Riding Roller Coasters Years ago, while preparing to preach about Pentecost, a holiday that at the time I knew nothing about, I discovered that one of my Unitarian Universalist colleagues had once been a Pentecostal minister. Pentecost and Pentecostal must be related, I figured, so I asked him to explain what this holiday was. He didn’t answer directly. Instead, he told me about an amusement park in the town where he grew up. The park was famous for its roller coasters. When he’d been a boy, they had this old wooden one. The train would chug along, inching up the slope, painfully cresting the hill, and then dash down the…
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Memorial Day and Healthy Grieving
Repressed Grief When we don’t address it, grief hangs on. We can we numb ourselves from our pain with force of will or sullen silence, with bursts of anger, or drugs, or busyness, yet the hurt does not go away. Instead, it settles into our joints, scars our muscles, makes our head hurt. Unable to face the enormity of our loss, some of us go to our grave frozen and miserable. Over the years, I’ve sat with many newly sober people who were shocked by the intensity of their ten- or twenty-year-old grief. Suddenly caught with no buffering substance, they felt overwhelmed by emotions they had forgotten how to process,…
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Self-Acceptance, Shame, Samson, and Grace
The Importance of Self-Acceptance Today we will discuss look at the importance of self-acceptance, for us as individuals and as a society. By self-acceptance, I mean not just that we like and are comfortable with ourselves, but that the self we accept be as close as possible to who we really are. Until we understand our true nature, we cannot be healthy, generous, or free. We cannot love or respect what we do not understand. Understanding ourselves has benefits beyond our own satisfaction, however, When we see and accept our own true self, we learn also to see, accept, love, and respect others. Thus self-acceptance is important for our communities.…
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Mother’s Day and the Joy of Turning
The Mess in Our World Today Thinking about Mother’s Day this year, I feel sad. A month ago, I wrote a song for the holiday, reflecting that it was, in some ways, a good thing my mother isn’t alive to see the mess we’ve made of our political and denominational world. In Unitarian Universalist circles, we still struggle to address race issues much as we did in the 1960s when the “black controversy” divided us. Now, voices are again raised in anger over our association’s “white supremacist culture,” while others defend themselves. In the United States, we are more divided than at any time except perhaps during the 1920s. Back then, the…
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Love, False Prophets, and Truth
Beware False Prophets In this week’s scripture reading, John 10:1-10, [1] Jesus warns us to beware the false prophet and heed only the true one. But how can we tell the false from the true? To answer this question, M. Russell Ballard, in a lecture given at the 1999 Latter Day Saints Conference, quotes Joseph Smith, founder of his faith, as saying, “We can accept nothing as authoritative but that which comes directly through the appointed channel, the constituted organizations of the Priesthood, which is the channel that God has appointed . . .” Anyone else, though he may claim to have received revelation from God, is an impostor. [2]…
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White Supremacy and Listening
The Importance of Listening Sometimes, our task is to remain silent. That is true for all of us at times. In the silence, we can listen to our hearts, to our god, to our neighbor. During this moment in our country’s history, this moment in our Unitarian Universalist denomination, we who have skin we call white are being asked to hush, to hear what others have to say, particularly those whose skins are brown as earth, or tree bark, or memories. Listening can be difficult, especially when we take it for granted that our voices are important, that our words matter, that everyone cares about what we have to say. That’s…
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Transcendentalists, Boomers, and Our Current World Crisis
Growing Up as a Boomer When I was a young Boomer, my mother took me to a Unitarian fellowship where I learned about the Big Bang and evolution, studied the cultures of ancient peoples, heard myths from around the world, and played touch football. At camp, I was taught to meditate and smoke cigarettes. My GI parents provided well, encouraged my education, and gave me a lot of freedom. Like most of my generation, I embraced internal reflection, individual spiritual awakening, and social activism based on a moral code that emphasized our responsibility to and for one another. Like my cohorts, I am one of what historians William Strauss and…
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Remembering Passover and Dismantling the Golem
Passover, Freedom, and Slavery Passover commemorates the triumph of freedom over slavery. On this holiday, Jews around the world remember their history. They remind one another of who they really are. They recount where they have traveled, and they tell the story of a God who loved and delivered them. In our country today, we need a God to vanquish the evil powers and free us from our own slavery. We are trapped in an addiction that glorifies wealth and aggression. Feeling out of control ourselves, we try to control others. We punish them severely, yet we indulge ourselves. Our political leaders lose their way, like addicts hidden in tenements,…
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Living Our Values
Ideology Versus Compassion To live our values, we must first figure out what values we want to live by. Religions can guide us in that as long as we are careful not to adhere rigidly to any system of beliefs. In The Song of the Bird, author and priest Anothony de Mello reminds us that it is dangerous to to make a rule-bound religion out of spiritual truths. In the story, “Bayazid Breaks the Rule,” de Mello tells about a time, during the month of Ramadan, when Bayazid was traveling and teaching. He reaches a town in Iran where his worshipers rushed to greet him. They made a big stir. Weary…
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Lent, Temptation, and Our White Supremacy Culture
Lent, Temptation, and Life Events Our topic this week is temptation. Originally I thought I would connect this to Lent, writing about Jesus’s forty days in the desert when he was tempted by Satan. During this time, Jesus, rather than giving in, gave up and let go. What might we learn from this? How can into the spirit of Lent enhance our recovery journey? These questions still matter to me, and I will touch on them later. However, two events that occurred this week in Unitarian Universalist circles changed my plans. One is that the president of our denomination resigned; the other is that a ministerial colleague, charged with possessing…
