Category: Sermons

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 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, 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.

Posted in Sermons

Samhain as Liminal Space

Posted on by Deanna Lack
Photo by Simon Matzinger

It seems like, at least some years here in Tennessee, we go along, and it’s summer way past the end of summer. I don’t know about you, but at that first cold snap I run into my closet and pull out flannels and cozy sweaters, and put the kettle on for a cup of hot chocolate. And then summer comes back for another two months. Then, overnight, it goes from 90s during the hottest part of the day to 30s and 40s at night. Tennessee is not a land of happy mediums when it comes to weather.

Pagans observe what we call the Wheel of the Year. In some parts of the year, the wheel turns slowly, but this year it seemed like we turned that eighth-turn from Mabon to Samhain all in one go. But with it getting darker earlier, and the leaves swirling around you, and the chill in the air, and the storm clouds, you can definitely feel it turning, can’t you?

In pagan tradition we consider Samhain the end of the year, which, because the cycle is a wheel, means it is also the beginning of the year. The Wheel has eight pagan sabbath or holidays — Yule and Litha at the solstices, Mabon and Ostara at the equinoxes. Pagans also observe four cross-quarter holidays at the midpoint between each solstice and equinox. Samhain is one of those cross-quarter holidays in Celtic tradition, between Mabon and Yule.

Because these traditions come from agricultural societies, the observance of each of the festivals is closely tied to what is happening in the natural world at that time of year. They’d celebrate the planting at Beltane, the first harvest at Lughnasa. Samhain is the last of the harvest, when everything is dying on the vine, and people made some careful decisions about which parts of their herds to cull so that they could survive through the difficult winter.

Samhain and Halloween have always been associated with death. As people considered the plants and animals nearing the ends of the cycles of their lives, they naturally thought about the cycle of their own lives. It was believed that at this time of year, the veil between this world and the world of the dead was thinner, and therefore ghosts could cross over, or you could speak with your ancestors. Many traditions practice dumb suppers in which they set places of food and feasted with their dead.

When Christiansen converted Celtic peoples, they moved All Saints or All Hallows’ Day from May to the first of November so that it could coincide with the celebrations the pagan people were already doing, so Christian tradition honors November 1 with consideration of those who have gone before us, too.

This year, I want to expand a little bit on the meaning of Samhain or Halloween in a way that it could apply to our lives, not as a holiday or Pagan observance or even necessarily a time to honor our dead.

Samhain is often described as a liminal time, or liminal space. Liminal is defined in the dictionary as “relating to a transitional or initial stage of a process,” or “occupying a position at, or on both sides of, a boundary or threshold.” The term comes from the Latin word limens, or threshold. In anthropology, the term is defined like this: “the quality of ambiguity or disorientation that occurs in the middle stage of a rite of passage, when participants no longer hold their pre-ritual status but have not yet begun the transition to the status they will hold when the rite is complete.” This is according to Victor Turner, who studied rites of passage among African societies. So liminal space is a little limbo, a pause between what has passed away and what is yet to be.

How does this time of year fit that definition? This idea of thinning threshold between the world of the living and dying, that is liminal it’s. In practical and agricultural terms, we are at a transition between the plenty of summer and a difficult winter, a time when we honor what is gone and think about an unknown future and how we might plan for it. People at this time of year will often put on costumes and blur their identity or experiment with the idea of being someone else. That, too, is liminality. These portrayals sometimes represent the deepest-seated fears of our species.

Sometimes in meditation we’re asked to pay attention to the space between our breaths. It’s a little bit of a challenge, because we don’t often acknowledge a space between our breaths at all. But if you’ll follow your breath for a moment, you’ll notice that at the peak of each in breath and before each out-breath, there’s the tiniest gap. Sometimes, this gap is bigger. Imagine someone surprises you, and you gasp. Humor me for a second, pretend that Bigfoot just walked in the door and give me a good gasp.

You notice how big the pause is after that sharp breath? You’ve sucked in enough air to fill your lungs for fight or flight, but you haven’t quite figured out what to do with that lungful of air. It’s liminal. And, naturally, since this is a UU church, what we’d do next is welcome Bigfoot and offer him refreshments.

Sometimes, liminal spaces happen in our lives like that. Sometimes the unthinkable happens. We lose a job we were depending on, a long-term relationship ends, we lose someone very dear to us in death, we receive a serious diagnosis, we find out we’re going to be parents. The shock of these things is like that GASP — What now? We have no idea. We know things are never going to be the same, but we have no idea what comes next. Your very sense of identity feels uncertain. If I’m not a husband anymore, who am I? If I’m not a pharmacist, what’s the next step? If I’m not childless, how do I keep this very big, very important role of Parent from eclipsing all of the other roles that are still important to me?

In these liminal spaces, the moment between then and now, between teh past and the not yet, we are NOT comfortable. Franciscan friar Richard Rohr says, “It is when you have left the tried and true, but have not yet been able to replace it with anything else. It is when you are between your old comfort zone and any possible new answer. If you are not trained in how to hold anxiety, how to live with ambiguity, how to entrust and wait, you will run… anything to flee this terrible cloud of unknowing.”

But sometimes these moments in our lives are the defining ones. Sometimes we see with the perspective of years that we could not have become who we are now without these crises, and the liminal moments that followed, the times when we did not know what was next and we had no choice but to wait and see what the Universe was going to bring us.

Each week we recite together our mission statement, and one very important facet of it is Spiritual Growth. It’s also the third principle of Unitarian Universalist, “encouragement to spiritual growth in our congregations.” We’re not talking about religious doctrine when we say that, we’re not talking about learning some fact that will make us better Unitarian Universalists, and it’s not some kind of mystical revelation. And it’s a simple truth that if we aspire to spiritual growth — then by definition we have to outgrow our comfort zones. You might realize that your beliefs about yourself or about how the world works are not true, or not in line with the person you want to be. It’s a little shocking sometimes. *GASP*! Well, if this isn’t who I want to be, who do I want to be? What’s the next step? Liminal space.

And if we don’t develop the capacity to, in Richard Rohr’s words, live with that ambiguity, hold that discomfort, and just sit for a time and see what develops, then we missed an opportunity. We can run back to the last phase of spiritual comfort. We have probably all done that, like toddlers exploring and suddenly realizing that we’re far from mom and running back, not quite ready for the next phase. That’s okay. But growth demands uncertainty sometimes. It demands anxiety. It demands letting go of what’s behind.

“More often than not,” says Irish poet John O’Donohue, “the reason you cannot return to where you were is that you have changed; you are no longer the one who crossed over.” He says threshold is a better word than transition for the changes we endure. Threshold is related to the word thresh, which was the separation of grain from husk. It includes notions of entrance, crossing, border, beginning. To cross a threshold is to leave behind the husk and arrive at the grain (ah, another reference to our time of year).

In this essay in To Bless the Space Between Us [Liminal!], O’Donohue goes on to say that our culture has little to offer us for crossings; we have “ritual poverty.” “Many people are left stranded in a chasm of emptiness and doubt; without rituals to recognize, celebrate, or negotiate the vital thresholds of people’s lives, the key crossings pass by, undistinguished from the mundane, everyday rituals of life.”

So here, in this safe space among friends, we can practice sitting with ambiguity. We can practice letting go. We do this at our Burning Bowl ritual at the beginning of the calendar year. Samhain is another good time to do it.

So I invite you to the space between breaths with me. Take a moment, ground yourself with your feet on the ground, turn your palms up in a receptive gesture, and notice for a few moments the tiny pause at the top of the inhale and at the end of the exhale. At Samhain and Halloween, we hold sacred these in-betweens, these thresholds. We honor what has gone before and allow it to pass on.We honor those who have preceded us in crossing death’s threshold, and hold their memories gently and tenderly.

Posted in Sermons

Indigenous People’s Day

Posted on by Deanna Lack

O Great Spirit,
Whose voice I hear in the winds
and whose breath gives life to all the world.
Hear me! I need your strength and wisdom.
Let me walk in beauty, and make my eyes
ever hold the red and purple sunset.
Make my hands respect the things you have made
and my ears sharp to hear your voice.
Make me wise so that I may understand
the things you have taught my people.
Let me learn the lessons you have hidden
in every leaf and rock.
Help me remain calm and strong in the
face of all that comes towards me.
Help me find compassion without
empathy overwhelming me.
I seek strength, not to be greater than my brother,
but to fight my greatest enemy: myself.
Make me always ready to come to you
with clean hands and straight eyes.
So when life fades, as the fading sunset,m
y spirit may come to you without shame.

I’m going to start this sermon with lies. As you’re probably aware, tomorrow is our national observance of Columbus Day. It’s been moved to a Monday holiday, but officially, it recognizes the arrival of Columbus in the Americas, on October 12 in the year… well, you probably know.

Like most Americans, you’ve probably had a whole lot of education about Christopher Columbus. It feels to me like we started there in every history class I ever took, from first grade to college, though, to be fair, college gave us a chapter about the people who were here first, beforehand. I’m sure you learned the rhyme, in 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue. You probably forgot nearly every other date you learned in history class. Can you think of another one, off the top of your head, other than 1776? So here’s a sample of lies your teacher told you, as mentioned in the book Lies My Teacher Told Me by James Loewen, which has an entire chapter on Columbus.

  1. Columbus discovered America. Even if we discount the peoples that were here, there were Vikings and explorers from Siberia who came here much earlier.
  2. The ships endured bad weather. Nope. Columbus’ own journals say the seas were calm. We just like the adventure tale.
  3. Everyone thought the earth was flat and Columbus proved otherwise. Nope. It was common knowledge at the time that the earth was round, modern day flat-earthers notwithstanding
  4. Columbus just wanted to explore and find a trade route to the West Indies. Actually, he was pretty into conquest and exploitation, too
  5. Columbus made friends with the native population and gave them their name ‘Indians.’ Well, that last part is true. We’ll cover his treatment of the natives in a bit.
  6. Columbus was Italian. This isn’t certain either. He may have been Spanish. He may even have been a Jew.
  7. A quote from a 1992 high school textbook: “Although Columbus made three more voyages to America, he never really knew he had discovered a New World. He died in obscurity, unappreciated and penniless. Yet without his daring American History would have been very different, for in a sense Columbus made it all possible.” He wrote in his own journals, “I have come to believe that this is a mighty continent.”

What was it that Columbus made possible? Columbus’s first order of business upon meeting the Arawak Indians was to discover if they had any gold. The Arawak told them there was a tribe nearby that had gold, so he sailed to the other side of the island, saw some villages, and wrote about them: “I could conquer the whole of them with fifty men and govern them as I pleased.”

On his first voyage, he kidnapped 10-25 Indians and took them back to spain. Indeed, on return trips, since the gold he envisioned in massive quantities did not pan out (pun intended), he had to return some kind of dividend to Spain, and what that turned out to be was human trafficking. In 1495 they rounded up 1500 Arawaks and took them back to spain as slaves. The Arawaks, as you might not be surprised to hear, resisted, which gave Columbus an excuse to slaughter and conquer them, besides the ready-made excuse of their not being Christian. Spaniards took whatever they wanted, including the women, their food, hunted Indians for sport and murdered them for dog food. Most of these gruesome facts are available in the accounts of the Spaniards themselves, including Columbus.

The other thing that Columbus apparently made possible was wiping out of dozens of native civilizations by disease.

Charles C. Mann’s book, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, dispels the myth of the pre-Columbian Native as backward, unenlightened, a primitive holdover. In light of evidence gleaned by archaeologists over the past several decades, thriving, enormous civilizations existed here in the Western Hemisphere that rivaled the most sophisticated in the Old World.

Mann begins with an introduction entitled, “Holmberg’s Mistake.” Allan R. Holmberg was an anthropologist who lived among the Siriono people in a part of Bolivia known as the Beni, between 1940 and 1942. His account of their lives, Nomads of the Longbow, was published in 1950, and accounts for a lot of our modern perception of natives. He called the people “among the most culturally backward peoples of the world,” and saw them as the “quintessence of man in the raw state of nature.” Holmberg described them as having no clothes, no domestic animals, no culture to speak of, no religion, and he attributed this to their being primitive and backward. He, and many others, viewed native peoples as having essentially nothing worth having until Columbus brought it to them in 1492.

Though the Siriono were culturally impoverished, it was not because of their failure to develop a culture over the millennia, but because they were decimated by smallpox in the 1920s, cutting their population from at least 3000, to 150 in the 1940s. It caused a genetic bottleneck. At the same time, they were battling white cattle ranchers taking over the region and forcing them into servitude. The Siriono were not backward, but reeling from disease and injustice. “It was as if,” Mann concludes, “[Holmberg] had come across refugees from a Nazi concentration camp, and concluded that they belonged to a culture that had always been barefoot and starving.”

The image of the noble savage is one that has persisted in the imaginations of Europeans and their colonial descendants for centuries. Native peoples were brought back to Europe to display in a manner reminiscent of, and often as part of, a sideshow. Not understanding them, they were seen as holdovers from mankind’s ancient past. This idea, that Native Americans lived in a state outside time, having no effect on the land they inhabited, creating no lasting monuments, just waiting for conquest, dominated scholarly works and thereby high school and college textbooks for many decades. What purpose does this narrative serve? Mann quotes a British historian in 1965, Hugh Trevor-Roper, saying “Native people’s chief function in history is to show the present an image of the past from which by history it has escaped.”

Throughout the rest of the book Mann dips into culture after culture, showing the stunning complexity of Native American life before Columbus, and in many cases, astonishing numbers to boot. The narrative in most texts is that Pizarro overwhelmed the Inca with horses, steel, guns, and superior technology. There is truth in this, but the actual picture is more complex.

You see, smallpox arrived before Pizarro, killing their leader and his heir, which left a second son, Atahualpa, the de facto leader. But that was in dispute, and the Inca were in the midst of a civil war. It’s estimated that half their population died. This disaster unraveled social norms and caused all kinds of upheaval.

In the midst of this, Atahualpa, who had scouted Pizarro’s forces and determined that his 168 men were not a threat to his own 80,000, received Pizarro as a diplomat. The Inca were unarmed, expecting diplomacy. The Spaniards slaughtered them.

Without this diabolical attack, on a battlefield, Pizarro’s victory might have been very different. Yes, the Spaniards had guns, but on their mountainous home turf the Inca sling and bola were very effective. Yes, they had horses, but look at this picture of an Inca road. They were steep, with steps, much more suited for humans on foot and sure-footed llamas than steel-shod horses. Imagine trying to come up this road while someone was throwing projectiles at you from the bottom. I’m sure the person at the foot of this road can attest to what that might be like, and you might ask her because, it’s Janie.

Smallpox was probably the biggest factor in the easy conquest of native populations. The disease spreads quickly because people are contagious for 12 days before they begin to show symptoms, and they often fled the disease, carrying it from village to village, so it decimated Native populations like wildfire. There is a lot of disagreement on estimates of how many Natives were here before Europeans arrived, but some researchers estimate as many as 90 million or more, as compared with 10 million in Spain and Portugal at the time. Pizarro arrived after smallpox and still wrote of how astounded he was at the scope and population of Inca civilization. If these estimates are true, disease killed 80 to 100 million Native Americans by the seventeenth century — 1 out of 5 people then alive on earth. Mann draws an equivalency — if New York were similarly affected by disease today, the remaining population would not fill Yankee Stadium. In the sixteenth century DeSoto arrived in what is now Arkansas (with dozens of pigs, who may have been responsible for some of the epidemics) and described it as “thickly set with great towns.” But when the Frenchman LaSalle visited the same area in 1682 he found it deserted, with no villages for 200 miles.

The same was true further north. We’ve also been told the Thanksgiving story since early childhood, but the reason Tisquantum, whom we know from elementary school as Squanto, was fluent in English was because he’d been captured by British sailors seven years before, abducted, and returned to find his people, the Patuxet, completely wiped out by smallpox and there were English squatters in his village who called themselves pilgrims.

Mann makes an interesting argument regarding the human sacrifice practiced by the Aztecs, as well. It certainly happened, he says, and likely on a large scale. But, he says, it was in the Spanish interest to exaggerate this aspect of Aztec life, in a sort of rationale for conquest. In addition, the contemporary European society likewise had a taste for slaughter as public spectacle, heretics being burned alive, criminals drawn and quartered, bodies impaled and displayed on city walls. Perhaps, Mann suggests, the two societies were more alike than either realized. He goes on to describe the rich culture of the Aztecs in poetry and philosophy. European and Asian cultures had the advantage of trading and intermingling for hundreds of years, building on one another’s ideas, offering one another cultural exchanges. Can you imagine what might have been possible if they had approached these massive, culturally diverse societies the way they approached Asia, and exchanged ideas? Instead they were cut down by European diseases and European greed for gold, and land.

I do not have time to touch on each of the many cultures Mann discusses in 1491. He covers the Olmec and their remarkable immortal stone heads, the Clovis civilization’s stoneworking, the amazing development of maize as a staple crop, the Maya and their astonishing calendars, the massive figures of the Nazca, the challenges and development of agriculture along the Amazon, the mysteries of the mound-builders of Cahokia.

The takeaway is this: Europeans did not step into a cultural void, or a pristine wilderness inhabited by a scattering of savages. There were complex, evolved cultures across both American continents, living and interacting with the land, sometimes stewarding it wisely, sometimes causing wholesale destruction, creating great, populous civilizations, and often fractured and at war with one another (another thing that left them vulnerable to invaders). It is time to stop erasing these cultures and making them nothing more than a prologue to what we tell ourselves is “American” history, which is really a history of Europeans in the Americas.

Why does this matter? Maybe History was your least favorite subject in school, and maybe I’m boring you to tears with all of this. I hope not. It matters because we continue to celebrate racial violence and oppression. Some of you will be off work tomorrow to celebrate the life of a man responsible, directly and indirectly, for untold suffering, human trafficking, murder, and the wiping out of great civilizations whose stories and cultures are now lost to us forever. But we don’t talk about that loss. We say, “without his daring, American History would have been very different.” That’s true, but I think not in the way the textbook meant it.

It matters because, as people who seek social justice, we can’t just be nonracist. We have to be anti-racist. Seven states have rejected the celebration of Columbus day, replacing it with IPD or Native American Day. Our own UUA has joined with other organizations such as the Friends Committee on National Legislation, a Quaker organization, and others, in rejecting Columbus Day and the Doctrine of Discovery, which could be a sermon on its own. This doctrine from the 15th century was rooted in church decree, and basically said, if the people who live in a place are not Christian, conquest, colonization, and exploitation are sanctioned. It’s based on a scripture that says “Every place that the sole of your foot will tread I have given you, as I said to Moses.” In 1823, the Supreme Court ruled that discovery rights of Europeans as expressed in this doctrine applied to the United States European descendants, and the result of that decision still affects government policy to this day.

So how will we celebrate the second Monday in October? I’d like to suggest that we, as a congregation, follow UUA’s lead and adopt a resolution to reject Columbus Day in favor of IPD. UUA has suggestions for honoring IPD:

  1. Craft a Sunday service around Indigenous Peoples’ Day.
  2. Build and strengthen connections to nearby Native communities. I have to do more research, but as you probably know, the local Cherokee were murdered and relocated from here on Jackson’s watch, so I don’t know how much of a Native community still exists. This bears researching.
  3. Study the Doctrine of Discovery and work to eliminate its effects. I propose that we do this in future SJMs and possibly future sermons. I’d like your feedback on this.
    Take action to rename Columbus day in your state.
  4. Provide RE programming about IPD.
  5. Hold a movie screening with a discussion afterward about Native peoples.
  6. Host a common read book discussion. They suggest Beacon Press’ An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States. If you would like, we can do this after White Fragility.
  7. Engage with immigration as a moral issue. Indigenous people of Central America are a big part of today’s desperate wave of immigration to the US. We have already supported a community in Central America, the Copal A community in Guatemala, who are working to educate native cultures in their area, keep their language alive, and educate people here about what they are doing. If you would like to continue to donate to Copal A, I can give you contact information to keep up with what they are doing.
  8. Take action for the rights and needs of Native peoples. There are a lot of ways to do this. Here are UUA’s suggestions on the subject.

Before I close, I would like to suggest that we consider taking another look at our Statement of Conscience, which doesn’t include anything about Native American rights. It has statements about racial justice, but I think it’s worth having a conversation about what things should be named specifically and which are fine as generalizations. (Some in the congregation agreed that it might be worth taking a look at, and we definitely need to replace the glass).

My blessing for you today is a Cherokee prayer:

May the warm winds of heaven blow softly upon your house
May the Great Spirit bless all who enter there.
May your moccasins make happy tracks in many snows,
And may the Rainbow always touch your shoulder.

I’d like to add:

May we work to educate ourselves and others about the history of native peoples,
And may we do our part to change the narrative of oppression.

Posted in Sermons

Hey Wiretap! Do You Have a Recipe for Pancakes?

Posted on by Deanna Lack

The following is a speech I gave in Communications class at Motlow State Community College on April 2, 2019.

Good morning. I’m Pepper Traymore. Oh wait, that’s my porn star name. I was on Facebook last week and there was a thing on there that said, if you take the name of your first pet and the road you lived on when you were a child, that’s your porn star name. What’s yours? We don’t have time to share all of them, but maybe take a second and tell the person next to you if you find it amusing.

Those things on Facebook are always a lot of fun. Take this quiz and find out what breed of dog you are, cut and paste this list of personal questions and tell your friends about where you had your first kiss, and what year you graduated from high school, and more.

Unfortunately, I’ve just baited you into sharing two pieces of personal information about yourself with the person next to you, who might be a relative stranger. Those pieces of information might be things you used as a password to your Facebook account, or your online bank account.

Maybe you’ve seen the above meme. It highlights the fact that in 50 years, we’ve gone from deeply suspicious of government spying to basically sharing our private information with the world voluntarily. I’m going to give you a brief history of technology and personal information, talk about what They with a capital T might be doing with your data, and give you a few ways to safeguard your data and your privacy while living in the world and on social media.

Wiretapping is almost as old as the telephone. Americans were outraged when they first learned of law enforcement’s use of wiretaps in the 20s, so laws were made limiting the use of electronic surveillance by police.

With World War II came relaxations of prohibitions of government spying on citizens. President Roosevelt authorized the use of wiretaps to monitor “subversives.” In wartime this meant potential Nazi and Japanese spies, but in the 50s, it broadened to include progressive activists fighting racial segregation. “Subversives” went from meaning foreign nationals to American citizens who disagreed with the government. Do you see how dangerous that is?

Fast forward 50 years to 9/11. In the wake of those attacks, Americans feared terrorism, so they were willing to accept new legislation like the Patriot Act, and the formation of the Department of Homeland Security, which was later found to be monitoring American citizens. And then, of course, the advent of social media, in which we willingly share vast amounts of private information. Technology has developed so fast that new gadgets come out faster than we can even begin to think about what effects they may have on our lives and our privacy.

In 2013 Edward Snowden revealed ways in which the NSA was monitoring American citizens that alarmed some people. Other people took the attitude, “Well, I’m not doing anything wrong, so I have nothing to hide.” But all of us have things we would prefer other people not know about us, things we might tell our best friend or our doctor or no one at all. And as Orwell’s novel 1984 pointed out, a society that monitors its citizens breeds subservience, and quashes creativity and dissent. Throughout all of our history, we have associated these tactics with Communist and Fascist nations and dictators, not with democracy.

When I started researching this topic, the amount of information out there and the number of ways that your data can be tracked boggled my mind. One TED talk described us as walking around in a cloud of information. Everything we do leaves a little digital trail, not just online but in the real world, too. But I want to narrow my focus to two ways “they” might be tracking you.

The first is the things you like or favorite on Facebook. That innocent click tells data miners so much about you. Information can even be mined by how long you pause while you’re scrolling, you don’t even have to click the like button. So what can they tell? Algorithms have developed so much that information can be had about your religion, your political ideals, your sexual preference, your sexual behavior, how much you trust your friends, whether you are using drugs.

One example in Forbes magazine told a story about a high school girl who received a flyer from Target offering pregnancy and baby products, alerting her parents before she had told them she was pregnant. How did Target know? She had looked at ads for vitamins, and bigger purses.

In addition, if you allow Facebook and Google to monitor your location, you are providing information about where you go, what stores you frequent. This is used for targeting ads to your particular demographic. Have you ever had the experience of just talking about something you were thinking about buying, and then suddenly seeing ads on Facebook for that very thing? It’s something we sort of joke about, but when you think about it, all of that information that is being gathered can be used for nefarious purposes, even manipulating the things you think about. Hacking the human brain is becoming a reality, and no hardware need be installed when we spend hours a day interacting with the software.

The other way companies are mining your data is through the use of smart devices. Kashmir Hill is a journalist who lived for 2 months with 18 smart devices, all linked with an Amazon Echo. She had a computer scientist monitor the information the devices were sending back to the companies who made them. You can get smart refrigerators, smart TVs, even smart sex toys. In those two months, there was not one hour of radio silence. The Echo was relaying information to Amazon every 3 hours, and all of the other devices were sending data to their manufacturers, who then sell that data to other companies. The computer scientist knew what TV shows they were watching and for how long, how often they went to the refrigerator, and yes, the smart sex toy was sending information about its use back to the company, as well. Do you feel watched yet? As I said, these are only two ways you are constantly generating data that is available for use and for sale by the corporations who run every website you interact with, and create the items you use, and you do not generally know it is happening, nor can you control it if you did.

But, there are some ways you can protect yourself.

  • First, use smart passwords. Don’t use pet names or information about you that is obtainable through the quizzes on Facebook or other easy data mining. Never reuse passwords, which is more dangerous than using easy passwords. Of course, never give out your password.
  • Review your privacy settings on social media, and review it REGULARLY. Facebook updates its algorithms and terms of service often, and you might find that somehow your phone number and email are public information. Be wary of friend requests from people you have already friended; it could be a new account, or it could be someone trying to get information about you or hack you account.
  • Be careful about what you share on Facebook. Be aware that when you apply to a college, or apply for a job, or anything else that is important to you, one of the first things those people are going to do is check your facebook account. If your wall is public and full of images of you drunk at parties, you’re not likely to get the job.
  • Don’t be too trusting when asked for private information. Be your own “human firewall” and educate yourself on the ways data is being gathered and used. Be careful about checking in. Just checking in or posting vacation pictures to a public Facebook account can alert someone that you’re not home and give them an opportunity to rob your house while you’re gone.
  • Finally, it’s important to keep abreast of the latest information about cyber security. Experts say it’s not a matter of if you’ll be a victim of a cybercrime, but when. It may be worth it to look at identity protection, but do your research.

Big Brother may be watching, and there is a lot we don’t have control over when it comes to how our information is shared and sold, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be careful where we do have control. Be safe out there.

Posted in Sermons

Blessed Are the Tree Huggers

Posted on by Deanna Lack

This is a sermon I gave at Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Cookeville on March 24, 2019.

<Read The Giving Tree>

Do you think this is a healthy relationship? If this was a human relationship between two adults, what would you think of the boy? What would you think of the tree?

I loved this story when my son was young so much that it was one of two children’s books I kept after he got older, but I’ll be honest, I didn’t think about it much. It’s good to be giving, right? It’s good that the tree was happy, right? The telling words are after he took her trunk to go far away: “The tree was happy… but not really.”

The boy might have loved the tree in his own way, but would you call him a tree-hugger? Really, he was exploiting her in every way imaginable. Would you call him an environmentalist?

Now, when I look at this story, I see it a lot different than I used to. I see it as a metaphor for humans’ relationship with the earth. The earth is our Mother, and she gives us everything we need to live. But, not content to accept her as as place to climb branches and play and eat apples, we plunder all of her resources with no regard for her well-being, or for what she will have left to give us when we have taken it all away.

The earth is so perfect for human habitation that altering things in the slightest way would make her uninhabitable by our species. There are so many ways that this is true, but since we’re talking about trees today, here are ten ways trees make your life better, or even make your life possible:

1. Trees produce oxygen. Two mature trees produce enough oxygen in a year for a family of four.

2. Trees filter the soil they are planted in, cleaning it of pollutants and toxins.

3. Trees and forest ecosystems support biodiversity, creating habitats for creatures, some of which we depend on directly.

4. Trees reduce the greenhouse effect. During photosynthesis, trees take in carbon and store it in their wood, so the more trees there are, the slower global warming affects our planet.

5. Trees produce fruit and nuts.

6. Trees prevent soil erosion. Their networks of roots keep the soil intact. Without this, we lose the vital top layer of soil where other plants grow best. When land is stripped of trees, often very little else will grow, producing deserts or barren wastelands.

7. Trees provide shade and reduce evaporation. If your house is in the shade of a tree, you’re probably using less energy to cool it, another way they help with global warming.

8. Trees filter the air. They trap particulates like smoke, ash, and dust that can damage the lungs of mammals. These things then wash to the ground at the next rainfall, and can then potentially enrich the soil.

9. Trees add beauty to our life. Here in the first breath of spring, I probably don’t have to tell you this. You’re probably as excited as I am to see the flick of spring green on the end of branches, the flowers on deciduous magnolias, redbuds, and dogwoods. It’s like an old friend returning. And of course, they are beautiful not only in spring, they are beautiful year-round, in so many different ways.

10. Trees improve mental health. Studies have shown that spending time in nature and in the company of trees improves cognition and memory, and reduces stress.

So, and you knew this question was coming, I want to ask you: when was the last time you hugged a tree? If you’re feeling stressed, depressed, or anxious, have you considered forest therapy? They don’t charge by the hour.

There is a tree on the farm where my horses live, a huge, ancient pear tree. The horses stand in her shade and as often as I can, I take advantage of one of her gnarled roots to use as a meditation cushion, closing my eyes to just listen and be. Often when I do this, the horses come to me and lower their heads and half-close their eyes to meditate with me. Do I hug her? Yes. I thank her for the embrace of her gnarled roots and for taking care of my horses with shade in the summer and pears in early autumn.

Today I’d like to introduce you to the original tree-huggers. They belong to a Hindu sect in the arid northern Rajasthan region of India, called the Bishnoi. The sect was founded in 1485 by a man who came to be called Guru Jambheshwar or Jambhoji, and even back then, it was caste-neutral.

Jambheshwar witnessed the clear-cutting of trees during times of drought to feed animals. You see, the region is mostly desert, subject to cruel dust storms. The local Khejri trees are a marvel, with deep roots that access water that humans and animals can’t get to, which is stored in the wood and leaves of the tree. So when drought is severe, sometimes the only way to get water is from the trees. But in Jambheshwar’s time, people were clear-cutting the trees to feed animals, and the drought went on so long that the animals died anyway, and then the trees were gone.

Jambhoji preached ecological responsibility. He gave his followers 29 principles, from which their name comes; the Bishnoi, which means 29. Eight of these principles preserve biodiversity, such as prohibitions on killing animals, sterilizing bulls, or cutting green trees. Ten of them deal with health and hygiene, and four have to do with daily worship. The Bishnoi’s proscription on cutting allowed shrubs to grow in the desert, protecting it from wind erosion, and they also developed, hundreds of years ago, water harvesting systems to preserve life. Jambhoji also called for tolerance during discussions, and 120 Shabads or sayings are recorded in which he preached love for all living beings.

In this region of Rajasthan there is a town called Khejarli for the groves of Khejri trees nearby. These trees became particularly sacred to the Bishnoi, because of their remarkable endurance and ability to help sustain life in the desert.

But in 1730 the king of Jodhpur sent men to cut the Khejri trees for construction of his new palace. The Bishnoi protested, but their protests fell on deaf ears and the king’s men continued with their plans to cut. One young Bishnoi mother, Amrita Devi, threw herself upon the trees, wrapping her arms around the Khejiri and hugging them, telling the king’s men that they would have to go through her before they could harm the trees. She said “To lose one’s head to save a tree is a good bargain.”

She lost her life, as did all three of her daughters. The king’s men killed them, and felled some of the trees. Aghast, Bishnoi from all over came to protest. In the end, 363 of them, from 83 different villages, lost their lives as they wrapped themselves around their sacred trees to try to save them, perhaps the world’s first ecological martyrs.

The king heard of this and ordered his men to cease logging. He was so impressed with the bravery of the Bishnoi that he declared Khejarli off limits for logging and hunting, and to this day it is illegal to cut one of these trees. Khejarli is beautiful and verdant in a region that is mostly desert, and it is preserved today as a heritage site. In 1988 it was named by India’s government as the first National Environmental Memorial.

In addition, the actions of Amrita and the Bishnoi prompted what is known as the Chipko movement, from a word that means “to hug”, a nonviolent movement to protect other trees in other places. This is a successful nonviolent protest in India almost two hundred years before Gandhi’s protests.

For all of us, it is not a stretch to say that trees are life, but for poor people in rural areas and less developed countries, it is much more true. When the environment suffers, they are always the first to feel the crisis. <slide> I’d like to introduce you to another tree hugger who has lived in our own time, although as she won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004, perhaps you have heard of her.

Wangari Maathai was born in Kenya and educated in the US. She became the first East African woman to hold a Ph.D. When she returned home from America, she was distressed to compare the affluence here with the terrible poverty in her homeland. Women around her native Nairobi would often have to walk miles and miles to get firewood because the forests had been clear-cut to make way for building. This was having effects on soil erosion, water supply, and so much more. Wangari worked with the National Council for Women, and in 1977, she had an idea to enlist poor women to plant trees, to provide fuel, prevent soil erosion and desertification. She gave the women a small stipend to do the planting. She said in an interview, “I started simply to meet the needs of women.” But in so doing, she was meeting the needs of the environment as well.

The response shocked her. She discovered that Kenya’s corrupt government and a few powerful people controlled these resources, and they did not like a woman defying traditional gender roles, speaking up, and empowering the destitute. She was arrested, imprisoned, and bullied. But when the government changed, she was given a place in its environmental department, and continued to make a difference up until she died in 2007.

Her?? Green Belt Movement has to date planted 51 million trees, gave people a voice in standing up to their government, employed people who desperately needed help, and trained 30,000 women in forestry, food processing, bee keeping, and other skills. The movement has since expanded to teach women in many other African nations how to steward the land.

Over their lifetimes, those 51 million trees will capture and store the carbon dioxide emissions from burning 25 billion pounds of coal. This is why trees are critical to slowing climate change. In areas where trees are sparse, climate change wreaks havoc. And, as both these examples have shown, planting and caring for trees can have a positive influence on the lives of people, especially on the lives of people who desperately need help.

In addition, I want to point out here at the end of Women’s History Month, that both of these stories highlight the courage, ingenuity, and tireless work of women environmentalists, and of course they are only two examples among many. In an echo of the Bishnoi protest, in 1997 Julia Butterfly Hill lived for some 700 days in an old-growth redwood tree to save it from being cut by a lumber company, raising awareness for the importance of old-growth forests, and she continues to stand on the front lines of environmentalism.

Russ and I went for a drive yesterday, through forests just beginning to flicker with green, punctuated with purple-garbed redbud branches. Where I grew up in a suburb of Cleveland, Ohio, for the most part, forests existed where they were protected. We are so fortunate to live in this green land full of trees everywhere, not just in parks. So I ask you to consider planting a tree or two this spring, and even if you can’t, consider hugging one and offering it your thanks for the hard work it’s doing on your behalf.

In the midst of an administration that is anti-environment, it’s easy to lose hope or give up. Don’t do that. I offer you quotes from two of the women we talked about today. Julia Butterfly hill said, “You, yes you, make the difference.” And Wangari Maathai said, “We cannot tire or give up hope. We owe it to the present and future generations of all species to rise up and walk.”

Posted in Sermons

Manifestation and Letting Go

Posted on by Deanna Lack

The following is a sermon I gave yesterday for Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Cookeville‘s Burning Bowl ceremony. This is a ceremony in which each person writes on a piece of paper something that they would like to let go of, that is no longer serving them. Then we light a candle in a big ceramic bowl and ceremonially burn the papers. I really wanted to use flash paper this year, or flying wish paper, but I didn’t get the Amazon order in time. Maybe next year.

Burning Bowl Ceremony

The only constant is change, said Heraclitus of Ephesus.

Question: how do we bring more of what we want into our lives, and let go of the things we don’t want in our lives? In other words, how do we direct the change?

In Pagan and New Age and other spiritual circles, this concept is discussed using the term “manifesting.” This language entered the mainstream about 15years ago with the popularity of The Secret and Abraham-Hicks’ message about the Law of Attraction. The concept is this: If you ask for something, and you focus on it without fear about it not happening, without framing it in a negative — “I don’t want to get sick” — then it will happen. Because of your focus, you are attracting what you wish to you. By doing this you can heal your sickness, you can be rich, you can have whatever you want.

Needless to say, this concept is wildly popular. It got celebrity endorsement, and its proponents made millions explaining to people, sometimes claiming to channel otherworldly entities, how to ask for things so that you get them. The problem is that when the wishes fail to come true, people who prayed for God to make something happen or expected the Universe to provide wonder whether the fault might be in them. So, Is it true? Can we wish our futures into existence?

Like most things, it has a grain of truth in it. What you focus on, you will draw to you, but maybe it’s not because of some universal magic. Or, maybe it is. But most often, you don’t get what you want because you wished for it. That’s much more likely to work for someone who was rich, white and privileged in the first place. But when we give something our attention, it does make us more likely to look for connections, relationships, and opportunities that will draw those things to us. It makes us more likely to put our efforts into making it happen. And if there’s some universal law at work, so much the better, but the need for the work doesn’t go away. You still have to show up every day to make the thing happen.

But sometimes we get blocked. We get in our own way with negative self-talk, or fear of taking the next step or of failing, or lack of faith in ourselves, or lack of support from those close to us, or any other number of reasons. So the first question I want to ask you is this: what do you want to manifest? What do you want to be the focus of your year, what do you want to draw to you or accomplish in 2019? Put another way, I’m reading a book called First Things First and it asks the question: What is the one activity that you know if you did superbly well and consistently, would have significant positive results in your life? And the obvious follow up question is: why aren’t you doing it? Put more poetically, by Mary Oliver, what are you doing with your one wild and precious life?

So ask yourself, what is holding you back? What pain are you holding in your heart that it would better serve you to let go? As you ponder this, bear in mind that not all pain should be let go, just yet. Sometimes we need to hold it, and love it until it is ready to depart on its own.

The Buddha liked lists. One of the lists he gave us was Five Hindrances. He identified them as five mental states that hinder us in meditation and in our daily lives. For some of these things, we don’t have direct translations in English, so I thought I’d give each of them some attention.

The first hindrance is sometimes translated as greed, sometimes sensual desire. I like to think of it as Grasping or Clinging. We humans don’t like change, and yet all things change. Sometimes we cling to things out of habit or fear of sacrificing comfort, but those very things might be what is holding us back. They may even be relationships sometimes. Or they may be attachment to things. Maybe we can’t clear space in our mental lives because we have too much literal clutter in our houses, but we cling to those physical possessions for one reason or another.

The Second Hindrace is Aversion, and it is the flip side of the first. We cling to good experiences, pleasant sensations, and the other side of that coin is, we often push away what we have judged as bad or negative, or things that are unpleasant. In doing this we often lose a valuable lesson. One I like to share is, when I began meditating, every time I took a breath one of the vertebrae in my neck would click. Every inhale. Breathe in — click. Breathe out. Breathe in — click. Breathe out. It drove me insane. I could not focus on my breath or being present because of that damned click. So I went online, because I figured, I can’t be the first person to have dealt with this, how do I get rid of it? And somewhere in the middle of all of my online searching, I suddenly realized… sitting with this thing is no different than sitting with leg pain, or sitting with grief. You allow the experience, thank it for what it has to teach you, and let it be. The crazy thing was, it seems likely that I was causing the click because of some tension somewhere, because when I took this advice, it quite often stopped happening. And that’s true of aversion in a lot of cases… when we push something away, when we are saying to ourselves I HATE THIS, I CAN’T STAND IT, we are giving it attention and still holding it, just in a different way.

The third hindrance is Sloth and Torpor. These are translated pretty accurately, and I think you get the idea. Another Steven Covey phrase is “mind over mattress.” Often we have so much resistance to something, say for example, exercising, or getting started on a cleaning project. And then we get started and realize that getting started was 90% of the battle.

The fourth hindrance is Restlessness, Anxiety, and Worry. I don’t have to explain to you what these are, and if you’ve ever had an anxiety attack or worried about something you know what I mean when I call it a hindrance. For a Buddhist the answer to these things is the same as the answer to all of the others: sit with it. Let it be. In our modern day we often identify too much with things. We say I AM depressed, or I AM anxious. I want to ask you to watch your language and stop BEING things that are hindering you. Say instead, I am feeling anxious, and then, if you can make space for it, sit and ask why you might be depressed or anxious. This is not to say that you should not get help for these things if you need it. If this is a chronic problem for you, professional help might be needed.

The fifth hindrance is Doubt. Hindering doubt is not the same as questioning doubt. Questioning doubt leads us to greater understanding. Hindering doubt is occasionally failing to trust those who have our backs, but most often hindering doubt is self-doubt. Fear of failure, failing to trust ourselves, wondering if we’re strong enough to deal with something. So I want to tell you, not only are you strong enough, but you are Enough in every way.

Returning to our theme of how to manifest something that we want in our lives, and letting go of something else to make room for it, I want to read Thich Nhat Hanh’s words about Impermanence.

Impermanence Makes Everytghing Possible

We are often sad and suffer a lot when things change, but change and impermanence have a positive side. Thanks to impermanence, everything is possible. Life itself is possible. If a grain of corn is not impermanent, it can never be transformed into a stalk of corn. If the stalk were not impermanent, it could never provide us with the ear of corn we eat. If your daughter were not impermanent, she cannot grow up to become a woma. Then your grandchildren would never manifest. So instead of complaining about impermanence, we should say, “Warm welcome and long live impermanence.” We should be happy. When we can see the miracle of impermanence, our sadness and suffering will pass.

Impermanence should also be understood in the light of inter-being. Because all things inter-are, they are constantly influencing one another. It is said that a butterfly’s wings flapping on one side of the planet can affect the weather on the other side. Things cannot stay the same because they are influenced by everything else, everything that is not itself.

When we think about manifesting things in our lives, it’s important to spend some time thinking less about I want this NOT that, and more about How can this become that? Our lives are not a series of switches to be flipped, I no longer want this, I want more of that, but instead, we are all living on a continuum of inter-being and inter-becoming. Going back to Thich Nhat Hanh’s teaching:

Conditions

Looking deeply into a box of matches, you can see the flame. The flame has not manifested, but as a meditator you can see the flame. All the conditions are sufficient for the flame to manifest. There is wood, sulfur, a rough surface and my hands. So when I strike the match ad the flame appears I would not call that the birth of a flame. I would call it manifestation of a flame.

The Buddha said that when conditions are sufficient you manifest yourself. When conditions are no longer sufficient, you stop manifesting in order to manifest in other forms, with other conditions.

— Thich Nhat Hanh, No Death No Fear

I encourage you to sit in silence and meditate on these things, especially the concept that what you want to manifest is not a thing that doesn’t yet exist, but something that the conditions have not until now been right for. What would it take to make the conditions right? Perhaps, light a candle to gaze at, as you think on these things for at least a few minutes, or however long it is comfortable for you to meditate.

Following the meditation, if you want to do the ritual portion of this exercise, take two pieces of paper, perhaps different colors . On one, write whatever you think you need to let go of, in order to make room for more of what you want in your life. On the other, write whatever you want to call to you. Light a candle and have nearby a large ceramic bowl or perhaps a large clay flower pot. I find this ceremony most powerful to do near dusk. You can fold the paper in some way that seems significant to you. Carefully light the paper with the candle, and drop the paper into the bowl. You might spend a moment watching the edges curl, blacken, and become something else: ash, embers, a chemical reaction, carbon dioxide, and then dissipate to become part of something else. After our congregation’s Burning Bowl ceremony, I took the ashes and put them in my compost pile, so that they literally could become part of something else, so if that feels right to you, you can do that too. Some people empty the ashes into a running stream of water to be carried away symbolically, again.

What you do with the other sheet of paper is up to you. You can put it somewhere you’ll see it in your house, or on your altar at home if you have one, or you can bury it in the earth or fold it into a paper boat (please use environmentally friendly, degradable paper) and release it into that stream of water with the ashes of the other paper. Or, do some other symbolic act of releasing your desire into the universe.

My friends, may your goodbyes be gentle.