On Repentance and Repair

Our Unitarian Universalist Association has a Common Read program. Each year a book is selected for UUs all over to read, to discuss, to have as a shared reference point. The program started in 2010, when the first UUA Common Read was Margaret Regan, The Death of Josseline: Immigration Stories from the Arizona-Mexico Borderlands.
2011-12: Eboo Patel, Acts of Faith, which makes the case for interfaith dialog to promote pluralism and facilitate justice.
2012-13: Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.
2013-14: Saru Jayaraman, Behind the Kitchen Door, which exposed the plight of restaurant workers.
2014-15: Paul Rasor, Reclaiming Prophetic Witness, in which Rasor, a leading UU theologian, makes the case for bring our liberal religion into the public square.
2015-16: Bryan Stephenson, Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption, addressed the injustice and racism of our criminal justice system.
2017-18: Rev. Dr. William J. Barber, The Third Reconstruction: How a Moral Movement is Overcoming the Politics of Division and Fear.
For 2017-2018, for the first and only time we had two Common Reads: the Mitra Rahnema edited anthology, Centering: Navigating Race, Authenticity and Power in Ministry, and Frances Moore Lappé and Adam Eichen, Daring Democracy.
2018-19: The Manish Mishra-Marzetti and Jennifer Nordstrom edited anthology, Justice on Earth: People of Faith Working at the Intersections of Race, Class, and Environment.
2019-20: Roxane Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous People’s History of the United States.
2020-21: Imani Perry, Breathe: A Letter to My Sons.
The 2021-22 selection was Zach Norris, We Keep Us Safe: Building Secure, Just, and Inclusive Communities – which was re-titled for paperback release as Defund Fear: Safety Without Policing, Prisons, and Punishment.
2022-23: Nancy Palmer-Jones and Karin Lin, Mistakes and Miracles: Congregations on the Road to Multiculturalism.

And that brings us to the 2023-24 selection, Danya Ruttenberg, On Repentance and Repair: Making Amends in an Unapologetic World. Fifteen books over 14 years. Eight of them, just over half, were published by our own Beacon Press, a department of the Unitarian Universalist Association that was founded back in 1854. Another four of them were published by Skinner House, an imprint of the UUA.

I caught on to the Common Read in its second year, back in 2011, when I was then serving our congregation in Gainesville, Florida, and I've read every one since then. I wanted to go through the full list today, out loud and before the community, because the exercise of saying its name brings back the memories of those memorable reads. Part of those memories is the group gatherings I was a part of in Gainesville, and in White Plains, New York, to grapple with other UUs about what we learned in the pages of those common reads.

Each book changed me. Each book brought a perspective and insights and passion that keeps coming back up for me. And to be a Unitarian Universalist means that we are connected with all other Unitarian Universalists, in a thousand UUA congregations across the US, and with sibling organizations in Canada and around the world. We share the principles and purposes and sources declared in the UUA bylaws; we sing out of the same hymnal -- and, since 2010, we’ve had these Common Reads to give Unitarian Universalists everywhere a shared experience.

The religious task, the spiritual project, is to be more fully alive, and more fully connected, to all of reality – all of the beauty and all of the tragedy. Our aim is to not be oblivious to the wonder, the awe, and beauty – nor to turn our backs on, to forget for a moment, the heartbreak, the loss, the grief, the pain. Our task is to hold vividly and simultaneously in our minds and hearts the full poignance and the interconnection of the beauty and the tragedy. Reality, I have said before, is never depressing. It sometimes hurts, but the more of reality we hold in consciousness, the more alive we are – and aliveness is not depression.

Many of our Common Reads have helped readers awaken their compassion, and that means being more fully alive. The 2023-24 Common Read – Danya Ruttenberg, On Repentance and Repair – addresses many different ways that we humans wound one another. I’ll talk some this morning about the book, but you must read it. We will have a forum about this book on November 17, which gives you 7 weeks to beg, borrow, or buy the book and read it. Then come to the November 17 forum to share and hear each others’ thoughts. It’s important. For though Ruttenberg has some hard stories to tell, I don’t know if I have ever read a more hopeful book. We can repent. We can repair. We can apologize and forgive and be accountable and atone and make amends and heal and reconcile – and life can flourish. Sometimes we can even do so completely – make full amends and entirely reconcile. Often we cannot, but some sort of step in that direction can always be made.

It isn’t easy. It can’t be easy. If your gestures toward repentance and repair are easy, they won’t be transformative and won’t engage real accountability. As John Kennedy said of going to the moon, we do it not because it is easy, but because it is hard. Here we’re not talking about a moonshot, but about spiritual work, but still, being hard makes it worth doing. Wendell Berry’s poem “A Vision” is about repentance and repair of our relationship with the Earth, and it concludes describing the world we yet can make: “The abundance of this place, the songs of its people and its birds, will be health and wisdom and indwelling light. This is no paradisal dream. Its hardship is its possibilities.” It’s the hardship that makes it real.

The New Moon begins on Wednesday -- October 2nd -- and on the Jewish lunar calendar, this new moon signals the Jewish New Year: Rosh Hashanah. In Jewish tradition, the first 10 days of the New Year are Days of Repentance, culminating in Yom Kippur the Day of Atonement. That is, the tradition calls for starting each year by reflecting on the moral transgressions of the past year and sincerely repenting of that harm.

Jewish tradition distinguishes sins against God from sins against others. Sins against God would be things like idolatry, blasphemy, desecration of Shabbat, violating kosher laws, disregarding Jewish holidays, failure of gratitude for providence, and general neglect of reverence. Sins against others would be anything that hurt them or damaged the relationship. During this period of repentance, the sins against God are atoned for through confession, regret, promising not to repeat the error. Sins against others, though, can only be atoned for once the wrong has been made right, such as by paying restitution or receiving forgiveness from the victim and repairing the relationship insofar as possible before embarking on a new year. It's not enough to feel privately sorry and resolved to do better – you have to engage with the victim – except where engagement would only worsen the harm – and make things right insofar as that may be possible.

These are the High Holy days, the holiest days on the Jewish calendar – and they days dedicated to repentance. What a great idea. So with the 2024 high holy days beginning in three days, it’s a particularly apt time to be reading On Repentance and Repair – written by Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg, and drawing on the work of 12th-century Rabbi and philosopher, Moses Maimonides.

At various times in our life, we all cause harm, we’ve all been harmed, and we’ve been bystanders to harm. As Ruttenberg writes:

“We all cause harm sometimes. Maybe its intentional, a result of a calculated attempt to gain power, or from a place of anger or spit. Maybe it’s out of carelessness, or ignorance, a reaction to fear, or because we were overwhelmed and dropped some balls. May it’s because we were acting out of our own broken places or trauma, or because, in our attempt to protect some interests, we ran roughshod over others. Maybe it’s because our smaller role in a larger system puts us in the position of perpetuating hurt or injustice. Maybe it’s for one of a myriad of other reasons, or a combination of them. We have all been harmed. We all nurse stories about the tender places where we have been bumped, cut, battered by others – by people, institutions, or systems. Sometimes, maybe, we have managed to heal completely; sometimes a scar is left behind. Other places still ache now and again. Some injuries may hinder us from being able to do things that we once could, or even cause immeasurable, even irreparable damage – to ourselves, our families, our communities, or our heritage. We also are all bystanders to harm. We read about it in the news, debate it on social media, decide when to speak up about it at work or to a family member, and witness social structures that do not deliver on ideals of equity, respect, and justice.”

Causing harm, and being a bystander witness to harm imposes some moral obligations, argues Ruttenberg. Being harmed doesn’t so much impose an obligation, but the work of healing is to see how open you can be to what the prospect of healing might entail, even if the answer is not very much. It’s often hard to hear the message that we have caused harm. There’s a tendency for the one charged with causing a harm to claim, “but I didn’t mean any harm.” In response, the slogan has emerged, “it’s not the intent, it’s the impact that matters.” The phrase goes back at least to Peggy McIntosh’s 1988 paper, “White Privilege and Male Privilege.” The phrase started catching on among leaders of feminist and race relations discourse, emphasizing the importance of considering the effects of actions on marginalized groups. For instance, works by bell hooks in the 1990s were regularly framed in terms of intention vs. impact. In the early 2000s, the phrase gained traction in social justice and anti-oppression movements, particularly in academic and activist circles. In the 2010s, with the rise of social media, declarations that it’s the impact, not the intent, that matters became more widespread, especially in discussions about what, for many of us, were then new concepts: microaggressions, cultural appropriation, call-out culture.

There is, in fact, a much older concept in law and morality that captures what this is all about, and that is negligence. If you have a swimming pool in your back yard, and you don’t put a fence around it, and the neighbor kid drowns in your pool, you have been negligent, and you are at fault. It doesn’t matter that you didn’t mean to harm the child. Similarly, if you say something misogynist or racist, though you may not be in any legal trouble, you are morally negligent. You may not have intended any harm – indeed, you may not have known that what you were saying was misogynist or racist -- but you should have known. We all have an obligation to learn about what is harmful, to know what will give offense, and you’re negligent if you fail to do so.

In any case, whether we talk in terms of negligence, or in terms of impact vs. intent, the point is: you are not off the hook just because you didn’t mean any harm. Actual malice, as the lawyers say, may increase your liability, but absence of malice doesn’t mean you aren’t culpable – and that’s a moral principle as well as a legal one. We are obligated to not do harm – not merely to not intend harm – and that means we have a responsibility to stay current on the public discourse that brings to light what sorts of words and actions are likely to hurt someone.

Yes, it’s true that even if one is as current as possible, one may still blunder. When that happens, apologize. Learn from the mistake. Make amends if you can, and try sincerely not to do it again. Ruttenberg urges us to take up the work of finding our way back from harm we have done. She writes,

“I want, more than anything, to show you, to show everyone, that this work is not impossible to do, but it is work, and it can be done (though we must not be too generous with participation trophies or cookies for people doing the bare minimum).”

She then turns to Maimonides for the basic 5-step scheme of how the work needs to go.

Step One: naming and owning the harm.

In other words, fess up. A sentence or two suffices. Rutterberg’s examples:

“It wasn’t OK that I told that joke in the staff meeting. I didn’t realize it at the time, but now I understand it was pretty transphobic.”
“I have a confession to make. I know everybody’s been trying to figure out who ran over Simon’s cat. I feel horrible. It was me.”
“I need to admit that I overcharged customers and pocketed the difference. Four have come forward, but the truth is, there are more.”
“I know I told you all I was sick last weekend and that’s why I couldn’t come help out. But actually I went away with my girlfriend.”
“Our organization continued to solicit the donor even after we found out that his money was obtained through criminal means and the donor hasn’t been held accountable for that.”
“Our state has, for centuries, and is even now continuing to violate treaties with the Sioux Nation. Our possession of this land and our development of it constitute theft.”

There is much in our culture that teaches us to protect ourselves, be defensive, shift blame, minimize the problem, focus on how good our intentions were, or just put off an uncomfortable conversation to another day. A direct confession – naming and owning the harm that was done – sweeps away all of that obfuscation, so that is step one.

Step Two: Starting to Change – making yourself into a person that can to be relied upon to not again commit that sort of harm.

Ruttenberg says,

“The work of transformation might include tearful grappling with one’s behavior in prayer, meditation, or some other practice; making financial sacrifices that have meaningful impact both on one’s own wallet and the world; changing one’s self-conception and self-identity in appropriate ways; putting oneself in new situations both to consciously avoid the opportunity to cause harm and perhaps to experience what it’s like to not have control or power – someplace where one might get some practice in the virtue of humility. These days this process of change might also involve therapy, or rehab, or educating oneself rigorous on an issue..... The goal here isn’t merely making amends. It’s transformation.” (33-4)

Step Three: Restitution and Accepting Consequences.

Because: “Repair work isn’t really repair if the only thing that’s changed is the perpetrator.” Yet, “a person who caused harm (even unwittingly! Even with the best of intentions!) will be better positioned to truly make amends after they have gone off to do some of the work” of steps 1 and 2. (37)

Step Four: Apology.

Sometimes the steps may take a while, and you don’t have to have fully completed one step before beginning another. At some point when you’re well into step two, transforming yourself, and have begun the process of restitution and amends and accepting the just consequences of what you’ve done, it matters that you say you’re sorry and ask for forgiveness. If nothing else, you’re showing that it matters to you what ongoing feelings the person you hurt is having -- letting them know that, whether or not you ever return to their good graces, you do want to.

An apology “demands a sincere offering of regret and sorrow for one’s actions. It requires understanding when approaching a victim might harm them further and navigating that with sensitivity.” (41-2) It certainly is NOT “I’m sorry that you were hurt by this perfectly reasonable thing that I did.”

The victim’s needs are at the center, and that might be complicated. If it’s not possible to approach the victim without inflicting more hurt, then don’t approach. The victim may have died, or be unable to forgive. The specific context will indicate the most that can be done by way of apology. The main thing is that we understand it’s not about checking off necessary boxes or seeking an outcome that benefits us, but is a natural outgrowth of repentance work we’ve been doing all along.

Finally, step five, making different choices.

When faced with the opportunity to cause similar harm in the future, we make a better choice. That choice should happen naturally because the person making it is a changed person in the ways that matter.

There’s a lot more to understand about forgiveness and its role in healing, about atonement, about repentance in personal relationships versus harm in the public square, about how institutions and nations can repent, about how the needs of healing are and are not served by our justice system. I look forward to your taking in what Ruttenberg has to offer about that, and the riveting stories she shares by way of illustration. And I’ll see you on November 17 to talk about that.

In the meantime, Shana Tova – happy new year.

God the Adjective

God is traditionally used as, thought of as, a noun. Last week I talked about "God the Verb." Today: "God the adjective."

At this point, you might be looking forward in confident expectation to an upcoming sermon, "God the Interjection." I’m not planning to do that, although when arguments about God get going, interjections – including expletives – are likely to fly.

Speaking of arguments about God, you might remember that last March, I gave a sermon titled, “The Ontological, the Semantic, and the Tribal.” I said that an argument about God might be ontological, or it might be semantic – but at root, it’s usually tribal.

An argument about God might start off appearing to be ontological. Ontology is the study of being, existence, and how to determine if things exist. The ontological question is: does an entity exist that knows, that desires, and that creates whole worlds?

The argument might then shift to being semantic. What exactly does the word "God" mean? Is it a legitimate use of the English language to use the word “God” to refer NOT to a person-like entity that knows and desires, but only to a source of beauty and mystery; a power inspiring gratitude, humility, wonder, and awe; an ultimate context and basis for meaning and value; the widest reality to which our loyalty is owed; or the Cosmos: “all that is, or ever was, or ever will be”? Can you say that there is nothing in the universe except what the scientists describe and still call THAT “God”?

Why do people get riled up over semantic arguments about the word “God” when no other semantic argument elicits much concern or passion? I think it's because the real conflict is neither about ontology nor semantics. It’s about tribe. Are you in my tribe – do you speak the tribal passwords, affirming or denying the existence of God, adopting my tribe’s definition of the word “God”? If you’re not in my tribe, then we must fight – or else avoid the subject altogether.

There are meanings of “God” acceptable within the English language that don’t mean person-like or supernatural, so I want to ask you: Do you still prefer not to use the word because of tribal identity? You don’t want anyone to think for a minute that you might be in the Woo-Woo tribe? I think, for some of us, that’s the hang-up. We’re more interested in protecting our self-identity as members of the No-Woo tribe than we are in connecting with other people through the meanings that we share: awe, wonder, beauty, mystery, source of hope and healing that we call by many names.

Let me tell you some of my history with God. The G-word and I have had a checkered relationship. When I was in first grade, in Pinetops, North Carolina, where there was no Unitarian Universalist congregation, the neighbor kid sometimes invited me to go along with him to his church. Several times that year, I went, and as a result of the instructions given me at that Presbyterian Sunday School, there was a brief period in my life during which I did a nightly bedtime ritual called “prayer.” “Prayer” involved asking someone named “God” to do, for various friends and relations, something called “bless.”

By fourth grade, I had left behind “that kid stuff.” I was then living in a different small southern town: Carrollton, Georgia. Carrollton didn’t have a Unitarian Universalist congregation either, but it was only an hour’s drive from Atlanta, where, sporadically, I was taken to the UU church. Soon after learning there was a word “atheist,” I decided that I was one. I made this declaration at the UU church, and no one seemed very interested. I made this declaration during lunch at my elementary school cafeteria, and a palpable buzz shockwaved through hall.

The news reached an ardent and incredulous girl a few tables over. She arose, and, flanked by a silent friend to function as diplomatic observer, came over and confronted me. “You don’t believe in God?” she asked. “No,” I said, suddenly interested in the lima beans on my plate. “Do you know what the Bible is?” she pressed. I offered my considered and scholarly assessment. “Just some book by some stupid people,” I said sullenly.

She gasped. The diplomatic observer gasped. The two of them withdrew to tut-tut with others over the lostness of my soul and the rift to their social fabric that my apostasy represented. That was the beginning of my career in theology and scriptural hermeneutics. In my remaining seven years in the town’s public school system, I ventured no further discourses on religion, but that was enough. Throughout that time I was “the class atheist.”

Back then, it was clear what “God” meant – and clear -- to me – that the universe included nothing that instantiated that meaning. Now, nothing about God is clear: there’s only ambiguity and mystery – beautiful, rich, joyous ambiguity and mystery.

The theist says there is such a thing, the atheist says there isn’t such a thing, and the agnostic says “I don’t know whether there’s such a thing or not,” – but they all pretend to know what sort of thing it is they’re talking about. The universe, however, is more amazing – life is more profoundly awesome – and the Bible’s authors, editors, and redactors were wiser and more insightful – than my fourth-grade self was prepared to comprehend.

In the years after high school the issue in my mind gradually shifted from being about God to being about "God" – that is, from the ontological question about the way reality is to the semantic question about the way words are used. Might not the word “God” be used, not to make a controversial empirical claim about what is, but to draw our attention, as a good poet does, to certain qualities of existence – qualities which are not subjects about which to dispute, but are a felt reality momentarily overlooked? It’s not about being convinced or persuaded. It’s not about believing. It’s about being reminded of what we already know deep down: that this present moment – if we truly show up for it – is so sweet and so delicious that we need words like “holy” and “divine” and even “God” to help us notice it.

It’s not about what exists; it’s about the qualities of existence: is it wondrous, mysterious, beautiful, awesome? Those adjectives are the crux of the matter, and that’s why I suggest to you today that God is an adjective.

Glen Thomas Rideout has a poem titled, "god is no noun." It’s beautiful and evocative -- and it is dismissive of the idea of God being an adjective. The poem begins: “God is not a noun and certainly no adjective.” But I think Rideout overlooks that the qualities of things are more important than the things. It doesn’t matter much whether it’s a house or a cave if it’s luxurious, comfortable, warm, cozy, well-equipped, affordable, energy-efficient and conveniently-located. It’s those adjectives that matter.

It matters what we say exists or doesn’t exist – but it matters more whether we apprehend that whatever exists – existence itself -- is holy, sacred. “God” is an allusion to the quality that existence has when we are so fully present to it that we perceive divinity there.

Two writers – one of them who did not identify as Christian, John Dewey, and one who did, Dietrich Bonhoeffer -- both support this emphasis on the adjectival. John Dewey said religion, the noun, didn’t do much for him. But he recognized the deep value of religious, the adjective. “Religious” referred to a kind of experience, a special quality that suffuses some experiences. You don’t have to have a religion in order to have religious experience. The noun, religion, indicates some particular religion, and any particular religion carries a lot of particular baggage – doctrines, rituals, theologies, moral dictates.

The religious quality in experience, on the other hand, requires no doctrines, rituals, or moral rules. A religious attitude “may be taken toward every object and every proposed end or ideal,” wrote Dewey. When something feels profound, or moving, or like a revelation or an epiphany – while on a nature hike, or through involvement in some project – we might say “it was a religious experience!” We wouldn’t say it was a religion.

An experience has religious quality when it results in adjustments to life’s conditions, orientation, a sense of peace and security, said Dewey. It might be brought about by devotion to a cause, by a passage of poetry, by meditation. The religious quality is a unifying, connecting quality. It re-orients us, brings a feeling of peace through awareness of interconnection with everything.

Writing along lines similar to Dewey was Dietrich Bonhoeffer -- a German theologian and outspoken critic of Hitler, imprisoned and eventually executed by Nazis. Bonhoeffer called for a religionless Christianity. Wrap your mind around that term: “religionless Christianity.”

Bonhoffer wrote in a letter from prison: “The New Testament must be interpreted in such a way as not to make religion a precondition of faith” (329). Religion, he said, “is only a garment of Christianity – and even this garment has looked very different at different times.”

I think Bonhoeffer had in mind the same idea Dewey had: that this noun, religion, denotes some set of doctrines and practices. No single set is necessary for giving experience that religious quality. A wide variety of sets of doctrines and practices can help cultivate the religious quality of experience. In Bonhoeffer’s way of putting it, the religion of Christianity -- that is, the doctrines and practices -- was only a garment covering over the true Christianity beneath – a Christianity that had nothing to do with doctrine or ritual and everything to do with the experience of transcendence in our lives. Christians discarding the garment of their religion – Christians, that is, those who possess “religionless Christianity” – will recognize that very different doctrines and practices – say pagan ones, or Buddhist ones – also facilitate our awareness of that which goes by many names: the oneness of reality, the divine, the ground of being, the transcendent, the awesome quality of the universe, the interbeing of everything, the interconnected web of existence -- God.

Christians discarding this religion garment, said Bonhoeffer, will cease to regard themselves “as specially favored, but rather as belonging wholly to the world” (280-81).

So that’s a little conceptual background from Dewey and Bonhoeffer.

It seems to me that God as a noun splits us apart, creates tribal division. God as a noun begs the question: what properties does this noun have? Is God loving or angry and punitive? Merciful or just? All-knowing or just very knowing? All-powerful or just very powerful? God the noun begs the question: what does this noun do? Does God intervene in human affairs daily? Or did God create the universe a while back, and is now watching it unfold, the way a child watches carefully laid-out dominos fall?

While God the noun has properties – leaving us humans to argue what those properties are -- God, the adjective is a property that we can pretty much agree on. Most people in any faith tradition would agree that life and the universe is awesome and sacred.

If God is a noun, then we must face the question of whether God is the sort of noun that the Catholics describe, or that the primitive Baptists, or the Eastern orthodox, or the Jews, or the Muslims, or the Hindu describe. If, for example, you posit God as an ultimate cause, then you can’t help but get stuck in conundrums like what caused God?

In one form of Hinduism, the earth rests upon the back of an elephant. You may have heard the story of an Englishman encountering an elderly woman of this Hindu faith. What does the elephant stand on? he asked. The elephant stands on the back of a monkey, she answered. And what does the monkey stand on? The monkey stands on the back of a turtle, she replied. And what does the turtle stand on? he asked patiently. The turtle stands on the back of another turtle. “And what does that turtle…?” he started to ask. At that point the woman interrupted him. “From there on,” she said, “it’s turtles all the way down.”

See? That's the kind of conundrum you get stuck with if divine and holy are made into a noun. We get arguments about different conceptions of that noun. “Do you believe in God?” is a question used to divide people. I believe in the adjectives, and they tend to be less divisive. I believe in green and growing, dark and peaceful, loving and kind, amazing and wonderful. I believe in the beautiful and tragic quality of life. I believe in religious qualities. I believe in awesome, in grateful, in hopeful, in joyful. I believe in full. I believe in earthy. I believe in wise, and compassionate. I believe in sufficient: this life, this world, come what may, it is enough. It will do.

I believe in a god world: a world not of our own making that supports us and sustains us, which grounds us for the meaningful pursuit of ideals. I believe in the god life, which can be experienced by people of any religion or none – a life of awareness, a life of attention to the interplay of forces, a life of deep sympathy with all of them even when it does come time to take a stand against some of them. I believe in holy, for each breath is holy. I believe in sacred, for each step is sacred: we have but to be mindful and know it.

God the noun is an ultimate cause of things. God the adjective is a quality we can perceive of the flow of all the causal forces, none of them ultimate, interacting continuously. We experience those forces adjectivally: luminescent, transcendent.

I’ll close with three further illustrations of the importance of the adjectives. First, Tagore:

"Is it beyond thee to be glad with the gladness of this rhythm? To be tossed and lost and broken in the whirl of this fearful joy?"

Notice that it's the adjectives that convey the force of Tagore's words: glad, tossed, lost, broken, and fearful.

Second, the well-known e.e. cummings’ passage:

“I thank You God for most this amazing day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything which is natural which is infinite which is yes ...”

It’s the adjectives that carry the impact: amazing, leaping greenly, blue true, natural, infinite – and yes, which cummings is using as an adjective.

Finally, a parable from the Zen tradition.

A man fleeing from a tiger came to a precipice, caught hold of the root of a wild vine and swung himself down over the edge. The tiger sniffed at him from above. Trembling, the man looked down to where, far below, another tiger was waiting to eat him. Only the vine sustained him. Then some mice appeared and began gnawing at the vine. Just then, the man saw a strawberry growing near him. Grasping the vine with one hand, he plucked the strawberry with the other. How luscious and sweet it was!

Again, it’s the adjectives that carry the punch: luscious and sweet.

Our time here is short, before the mice hand us over to the tigers. All we can do is notice, notice, train ourselves to notice – notice the god quality in every luscious and sweet moment.

Theological Hospitality

READINGS

A number of writers have been attracted to the thesis that God is a verb. Buckminster Fuller, in 1940, wrote:

Here is God's purpose –
for God to me, it seems,
is a verb
not a noun,
proper or improper;
is the articulation
not the art, objective or subjective;
is loving,
not the abstraction "love" commanded or entreated;
is knowledge dynamic,
not legislative code,
not proclamation law,
not academic dogma, nor ecclesiastic canon.
Yes, God is a verb,
the most active,
connoting the vast harmonic
reordering of the universe
from unleashed chaos of energy.
And there is born unheralded
a great natural peace,
not out of exclusive
pseudo-static security
but out of including, refining, dynamic balancing.”

Here’s how the poet Wild Bill Balding puts it:

God is a verb, not a noun:
'I am who I am,
I will be who I will be.'
dynamic, seething, active
web of love poured out,
given, received, exchanged,
one God in vibrant community
always on the move,
slipping through our fingers,
blowing through the nets we cast
to hold and name,
confine to nouns, to labels,
freezeframe stasis,
pinned like a butterfly,
solid, cold, controlled, lifeless.
'I am who I am,
I will be who I will be' -
not pinned down by names, labels,
buildings, traditions,
or even by nails to wood:
I am: a verb, not a noun,
living, free, exuberant,
always on the move.

Jean-Claude Koven writes:

“God is indeed a verb. He is not the creator. He is the ongoing unfoldment of creation itself. There is nothing that is not a part of this unfolding. Thus there can be nothing separate from God. . . . When we perceive God as a noun, we envision him as the creator, the architect of, and therefore separate from, his creation. Identifying ourselves as part of that creation, we see ourselves not only separate from our source but separate from each other and all other manifest things as well. . . . Once I viewed God as a verb instead of a noun, my perception of life shifted. Everything around me, manifest or no, became God. There was only God. When someone spoke to me, it was with God's voice; when I listened, it was with God's heart. As you begin to view God not as the creator but as the constantly changing dance of creation itself, you'll discover God in everything you see – including yourself.”

PART 1: HARD TRUTH AND DEEP TRUTH

On the one hand, we Unitarian Universalists do cherish our theological diversity. We like being around people with a range of viewpoints and practices.

On the other hand, though, we aren’t always able to be as hospitable to divergent religious viewpoints as we could be. Some years ago, our Unitarian Universalist Association conducted a nationwide survey of our various theological identities. It asked people to identify their own theological identity and indicate whether they felt completely welcomed in their congregation. The UU Christians by-and-large said they felt more-or-less accepted, but they were sometimes marginalized. The UU Pagans said they felt basically accepted, but sometimes marginalized. The UU Humanists also felt mostly accepted, albeit, they said, sometimes a little marginalized. The UU Buddhists said, “We’re fine.”

To think in a welcoming and hospitable way about people with diverse theological views – a way that makes everyone, regardless of their preferred metaphors for matters of ultimate concern, fully accepted and integral to the center of our congregational life, it helps to think for a moment about: Truth. The thing is, our default position – which we think to ourselves even if we don’t say it aloud – goes like this: “My way of understanding the world is true, and other people’s bizarre fantasies will just have to be tolerated – because we’re proud of our theological diversity.” So let’s think through a little bit this notion of truth so as to minimize the (perhaps unconscious) stumbling block that it can be for us. As a tool for conceptualizing this, allow me to submit for your consideration, that there are two categories of truths: call them hard truths and deep truths.

Hard truths are the domain of scientists and historians. Hard truth is also the concern of criminal trials to ascertain the hard truth of who did what. This is a kind of history, as the attorneys attempting to convince a jury of what happened on the night of 23rd are functional historians, sifting through evidence to tell a story of what happened in the past. If you find yourself on the witness stand at a criminal trial, they are not going to be interested in poetry. They do not want your creative metaphors that limn the unspeakable depths of what your soul has experienced. They want, as Jack Webb used to say on "Dragnet": "Just the facts, Ma'am."

Indeed, the methods and claims of the historian may be seen as an outgrowth from the earliest forms of criminal justice. The genre we know as history is commonly said to have been invented by the Greek writer Herodotus, whose Histories was written between 440 and 430 BCE, providing an account of the Greco-Persian Wars. Herodotus was able to conceive of this new genre, this new kind of writing, and his readers were able to comprehend what he was doing, I think, only because Herodotus was building upon and extending modes of thought available from centuries of community practices for dealing with transgressors against the community’s norms (i.e., criminals).

To decide if a person was, in fact, a criminal required the beginnings of a notion of what I’m calling hard truth. Early human communities had to ascertain the hard truth of just what was done to whom. They had to consider available evidence and how best to interpret that evidence. There may not have been anything much like Sherlock Holmes-type deduction from the physical evidence, and the parties’ status in the community probably carried more sway than, to us, would seem fair, but still, there was likely something like character witnesses and some attempt to work out what most likely really happened – to discern, that is, the hard truth of the matter.

For a long time in human history, this may have been the only sphere where hard truth really mattered to the community. Outside of this need to determine moral responsibility, storytellers wove stories about the origin of the world, of how the people came to be the people they understood themselves to be, and these mythic tales were assessed by communal agreement that they were satisfying stories. Such mythic stories were not matters of “hard” or “evidence-based” truth, but they did tell deep truth with moral lessons. The stories were true by virtue of corresponding to the moral reality of the community.

Then Herodotus came along and by his example created an interest in telling stories about the past that were not just edifying and morally instructive and uplifting, but were hard true, or “evidence-based.”

Then science came along – though it sure took its time getting here. There were various methodologies of what I’d call pre-science or proto-science through ancient and medieval times, but a full-on embrace of the experimental method didn’t happen until about 400 years ago. If I had to pinpoint it, I’d say 1642. That’s the year Galileo died and the year Newton was born: kind of the center year of the transitional period into our scientific age. Scientific method doesn’t come naturally to homo sapiens brains. Our species has been around for about 300,000 years. Suppose we say exactly 300,000 years. That would mean it took us 299,600 years to grasp and adopt the scientific method, which we have had for only the last 400 years.

What science has given us in these 400 years is amazing powers of prediction and control. When you can predict what things will do, you can set up conditions to make them do it, and, boom, we’re off – steam engines, electric lights, automobiles, airplanes, radios and so on to all the devices we live with today.

I hear my Mom’s voice – she was a physics professor – saying that science aims to explain our world. OK, Mom, but science is a particular kind of explanation – namely, the kind that facilitates prediction and control. The hard truths in history and in criminal law provide us our best guess about what happened. The hard truths of science provide us with amazing prediction and control. But we want more than to predict and control our world. We want also to befriend it. We need to love, and to belong, and to know how to think about what’s right and what’s wrong -- what’s good and worthy and valuable and what isn’t – and who we are. We need to know not just what has happened or what we now could make happen, but how to decide what should happen – what we want to happen.

For that we need truth that is deep rather than hard -- poetic truth that speaks to the depths of who we are and what is our place in all of this. Science and history figure into that, but they cannot by themselves convey these deep truths. A good novel is fiction, but it contains deep truths that science and history alone cannot.

I’ve said before that theology is best understood as a kind of poetry. So science and religion can have no quarrel with each other. One is in the hard truth business and the other in the deep truth business.

I know that sometimes some people have thought that what scientists were saying was a threat to what their theology said. The Catholic church tried Galileo for heresy for saying the Earth went around the Sun, not vice-versa. And a lot of people even today regard evolution as in conflict with their religious teachings. But that doesn’t mean we have to see any conflict between science and anybody's religious teachings.

Religious teachings – whether ours or someone else's – provide a person with deep truth, while evolution is a product of our quest for hard truths. It’s out of place to start citing T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland” on the witness stand in a criminal trial, and in just the same way it’s out of place to start citing Genesis in biology class – though both “The Wasteland” and Genesis are profoundly meaningful and important works of literature that command our attention in our quest for deep truth.

If our religious differences are understood as matters of different poetry, then the fact that some people are Catholics and some are Shinto may be regarded the way we regard the fact that some people prefer Walt Whitman and some prefer Emily Dickinson. If a new style of poetry shows up, then let us be interested, curious, and maybe even playful with the possibilities that these new metaphors open up. After all, we are a religious institution – and the human grappling after deep truth is what we’re all about.

Theological literacy helps – it’s helpful to know more about what sorts of theological options are out there. So let me give an example. Maybe for some of us this will be good practice in being sympathetic and open to ways to think about God. Maybe there’s some poetry here that you can add to your very own heart’s spiritual anthology. Radical hospitality, you see, goes beyond tolerance, beyond accepting, beyond welcoming, and embraces a willingness to be changed by the other. Radical hospitality is interested in finding new poems to add to one’s own personal spiritual poetry anthology. The example I will go into is one that some of us may know, but not, I think, all of us – or, at least, maybe we could a reminder: Process Theology.

PART 2: PROCESS THEOLOGY

Process Theology began in the early 20th century, as a development from Process Philosophy, created by Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947). Whitehead, a mathematician turned philosopher, published Process and Reality in 1929. Western thought since Plato has privileged Being over Becoming. Whitehead flipped that. He said reality is fundamentally becoming. Process is what’s fundamental, and things are just temporary manifestations of unfolding process -- as opposed to the predominant presumption that things are fundamental and that they change is nonessential, an imperfection, a design flaw. The perfection of God, from the Platonists through Thomas Aquinas and up to modern times, was God’s unchangingness. Whitehead said change is not a bug in the system. It’s not a bug, it’s a feature. Change is not nonessential – it is the essence. The ultimate principle is creativity – the process of creating takes precedence over any product creation.

Whitehead gives us Process philosophy, and while Whitehead did write about the place of God in his philosophy, process philosophy did not become full-fledged process theology until the Unitarian Charles Hartshorne’s work expanded, extended, and revised Whitehead.

Born in 1897, Hartshorne lived to age 103. He was giving a talk at our UU General Assembly as recently as 1994, when he was 97. For Hartshorne’s Process Theology, God is not omnipotent. God is finite – changing and growing along with creation. Reality is made of events, not material substance. God, being finite and not omnipotent, doesn’t have full control of what happens. Rather, God engages with us in a process in which both we and God develop together. God changes. God offers us possibilities the full meaning of which God doesn’t know. As we, God’s creatures, explore the offered possibilities, Creator and Creation alike learn, grow, develop, allowing new possibilities to be offered.

Hartshorne held that people do not experience subjective immortality, but we do have objective immortality in that our experiences live on forever in God, who contains all that was. Just as you, throughout your life, build on your experiences, developing new experiences shaped by all prior experience, so, too, God, after your death, continues to build on your experiences. Your experiences continue to contribute to God’s new experiences for all eternity.

Yes, God transcends the world, but the world also transcends God. Yes, God creates the world, but the world also creates God. We are a part of God. Our growth is a part of God’s growth. God’s knowledge is the sum total of the knowledge of all life-forms – God’s desires, the sum of the desires of life.

The emphasis on change leads to the idea that God is a verb. In the readings above, Buckminster Fuller, Bill Balding, and Jean-Claude Koven, articulate this “God is a Verb” thesis. UU minister Stephen Phinney puts it this way:

“I believe that the holy is in the process of giving and taking of the love we have. In other words, the holy or God is the process of interchanging love.”

You might find this perspective radical or exhilarating. You might also have noticed that the God-is-a-verb people are not actually using “God” as a verb. They say, for instance, that reality is more a matter of events than substances. “Events” does convey a more dynamic quality than “substances,” but if we’re talking about parts of speech, “event” is just as much a noun as “substance” is. They speak of God as “process” and as “creativity” and as “energy.” All three are nouns. Jean-Claude Koven said God was “unfoldment,” and “infinity,” and “everything,” and “a dance.” Nouns every one. For that matter, “verb” is a noun.

Still.

The point is: there is in our life and our experience a cause for wonder, mystery, reverence. This is better thought of as a process, a dance, a creativity, a love than as a person or entity. Calling it a verb is just a way of alluding to its active doing.

But supposing – just to be playful -- we did want to be sticklers for actually meaning what we said. How would that go, for God to be a verb? Well, verbs need a subject, if we’re going to speak in sentences, so we could say: The universe gods. There’s the vast cosmos, quietly, grandly godding along through the ages. Reality gods. I god, you god, he she it gods, we god, you god, they god. All God’s children . . . god.

And what sort of activity is it “to god”? Following the lead of the process and the creativity theologians: to god is to unfold, like an infinite flower opening its petals; to develop through a process of interaction with all the rest of the godding universe. To god is to become transparent to the creativity of the universe shining through you. Certainly not a hard truth, but possibly a deep one.

To god is to fandango across the ballroom of oneness, to trip the light fantastic with -- no, as -- mountains and rivers and great wide earth, the sun, and the moon, and the stars. To god is, in the words of Sufi poet Hafiz, to “laugh at the word two.” It is to swim in the sea of mystery; to quaff from the cup of abundance. To god is to suffice. Whoever you are, whatever your imagined shortcomings, you are enough – ample. To god is to do and be everything that you do and are. Why would anyone want to call these activities "godding"? We might call them godding to help us remember, to help us wake up to, and attune ourselves to, the fact that everything we do and are is a part of the whole, a part of the dance, the mystery of creativity, the unpredictable unfolding of new things under the sun.

For the medievals, to apprehend reality at its most ultimate meant to conceive of changeless eternity. Above this world of corruption and change, God was pure, immutable, outside of time. To think of God as an active verb is to emphasize the time during which the actions take place. It is to put God in time, rather than removed from time. It is to perceive the holy in change, rather than imagine it in changelessness. It calls attention to divinity as spread throughout all of nature, as manifested by the activities of nature.

Verb theology can incorporate modern science, building a deep truth with building blocks of hard truth from science “that reality at the most fundamental level is composed of shimmering waves of probability, fluctuating, intertwining matter and energy” (Phinney). Instead of saying species just are, biologists now understand species as in flux. That hard truth can be a building block in cultivating spiritual awe and wonder at the playing out of unpredictable creativity all around us.

I have been imagining God as an intransitive verb. But let’s continue to be playful – yet at the same time heartful. What if God were a transitive verb? If reality gods, what does it god? Perhaps we could say the universe gods you, and it gods me. Reality gods the mud and the flowers alike; it gods the Republicans and the Democrats alike. It godded Palestinians and Hammas and it godded Israel and its militant leadership. It godded despotic governments at the very moment they were disappearing their own people and turning away aid.

There is an activity of relationship between all things, an active connection of each thing with all things. In the fullest realization of God-as-transitive-verb, everything gods everything (else). Unitarian theologican Henry Nelson Wieman, said that the “universe becomes spiritual” as

“more events become signs, as these signs take on richer content of qualitative meanings, as these meanings form a network of interconnective events comprehending all that is happening in the world.” (Wieman 23)

It would seem, to carry Wieman to his logical conclusion, that the universe will have attained total, complete and perfect spirituality when everything signifies everything else -- or when, we might say, everything gods and is godded by everything else.

Godding, then, would be the activity of building meaning by building interconnection and relationship. The butterfly in Australia gods the weather in Chicago. You god the stars and the stars god you. Joy gods sadness and sadness gods joy.

This use of “god” seems to mean something like “connects with” or “interdependently arises with.” But more. This way of thinking maybe helps us see through the illusion that there are any separate things. Everything IS everything else.

Verbs need a subject -- that is, I said, if we’re going to speak in sentences. But what if we dispensed with sentences? Could we tell the story of life, of creation, in a language without subjects or objects, a language of only verbs, a language that perhaps the Cosmos itself speaks when it whispers to itself -- or whispers in your ear? Because it is timeless we need verbs with no tense (past tense or present tense or future tense). And because it is both one and many, we need verbs that are neither singular nor plural. Because it is infinite, the Cosmos speaks in the infinitive. So in the pursuit of poetic truth, I offer, in closing, this poem consisting entirely of infinitive verbs.

To come, to go,
To run, to jump, to twirl.
To birth, to grow.
To laugh.
To fall, to break, to cry, to rage.
To abandon.
To return, to embrace, to love.
To wound, to bleed, to weep.
To arise.
To work, to play, to smile.
To journey.
To heal.
To arrive, to arrive, to arrive.
To bless.

Amen.

Gathering In

Here we are, gathering in, kicking off our new church year. It is good to be together. As we begin our year, as we gather in, it’s a good time to reflect on why. And the first answer is just that: it is good to be together.

Good as it is, it’s sometimes not easy for human beings – particularly human beings in these polarized, disconnected, alienating times. A poll by the American Psychiatric Association in January of this year found that 30% of U.S. adults feel lonely at least once a week, and 10% feel lonely every day. Last year, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy released an official advisory on our epidemic of loneliness and isolation.

The report said that from 2003 to 20219 (so this is before the pandemic), time spent alone increased for the average American from 285-minutes-per-day to 309-minutes-per-day -- representing an increase of 24 hours per month spent alone. We need some alone time – but not 36 hours a week, on average, which is what we were getting in 2019 -- and then the pandemic, of course, spiked that number further upward.

From 2003 to 2020, the report said, time respondents engaged with friends socially in-person decreased from 60 minutes-per-day to 20 minutes-per-day. That’s not enough.

In 1990, nearly a quarter of Americans (27%) reported having three or fewer close friends. In 2021, nearly half (49%) said they had three or fewer close friends. Whatever “close friends” might mean, Americans are reporting that they feel close to fewer and fewer people.

Being the Surgeon General, Murthy looked at this as a medical issue. The physical health consequences of poor or insufficient connection include, the report said: A “29% increased risk of heart disease, a 32% increased risk of stroke, and a 50% increased risk of developing dementia for older adults.” Overall, “lacking social connection increases risk of premature death by more than 60%.” So: it’s really good to be together.

Just coming here is such an important thing you do for yourself and for each other – and yet, any kind of relationship with others is something Americans have been finding it harder and harder to do. “The thing we need most is relationships,” writes David Brooks, adding: “The thing we seem to suck at most is relationships.” Why is that?

I heard Nicholas Epley, professor of behavioral science at the University of Chicago, on a recent "Hidden Brain" podcast. Epley said he commuted to work on the train, where he had an unvarying protocol. He said:

“I just sat there and ignored everybody. I'd read a book, I'd listen to music, I'd scroll through my phone, looking at the news, the kind of thing that everybody else does. Sit down, you leave other people alone.”

Epley was doing this, even as he was on his way to the office where, among his academic duties, he was also working on a book “describing how we're made happier and healthier by reaching out and connecting with others by being social.”

One day it hit him, “like a lightening bolt,” he says:

“that here we are, highly social creatures with brains uniquely adapted for connecting to the minds of others. And yet, we're all sitting here ignoring each other. And that struck me as bizarre.”

We have this image of the obnoxiously gregarious passenger, and we don’t want to be that person, so we withdraw into our phone or a book. Where did we get that image? We probably picked it up from movies or TV rather than experience. Epley says,

“I decided I'd try to have a conversation with somebody that morning. I'd take an interest in somebody else. Eventually, all the seats are taken, and a woman comes and sits down next to me. She's an African American woman in probably her mid 50s or so, I would guess. She had on a bright red hat. I remember that very vividly. She sat down next to me, and I decided I'm going to try to get to know a little something about her. And so I said the first thing that came to my mind, which was a joke, but a compliment at the same time, I complimented her on her hat. I said how much I liked it, and that I had one just like it. And we both chuckled. I mean, it wasn't, look, it's probably not the best joke you've ever heard. But that got the conversation started. And from there it just went. We talked about our careers and our jobs and what we did for a living, but also whether this was really what we wanted to do for a living. I remember her feeling sort of stuck in her job and it wasn't quite what she wanted to do and thinking about making a change. She talked a little bit about her family, how she needed to support her family. And, you know, the conversation went really fast. It was about a half an hour trip. It was over really quickly. I was struck by that. And as I got up to leave, I thanked her for taking time to talk to me. She seemed delighted to have talked to me. And as I walked off the train, I remembered two feelings. One, that it felt nice. It was nicer than what I'd normally done that morning, which was probably scroll through the news. But the other thing I remembered was that it was surprisingly nice. I was, I was surprised by how nice it was.”

So Epley, being a research psychologist, began a study. He and a colleague went to the Homewood, Illinois Metra station and set up a sign on the way up to the train platform that recruited people to participate in an experiment if they were interested. He says,

“we handed them a $5 Starbucks gift card, and then we randomly assigned them to do one of three things on the train that morning. In one condition, we asked people to just do whatever they normally do on the train. In the next condition, this is our solitude condition, we asked people to keep to themselves, to just focus on their day ahead, and not engage other people in conversation. And in the third condition, we asked people to do the thing that I did on the train that morning, which was when somebody comes and sits down next to you, try to have a conversation. We then handed them an envelope that had their Starbucks gift card in it and a survey in it. And we told them, at the end of your commute, fill out the survey, drop it back in the mail to us. And off they went.”

The survey asked them how pleasant was your commute compared to normal? How happy do you feel after this commute? And how sad do you feel? Epley reports:

“What we found was that people actually reported having the most positive experience when they talk to a stranger. And they had the least positive experience in the solitude condition, where we asked them to keep to themselves. The control condition where people did whatever they normally did fell in the middle. We conducted another experiment where we asked people not to tell us … how they thought they would feel if they were in each of these conditions -- to predict how they would feel. And what we found was that people actually predicted that they would have the least positive experience in the connection condition and the most positive experience in the control and the solitude condition. And those expectations were just precisely wrong.”

Epley goes on to say that extrovert vs. introvert doesn’t matter. He says:

“Psychologists have been doing lots of experiments where they ask people to behave more extrovertedly or more introvertedly, and the very consistent finding is that when people actually do this, people feel happier when they act extroverted than when they act introverted, and that's just as true for folks who are consistently extroverted as it is for folks who are consistently introverted. As far as we can tell, where introversion and extroversion matters is not in people's experience of social interaction, as much as it is in their choices of social interaction. That is, extroverts choose to reach out and engage with others a little bit more often than introverts do. And as a result of choosing to reach out, they tend to be a little bit happier. In many ways, it seems a little bit like physical exercise, that some of us choose to exercise more than others, even though all of us, regardless of whether we choose to or not, would actually be a little healthier if we exercised more often. The same thing seems to be true with our sociality as well.”

So research from Epley and others shows we systematically underestimate how much we will enjoy connecting with people, and how meaningful our outreach will feel to others. Why do we underestimate this?

We have a desire to connect, but we also have fears that lead us to avoid other people – and the “avoid” circuitry tends to win out over the “connect” circuitry more often than is really optimal for us. Most of us, usually, have to give ourselves a little push, stretch ourselves a bit, to go ahead and start up that conversation.

The quality of the connection is especially enhanced if we don’t just stay at the level of small talk. We have this idea that we have to get to know a person over a long period of time, and slowly work our way up to deeper conversations. Actually, it doesn’t take so long. You can very quickly – not quite immediately, I would say, but almost – ask a relative stranger a really deeply connecting kind of question: What do you regret most in your life? Or what do you want to be known for? What are you most proud of? If we were to become friends, what would be most important for me to know about you? If a crystal ball could tell you anything about the future, what would you want to know? When was the last time you cried cried in front of another person? Or if you just say, “tell me about yourself,” they will often start going pretty deep into who they are – their hopes, trepidations, yearnings.

We’re afraid of being rebuffed, but Epley says,

“I cannot think of a time where I've tried to really connect meaningfully with somebody in conversation and they've said no. You take an interest in somebody, you ask about something they really care about, they're happy to talk to you about it typically.”

I’m talking about gathering in: gathering in as a congregation – and what it takes to gather people into our lives. Why do we gather here – why are we a part of this church? I said, first, that it’s just so good to be together – so necessary, even, though its sometimes a push to make ourselves do it.

When we ministers get together, we have sometimes been wont to express a little frustration about congregants who seem to think church is just a social club. But you know, in these days of increasing isolation and loneliness, the fact is we need more social clubs. If that’s all that we were, that would be reason enough to keep the doors open. At the same time, that’s not all that we are – we are not just a social club. We are a covenantal people – a people of covenant, and Bill and I reviewed the levels of covenant at the beginning of our service today.

We have a mission: "love radically." That's not typically what a social club would say. "Grow ethically and spiritually. Serve justly." So we gather in because its so good to be together, and we also gather in to carry out our mission. We gather in to love radically – and to learn from practice and from each other how to do that. We gather in to grow ethically and spiritually.

We have work to do. And like starting up a conversation with a stranger, it might feel a little uncomfortable at first. You can think of this church as a social club, but also a gym. Earlier I cited Nick Epley as saying that sociality was like exercise – some of us may be more inclined to it, but its good for all of us. This is a place for toning those spiritual muscles -- strengthening the meaning, purpose, and wholeness of your life.

In my sermon a year ago at our in-gathering, I cited my colleague Rev. Victoria Weinstein. Let me this year remind you what she said:

“If I go to the gym and people are sprawled out napping on the floor of the aerobics studio, I will think the gym management is not just remiss, but nuts. It’s no different in church. We’re all there for heart strengthening of a different kind. Leaders should be empowered to be able to say: 'Get off the aerobics floor, please. You can nap at home.' This isn’t about not loving people. It’s about being clear what congregational life is for. Napping on the floor of the aerobics studio is not part of our mission, so we won’t be addressing your complaints about the pillows.”

Thank you, Rev. Weinstein.

To say that a church is a spiritual gym is not to forget that the church is also a spiritual infirmary. There are times in life when we come to church sick at heart, soul weary, broken-spirited. Before we can think about the exercises and disciplines which cultivate and strengthen our wisdom, compassion, and equanimity, we just need to be cared for. We need replenishing rest. We need salve for our woundedness, for indeed salve is the root of salvation, with which our religious forbears were particularly concerned.

Yes, the church has that pastoral function in addition to its prophetic task to serve justice. As the saying goes, the church’s function is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. Let us recognize that every one of us is both – in some ways afflicted and in need of comfort, and in some ways comfortably complacent and in need of an afflicting prod. What we are here for, the reason we gather in, the thing that both comforts us in our affliction and afflicts us in our comfort, is this mission: love radically, grow ethically and spiritually, and serve justly.

We grow by continuing to learn and reflect, and to help focus that, we have 10 monthly themes we’ll be developing this year:

• Hospitality,
• Fear,
• Reason,
• Awe and Wonder,
• Vow,
• Borders and Boundaries,
• Dignity,
• Caring,
• Beauty,
• Community.

Explorations of themes like these help UUs develop a language of faith, competency in our theology, and the inner resources for dealing with tough times. So come to Sunday service, read each month’s issue of “Connecting,” get out your journal and delve into the journaling prompts included in the issue, sign up for and come to Connection Circle (click here).

Radical hospitality is our theme this month, and it’s what today’s sermon has been about, though I didn’t mention the word hospitality until now. The need for hospitality given our epidemic of loneliness and isolation; the benefits of talking with strangers, on trains or anywhere – both to us and to them; how quickly we can go deep in conversations even with people we haven’t known long. It doesn’t come easily and naturally to us to open up to others, to build real connections, but that’s what being hospitable is all about.

As we gather in as a congregation, let us gather into our lives more people. We need it. They need it.

May it be so. Amen.

Labor Day Lessons about Hospitality

We are exploring hospitality this month. And it’s the Labor Day weekend. It is my task this morning to weave those two together to effect your delight and edification -- to see what hospitality lessons may be gleaned from the Labor Day story.

I’ll begin with a poem that Sarah Chang shared during her service a couple Sundays ago. It is a Coleman Barks poem inspired by Rumi. I say it that way because Coleman Barks is the poet singlehandedly responsible for the boom in interest in the 13th-century Sufi mystic, Jalaludin Rumi. Coleman Barks is a fine American poet. He does not speak or read Farsi Persian. He read English translations of Rumi and thought, “I think I can say better what I think that’s saying.” I have read some of those earlier English translations of Rumi, and in my opinion Barks is right about that: he does say it better. But whether what we’re getting is really Rumi or more Coleman Barks is an open question. For one thing, Rumi was deeply, devotedly Muslim, and references to the Koran are sprinkled extensively through his poems, but all of that has been erased from Coleman Barks’ versions, so I feel like I ought to acknowledge that. Still, this Coleman Barks poem inspired by Rumi is lovely, and is beloved by many throughout the English-speaking world – and is very wise.

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.
Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

You are a guest house. Hospitality is your job – it is the labor (see what I did there?) the joyful labor of being human.

Hospitality involves the skill of making other people feel welcome, assured that they belong. And what Rumi by way of Coleman Barks tells us is that every experience is like a person – every emotion, every passing fear or sadness or moment of joy, every momentary awareness, every problem or challenge – is like a person to be welcomed and entertained and assured that they belong. You could try to keep out those guests you find unpleasant – and I guess you probably have tried to suppress feelings you didn’t want. But if you don’t welcome them at the front door, emotions do have a way of sneaking in through the back door. Hospitality is about welcoming all of your life into your life – and that includes other people.

Now: On this Labor Day weekend, I want to share with you a story about the origin of Labor Day – how we came to have this holiday. It is fundamentally a story that has its roots in the impulse toward hospitality – wanting to be hospitable, but not hospitable to everything. When our hospitality isn’t radical – isn’t extended, as Barks and Rumi say, to whatever comes – when we want to welcome what is fun and joyous and slam the door on what is dark or hurts a bit – then things won’t work out so well.

Labor itself is the mixing of what is hard with what, we hope, is rewarding – intrinsically rewarding ideally, and at least extrinsically rewarding, but even when intrinsically rewarding, still sometimes un-fun. We happen to inherit a tradition in which labor is punishment. In the Genesis story, the original humans ate “of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil,” and Yahweh kicked them out of paradise, and gave them labor. Yahweh was gender-specific about the labor – in keeping with the culture of the time from which these stories emerge. The woman’s labor is childbearing. The man’s labor is working the fields. So labor is what we have to endure because we ate of a tree and got called out. We go out of Eden and go into: labor. Tough break.

The interpretation of that Genesis story that makes more sense to me is one offered by Rabbi Lawrence Kushner in Eyes Remade for Wonder. Kushner suggests that the whole thing was a setup. Like any good parent, God knew that to grow up we would have to leave home and so put that tree there to create a pretext for kicking us out.

“We have read it all wrong. God was not angry. God rejoiced at our disobedience and then wept with joy that we could feel our estrangement and want to return home.”

The return home, however, is not easy. It is, in fact, labor. And the labor of making our own way home and the labor of making others feel at home turns out to be the same labor.

Whether or not labor seems to us to be a pain or a drudgery to endure just to pay the pills, there is before us also the prospect of labor as the path home. Let me then relate the cautionary tale of industrialist George Pullman, born 1831.

George Pullman founded the Pullman Palace Car Company that manufactured railroad cars, particularly the Pullman sleeping car. In 1880, he bought 4,000 acres 14 miles south of Chicago, and got an architect to design not only his new plant for making railroad cars, but a whole town: houses for 10,000 workers, shopping areas, a church, theaters, parks, a hotel, and a library – all owned by one man. He built and owned the power plant that powered his factory and his town. The town was named after him: “Pullman, Illinois.”

Pullman’s workers worked for him, lived in houses owned by him, paid their rent and their utilities to him, and shopped in stores owned by him, strolled in his parks. He was, in his way, and in his mind, being more hospitable to his workers. His aim was to solve the issue of labor unrest and poverty: labor unrest for his own industrialist motives, but at least he had the insight to see that to do that required tackling poverty.

For years George Pullman had been a philanthropic supporter of fine schools – with the aim of providing business with a better quality of laborer. He wanted a happy, loyal workforce, so his town provided for all his workers’ needs. They got a state-of-the art home: indoor plumbing, gas lights, sewers – well above the average dwelling of the time. They got fine country air and beautiful neighborhoods. The mortality statistics, indeed, established that Pullman, Illinois was one of the most healthful places in the world to live.

The town created a national sensation. The press praised Pullman’s benevolence and vision. To ensure there would be no unhappiness, Pullman prohibited outside agitators, allowed no saloons, or vice district. The hotel on the edge of town had the town’s only bar, and it was open only to visitors, not the residents. He prohibited independent newspapers, public speeches, town meetings or open discussion. He wanted his workers to have clean homes, so his inspectors regularly entered homes to inspect for cleanliness and could terminate leases on ten days notice. Private charitable organizations were prohibited. Pullman was showing hospitality – but on his own rather restrictive terms – which isn’t real hospitality at all.

He built only one church building in his town: the Greenstone Church. Pullman’s plan was that all religious denominations would band together and share the one building. But the various denominations would not unite, and no single denomination could afford the rent, so the church stood empty for the town’s first seven years until Pullman finally slashed the rent by two-thirds, and Presbyterians rented it. But it all came crashing down.

In 1893 the stock market crashed. The railroad "bubble" (overbuilding railroads, and relying on shaky financing to do it) burst. The "Panic of 1893" was, at the time, the worst economic depression the United States had ever experienced. 150 railroads closed. There was massive unemployment. Pullman cut his workers' wages by 25 percent or more. He did not, however, reduce the rents he charged his workers for living in Pullman, Illinois. Hospitality sometimes entails sacrifice, and Pullman wasn’t willing to share in the sacrifices of hard times.

The next year, 1894, 4,000 Pullman employees went on a wildcat strike: "wildcat" because it wasn’t authorized by the workers’ trade union officials -- which was because they didn’t have any trade union officials -- which was because Pullman didn’t allow labor unions. Then organizers for Eugene Debs' American Railway Union came in and signed up many of the striking workers, and the Pullman strike spread. Soon 100,000 railroad workers across the country were refusing to handle trains with Pullman cars. The strike shut down much of the nation's freight and passenger traffic west of Detroit.

Various sympathy strikers prevented transportation of goods by walking off the job, obstructing railroad tracks or threatening and attacking the replacement workers the railroads sought to hire. At its peak, the strike involved 250,000 workers in 27 states.

Pullman called up his friend and fellow railroad director, United States Attorney General Richard Olney. With President Grover Cleveland's backing, troops were sent to Chicago. The federal government secured a federal court injunction against the union, Debs, and the top leaders ordering them to stop interfering with trains that carried mail cars. They refused. The Army moved in to stop the strikers from obstructing the trains. Violence broke out in a number of cities inflicting millions of dollars in damages and killing 30 people.

The Army broke the strike. Debs went to prison for violating a court order. The railroads fired and black-listed all the employees who had supported the strike.

As soon as the strike was over and the trains were running, President Cleveland and Congress moved to make conciliation to organized labor. Six days after the 1894 Pullman strike ended, legislation was pushed through Congress declaring that the first Monday of September was a Federal holiday, Labor Day.

So that, dear ones, is why we have Labor Day. It is the consolation prize we got after the Feds sent in troops to protect corporate interests and break up a strike. It was a bone to try to head off further conflict. And they put it in September, instead of giving official recognition to the more widely known International Workers Day on May 1, because they wanted to pull attention away from the more radical labor movements.

The story of conflict between "management" (the wealthy, the controllers of capital) and people whose labor they want to make use of (whether slaves, indentured servants, or laborers) is the central and on-going story of our country. This is who we are as a people.

Labor Union membership peaked in the 1940s and 50s, and has been declining ever since. There are 6.4 million working poor, as of 2021, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. On the weekend for celebrating labor, let spare a thought or two for those who labor and aren’t paid enough to not be poor.

The story of George Pullman is of particular salience to us Unitarian Universalists. This story -- the story of the industrialist who owned an entire town, ruled over it, sparked a national strike, and then brought in the Army to violently break that strike -- is our story, quite specifically. You see, George Pullman was one of us in a very direct sense. George Pullman was a Universalist: born, raised, lived and died. George’s father, raised a Baptist, and his mother, raised Presbyterian, converted to Universalism, drawn to the “God is Love” message of the Universalist minister Thomas Eaton. George's Dad often led the services when no preacher was available.

The Pullmans were a devotedly, devoutly, Universalist family. Both of George’s two older brothers became Universalist ministers and were prominent figures in our faith. Late in his life, George Pullman had a Universalist church built in his hometown, Albion, New York, as a memorial to his parents.

Industrialist George Pullman was a Universalist, born and bred and lifelong. Something of the Universalist outlook may be detected in his life and actions. He believed his workers deserved decent accommodations. He saw that education was a win-win: it made workers lives better, and made them more useful workers for businessmen like him. "I have faith," Pullman told the press, "in the educational and refining influences of beauty, and beautiful and harmonious surroundings."

Pullman had a kind of Universalist hope that different denominations could come together and worship together in one church. There is a certain idealist, utopian strain of thought in the planning of his town. Liberal religion is characterized by an optimism about human possibility. From our beginnings 450 years ago, Unitarians and Universalists have been peoples who rejected Calvinistic conceptions of humankind’s total depravity. That optimism about human capacity is displayed in Pullman’s vision of a company town where every one was happy and productive.

In his case, it didn’t work out. Shortly after Pullman's death in 1897, courts ordered the homes sold to individual homeowners. What went wrong was that Pride and Control took over. Yes, people can get better -- can learn, can grow -- but they have to do so in their own way. That is the key to genuine hospitality – not merely meeting what you think their needs are, but journeying with them in the discovery of those needs. Growth, learning, and development cannot be all planned out with precise outcomes determined in advance.

Pullman believed in human improvability, but didn't believe in people enough to let them work out their own growth, awakening, salvation, in their own way -- even if they used their freedom to go backwards for a few years -- or a few generations -- and even if, left to their own devices, they drank, or listened to speeches from agitators, read independent newspapers, gathered and discussed unsavory ideas. Pullman wouldn't listen to his workers' needs.

We can’t ever be so arrogant that we won’t meet and talk and consider where other people are coming from. For Labor Day, remember George Pullman, the industrialist whose meanness sparked the events that led to the creation of the holiday. Remember George Pullman, the Universalist who got the optimism but didn’t get the humility – because we Unitarian Universalists today follow in his footsteps in more ways than it's comfortable to admit.

When has your voice of “let’s make it better,” come out as "fix it my way or I will treat you as evil obstructionist"? When have your own ideals made you cruel? I think we do that every time we think someone else is wrong. Then let this be our Labor Day prayer: to find the courage of hospitality: to talk to the people we think are wrong, and stay at it until we get over ourselves.

“God rejoiced at our disobedience,” said Rabbi Kushner, “and then wept with joy that we could feel our estrangement and want to return home.” We feel the estrangement. My challenge to you – and to myself -- is to talk, face-to-face, with someone you think is wrong. It’s election season – it’s not hard to find them. The hard part is talking to them, and keeping a civil tongue even if they don’t.

And that is hard. We feel our estrangement. So many of our fellow citizens, have such anger and fear – it’s easy for us to get angry at, and a little afraid of, them. The labor of hospitality, of returning home, one small step toward one small mend in one small relationship at a time, is ours to do. May we take up that labor. Blessed be. Amen.

A Daily Practice: Take Centering Moments

Adapted from Edwin Lynn, "The Sacred Moment,"

in Scott Alexander, ed., Everyday Spiritual Practice.

Life is precious. Every day is blessed, and living our lives fully doesn't happen automatically. The tasks of the day sometimes require our focus to shift away from simply experiencing our world just as it is, and ourselves in that world.

We can, however, create sacred moments. Several times a day -- at least once every day -- stop and drink in the moment for a minute or two. This practice works especially well outside: pausing during a walk, say, or stepping out your back door for moment. To better remember each phase of this practice, memorize these six “S words":

• Sight
• Sky
• Stance
• Smell
• Skin
• Sound

1. SIGHT: Look around. Note what's in view: trees, grass, the color of buildings, or of the dirt. If you're stopping in a spot where you've stopped before, try to notice new discoveries and be aware of subtle daily changes in the blossoms, leaves, shadows, and colors. If you're by a pond, for instance, you'll notice the water changes moment by moment, depending upon the wind and sun. Water is especially sensitive to light, and the breeze creates a ballet of changing reflections.

Don’t just look. Let the sights sink in. Let them integrate in awareness with your other senses.

2. SKY: Often, we see only what is at eye level, without being aware of the sky. Whether it is cloudy or bright, you'll find that when you are aware of the sky, you are more aware of the day. The sky gives context to the day and reminds us of our physical and spiritual presence in the world.

3. STANCE: As you look out at your surroundings and the sky, become aware of your stance on the ground, your rootedness and connectedness with the earth. Feel this relationship through your legs and feet. Notice the ways you are centered and grounded.

4. SMELL: Smell is the most fundamental of our senses, strongly associated with deep memories. If you've had the experience of returning to a place after being away for some years, you may have noticed the distinctive smells, rather than the landscape, are what you most vividly remember. A delicate sniff can catch the subtle aromas of a pond’s misty moisture of natural flowers or of local vegetation. Attention to aroma heightens the reality of the moment.

5. SKIN: Bring attention to what you're feeling on your skin: the temperature, the movement of air. We usually pay little attention to the wind unless it's very brisk. Most of the time, though, there is at least a slight breeze -- which you'll notice if you train yourself to. Maybe you can feel the breeze differently on different parts of your face? How warm or cold is it? The feeling of warmth from the sun or the damp chill of penetrating cold is also a part of the moment about which your skin can tell you.

6. SOUND: Sound is the crucial focus of a sacred moment: listening is its theme and its essence. Listening keeps us in the moment so our minds don’t wander. The sacred moment intensifies and lengthens our time of seeing into a time of being. To reach a sacred moment, look relatively straight ahead and don't allow yourself to be distracted by any moving sights. Listen to the wind, the leaves, the water, and the birds. With these outer sounds, the chatter of inner thoughts is kept from intruding upon the moment. If you are not listening, you know you are not in the experience, but still trapped in your head, thinking of the past or the future.

See the landscape and sky, feel the ground and the breeze, smell the water. And in particular: listen.

You can certainly also create a sacred, centering moment while you're indoors. In the morning while showering, for example, you can use to time for this practice. The sights are obviously limited, and you cannot see the sky, but stance, sense, and smell are particularly acute. Listening to the water as it splashes on your body throughout the shower is the key. It makes the shower more enjoyable. It also connects you to the larger waters of lakes, rivers, ocean, and skies. To make breakfast another sacred moment, avoid watching television or reading the newspaper; there will be time for those connections later. The morning is an optimal time to let heightened awareness engage the glory of the day.

The difficult part is allowing the extra time. It is very easy to rationalize that one doesn’t have the time. But if you'll take these pauses, you'll probably find you're always glad that you have.

Then, an end-of-the-day walk is a great time not only for the exercise -- with the usual daydreaming -- but for applying the principles of this practice to create a walking meditation. The sights and sounds are richer, though the distractions are more plentiful. Be especially aware of the sky and of the variation in smells from place to place — even of the wind changing direction along the way. Again: listening is key to staying in the moment.

The preciousness of the day is enhanced in direct proportion to its number of sacred, centering moments. Through sacred moments, we can quiet our mind’s inner chatter, and transform our experience of merely seeing into one of more fully being.

Why We Welcome

I’m going to talk about nature and what's natural. We’ll see how our understanding of nature became a concept of natural law, and what that means. Then I’ll point to some very different lessons we might take from nature. I’m not going to get to it for a little while, but I want to let you know that it’s coming. It’s our mission to grow ethically and spiritually, and I think to grow ethically we need to develop our repertoire of concepts for reflecting on ethical questions. Among those concepts are natural law theories of ethics – which, in accordance with our mission, we’ll look at in a little bit.

First, let us note, on this Pride month, that we Unitarian Universalists have been at the forefront of progress of LGBTQ justice. We can be proud of that. We should remember, however, that, while we’ve been ahead of the curve on attitudes about LGBTQ folk, we have sometimes not been very far ahead of the curve.

As early as the 1950s, some Unitarian ministers were officiating at services of union for same-sex couples. Good for us. But: many of our ministers then were refusing to do such services, and those that did sometimes didn’t tell their congregations and didn’t hold those services in their churches. It was the 1950s.

Since 1970, our Unitarian Universalist Association has been on record as supporting the rights and worth of lesbian, gay, and bisexual persons. Still, the lived experience of these folk in UU congregations was often painful. In the 1980s, our national Unitarian Universalist Association conducted a multiyear, nationwide study of UU’s attitudes about sexual orientation. The findings “exposed many negative attitudes, deep prejudices, and profound ignorance” that resulted in LGBTQ people being excluded from full participation in UU congregations.

In 1987, then-President of the Unitarian Universalist Association, William Schulz, addressed the General Assembly that June. Rev. Schulz said:

“We Unitarian Universalists have been the religious leaders in [the area of gay and lesbian rights]: in our establishment of a denominational office; in our support of ministers who perform services of union. But at the moment, our values and principles are being sorely tested: not just by prejudice from outside our doors, but by homophobia from within. Let me put it as directly as I can: far too many of our congregations are choosing not to call or even consider gay or lesbian ministers solely on the basis of their affectional orientation. When we hear questions like these posed about gay or lesbian candidates – ‘But will she talk about anything other than homosexuality? But will we become a “gay church”? But will he be able to counsel heterosexuals? But will the community accept her?’ – when we hear questions like these, we know we are in the grip of a profound terror.”

My guess is that back in 1987 those questions bounced around in this congregation if the possibility of a gay or lesbian minister were discussed. Some of you have been around here long enough to remember. And you’ve seen your own attitudes grow and change, along with the shift of your fellow congregants around you. Rev. Schulz’s 1987 address to the General Assembly went on to say:

“The fear of same-sex love runs deep in Western culture. But I beg us to understand that if such fear is permitted to control us, we will be in violation of everything which Unitarian Universalism stands for in the world. It is not enough to say passively and contentedly, ‘Why, of course, gays and lesbians are welcome in our congregation if they choose to come.’ What is required is the recognition that gay and lesbian people are already members of every single congregation on this continent. The issue is whether they feel supported enough to make their presence known. What we require is the courage and wisdom to acknowledge our own fears, both gay and straight, and to take active steps to make the welcome known to the gay and lesbian community.”

Back in 1987, we may have been ahead of the curve, MAYBE – but were definitely still ON that learning curve, and with a ways to go.

In response to the attitudes revealed by our study, in 1990, our UUA (Unitarian Universalist Association), launched The Welcoming Congregation program along with the Welcoming Congregation Handbook with lesson plans for 10 workshops. Congregations were urged to seek certification as a Welcoming Congregation, and to get that certification required completing a two-year education and discussion program designed to change those attitudes, correct those prejudices, and replace ignorance with knowledge and understanding. The first UU congregation to receive certification received it by the end of 1991.

One thing you may have noticed about Rev. Schulz’s 1987 address was that it was all about the L and the G, and nothing about the BTQ. The 1999 edition of the Welcoming Congregation Handbook was substantially expanded to be more inclusive of transgender identity and bisexual identity, as well as race and ethnicity. Four new workshops were added: “Racism and Homophobia/Heterosexism,” “The Radical Right,” “Bisexuality and Biphobia,” and “Transgender Identity: What it Means.”

In 2003, in the case of Goodridge vs. Department of Health, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled that same-sex couples could not be excluded from marriage rights in Massachusetts. Hilary Goodridge led a total of 14 plaintiffs in that case -- 7 same-sex couples – and half of those 14, including Hilary Goodridge and her partner Julie Goodridge, were UUs.

In 2006, 16 years after our Welcoming Congregation launched, the milestone 500th congregation to attain the Welcoming Congregation status was reached. There were then, as today, just over 1,000 UU congregations nationwide – and we passed the half-way mark for our congregations being Welcoming Congregations later in 2006. Today, most of our congregations have the status LGBTQ Welcoming. In 2008, the Connecticut Supreme Court required that state to recognize same-sex marriage. After Massachusetts and Connecticut, few people expected Iowa to be the third state to recognize same-sex marriage, but we were – in 2009 – though we also had backlash about that.

Through it all, we UUs have been out in front – even if often only a little in front – in understanding and welcoming LGBTQ folk. Many of us are LGBTQ folk, and what straight folk learn from LGBTQ folk, and what LGBTQ folk learn from other LGBTQ folk – what all of us learn -- is what perfect looks like. To explain what I mean by that, we have to look further back in history.

An idea that goes back in Western civilization for centuries and still occasionally manifesjts is the idea that LGBTQ activity is unnatural. What have been called “sodomy laws” were still on the books in 14 states until 2003 when the Supreme Court’s Lawrence v. Texas decision invalidated them. Those laws often made reference to unnatural acts. I know that few of us would subscribe to the idea that LGBTQ activity is “unnatural” – but let’s explore where this terrible idea came from so that we can better combat it where we see it cropping up.

The “natural law” is supposedly universally valid and therefore “natural” and discoverable by reason alone. The idea is that moral and legal order derives from the nature of the cosmos, or the nature of human beings. Natural law consists of a set of principles that can be seen to be true by our ‘natural light’ or reason. There are religious versions, in which the natural law expresses God’s will for creation, and non-religious versions in which human nature establishes conditions for human flourishing, and the morally right thing to do is to follow what our nature establishes.

When I was young and much taken with the idea of civil disobedience to unjust laws, this idea that were principles higher than the positive laws passed by congress and approved by the courts was very appealing. It's still appealing. This idea that there are principles of justice higher than statutes, principles which courts try to discern and apply, is an important, valuable, even necessary idea. Courts, of course, sometimes get it wrong, and may be criticized when they do, or when we think they do. The court might be getting it right and its critics the ones that are wrong, but we can’t have that discussion unless we presuppose the existence of such higher principles of justice. Presupposing them, we may then proceed to debate about what they are. What we’re really doing in such debates, I think, is trying to organize and articulate our moral intuitions in a way that might provide some guidance for us going forward. Natural law theory says criticism of unjust laws involves appealing to principles that are “discoverable by reason.” I don't think so. Such principles are certainly discussable by reason. Human beings can make arguments to each other about them – and we do. But I'd say the principles are more invented than discovered. But whether we are inventing principles or discovering them, I think it's important that we be able to give reasons for thinking a statute or a court decision is wrong -- and that we may sometimes find those reasons so compelling as to justify civil disobedience.

The dream of reason is to produce arguments so compelling that all people – at least, all people whose reasoning is working properly -- will arrive at the same conclusions – and that is a pipedream, a delusion. What natural law theory fails to account for is that reason, diligently applied by motivated reasoners, can always craft a counter-argument to any argument. The dream of arriving – through a process we self-congratulatorily call ‘reason’ -- at a universally agreed set of principles we can then inerrantly use in all our moral deliberations ain’t gonna happen. And when we expect that it could happen – when we expect reason to eventually yield universal agreement on principles that will settle all moral questions what actually does happen isn’t good.

In particular, let’s look at how natural law theory came to call certain sexual or affectional orientations unnatural. Aristotle gave us a version of natural law which said that what is natural, and therefore good, for any being, is for that being to realize its telos: its end, its purpose, its goal, the reason for its existence and the ultimate aim toward which it strives. Everything has a telos, and the good for that thing is to become what its telos is for it to be. The telos of an acorn is an oak tree. The telos of a knife is to cut.

And, for Aristotle, the telos of a human being is, in a word, flourishing. Actually, his Greek word is eudaimonia, variously translated as flourishing, or well-being, or happiness. I’ll go with flourishing. Our nature has an aim, and what makes something good, then, is that it facilitates realizing the aim our nature. What is good for a dog is what is perfective, or completing, of its doggy nature – what brings it to its fulfillment. What is good for a human is what is perfective, or completing, or fulfilling of human nature: that’s our flourishing.

That doesn’t sound so terrible. Flourishing is surely a good thing. But you may have noticed that what’s being assumed is that all humans have the same nature, and that perfecting or completing or fulfilling what we are as humans will be the same in all humans. Aristotle, we love you, man, but that’s messed up.

Then, in Aquinas’s hands in particular, the idea that everything had a purpose applied to each of our parts. Hence, it was an abuse of reproductive organs to use them for anything other than their “natural” purpose: which was to reproduce. Sexual acts not ordered toward procreation violated natural law; they were unnatural. Aquinas became the official philosopher of Catholicism, and so, to this day, Catholic teaching is that neither same-sex sexual activity, nor even artificial birth control, is permissible because that’s using the reproductive organs for something other than their purpose: to reproduce.

Most of us, I think, recoil from Aquinas’ conclusion, but it’s worth taking some time to clarify why. For one thing, we might say, we shouldn’t look to nature for answers to our moral questions. For another thing, supposing we do look to nature. We now know a lot about nature today that Aristotle and Aquinas did not know. We know, for instance, that species evolve.

If Aristotle had been aware of species evolution, and if he had applied his notion of telos not just to individuals but to species, he probably would have said that the telos of a species is to perfect itself through gradual incremental improvements in its functioning down through the generations. But already we run into a quandry. Take for instance, a species that lived about 6 million years ago and was the last common ancestor of humans, chimpanzees, and bonobos. Was its telos as a species to evolve into humans, or into chimps, or into bonobos? Which one of those is a fulfilling, a perfecting, of the last common ancestor, while the other two are mere aberrations? That’s not an answerable question – though I kinda like the case for bonobos myself.

Again, we really shouldn't be trying to take moral lessons from nature. Philosophers call that the naturalistic fallacy. But if we were going to look to nature for some pointers, then what nature would show us is that there are an unimaginably large number of branching possibilities – none of them better than others, and none of them having a telos other than to keep on branching out new possibilities, creative new forms.

If we were going to apply nature’s model to human society, then we would celebrate our branching out new possibilities, creative, sometimes, say, flamboyant, new forms for loving, creative new experiments with roles and identities. That’s nature’s way. Nature’s model is diversity, experimentation, and unpredictable change – and for manifesting that in the social realm, we are especially grateful for our LGBTQ folk – and especially proud.

If we were going to look to nature for some pointers, then there’s an even more radical lesson there. Gradual incremental improvements in functioning down through the generations is only part of how evolution works. Sometimes the change isn’t about things working better – like eyesight getting sharper or intestines getting better at digesting a new food source. Sometimes the change is a complete repurposing. In the process of evolution, parts that evolved to serve one purpose get appropriated for an entirely different purpose.

I really want us to understand this feature of how nature works – what “natural” really is – not because nature dictates morality, but because nature's way of species evolution does offer us a metaphor for thinking about how social moral evolution happens. So let me give several examples:

Mammalian forelimbs gradually evolved in one direction into bat wings. Evolving down a different branch, they turned into dolphin fins. But the original purpose of forelimbs was for walking on. Even grasping things with them was an innovation. Certainly, when they first emerged they had nothing to do with either flying or swimming.

Certain insect antennae turned into mandibles, with a function completely different from antennae.

A jaw bone in dinosaurs, fish, and reptiles emerged for reasons that had nothing to do with hearing, but, in mammals, that small bone was appropriated and made into a part of the auditory system.

An ancestor of wasps and bees had an ovipositor (egg-laying tube). It was there to lay eggs, not to sting with -- yet it was appropriated and made into a stinger.

Before there were land animals, certain fish developed a swim bladder, which they could fill with gas, usually air. This allowed the fish to stay at a given depth without expending energy on swimming. The swim bladder evolved into the lung of the earliest lungfish – and from there into the lungs of land animals. This device for staying at a given depth in water turned into the essential step for moving onto land -- which was entirely different from the purpose for which it originally evolved.

Structures that served one purpose get put to very different purposes. It happens all the time. Nothing could be more – shall we say it – natural.

It's easy to miss just how radical a point this is. Through millennia of Western civilization we have been making moral arguments "from nature": that certain actions were "unnatural," and therefore wrong, because they violated something’s purpose. It turns out nature herself repurposes organs. Building upon its inheritance, the lungfish transcended that inheritance and became a new thing on this earth. Bats and dolphins, mandibular and stinging insects, mammalian auditory systems -- and, one way or another, ultimately every complex feature of every species -- built upon its inheritance to transcend that inheritance and become a new thing on this earth.

If we are to draw lessons from nature, the lesson to draw is this: creative new purposes are just as natural, and just as important, as incremental improvements in fulfilling a prior purpose.

I said that what straight folk learn from LGBTQ folk, and what LGBTQ folk learn from other LGBTQ folk – what all of us learn is what perfect looks like. Perfect, we can now see, is not about getting better at some preconceived ideal. Perfect is the ever-branching creative repurposing of whatever we find ourselves with. Perfect is the discovery, or invention, of new ideals rather than attainment of a preconceived ideal. Perfect is becoming who we are, being ourselves, just as we are, just as we love, and just as we are becoming, whatever transitioning we may be in the midst of. How can we not take pride in that? How can we not be welcoming of that?

May it be so.
AMEN