understanding, skillful intention. I could give a sermon on each one of these and expound on them at length, and in fact, the Buddha spent forty years of his teaching discussing these concepts.

But instead of expounding on them, I want to recommend the practice. Whether you do meditation in the context of Buddhism or not, the time you spend on the cushion or doing whatever other form of meditation seems best to you — it can be walking meditation, mantra meditation that has its roots in Hinduism, coloring, dancing, or whatever else places you in the moment and works for you as a focus — it is training. We call it practice because spending those moments teaching our mind to walk away from those demons forms neural pathways that stand us in good stead when that driver cuts us off, or when we run into other forms of frustration, or the bigger catastrophes in life that we don’t have the first clue how we’re going to deal with. This realization hit me one day while I was listening to a Dharma talk about how sitting in meditation is great training for those sleepless nights when your mind is spinning constantly on everything and nothing. A light bulb went on. OH, that’s what meditation is for! It’s brain training! And when we’re suffering we can sit with those four Noble Truths and and name, diagnose, prognose, and cure — or sometimes, maybe just ease — the suffering.

In each sermon, I try to offer a blessing at the end of it. This week, as a way to celebrate Bodhi Day, I’d like us to offer the blessing together in the form of a Buddhist Metta meditation. I know I’ve talked about Metta practice before, and you’re probably familiar with it in one of our hymns, but I thought we would walk through one together as both blessing and mindful moment this morning. So here’s how this works: you don’t need to close your eyes, but try to feel the resonance of each sentiment as you say it. You can look at the screen as you follow along, but do ground yourself with both feet on the ground as normal for our meditative moment.

Generally in Metta practice, we think of three to five sentiments of good will, and then we offer them, first to ourselves, then to a dear one, then to an acquaintance, then to someone it might be challenging to offer loving-kindness to, then finally, to “all beings.” Normally in meditation this is done silently, but we’re going to speak these sentiments aloud this morning.

May I be gentle with myself.
May I forgive quickly.
May my suffering be eased.

May you be gentle with yourself.
May you forgive quickly.
May your suffering be eased.
(X3)

May all beings be gentle with themselves
May all beings forgive quickly.
May the suffering of all beings be eased.

My friends, may you go joyfully into your week and the season.

Sources/Further Reading:

U of V Study
Sacred Stories: Wisdom from World Religions

Gil Fronsdal Zencast Dharma Talk about the Four Noble Truths

Posted in Big Questions

This is My Buddha

Posted on by Deanna Lack

I’d like to tell you the story of my Buddha. This Sunday, I’m giving a sermon on Bodhi Day, the anniversary of the Buddha’s enlightenment. So I’ve been sitting with my Buddha a bit this week, thinking about my journey as a Buddhist and meditator (among, of course, other things).

First of all, he was a gift from my friend Cole, who happens to be Pagan, not Buddhist. I thought initially I would repaint him, but I haven’t done that. Yet? I may still. But I like him as he is, too.

The important thing to note here is the rock he is holding. I found this rock on the shores of Lake Erie when I went to see my parents after my brother committed suicide in 2017.

After Anthony died and I rushed to get a plane ticket and get home for whatever funeral arrangements had to be made, as the plane circled to land and I saw the lake, tears suddenly flowed. I don’t like crying in public places. Disembarking a plane wasn’t a comfortable place to cry. But the lake holds a lot of memories, and my brother at the heart of a lot of them. Dad had a boat out near the islands (Kelley’s, Put-in-Bay, etc.) and on the weekends he had us, when the weather was good, we would go out to the boat and spend the entire weekend on it, fishing, swimming, visiting islands, sometimes just tooling around. So many memories.

I live now in land-locked Tennessee, and there are lakes, but nothing like Erie. When I landed and my dad picked me up, the first thing I said was, I want to go to the lake. So mom, dad, my aunt, and I went the next day.

When we got there, I wandered away from the others and sat by myself on the rocks with the wind whipping through my hair, crying. Erie doesn’t have an enchanting salt air smell like the ocean does. It smells like fish. But it’s a smell I love. Eventually, I returned to mom and dad, and pulled out my phone and put on “Sailing” by Christopher Cross, which was sort of our on the boat anthem. Dad cried. I cried. It’s good to cry together sometimes, even if it is public.

Finally, I strolled along the sandy part of the beach and picked up a couple of rocks. This one was the smallest, the smoothest. It was perfect, really. And then, in my carry-on bag on the way home, it cracked in half.

I kept it anyway. In fact, somehow it seemed more significant, cracked, than the other stones that stayed perfect in my bag.

I didn’t find comfort in the story that my brother is in heaven, and my Jehovah’s Witness parents couldn’t even say with certainty that he would be resurrected to live with them in their New System/Paradise. Instead, I found my comfort in Thich Nhat Hanh’s book No Death, No Fear. This is among the many passages in it that comforted me and still comfort me:

“When I make a pot of oolong tea, I put tea leaves into the pot and pour boiling water on them. Five minutes later there is tea to drink. When I drink it, oolong tea is going into me. If I put in more hot water, making a second pot of tea, he tea from those leaves continues to go into me. After I have poured out all the tea, what will be left in the pot is just spent tea leaves. The leaves that remain are only a very small part of the tea. The tea that goes into me is a much bigger part of the tea. It is the richest part.

“We are the same; our essence has gone into our children, our friends, and the entire universe. WE have to find ourselves in those directions and not in the spent tea leaves. I invite you to see yourself reborn in forms that say you are not yourself. […]

“You do not have to wait until the flame has gone out to be reborn. I am reborn many times every day. Every moment is a moment of rebirth. My practice is to be reborn in such a way that my new forms of manifestation will bring light, freedom, and happiness into the world.”

One day I was rearranging the altar where I meditate each morning, and I set my Buddha at the center. I realized that he was holding his hands as if he was holding something. I looked down on the shelf and there was my broken rock, the broken pieces of me. I gently placed them into the Buddha’s hands and trusted that if I sit there and practice looking deeply, I will see that the broken rock is both the same as it has always been and that it will never be the same again.

Posted in Sermons

Sermon: A Practice of Gratitude

Posted on by Deanna Lack

My pretty Thanksgiving Cactus in the sunshine

My gift for you today is a little book of Gratitude. If you carry your book of gratitude with you, maybe when a delight or something to be grateful for strikes you, you’ll be moved to write in it then and there.

The science is really clear: having a regular practice of gratitude is really good for our mental health. It increases a sense of well-being and happiness, and decreases symptoms of PTSD, anxiety, and other mental illnesses. Studies have been conducted on well people and on patients seeking counseling. A Berkeley study showed that the effects weren’t just the immediate good feeling that comes from thinking nice thoughts. Using fMRI technology, the brain scans showed more activity in the medial prefrontal cortex when people were feeling gratitude, and these changes lasted up to three months after the practice was begun.

In another study, scientists asked one group of people to write down the things that they were grateful for on a weekly basis, while the other group recorded hassles or neutral life events. The folks who kept gratitude journals exercised more regularly, reported fewer physical symptoms, felt better about their lives as a whole, and were generally more optimistic about the upcoming week—compared to their negatively focused counterparts.

This seems to be borne out among my friends. I asked on Facebook whether my friends had a regular gratitude practice. Those who responded that they did reported that it makes them feel closer to God, more empathetic, not as quick to anger, a better life, closer relationships, better outlook, and “reduced grump-butt levels.” My friends exist on a wide religious spectrum, and I know that these answers came from Christians, pagans, and those who don’t subscribe to any particular religion.

In my own experience, I’ve found that knowing I’m going to be looking for something to write in my gratitude journal has the effect of making me more present to notice things to be grateful for or finding delight in. What about you? Do you have a regular practice of gratitude?

Surveys show we WANT to be more grateful. One reported that 78% of Americans had felt strongly thankful in the past week. That number is so high that it seems likely that there’s some social desirabaility bias going on – we want it to be true that we feel deep gratitude on a regular basis. Diana Butler Bass, author of the book Grateful: The Transformative Power of Giving Thanks, comments on this statistic and compares it to another study in the same year, 2015, and has this to say:

That sounds great, but those numbers also point to a problem: that of a gratitude gap. They reveal a disparity between our private feelings and our public attitudes. Social scientists have extolled gratitude as a personal path to peace, health, and contentment. Giving thanks, however, is more than a private practice; those same researchers insist that gratitude is socially beneficial and strengthens communities. Gratitude is about ‘me’ and it is about ‘we.’ Where is the gap? A week after the Pew survey on the gratitude question, Public Religion Research Institute posted a very different study regarding American attitudes as we moved into a Presidential election year. That study discovered that Americans were more anxious, less optimistic, and more distrustful than ever. Subsequent political events made evident a surge of rage, revealing a toxic level of anger, fear, division, and intolerance in the American electorate.

The survey puzzled me. Did the same people who felt grateful also express these negative emotions? Had they divided their lives into personal thanks and public rage?

She says further on, “our understanding of thanks is polluted by our toxic dissatisfactions.” When I read this, I immediately thought of Thanksgiving. It’s a holiday not only based on toxic cultural fables that literally whitewash our history, and it’s becoming a holiday of gluttony with a thin veneer of gratitude that seems to be thinning even more. Even further, in recent years, Christmas has encroached on our supposed thankfulness more and more to the point that Black Friday now starts at 6 pm on Thanksgiving Day, and peoples “toxic dissatisfactions” have them running out of houses full of turkey so that they can do battle for the best prices on the commercial madness that our American highest holy day has become. I wonder at how many tables this week thanks will be expressed for families, while failing to express thanks to family members.

Christmas itself often brings anxiety about the equivalency of our gifts.

For me, and maybe for you too, a practice of gratitude might feel a little messy if you don’t believe, as the Bible says in James, that “every good gift and every perfect present comes from above.” If your practice of gratitude incorporates expressing your thanks to God, I think that’s a beautiful thing. But I also think we need not forget those through whom those gifts come. Let me ask you this: if you believe in a benevolent deity, what would make them happier – if you spent every night on your knees pouring out verbal thanks to them in prayer, or if you shared your gifts, your blessings and your thanks with others? If all good things come from god, then your sharing – whether that’s your love, joy, gratitude, or material things – means you get to be part of the divine distribution process, and how cool is that?

And if you don’t believe that all good things come from god, then finding the source of your good things becomes maybe even more important. It makes me think of this meme I’ve seen before:

Gates was going to be my service coordinator today but couldn’t. She shared with me this video that I wanted to share with you:

AJ Jacobs on Gratitude

What jumped out to me in that video is that this exercise in gratitude drew Mr. Jacobs’ attention to what is our 7th principle of UUism: respect for the interconnected web of existence of which we are all a part. I think the heart of gratitude lies in this principle, and maybe also in the principle of democratic process.

Our society has roots in feudalism. Under that system, and systems before it, you do something for your lord – give him part of your livelihood – and he does something for you, namely, lets you live in his territory. This equation, where a benefactor bestows something upon a beneficiary, and the beneficiary is expected to be both grateful and often also to cough up something of value in return, is a societal more, and we’ve had a couple of centuries to shake it, but we’re not doing a great job of it. Your parents probably taught you that when someone gives you a birthday or graduation gift, you’re expected to say thanks. Even before that, when a stranger gives a child a piece of candy, we say to the child, “What do you say?” I’m not saying that this is a bad thing, it’s valuable to teach children to express gratitude. But, as this author says, “obligatory gratitude rarely has a heart.” It’s part of maturity to grow and express gratitude not only when it’s expected. When you express gratitude the way Mr. Jacobs did, to people who are underappreciated for making the world work successfully, then your thank you becomes a gift.

It’s important to separate the emotion of gratitude from the intentional focus on the present moment. It’s also important to have perspective, because from a mature vantage point, we can see that things that felt really awful in the moment were really, ultimately, something we learned from and grew. When you can be grateful for that painful event in your life, and see it from a new vantage, that’s a mark of maturity.

I think it’s also important to be careful, in our practice of gratitude, that it doesn’t become a kind of prosperity gospel. This is essentially what prosperity gospel teaches: God wants you to be materially wealthy and personally happy. Therefore, your wealth and your privilege can be considered evidence that you are blessed by God. This isn’t exclusive to Christian teachings. In the video The Secret the idea was popularized that the Universe wants your highest good and therefore, if you just ask in the right way, all good things will come to you. This is really just a non-Christian prosperity gospel.

Do you see the danger in this kind of thinking? It leaves everything else out of the picture. You have “stuff” because God likes you and he hands it to you. If that “stuff” comes at the cost of child labor or environmental damage or other people being disadvantaged, or any number of other societal ills, well, if it was the will of the universe, who are we to argue, right? And then, if we’re not being financially blessed, what did we do wrong, why have we lost the favor of God or the Universe?

If gratitude is only about the good feeling we give ourselves about counting our blessings, then it will help us cope with a dysfunctional system. But if we still carry around a structure of gratitude as a debt or obligation that requires payback, and if we find in our gratitude practice that the blessings we are counting are primarily first-world material things, then “it serves to reinforce hierarchical structures of injustice and spiritualizes gifts and blessings while offering only heavenly rewards to those lower down the system.” In other words, those who are well off see their blessings as evidence that God cares about them, while people who don’t have these privileges will, if they’re good, get some nice things when they get to heaven.

From Rev. Bass’s book:

We might be grateful persons, with thankful hearts, and be fanatical about gratitude journals and intentions, but as soon as we walk out our front door or turn on the news, we are confronted with a world of payback, quid pro quo, corruption, and ungrateful neighbors. […] If gratitude is built on a myth of scarcity and imperial hierarchies, it has been corrupted. If gratitude is privatized and collaborates with injustice, it is not really gratitude… Gratitude begins with a profound awareness of abundance and builds communities of well-being and generosity. Gratitude opens toward grace.

True gratitude, not transactional gratitude but transformative gratitude, cannot be quiet in the face of injustice. The sort of gratitude that changes our individual lives will also revolutionize our lives in community and as citizens. Gratitude as an ethic moves us from the kind of private thankfulness that comforts us to public practices that push us out of our comfort zones.

“The ‘me’ of gratitude must extend to the ‘we’ of gratitude as an ethic, a vision of community based on habits and practices of grace and gifts, of cultivating a wide field of vision and deepening our awareness of humility and blessing, of setting tables and sharing food for all. Gratitude is not merely resilience. Gratitude is resistance too. It is time for all of us to join in the resistance.”

You know, when Donald Trump won the presidency, as I told you a couple of weeks ago, my reaction was activism. But as my friend Angela said to me, we engaged in a sprint, and I’ll be honest, I didn’t have the endurance to keep going, calling my representatives every day and showing up for every rally, or, like her, running for office. I burned out. I felt kind of guilty because I had bought shirts and pins that said “Nevertheless, she persisted,” and “Resist,” yet I was not persisting. Maybe you’ve had this experience too, the constant barrage of more and more ridiculous news from the White House has just ground me down over the last three years. I started to wonder, what can I do that matters? My phone calls to Diane Black do not matter, not at all.

But over time, I started to realize that my best service to the community and the world was within these walls. I could find people who were similarly discouraged and be with them and make them feel maybe for the first time in a week that they weren’t alone. I could use the church’s voice in the community, put on my golden swarm shirt and show up for a rally to say “I will not forget the victims of this shooting,” or “I do not support children being locked up at the border.” The work of this faith community is small, but with networking with other liberal orgs in the community and with your support, it can grow. We don’t have to resist alone, because we’re together, and together, we’re making things happen. In the last few weeks our church has received a grant to help increase early childhood literacy in the area, and we can do that in a way that promotes inclusion and acceptance, because that’s our vision. Some of our friends have a vision even bigger than that. There’s a lot more our little church can do, and it starts with us. When I think of the things I’m most grateful for, this church is at the top of the list, right after my family. You’re at the top of the list. So I would encourage you to consider that in your thought process on gratitude, and if you haven’t made a pledge to help support the work of this growing church in our community, to contribute to having this little haven here in Conservative Cookeville, there’s still time to do that.

My blessing for you this week:

May you give thanks
May you express thanks to those who have blessed you
May you look at your blessings a little differently than you have in the past
May you see through the lens of interconnectedness.
May we have courage to resist when resistance is needed
May we as a community build within these walls an ethic of gratitude
May we model the kind of thankful world we want to see outside these walls

Posted in Big Questions

I’m sorry… Thank You

Posted on by Deanna Lack

Hawaiian Volcano. Photo by Marc Szeglat, volcanoes.de

My meditation this morning left me with tears streaming down my face. It was a practice called Ho’oponopono, a practice of indigenous Hawaiian healers and shamans, and something I want to work with more. Here is the practice, a sort of mantra:

I’m sorry. Please forgive me. I love you. Thank you.

In the version I practiced, as part of Davidji’s 30 Days to Rebirth course on Insight Timer, the meditator imagines themselves as a child. I’m sorry. Please forgive me. I love you. Thank you. Then as a young adult, an adult, recently. Then imagining another person. I’m sorry, Please forgive me. I love you. Thank you.

When I arrived at the last portion of the practice (which I think I will expand to make it more metta-style when I do it myself, maybe more on that later), my mind went immediately to my brother Anthony, who committed suicide in 2016. I’m sorry. Please forgive me. I love you. Thank you.

I cannot ask his forgiveness any longer, and even if he was alive, I don’t think it’s a conversation he would have wanted to have. But it’s a conversation I can have with him now. I’m sorry that when you needed me, when everyone you loved was cutting you off, that I said okay to that practice and hurt you. They told me it was the loving thing to do. How can cutting someone out of your life ever be the loving thing to do? I’m sorry. Please forgive me. I love you. Thank you.

And back to myself, for doing the cutting off: I’m sorry. Please forgive me. I love you. Thank you.

There’s so much to process here.

And as I journaled about this, I have shifted my practice of gratitude to a practice of delight. What, in this heavy but necessary moment, could I call a delight? I wrote this:

Delight: How about this? Crying. It is a thing I have always hated. I hate the not-in-control-of-myself feeling, especially in front of other people. But my grief — for Anthony — taught me that catharsis is important and needed, that repressed tears will weigh down your soul to the point of sickness, even to the point of death. I promised myself then, grieving, that whatever comes, I will let it come, and then let it go.

Did I ever see my adult brother cry? I remember when he was really little, and he would cry. My grandfather told him ‘Toughen up, be a man,’ and mom got mad. He’s not a man, she said, he’s a little boy, and there’s nothing wrong with tears. Which message did he internalize? Which one did I?

My Aunt Betty was famous in my family for her ability to cry gracefully. It was, mom and I said, because she didn’t bother trying not to cry, she just let the tears flow, and we (mom and I) would say she was beautiful, crying, and wish we could be beautiful crying too, and not resist it.

This morning in meditation I was beautiful crying. I did not resist it. In meditation — alone — I can let the tears flow, feel them drip from my chin, and feel deep gratitude for the way they wash through me like a summer storm and leave me feeling cleansed and purified. A little more whole.

Posted in Big Questions, Sermons

My Spiritual Journey

Posted on by Deanna Lack

This is a sermon I gave at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Cookeville on November 10, 2019.

Meditative Moment: Before we talk about my spiritual journey, I want to use our meditative moment to think about yours. So settle in, ground with your feet on the floor, and if it feels right let your eyes drift closed or soften your gaze. Picture a pool of water, the pool of your consciousness, and we’re going to think about a few questions. Imagine the questions as pebbles dropped into the pool, and see what comes up for you.

Imagine yourself as a child, thinking what God was like. Was God your friend? Did people encourage you to ask questions about God? Imagine yourself growing, and think about whether it was safe to believe what you believed as you grew.

Now, imagine yourself as a young adult. Think about the moment you started to separate “spiritual” from “religion”. Think about the times you realized how big the world was, how big the universe was, and started wondering about your place in it and what you were meant to do.

And now, think about your recent journey. What twists has the spiritual path put in front of you that surprised you? What crises of the heart led you to ask new questions? And where did those questions lead you?

(We did this in a short meditation, but I may turn it into a longer, recorded one… I do recommend you try it, and maybe write down what came up for you afterward)

I would not be surprised if every person in this room would give a little chuckle and say “oh, my spiritual journey’s been a twisty one.” We have a couple of people in here who were raised as UUs, I think, but even they would probably say the path has not been simple.

And mine isn’t either. Susie asked me to give a “get to know your minister” sermon. It’s been a little odd writing this, and thinking about how in the world I would cram nearly 50 years of journey into 20 minutes. Obviously, I’m going to need to hit the highlights and move on, but if you have any questions, most of my life is an open book to you. If there’s something that speaks to you about this journey, and it can help you somehow on yours, please feel free to ask me more about it. And before I start, I want to say that I am not condemning the religion of my youth… it’s just not the path for me.

So, I think that for almost as long as I can remember, I have been spiritually curious. I was born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio. My parents came from very different religious backgrounds, he Catholic, she Jehovah’s Witness, and neither of them were practicing any religion when I was born, although I was baptized Catholic as an infant. But my grandfather taught me about Catholicism and took me to church occasionally, and to his Our Lady of Consolation shrine in Carey, Ohio, where he went to do the stations of the cross every year, even when he was really ill. On my mom’s side, her sister, my Aunt Nancy, was the faithful one; my mom and my grandparents “fell away” as they say, meaning they stopped going to meetings. And I was full of questions for anyone who didn’t mind talking about religion.

I was also a studious child. At the shrine I’d get books about the saints, and my cousins rolled their eyes at me because in summers when I visited them in West Virginia, they would be outside playing and I would be inside reading the bound volumes. These are encyclopedic volumes containing past copies of the Watchtower and Awake magazines that they distribute door to door. My aunt had them going all the way back to the 40s, and to me it was a treasure trove of information. I was eight.

Aunt Nancy arranged for me to study the Bible with a family friend in Ohio, Alice, who was a pioneer. That’s what JWs call people who spend 90 hours or more in the ministry every month. By the time I was 12, I was begging mom to take me to the Kingdom Hall. Eventually, she did, and she and I and my brother went.

My parents had been split up since I was 8, but when I was 14 or so Dad got interested in “the Truth” – what JWs call their religion — and started studying the Bible as well. After ten years apart, they remarried, and they’re still married, and still Witnesses, 30 years later. I was baptized when I was 17, and the year after that, while I was still in my senior year of high school, I started serving as a pioneer, spending 90 hours a month preaching door to door. I was not, however, allowed to speak directly to the congregation, as a woman. For a time, I went to Kentucky to preach where the need was greater, which means that the Witnesses don’t get to the houses as often. My brother, on the other hand, was also baptized, but when he was 18, he left, and he was disfellowshipped. When you’re disfellowshipped, your family and Witness friends are not supposed to talk to you.

But I was in love with a fellow Witness, Len, and when we spoke to the elders about our wedding they specifically asked if we’d had sex. And since we had, there was a committee formed, and they sat with us for three hours asking very pointed questions about when and where and how often, and there were two possible results – disfellowshipping, or public reproof, depending on whether the elders determined we were repentant. Our fate was the latter, which meant we could not speak in the congregation but were allowed to continue to attend and our family could still speak to us. It was a bad way to start a marriage, in guilt and shame, and I think it had no chance. We divorced when my son was 2, and I was 25. Single parenting is a spiritual journey I could talk about for a whole hour, so I’ll leave that for another time, but Brandon and I are really close because of all of the time we spent together.

In some ways I was a really good Witness. I KNEW my Bible. I brought my study Bible in case you’re interested in looking at it and all my scribbled notes and highlights. I loved a deep dive into spiritual questions and I studied with complete zeal. But in other ways, I was a terrible Witness. I never converted anyone, despite being a pioneer, and I’d find myself chastising myself for nodding along fascinated as someone told me their religious views, when the point of my being at their door was to tell them about my religion, and convert them.

A few years after my divorce, some things happened that resulted in a legal battle with my ex, and it was a trial so difficult that I got very depressed (for the second time in my life), and stopped attending meetings. My parents got alarmed, and they paid for me to visit a psychologist. And as I sat there explaining to him about how JWs believe that all the people except JWs will be killed at Armageddon and then they will live forever in paradise on earth, I thought… this is messed up. Someone who believes this is not who I want to be anymore. Someone who judges how spiritual people are based on the smallest things like what TV shows they watch, is not who I want to be anymore. So, the psychology kind of backfired for its intended purpose.

I stopped going to meetings, but I still believed in the things I’d been taught for so long as “the Truth.” And that means, I believed that God was going to kill ME at Armageddon, for probably about two years after I left. And that is a very heavy burden to carry.

But I wanted to be a writer, and I had a friend who recommended a book called The Artist’s Way, which is for blocked creative people. The book recommended journaling as a practice, so I started doing Morning Pages, 3 pages of freehand, stream-of-consciousness writing first thing after getting up every morning. And, there were exercises in there talking about the creative process. Many artists, it said, say that when they are creating, they’re pulling forth the divine, and that’s what enables the creative process. The book asked, how do you feel about that process? Does the god you worship support you in your creativity, or do you serve an adversarial god? As I worked though these questions, I realized that if I was going to choose not to be a witness, then I had to choose more than what not to be. If I didn’t want to be the person that believing in Jehovah made me, then I needed to think about what sort of Divine would I need to believe in, to be the sort of person I wanted to be? The terrifying answer was, I didn’t know. I wasn’t allowed to believe that any other gods existed.

But I started to play with these ideas of the divine in my journal, and I started to let myself look at other kinds of spirituality. There was a scripture that I often used when I was speaking to people door-to-door, that you could recognize religion by the kind of people it produced.

“Be on the watch for the false prophets who come to you in sheep’s covering, but inside they are ravenous wolves. By their fruits you will recognize them. Never do people gather grapes from thorns or figs from thistles, do they?  Likewise, every good tree produces fine fruit, but every rotten tree produces worthless fruit. A good tree cannot bear worthless fruit, nor can a rotten tree produce fine fruit. Every tree not producing fine fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.  Really, then, by their fruits you will recognize those men.” (Matthew 7:15-20, New World Translation

I’d read that scripture and substitute the word “Organization” (you could also use “church”) for “tree”, and “people” for “fruit. So, Every good church produces fine people, but every rotten church produces worthless people. The teachings of the church are reflected in the lives of its members.

And once I was outside this organization, I started to see without a filter, and it seemed to me that those teachings produced people who were judgmental and narrow-minded.

And I started to read, everything, like a kid in the candy store of the whole of human thought. Nothing was forbidden to me anymore. I wrote a poem about trying on ideas like a little kid trying on clothes in the goddess’s closet. I explored eastern religions, yoga, philosophy, New Age ideas, shamanism. I wrote this in my journal at the time:

“I am evolving. I feel myself in a constant state of flux. I’m like a child in a toy store, moving from one aisle to the next, unsure what to play with, sampling something and leaving it. There are so many ideas in the world! I want to wrap my mind around them, taste, assimilate or reject. I used to think I had eternity for all of this. Now, I seize the day, more or less. I am a gin player, picking a card (idea), seeing what it does with what is in my hand, discarding or keeping, waiting for the complete gin rummy. It’ll never come — I don’t want it to. I want to keep sampling philosophies, ideas, lifestyles, cultures.”

At first I was really scared of paganism because I had been taught that paganism is Satanism, and to entertain those ideas is to invite the devil into your mind. But nature is a huge part of my spirituality, and it had been even as a Witness. So I started to walk in the forest and get quiet in my mind, and to observe the cycles of the year, and I meditated with different traditions. I stayed afraid of pagan labels for 10 years, so I would never have called myself a witch until I met Dharma, who had the shop across the street there, where I worked, and for the first time I experienced Pagan community, and, as we Pagans say, I came out of the broom closet. My pagan practice is different than a lot of other pagans, if you can find two who practice alike. I don’t do a lot of spellwork, but I observe the wheel of the year and the movement of the moon, and I do a little tarot and a little candle magic, but mostly, I really enjoy ritual and marking significant events in my life with ritual. Concurrently, I took ideas from other religions that appealed to me, especially Buddhism. I call myself a Buddho-pagan Unitarian Universalist. My husband calls it “salad bar religion,” where you take what you like from the smorgasbord of the world’s spirituality.

When I was a Witness I loved singing the songs. They’re not called hymns, JWs call them “kingdom songs.” Sometimes, when I hit a particular note, my kingdom songbook would vibrate in my hand. I played the viola in high school, and with that too I experienced this resonance, when I’d find that sweet spot and the wooden body of my instrument would sing along, and I could feel it all the way through it and sometimes, all the way through me. And when I started exploring ideas, sometimes it seemed that way. I’d hit upon an idea and it would just sort of hum through me — resonance. YES, that fits right, that feels right. Have you ever experienced that?

In every human life I think some of the most spiritual moments are the moments of absolute crisis. That’s when we experience our paradigm shifts. It happened for me when I was experiencing that court battle and the injustice, and it made me question everything. From the time I left JWs, the only spiritual community I had was when I was working at Solstice Winds for a couple of years. But then, in September 2016, my only brother committed suicide, and two months later Donald Trump was elected president. My response to the trauma of those two events was threefold:

1) I got involved in activism. I attended the women’s march. At the time, there was a controversy with our school board in White County about some people claiming that our schools were indoctrinating the children in Islam, and I got involved with fighting the ultra conservative forces that were pushing that narrative in our community. I helped found the Indivisible chapter that is still active here in Cookeville. I went to nonviolent protest training, and that was enlightening and life-changing.

2) I went to therapy. . Side story about therapy, while I was there, I said, “My biggest regret is that I did not go to college.” My therapist said, “It sounds like you need to go to college.” Yeah, I said, but it’s so expensive, and I don’t even know what I want to be when I grow up, and I’m 45… Just take a few classes, she said. The next week, TN announced their Reconnect program to pay for adults to get an associates’ degree, and I said, well, I’m out of excuses.

3) One day while I was journaling, which I continued pretty consistently since I started in 2001, I heard a voice in my head that said: You need community. Go to UU.

Here’s what I wrote in my journal the next day:

“I’m going to church today at the Unitarian Universalist congregation. I just thought, yesterday, that it was something I needed. Tolerance is my preaching now, nature is my cathedral, animals are my clergy, and art is my prayer. Why, exactly, do I suddenly feel the need for religion? I can’t really say. There is a need to be of service, and they may help with that. I have gifts to give anyone recovering from religion, and that is where those people go. If I can promote love, tolerance, and hope in this confused and divided country, I will do it.”

And here I wrote the 7 principles of Unitarian Universalist, and their sources of wisdom and inspiration. And I wrote, “It does rather sound like it’s where I belong, doesn’t it? Acceptance is a keynote for me. We welcome you no matter who you are, and not (as with JWs) with the intention of changing you, “fixing” you. You are not broken, you are whole. You are a child of the Divine.”

The day I walked in the door, Ivan invited me to stay for the Social Justice meeting, and there, in that moment, was resonance. This feels right. This was my community. Where I had been part of a judgmental, narrow-minded religious community, I came here and found an accepting, broad-minded community that didn’t mind which religion I had cherry picked my truth from. Mark’s sermon on the third Sunday I came used a story from a pagan tradition. I looked at that in my journal and was shocked that that was only my third service, because at that point I already felt like a member of this community.

I’ve always been someone who loves a study of spiritual concepts. I love that UUism draws its spirituality from honestly, anything. You can find it in the direct experience of nature. You can find inspiration in a poem that isn’t meant to be spiritual at all. It’s easy to find inspiration in someone like Rumi, who is a spiritual poet, but you can find inspiration in Beat poetry. You can find inspiration in pop culture, or philosophy, or a snippet of scientific fact, or an ancient story, or even … in the Bible. I had loved making a study of the Bible so much, but now, the whole of human thought and the entirety of nature and science and the universe were open to me and part of the sources of wisdom.

I think I was a UU long before I walked in these doors. My grandmother was raised Lutheran and changed her religion to Catholic for love of my grandfather, and she would always say to me, “Honey dear, it doesn’t matter what religion or how you get to god. All paths lead to god.” I, because I was a JW and I knew everything, would nod and smile and internally disagree, and I would LOVE to tell her now how right she was. She used to say, “I believe in living your religion.” I wish that I could tell her how much her spirituality inspires me now. And I would love to go back and tell that young witness that I was, beating herself up about not monopolizing a religious conversation with “the Truth,” that she was actually doing exactly what was right for her soul.

So, once I found my community, starting last year I started kicking around the idea of being a minister myself. Some things seem impossible when you first dream them. First of all, I wasn’t sure I wanted to be minister of some unknown congregation, THIS is my community, but it already had a minister. Secondly, I did some research, and in order to be fellowshipped as a minister you need a bachelor’s, and a Master of Divinity, and I’m attending school part time, about ¾ of the way to my associates. There’s a lot of space between me and a fellowship. When Mark told us he was leaving the congregation, he said, there may be another way. I’m still a little shocked, to be honest, that that idea that tickled at the back of my mind last year has turned into reality so rapidly. And in some ways I feel like I’m not ready, but I’m buoyed by your belief in me and in love with the idea of growing as a minister as this little church grows as a congregation. When it comes to resonances, this just might be my biggest one yet. I thank you all for being my community, and for being my yes.

Benediction (Jalal ad’din Rumi):

The Journey

Come, seek,

for seeking is the foundation of fortune:
every success depends upon focusing the heart.
Unconcerned with the business of the world,
keep saying with all your soul, “Ku, ku,” like the dove…

Even though you’re not equipped,
keep searching…

Whoever you see engaged in search,
become her friend and cast your head in front of her,
for choosing to be a neighbor of seekers,
you become one yourself…

Day and night you are a traveler in a ship.
You are under the protection of a life-giving spirit…

Step aboard the ship and set sail,
like the soul going towards the soul’s Beloved.
Without hands or feet, travel toward Timelessness
just as spirits flee from non-existence.

…By God, don’t linger
in any spiritual benefit you have gained,
but yearn for more like one suffering from illness
whose thirst for water is never quenched…

Leave the seat of honor behind:
the Journey is your seat of honor.