Commensality: The Open Table

SERMON, part 1

Some Unitarian Universalist ministers mention Jesus exactly twice a year: Christmas and Easter. I have typically mentioned either Jesus or something from the Christian ("New") Testament a little more often than that, but not a lot more. In any case, it is Easter, so let's talk about Jesus. He had some worthwhile things to teach us.

“Jesus talks a great deal about the kingdom of God, and what he means by that,” says theologian Walter Brueggemann, “is a public life reorganized toward neighborliness.” Neighborliness. Not exactly the first word that pops to mind when considering the current state of public life in this country.

And what does this neighborliness entail? We are told "The last will be first, and the first last." Children and the poor are highlighted as exemplars. Power and wealth make such neighborliness difficult or impossible.

In Luke, Jesus says the Kingdom of God is within or among you. The preposition in the original Greek is “entos” – which can mean both within and among. “Within you” suggests an internal, spiritual reality. “Among you” suggests the kingdom is present in the community. I like to see Jesus as meaning both: being among you helps it be within you, and being within you helps it be among you.

Jesus described the kingdom of God as a feast where everyone has a seat at the table. In the 1990s, Latina feminist theologian Ada María Isasi-Díaz suggested calling it the “kin-dom of God,” which better expresses the emphasis on relationships over hierarchy, community and mutual care over patriarchal rule. The kin-dom of God is a radically inclusive community of equals. The kin-dom of God is what Martin Luther King called “beloved community” based on reconciliation and integration, nonviolence, economic justice, and radical love.

Today, I’ll draw on the work of John Dominic Crosson to describe the kin-dom of God as commensality – from “mensa,” Latin for table. Jesus’ vision for society is of an open table, where everyone has a seat at that table. Then, today being Easter, I’ll talk about how the Easter story, in particular, re-presents this basic social vision.

To understand what Jesus was really all about, argues scholar John Dominic Crossan, look at the way he took meals – the theology of food that he exemplified – the meaning of eating together. Anthropologists Peter Farb and George Armelagos write:

“In all societies, both simple and complex, eating is the primary way of initiating and maintaining human relationships.... Once the anthropologist finds out where, when, and with whom the food is eaten, just about everything else can be inferred about the relations among the society’s members.... To know what, where, how, when, and with whom the people eat is to know the character of their society.”

To bring home to our own experience the way that eating reflects social position, Crossan suggests:

“Think, for a moment, if beggars came to your door, of the difference between giving them some food to go, of inviting them into your kitchen for a meal, of bringing them into the dining room to eat in the evening with your family, or of having them back on Saturday night for supper with a group of your friends. Think, again, if you were a large company’s CEO, of the difference between a cocktail party in the office for all the employees, a restaurant lunch for all the middle managers, or a private dinner party for your vice presidents in your own home.”

The structure of our meals recapitulates the structure of power. And when Crossan examines the gospels, he finds Jesus teaching and exemplifying open commensality.

“The rules of tabling and eating [are] miniature models for the rules of association and socialization. Table fellowship [is] a map of economic discrimination, social hierarchy, and political differentiation.” (Crossan)

And for Jesus, the table was open.

While John the Baptist had fasted, feasting is more Jesus’ style – and the table was open. While John the Baptist had emphasized a coming future kingdom, for Jesus, “It is not enough to await a future kingdom; one must enter a present one here and now.” And that kingdom – that kin-dom – is one of abundance and equal sharing.

The gospels so closely associate Jesus with meal time that the Eucharist became Christianity’s sacrament. And the most famous painting of Jesus is DaVinci's "Last Supper." In the miracle story of the loaves and fishes, there are hundreds gathered – and all end up eating. Jesus takes the bread, blesses, breaks and gives. Those are the four basic moves of the life he represents: take, bless, break, and give: Take – receive. Open to take what experience and the world bring.
Bless – or, that is, be grateful. Pause for a moment of gratitude.
And then break into parts for giving back.

And consider this parable, from Luke 14:

“He said also to the one who had invited him, ‘When you give a luncheon or a dinner, do not invite your friends or your brothers and sisters or your relatives or rich neighbors, in case they may invite you in return, and you would be repaid. But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. And you will be blessed because they cannot repay you, for you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous.’
One of the dinner guests, on hearing this, said to him, ‘Blessed is anyone who will eat bread in the kingdom of God!’
Then Jesus said to him, ‘Someone gave a great dinner and invited many. At the time for the dinner he sent his slave to say to those who had been invited, “Come, for everything is ready now.”
But they all alike began to make excuses. The first said to him, “I have bought a piece of land, and I must go out and see it; please accept my regrets.”
Another said, “I have bought five yoke of oxen, and I am going to try them out; please accept my regrets.”
Another said, “I have just been married, and therefore I cannot come.”
So the slave returned and reported this to his master. Then the owner of the house became angry and said to his slave, “Go out at once into the streets and lanes of the town and bring in the poor, the crippled, the blind, and the lame.”
And the slave said, “Sir, what you ordered has been done, and there is still room.”
Then the master said to the slave, “Go out into the roads and lanes, and compel people to come in, so that my house may be filled.”’”

Now that’s an open table.

And consider what a horrific mess that would be to the standard hierarchical values of the time.

“If one actually brought in anyone off the street, one could, in such a situation, have classes, sexes, and ranks all mixed up together. Anyone could be reclining next to anyone else, female next to male, free next to slave, socially high next to socially low, and ritually pure next to ritually impure." (Crossan)

What a social nightmare that would be! Crossan comments that:

“The social challenge of such equal or egalitarian commensality is the parable’s most fundamental danger and most radical threat. It is only a story, of course, but it is one that focuses its egalitarian challenge on society’s miniature mirror, the table, as the place where bodies meet to eat.”

And Jesus lived out his own parable. Open commensality is the model of the Kin-dom of God. The nondiscriminating table represents the nondiscriminating society.This was a great annoyance to those who regarded open and free association as a thing to be avoided. First century Mediterranean culture emphasized honor and shame – and Jesus’ open table was profoundly subversive.

Two messages are clear. One is the radical egalitarianism of the open table. The other is that it happens right here and now – among the people around us today. When the table is open, that is the kingdom, the kin-dom, of God -- and the kin-dom of God is, as Jesus says, within you and among you.

“It is not enough to await a future kingdom; one must enter a present one here and now.”

But that was all just too radical for Paul – the erstwhile Pharisee and persecutor of Christians who had a conversion experience. But Paul never broke bread with Jesus – didn’t really grasp the open commensality.

And here we come to the Easter story, for the emphasis on Jesus’ bodily resurrection is an invention of Paul. For Paul, the end of the world was not merely imminent, but had already begun – and Jesus’ resurrection was but prelude to a general resurrection. Thus, for Paul, the Sunday of which we are today celebrating the anniversary was the beginning of a religion of the end-times. But Paul’s form of Christianity was not, for some time, the only form of Christianity being practiced. As Crossan explains:

"What happened historically is that those who believed in Jesus before his execution continued to do so afterward. Easter is not about the start of a new faith, but about the continuation of an old one. That is the only miracle and the only mystery, and it is more than enough of both.... It is a terrible trivialization to imagine that all Jesus’ followers lost their faith on Good Friday and had it restored by apparitions on Easter Sunday. It is another trivialization to presume that even those who lost their nerve, fled, and hid also lost their faith, hope, and love.”

So let’s look now at the Easter story – or, rather, the four quite different Easter stories. Did Mary Magdalene visit the tomb by herself? Was it Mary Magdalene and “the other Mary”? Was it Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome? Was Joanna with them? And also other women? Did they arrive before dawn, at dawn, or when the sun had already risen? Did they arrive to see an angel rolling back the stone, or was it already rolled back? Did they see guards? Angels? Both? Neither? Let us revisit the four variations in John, Matthew, Mark, and Luke.

READING (adapted from Mark 16, Matthew 28, Luke 24, and John 20)

JOHN: On Sunday morning Mary Magdalene went by herself.

MATTHEW: No. Two women, Mary Magdalene and “the other Mary,” went to the tomb.

MARK: No. Three women, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salomé went.

LUKE: It was at least four women: Mary Magdalene, who we all agree on; Mary the mother of James, as Mark said and maybe who Matthew means as “the other Mary.” There was also Joanna, and other women.

JOHN: She . . .

MATTHEW, MARK, LUKE: They . . .

JOHN: took spices to prepare the body for burial.

MATTHEW, MARK, LUKE: Yes, that’s right.

JOHN: Mary went in the pre-dawn darkness.

MATTHEW: The women went when the day was dawning.

MARK: No. The sun had already risen.

LUKE: I’m with Matthew. They went when the day was dawning.

JOHN: When Mary . . .

MATTHEW, MARK, LUKE: The women . . .

JOHN: Got there, she . . .

MATTHEW, MARK, LUKE: They . . .

MATTHEW: They arrived just in time to see that “an angel of the lord, descending from heaven, came and rolled back the stone and sat on it.”

MARK: No, they found the stone already rolled back.

LUKE: I’m with Mark on this one. It was already rolled back.

JOHN: Me, too. It was already rolled back before Mary got there.

MATTHEW: The two women saw one angel, the one who rolled back and sat on the stone, and also some guards.

MARK: The three women entered the tomb and saw “a young man dressed in a white robe.” No mention of any guards.

LUKE: The group of four or more women entered the tomb, and did not find the body. “While they were perplexed about this, suddenly two men in dazzling clothes stood beside them.” No guards.

MATTHEW: “The angel said to the women, ‘Do not be afraid, for I know that you are looking for Jesus who was crucified. He is not here, for he has been raised.’”

MARK: It was the young man dressed in a white robe who said essentially those words.

LUKE: I’ve got that the two men in dazzling clothes said it.

MATTHEW: So the two women left the tomb and ran to tell the disciples. Suddenly Jesus met them and said, “Greetings! Go and tell my brothers and sisters to go to Galilee; there they will see me.”

MARK: The three women “fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them, and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.” Some indeterminate time later, Jesus appeared first to Mary Magdalene, then to the disciples.

LUKE: The four or more women returned from the tomb and told the eleven disciples “and all the rest” what had happened. Later that day, Jesus appeared to two other women who weren’t in the group that went to the tomb, and these women didn’t recognize who he was at first.

JOHN: No, no. Mary Magdalene, alone, saw no one at all until after she returned from the tomb, and told two of the disciples that the body was missing. Mary and the two disciples returned again to the tomb. They still saw nothing but linen wrappings. The disciples left. Mary stayed, alone and crying. Only then did she look into the tomb and see "two angels in white sitting where the body of Jesus had been lying." Then she turned around, and there was Jesus, but she didn’t recognize him. She supposed him to be the gardener until he called her name.

SERMON, part 2

The compilers of the New Testament surely noticed these discrepancies. The writers of the later gospels would have known they were diverging from the earlier gospels. But for the Early Christian community, the differences and contradictions were a strength, not a weakness. The differences indicated authenticity, indicated that these stories were not coordinated, edited accounts but independent testimonies. If the stories were perfectly aligned, they would have appeared suspiciously manufactured.

The culture of the time did not draw a line between history and fiction – there was no division of their storytellers into historians and novelists. A story was a story, and its value was not in whether it met scholarly standards of historical accuracy that wouldn’t be invented for centuries, or even in whether it would stand up in the law courts of the time, but whether it moved the listeners, filled them with a sense of awe, and lent meaning to their lives. They delighted in the story being told in different ways, just as we today might enjoy a book and also enjoy the movie made from the book, even though the filmmakers changed a number of plot points.

In these very different Easter stories of Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John, we have a feast of diverse perspectives – not only in the plot details, but the theological dimensions being emphasized. Mark, in its earliest manuscripts, has a very abrupt ending that emphasizes mystery and awe. Matthew’s story emphasizes Jesus's divine authority and commission. Luke highlights the continuity with Hebrew scriptures. The John gospel focuses on personal encounters and recognition. It’s an open table feast of narratives.

The early Christians embraced a theology of abundance and plurality — in food, in gifts of the Spirit, and in story and perspective as well. So inconsistency among the stories is not a bug; it’s a feature. The early Church was modeling a unity that didn’t require uniformity. They demonstrated that we can tell the story differently and still have a shared commitment to the values which the story’s variations highlight in different ways.

In fact, telling different, even contradictory, stories enhances the richness of our community. Recall that Walt Whitman, in his “Song of Myself,” said:

“Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)”

Whitman grasped that life has contradictory lessons for us, and that embracing the contradictions enriches life. Yes, sometimes we have to choose which one of competing claims we will believe, which one seems to have the stronger evidence in its favor. Other times, though, we don’t choose one over the other, but live in the tension between them. Doubt, divergence, and creative retelling are not threats but pathways to a more full truth.

Christian dogma would come later. The earliest Christians had a theology of abundance and diversity and openness to difference. They were not interested in propositional belief – which propositions and doctrines to hold true and which ones to brand as heresy. The purpose of Christian community was not to believe propositions, but to tell, in varying and even contradictory ways, stories about their lived experience as followers of Jesus – experience that was itself contradictory or paradoxical: absent presence. Easter is about the absent presence of their beloved teacher and friend: how he was present in their hearts, while also absent.

The diverse and inconsistent stories, then, are an extension of the open table – open to all kinds of people and all their stories without attempt to iron them into consistency. But for all the diversity, there are two points that all four of the gospel Easter stories agree on. The tomb was empty, and women are at the center of the story. Let’s look at that second point.

It’s striking that women would be so central. In Jewish Palestine women’s testimony was widely regarded as unreliable and untrustworthy. Women were not eligible to be witnesses in court. As theologian Richard Bauckham explains,

“in the Greco-Roman world in general women were thought by men to be gullible in religious matters and especially prone to superstitious fantasy and excessive in religious practices.”

Yet it is women who discover the tomb is empty and women who first tell about it.

I see here a deliberate subversion of social and religious expectations. It’s a radical inversion of hierarchy, of the structure of who counts, who’s credible, and who’s worthy. I just don’t think it’s possible that the Gospels were trying to establish the resurrection as factual. If they were, they’d never have told the story with women as the witnesses – yet that is one thing all four gospels agree on. Establishing factual resurrection wasn’t the point – couldn’t have been. The point, instead, is to resurrect, or simply continue, the kin-dom of God – a beloved community based on grace, presence, and radical inclusion. And if that’s the point, then of course it begins with those who are least expected — but most deeply attuned.

The women’s testimony is not speculative theology; it’s relational encounter — “I have seen him,” Mary says. It’s not a doctrine, not a propositional belief, but a presence to be lived into – a resurrection-in-the-heart of hope and community connection, not proven with objectively credible evidence, but witnessed by love.

So the Easter story, in its multiple variations, yet all of them centered on women, on the ones who normally wouldn’t have a place at the table, illustrates the open table and the kin-dom of God.

Here, then, is what, this Easter, I urge us to remember: that the meaning is the stories we share and the bread we break; that the kin-dom is our open tables and our brave and tender love, and the beloved community is where everyone has a place, and every story is part of the feast.

May it be so. Blessed be. AMEN.

Training in Compassion 14: Whatever You Meet Is the Path

Whatever happens, good or bad, make it part of your spiritual practice – because everything IS part of the path. Even straying from the path is part of the path – just see it that way.

If you've followed the earlier trainings, or even some of them, then you're beginning to see that whatever you meet is the path. In spiritual practice, which is our life, there are no breaks. We human beings are always doing spiritual practice, whether we know it or not.

Once you begin practice -- or even just begin thinking about your practice -- you always keep going, because everything is practice, even the days or the weeks or the months or decades or entire lifetimes when you forgot to meditate, forgot to pay attention to whatever intentional spiritual practice you have. Even then you're still practicing, because it's impossible to be lost. You are constantly being found whether you know it or not.

To practice the slogan, "Whatever You Meet is the Path," repeat it to yourself again and again. Know that no matter what is going on, no matter how distracted you think you are, no matter how much you feel like a terribly lazy individual who has completely lost track of her good intentions and is now hopelessly astray -- even then you are on the path and you have the responsibility and the ability to take all of that negative chatter and turn it into the path.

Whatever you meet is the path.

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For the full version of this post: SEE HERE.

Conflict Is a Good Thing

I was once at a Zen gathering where the teacher's talk that day spoke to the somewhat unrealistic expectations that people showing up for Zen practice might harbor. Someone who undertakes a Zen practice is apt to imagine that if they are just diligent enough, and if they are focused enough, and if they sit zazen long enough, then something will happen to them called “becoming enlightened” – and after that, life is all rainbows and unicorns.

Zen, of course, does not make life all rainbows and unicorns. No spiritual practice will do that. Over time with a spiritual discipline, our problems bother us less. We get to where we don’t mind problems so much. But the problems themselves aren’t any less. And, really, that’s a good thing. Dealing with problems gives us something to live for – or, it can, if we relish the challenge.

Sometimes people expect congregational life to be all rainbows and unicorns. No one says it out loud, of course. “Hey, I joined this church. Where are my rainbows and unicorns?” No one says that. No one even consciously thinks it. But maybe some of us, unconsciously, were harboring a secret hope that this community was the end of all our problems. There’s something deeply human about that quiet hope. We don’t really expect magic, but there’s a part of us thinking maybe this church – or the right church somewhere – could somehow be the balm for everything — relational tension, grief, burnout, loneliness. When it isn’t, that can be disillusioning.

Faith communities do offer something beautiful: support, purpose, connection. But they’re also made up of people — real, messy, sometimes surprising, sometimes disappointing people. It’s at this point that you might expect me to say that we aren’t perfect, but as some of you have discerned about me, I like to take the opposite angle on that and say actually, we ARE perfect. We are perfect the way that newborn babes are perfect – delightful just the way they are while at the same time having a lot of growing to do.

And what better place to do your growing than surrounded by a hundred, or a few hundred, other people who have a lot of growing to do? Congregational life doesn’t solve all problems, but it’s a place to walk through them together. So, no rainbows and unicorns — unless maybe you’re doing an art project with the kids downstairs. Shared coffee and a cookie – hugs, maybe, if you’re game for that -- honest expressions of our hopes. Maybe some time when life is falling apart, a casserole. And the aforementioned support, purpose, and connection. It’s not rainbows and unicorns, but it’s nice. It can sometimes be more than nice. It can be life-saving – it really can. Plenty of us, I know, have stories of how this place held them together when everything was falling apart. And when things aren’t all falling apart, it’s still nice.

Until.

Until someone says something that rubs us the wrong way. Until a beloved program changes. Until one day we feel unseen. We see conflict. Maybe we’re embroiled in a conflict. We’re surprised. We’re disappointed. Maybe disillusioned. I get it.

It’s hard to see that conflict as a good thing. I know, some people love conflict. But most of the people who come to a church aren’t looking for a fight. People who are looking for a fight typically look somewhere else. Yet fights do happen here: personalities clash, expectations differ, my anxiety about there being too much of something meets your anxiety about there not being enough of that thing.

Conflict can, indeed, be beneficial. Conflict can be a catalyst for growth and change by forcing examination of our assumptions, creating pressure to move beyond comfortable but limiting patterns, and revealing blind spots we might not otherwise notice. Conflict deepens understanding as we gain clarity on what matters to each other, what our underlying needs are. Conflict strengthens relationships, for as we work through that conflict, the experience demonstrates our mutual commitment to an ongoing relationship and to this church, it exposes our vulnerability which makes the connection more intimate, and ends up building trust and resilience in our relationship.

A marriage that has weathered difficult fights is a stronger marriage, and the same goes for the relationship between you and this church. Conflict drives innovation as it challenges our complacencies and nudges us to a creative and novel synthesis of divergent ideas. Conflict helps establishes healthy boundaries as it clarifies our respective expectations, which reduces future misunderstandings. Better to air out and work through small misunderstandings so that that larger ones are avoided. Conflict builds democratic process as we collectively hear our different concerns.

Of course, conflict has to be done well. I remember many years ago, before I was a minister or even seriously considering the possibility of beginning the process toward becoming one, it was about 1990 or 1991, and I was in my early thirties, and a lay member in our congregation in Charlottesville, Virginia. I remember that a measure was up for congregational vote: a by-laws amendment that required a two-thirds majority to pass. I don’t remember what the proposed amendment was, just that I was in favor of it. It was just what our church needed. I spoke up at our congregational meeting, and marshalled my most cogent arguments – and remember, you are looking at the 1976 Georgia High School state debate champion.

Other people spoke against the measure, and several further others spoke also in support of what I supported. And when the 150 or so votes were cast, the tally came in at 57% in favor, 43% opposed. All these years later, I’ve long forgotten what the issue was, but I remember those vote percentages. My side had a clear majority, but not a two-thirds majority. The measure was defeated.

As the meeting adjourned, and the gathering slowly began thinning out, a feeling of remarkable joy came over me. It was the best I have ever felt after a congregational meeting. My side lost, but the process had been beautiful to behold, and inspiring to be part of. I loved how different we were, and how our different perspectives had been heard and weighed.

Did I still think the other side was mistaken? I’m sure I did, but I also recognized that it was possible I was mistaken, and, more important, that making mistakes is part of what makes us perfect: it’s how we grow and learn. My sense of bonding to a congregation has never been stronger.

That sense of joy in congregational life – in the possibility of human beings coming together and being different and disagreeing and building community not DESPITE the differences and disagreements, but community ON THE VERY BASIS OF differences and disagreements – that joy became part of why I so loved congregational life that I wanted to become a minister and help bring people into congregational life.

So become a minister I did. In that role, I served one congregation for seven years, and then served another congregation for ten years. They were strikingly different in how they processed conflict. The first congregation did not handle conflict well. The second congregation handled it pretty well. In fact, since I had just come to the second congregation from my experience with the first congregation, I found the way that the second congregation handled conflict astonishing. It was astonishingly healthy.

The second congregation had had a big fight just before I got there: voices had been raised, feelings had been hurt. But they kept talking it through, and they healed. They were able to let go of the past, settle into loving each other in the present. Their conflict had brought to them the benefits that conflict can bring: a catalyst for growth and change, re-examination of assumptions, deepened understanding of each other and strengthened relationships, vulnerability leading to greater resilience and greater trust.

The first congregation, on the other hand, did not have healthy conflict. The folks there were still seething from fights and divisions they’d had twenty years before I got there. They held grudges. Even when they tried not to, they were still holding them.

The leadership tried gamely to mitigate the bad feeling, and they promulgated a slogan they often repeated: Assume best possible motive. It’s a good slogan. Assume best possible motive. In a conflict situation, if you think the other side has nefarious motives, is operating from some hidden evil agenda, then the conflict isn’t just a comparison and weighing of diverse perspectives, it’s a battle of good versus evil. And there’s no reconciling with evil. To avoid that downward spiral of acrimony, the first congregation’s members reminded each other: assume best possible motive.

But this slogan didn’t make the grudges go away. The difficulty is, if conflict has gotten to the point where it feels like a battle of good versus evil, your brain at that point has locked in and locked down. You can tell yourself to assume the best possible motive, but the only motives that seem to you at all possible are all nefarious ones. You think you are assuming best possible motive, but even the best motive you can imagine still seems evil – because the conflict has so narrowed your imagination that you’re unable to imagine a truly good motive.

If it feels like a battle of good versus evil, then you don’t have the spaciousness, the imaginative capacity, to imagine motives on the other side that aren’t evil. Our imaginations fail, and against that failure of imagination, the slogan, “assume best possible motive” doesn’t stand a chance. Empathy, curiosity, and openness to complexity shut down. The lens flattens. People become caricatures, and motives become irredeemable. “Assume best possible motive” demands a level of imaginative and emotional flexibility that, in the midst of a good vs. evil conflict, we simply don’t have.

At that point the need is to create conditions for spaciousness to re-emerge. There are some intentional ways to facilitate that. Step back. Breathe. Sit silently and notice how your body feels when you picture the main other person with whom you’re disagreeing. Find someone you trust who is outside the conflict, who isn’t a member of the church, and talk it over with them. And name to yourself where you are – say to yourself, “Right now, I cannot imagine a good motive. That’s a signal to me that I need to pause, and not charge forward.”

This Des Moines congregation has had conflict. I heard a lot about it when I first got here. It undermined your confidence in yourselves as a truly good and wonderful congregation. My approach has been to say, “Eh. Let’s just do church for a while and see what shakes out – what settles down and what doesn’t. Will this turn out to be more like the first of those two congregations I was mentioning or more like the second?”

Turns out you are neither – you are your own thing. Of course. (Duh!) You are perfect, and you are learning. To continue that growth, let’s look at some examples of church conflict -- examples of conflicts we haven’t had here, but like those which some churches have.

Suppose a church finance committee is debating how to allocate a budget surplus. One member proposes investing in community outreach, while another insists on building maintenance. Voices rise. Someone mutters, “Some people just don’t care about the actual mission of the church.” In that moment, the disagreement has become moralized. It’s no longer about budget priorities — it’s a question of whether someone truly cares about the church.

The task is to recover spaciousness, which might happen if there’s someone to step in and say: “Can we each take a minute to name what we most hope for in this decision — not what we’re against, but what we’re trying to protect or nurture?” This reframes the discussion from attack/defend to values/vision, and invites people to see each other’s deeper motives, even if they still disagree.

I can easily imagine that, in this congregation, someone would step in to say something like that. There are a bunch of you, in fact, that I can see saying that.

Take another example. Suppose a church member posts an article on social media that others in the congregation find troubling. A few angry comments appear: “How could you share something so harmful?” The original poster feels attacked and responds defensively. Soon, both sides are questioning each other’s morality.

How might spaciousness be recovered? It might help for a third party, a mutual friend, to reach out to both parties to say: “I can see you both care deeply — would you be open to a conversation in person? I’d be willing to sit with you.” This small, human gesture introduces warmth and presence into a cold digital exchange. It creates space for nuance, tone, and shared humanity to re-enter.

Here’s a third case. During a small group discussion on a justice issue, someone shares a perspective rooted in personal experience. Another person, uncomfortable with what was said, doesn’t respond — but they don’t come back to the group the next week. They begin quietly avoiding the person who spoke up. The story in their head has already been written: “That person is pushing an agenda. I can’t trust them.”

The path toward recovering spaciousness might open if a facilitator notices the change and gently follows up. “I noticed you seemed uncomfortable last week. I care about your experience in the group. Can we talk about what’s coming up for you?” By inviting a conversation before assumptions calcify, the facilitator opens space for the withdrawn person to voice their fears — and maybe hear a fuller story.

One more. Something similar to this one might be on your horizon, because you’ll have a new minister next year, and they might make changes to the worship style that some folks might not like. It’s possible. I don’t know what that change would be, but in some congregations it’s a change in the music that can disorient longtime members. The sudden appearance of drums and electric guitar might make some long-timers think, “This new minister is trying to erase everything we’ve built.” Meanwhile, younger attendees feel energized and think, “Why are the older folks trying to kill the spirit?”

How to recover spaciousness? Rather than framing the situation as “traditionalists vs. progressives,” the celebrants team, with the minister, might host a listening circle where people are asked, “What kind of worship has helped move your spirit most deeply?” and “What do you grieve losing? What do you hope we can create together?” This allows pain and hope to coexist in the room — and helps everyone remember that everyone is seeking connection with the divine, just in different forms.

So I want to tell you today that we now have a new process in place to assist any of us in the recovery of spaciousness. We have a conflict reconciliation team – at today’s forum they and I will be discussing and describing how to make use of them. Let me go ahead and introduce them to you now – and you’ll see more of them in the forum. Sally B, Scott C, Jeremy G, John M, Ellen T. They are our spaciousness recovery team – though the official name is Conflict Reconciliation team.

In all of those examples, when spaciousness is recovered, then the benefits of conflict can emerge: growth and change, learning and new perspectives, deepened understanding of one another and deepened trust.

Sometimes it’s tough. But it’s so worth it. And, honestly, who really wanted rainbows and unicorns anyway?

Amen.

Training in Compassion 13: Do Good, Avoid Evil, Appreciate Your Lunacy, Pray for Help

For our Training in Compassion we have Four-in-one this time! Do good, avoid evil, appreciate your lunacy, and pray for help. These four reminders -- slogans to try to live by -- fit together, and bring us back down to earth.

If spiritual teachings are to really transform our lives, they need to oscillate between two levels, the profound and the mundane. If practice is too profound, it's no good: we are full of wonderful inspiring, lofty thought, insights and speculations but lack the ability to get through the day with any gracefulness or to relate to the issues and people in ordinary life. We may be soaringly metaphysical, movingly compassionate, and yet unable to relate to a normal human or a worldly problem.

On the other hand, if our spiritual practice is too mundane, if we become too interested in the details of how we and others feel and what we or they need or want, then the natural loftiness of our hearts will not be accessible to us, and we will sink under the weight of obligations, details, and daily-life concerns. We need both profound religious philosophy and practical tools for daily living. This double need, according to circumstances, seems to go with the territory of being human.

First, do good. Do positive things. Say hello to people, smile at them, tell them, "Happy birthday!" or "I am sorry for your loss, is there something I can do to help?" Normal social graces, but work a bit harder at actually meaning them. Cultivate a sense of caring. Try genuinely to be helpful and kind and thoughtful in as many small and large ways as we can every day.

Second, avoid evil. Pay close attention to our actions of body, speech, and mind, noticing when we do, say, or think things that are harmful of unkind.

Third, appreciate your lunacy. Give an inward respectful bow to your weakness, your own craziness, your own resistances. Truly it is a marvel, the extent to which we are selfish, confused, lazy, resentful, and so on. We come by these things honestly. So we make offerings to the demons inside us, we develop a sense of humorous appreciation for our own stupidity. We are in good company! We can laugh at ourselves and everyone else.

Fourth, pray for help. Pray to whatever forces you believe in -- or don't believe in -- for help. Whether you imagine a deity or God or not, you can reach out beyond yourself and beyond anything you can objectively depict and ask for assistance and strength for your spiritual work. Pretending to address something beyond yourself and asking for help and for strength to do what you know you must do helps you have that strength. Sometimes we forget this point and fall into the habit of imagining an illusory self-reliance.

Do good, avoid evil, appreciate your lunacy, and pray for help. Simple everyday instructions.

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For the full version of this post: SEE HERE.

Rev. LoraKim Joyner: Nurturing Nature through Wonder

No matter where you are, no matter how lonely, the world calls to you, saying you are home no matter where you are. Or on a journey home, like the birds migrating through Iowa. They announce our place in the family of things as they broadcast their place on this earth. Last night there were 75,000, but that ain’t nothing. We can see up to 40 million crossing in one night here in May.

No matter the loneliness, the tragedy, or the harshness of the world, Iowa is full of wonders. I am talking about the kind of wonder that is a surprise mingled with admiration, caused by something beautiful, unexpected, unfamiliar, or inexplicable. Wonders can be routine, or sometimes just over the top. This happened to me one day when I was visiting Kaieteur Falls in Guyana, a country in South America. The falls are the world's widest single drop waterfall, located on the Potaro River in the Amazon Forest. The falls were spectacular: the roar, the mist, the grandeur. Then I heard a large parrot call, and a pair of Red and Green Macaws flew out of the mist, as if the water had conjured them, and they flew right by us. After a short time, the birds returned, flying towards the fall, like they were going to enter the cascade, but instead, turned into the cliff face where they had a nest. I stood mesmerized, knowing I had seen one of the greatest wonders in the world, the colors of the parrots merging with the colors of the rainbows in the cascade thundering behind us.

There are wonders that stand out, and wonders also happen all around us, hundreds of them available to us in one week. People report having three awe experiences a week. How many do you have on average? Think back on this week. How many times did you drop your jaw or open your eyes, even slightly in amazement?

Do you wish you had more wonder? Whatever you answer, there are reasons why we lean into wonder. One reason is that we come by wonder naturally, for we wonder not alone upon this earth.

Jane Goodall was observing her chimpanzees in Gombe when she noticed a male chimp gesturing excitedly at a beautiful waterfall. He perched on a nearby rock and gaped at the flowing torrents of water for a good 10 minutes. Goodall and her team saw such responses on several occasions. She concluded that chimps have a sense of wonder, even speculating about a nascent form of spirituality in our simian cousins.

Maybe we wonder because it helps us connect to that which is good. Wonder, like other emotions, evolved as a motivator to help us move towards satisfaction or benefit, and away from discomfort or harm. It balances with the other emotions. The classic example is of a bear, at least classic for those of us who lived in Alaska where all life can be distilled down to bear stories or metaphors. Wonder draws us to the woods in hopes of seeing a bear, and fear keeps our distance. Too much fear and we never go out, too much wonder and we may get to close and trigger an aggressive action by a bear.

Wonder tempered with all our other emotional tools asks us to take a middle way - to get out and take some risks, but not overly so. With wonder we open, we connect, and life's possibilities open before us. Wonder helps us engage with the world to live in ways that integrate the reality that beauty is ever present. It also helps us face the also true, but harsher reality of harm, illness, death, disappointment, and massive suffering. Without wonder, we risk closing off to life, living more shallow lives, less intimacy and vibrancy.

One study showed how wonder opens us up. A group of researchers took teenagers and veterans rafting. A week later the participants reported being more engaged and curious about the world.

Wonder also lifts depression, and in one study showed people to have less inflammation as measured in saliva. It helps our prosocial behaviors - we become more empathetic, humble, and generous. When we have more empathy, others resonate with us better and we have improved relationships. Our self identity moves from a separate self to being part of a whole, or the whole itself. By merely writing about awe, we become kinder, more compassionate, and this can extend to other species and the biotic community as a whole.

I lead Bird Walks and Nurture Nature workshops and retreats where the goal is to see how we have choice in moving towards that which is good for us and others. How can we nurture human nature so that we can nurture all of nature? I believe this is an important question in this time of climate change, loss of biodiversity, extinction, polarized and dysfunctional politics – the list goes on but let’s just shorten it and call it the Polycrisis.

We need all the help we can get, and two primary aspects of human nature to help us nurture is to wonder about the beauty that connects all life. I’m going to invite us to consider specific practices that help us nurture wonder, and let us begin with music. Bruce – can you play something wondrous?

[MUSICAL INTERLUDE]

There are many ways to nurture wonder, as Rumi wrote:

Let the beauty we are be what we do,
there are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.

Let me suggest four. The first way is to wonder out in nature. These are wow experiences.

I was leading a multigenerational bird tour once in New Mexico with one of our congregations there, and the children were out of their daily routine, and were perhaps a bit hesitant, especially Jimmy. His mother had a cocaine habit, and he was born addicted to cocaine and had issues with connecting and resonating with others. We had come across a field full or snow geese, bright white in the sun. Suddenly they all took to the air, their wings vibrating in the very depths of our body and ancestral knowing. The children transformed, they came alive, were pure joy and connection, especially Jimmy who jumped, danced, cried out, and ran to his grandparents to be close to them, to be held, to connect, and to share in that wonder together. Nature is full of unexpected and surprising events that we cannot foresee, and this is good for us.

James Austin, a neurologist, encourages us to have nature experiences because they help integrate our neurological processing and contribute to mindfulness and living in the present moment with attention and gratitude. He particularly suggests looking up, and gives many examples of how this can wire us for presence, including an event that happened to me years ago. I told this story last year when I preached last, but it bears repeating because of the impact of how looking up is good for us, whether it comes in a rush, or more slowly.

I was out walking in Guatemala studying parrot nests, and my guide was a local Guatemalan. We weren't seeing many birds so we began to talk. He wanted to tell me of his love of Jesus and Mary, and I put up my guard a little bit, unsure if he was proselytizing me or expecting something from me I could not give. I was disconnecting and distancing myself from him mentally, when we came up to the forest's edge where the sun was just rising over the tree tops in a shroud of misty fog. Suddenly a loud flock of parrots burst forth from the tree canopy. Before I knew what happened, I was on my knees in the grass, weeping. I had been so startled with awe and beauty, I just fell. Afterwards I was a little embarassed, but, more than anything, I had a sudden clarity and connection to humanity and the world. I knew that when people said words like Mary and Jesus, it was like when I said birds and trees. That experience was part of moving towards things spiritual, towards beauty, towards service, and towards an ease around religious differences, for I glimpsed the wonder moving beneath it all.

Dr. Austin says my experiences were not usual. Indeed, in another study the researchers asked students to gaze up at trees, a task known to evoke awe. The other half turned their back to the trees. Afterwards they approached each group of students with a questionnaire and pretended to trip and drop pens on the ground. The awe group picked up 10% more pens, and felt less entitlement to payment for their participation in the study.

So looking up is good for us, whether it is the stars and moon, the trees, migrating birds in the night, or the trees. Let's take a moment to look up at trees, shall we? Wonder in nature are wow experiences. Like other emotions, having facial expressions of it and even acting it out, helps evoke it, such as saying Wow! Would you say it with me now? WOW!

A second way to develop wonder is to consider that nature isn't just out there; it's everywhere. How do we wonder at the ordinary, and move towards the banal and boring? The uncomfortable even? It's one thing to wonder at the exploding green leafy trees and the flower colors around us, but how do we do it when the leaves are brown and gone? Where is the wonder in the slushy dark days of winter while scrolling through the news about disaster and death?

There is more to wonder at than the last audacious thing that crazy politician said that evokes in us a sense of disdain, anger, or really energy. Really? It takes practice to cultivate wonder in the daily things, so our wonder isn't a REALLY response, but a more gentle really response. Again, we lead with our bodies by saying Really. Say it with me, would you? REALLY?!

To grow wonder, we can slow down and ask what is wondrous in the of ordinary or routine objects in your day. How did that get to be here? Why is it here? If the object is being that is alive, what are they doing and thinking? How is it connected to me and the web of life? Let us practice some shall we? Pick something in this room that is boring. I hope you are not looking at me. Maybe pick the wood in this room. How did it get to be here? Woody trees only evolved in the late Devonian period about 360 million years ago. The appearance of trees and forests were one of the triggers for the two major extinction events in the Devonian when over 50% of the world's genera went extinct. Today there are 3 trillion trees, 400 for every human. There are more of them than us, and they caused terrible drastic climate change and extinction. We're not so bad, really?!

This leads us to the third way of nurturing nature - seeing wonder in our own kind. If we could tap into wonder of the miracle of our own existence, not just in babies and the geniuses, what might our lives look like to see beauty in all the faces around us all the time? When considering other humans we ask:
How are we here at all?
What are we thinking and feeling?
How can we build bridges and go into space?
Why is it that we can be kind given all the challenges of life?

From my experience as a minister and conservationist, one of the biggest spiritual challenges I see for us is to see wonder in our own kind. We need to leave behind the sense of being bored, or blaming others, which can be summed up with an attitude of Dude! Instead we move to a softer and more grateful expression of Dude! Such as with Fonzi we can give others an “okay” sign. Say it with me please and then look at those around you. DUDE!

Those around you are also you,-- their wonder and beauty is yours, as is the whole world’s. We need to own how awesome is our own thinking, feeling, actions, and presence in the world. If we do not wonder at ourselves, we shut down the possibility to marvel and connect with all of life.

Cultivating wonder with all life helps us not only connect and heal, but we become better nurtuers of other species and the planet ecosystems. Cultivating wonder takes practice. So let us practice now with me. Repeat after me, I'm good! I'M GOOD!

Now, let's put it all together.
WOW. REALLY? DUDE I'M GOOD!

It's in our nature to wonder, and to nurture nature: ours, theirs, the earth's. Let us do it for ourselves and for all life.

WONDERING MEDITATION

We are almost through here, and we return to own lives. What will you do to connect to wonder?

There are some things that we can do to help us connect. Looking at nature, walking in nature, even looking at pictures of nature helps. Body movement is an important part of this – our body can lead us into physical states where we are more open and more likely to connect and wonder.

Let me suggest a few we can do right now, and you ca npraticipate as you wish, save it for later, and certainly turn off you video if you like. We can do them and then I can explain.

• Breathe deep – stimulates the vagal nerve and helps you feel safe
• Hold hands out – says I’m not feeling vulnerable
• Look up – we talked about that in the service – integrates brain patterns and increases compassion
• Twirl around – off blanace – feel comfortable
• Touch the ground – physical sensation tells the body what is happening beyond the mental loops in which we can get trapped
• Bow – greater humility – I give myself to you

Who Cares?

"Who cares?" We all care about something – but we don’t all care about the same things – which is why we sometimes signal that we don’t care about something by saying, “who cares?” But there are some things we all care about.

Our theme of the month for April is Caring. There are two questions here: what to care for and about – and how to care effectively. Are there things we care about that we’d be better off being a bit more nonchalant about? Are there other things we should be paying more attention to? When is worrying a helpful way to keep us focused, and when is it simply useless and harmful anxiety?

Let’s look more closely at the premise I started with: we don’t all care about the same things – but there are some things we all care about. Marshall Rosenberg had a way of distinguishing between the sort of things we all care about and the sorts of things that some of us care about and others of us don’t. The things we all care about, he called, “needs.” Per Rosenberg, a need is not something we will die if we don’t get, it’s just something we all want – something we all care about getting – often in proportion to how long its been since we had some. So food and sleep are needs – increasingly so as the hours go by since we last ate or slept. Oxygen is a need – increasingly so as the seconds go by since our last breath. These are part of the sustenance need, which also includes shelter and exercise. We need to sustain ourselves.

The other eight universal needs are: Safety, love (which includes the need to love and the need to be loved), understanding or empathy, creativity, recreation, a sense of belonging, autonomy, and meaning. Everybody cares about those things. Where we differ is in our strategies for getting them.

Everything we do is in service of our needs – but some of our strategies work better than others. So if you’re thinking, “I need a new mobile phone,” that’s not really a need in this sense – it’s a strategy. Getting a new mobile phone is, you are thinking, a strategy for meeting needs of connection.

You probably grew up hearing a distinction between needs and wants. As a kid you might say you needed some toy or the latest cool gadget, and your parents would say no, you don’t need it, you just want it. You probably found that unsatisfying. So I’m saying, forget that. Forget the distinction between needs and wants. They’re all wants. Even just staying alive is a want. There is no helpful distinction between needs and wants.

Instead, the helpful distinction is between needs and strategies – between wants that everybody has, and the wants that are your particular means to an end, where the end is something everybody wants. So the parent, instead of saying, “you don’t need that toy, you only want that toy,” might say, “that toy isn’t a universal want, since not everybody wants the toy. So it’s a strategy. What is the universal need (or want) that you see this toy as a strategy for meeting?”

Then you can look at what’s behind the particular desire. Maybe there’s a sense of belonging. Or maybe its recreation, or creativity. Or a combination of several needs.

And once we put it that way, then we are positioned to think about whether there might be other ways to meet that need. Once you recognize your strategy as a strategy, and then identify what need it is a strategy for, then you’re less prone to getting attached to and stuck on that strategy. You are freed to explore alternative strategies for that need. It’s liberating.

Caring, of course, is what defines us, what makes us who we are. Yet caring can turn into cares – as in careworn, worn down by cares. And if we aren’t paying attention, then what we find ourselves caring about – as judged by the habits we live by – can be out of alignment with what is really conducive to a good life.

Yesterday morning, at the Zen meditation on Zoom that I lead starting at 6:00am, Tuesday through Saturday morning, I was sharing with the group some words from Charlotte Joko Beck saying that we honor and pay attention to “the god of comfort and pleasantness and security. In worshiping that god, we destroy our lives" (Joko Beck, Nothing Special). She pointed out that by caring too much about comfort, pleasantness, and security, we pick bad strategies. We can get drawn into “drugs, alcohol, high speeds, recklessness, anger” because these things seem to offer comfort, pleasantness, or security. They seem to assuage our “fear of encountering any kind of unpleasantness.”

Joko says:

“If we must have absolute order and control, it’s because we’re trying to avoid any unpleasantness. If we can have things our way, and get angry if they’re not, then we think we can survive and shut out our anxiety about death. If we can please everyone, then we imagine no unpleasantness will enter our life. We hope that if we can be the star of the show, shining and wonderful and efficient, we can have such an admiring audience that we won’t have to feel anything. If we can withdraw from the world and just entertain ourselves with our own dreams and fantasies and emotional upheavals, we think we can escape unpleasantness. If we can figure everything out, if we can be so smart that we can fit everything into some sort of a plan or order, a complete intellectual understanding, then perhaps we won’t be threatened. If we can submit to an authority, have it tell us what to do, then we can give someone else the responsibility for our lives and we don’t’ have to carry it anymore.... If we pursue life madly, going after any pleasant sensation, any excitement, any entertainment, perhaps we won’t have to feel any pain. If we can tell others what to do, keep them well under control, maybe they can’t hurt us.”

Joko says that “every being on earth pursues” to some degree this “god of no discomfort and no unpleasantness.” And, “As we pursue it, we lose touch with what really is.” This pursuit inevitably fails. In the frenetic business of our pursuits to avoid pain, we lose touch with “the absolute wonder of what our life is.”

We begin to experience that wonder “only by contacting our own pain, which means no longer worshiping the god of comfort and pleasantness.” For Joko, experiencing our pain, paying attention to it, rather than “finding a place where we can shut the pain out,” is what leads to “surrender and opening into something fresh and new.”

Our biggest problem is the thought that we should have no problems. Problems and challenges are our life. We come more alive when we are with the pain than when we seek to avoid it. This is the practice of cultivating compassion. Passion, in its original sense, means suffering. We see that meaning in the Christian phrase, “the passion of Christ” – meaning the suffering and pain. So compassion is “com” – meaning “with” – and passion – meaning pain. Self-compassion is being with your own pain – compassion for others is being with others pain.

Sometimes there’s a fix. The pain of hunger just needs a little food. Sometimes there’s not – but rather than denial, just be with the pain.

David Brooks’ column this week was about people deliberately choosing what was uncomfortable. He talks about Haruki Murakami, who took up running. “By the late 2000s, [Murakami] was running six miles a day, six days a week every week of the year, and had run in 23 marathons, plus many other long-distance races, an ultramarathon and some triathlons,” Brooks writes. The thing is, running was often painful – miserable. Murakami’s memoir has lines like:

“As I ran this race, I felt I never, ever wanted to go through that again.”
And: “At around 23 miles I start to hate everything.”
And: “I finally reach the end. Strangely, I have no feeling of accomplishment. The only thing I feel is utter relief that I don’t have to run anymore.”
And: “It was draining physically, as you can imagine, and for a while afterward I swore I’d never run again.”
Yet he does run again. Brooks then says,

“All around us there are people who endure tedium to learn the violin, who repeatedly fall off stair railings learning to skateboard, who go through the arduous mental labor required to solve a scientific problem, who agree to take a job managing other people (which is truly hard) or who start a business (which is insanely hard).”

He goes on to say:

“When it comes to the things we really care about — vocation, family, identity, whatever gives our lives purpose — we are operating by a different logic [from the logic of seeking pleasure and avoiding pain], which is the logic of passionate desire and often painful effort.”

When he says “passionate desire” in this way, it seems to bring together the modern sense of passion and the original sense of passion as pain.

“People commit to great projects, they endure hard challenges,” not by anything remotely like a cost-benefit analysis, but “because they are entranced, enchanted. Some notion or activity has grabbed them, set its hooks inside them, aroused some possibility, fired the imagination.”

“The capacity to be seized” is an great talent.

“Some people go through life thick-skinned. School or career has given them a pragmatic, instrumental, efficiency-maximizing frame of mind. They live their life under pressure, so their head is down; they’re not open to delight, or open to that moment of rapture that can redirect a life.”

If all we care about is pleasantness and security, we aren’t open to wonder and delight – openness to which also means being open to discomfort and pain.

The wonders of life come from being open – broken open – to all of life – the full catastrophe. Close off a part of it – like the pain – and you also close off the real wonder. That phrase, “the full catastrophe,” I take from the title of a book by Jon Kabat-Zinn, “Full Catastrophe Living,” – and he got it from “Zorba the Greek,” where Zorba says, "I'm a man who's got the full catastrophe" – meaning his life is full of joy, sorrow, love, loss, and everything in between. Kabat-Zinn uses this concept to highlight the idea of embracing life as it is – the full catastrophe that life is, with all its ups and downs. Embrace, rather than resist or avoid difficult experiences. Take in and pay attention to human experience in all its messy, imperfect glory.

Without the difficulties, without the pain, we wouldn’t cultivate resilience, and find our fulfillment and well-being. David Brooks’ column is interested in how that openness can lead us to be seized by what becomes our great life passion – in the sense of a great pain but also a great meaning and purpose in a life dedicated beyond reason to something: to running, or playing the violin, or scientific inquiry or writing. Kabat-Zinn is interested in how that openness can lead us to be seized by the simple wonder of a moment. Either way, that openness gets closed off when, as Joko Beck says, what we care about is comfort and pleasantness and security.

Consider Sisyphus, the figure in Greek Mythology condemned by the gods to Hades and eternal punishment. He had to roll a heavy boulder up hill. When he got it to the top, it would roll back down again, and he’d have to start over. He was condemned for all eternity to pushing a heavy boulder, and to an awareness of the futility of his labor.

The futility aspect is rather curious, isn’t it? We feel like if we get that boulder to the top of the hill, we’ve accomplished something – but if it doesn’t stay there for even a minute but rolls back down again – then it was all futile. But why is a boulder at the top of a hill an accomplishment anyway? Why is it any better to have it at the top than at the base of the hill? It’s really no more futile to have the boulder rolling down the hill than to have it staying perched for a while on the hilltop.

So if we forget about the futility part, then there’s just the pushing part. We are all Sisyphus, pushing our rock. It’s not a condemnation or punishment, it’s just each moment. Pushing the rock or watching it roll down. We’re all doing what we do, moment by moment. But then we add judgments and ideas. The hell isn’t in pushing the boulder but in creating ideas of hope and disappointment. It’s the idea that we shouldn’t have to be doing it that turns any activity into hell.

The French writer Albert Camus in his essay, “The Myth of Sisyphus,” offers an extended reflection on the lessons of this myth. Camus concludes, “We must imagine Sisyphus happy.”

“If we are totally what we are, in every second, we begin to experience life as joy” (Joko Beck 20) – whatever boulder we may be pushing. Experiencing life as joy doesn’t mean there’s no sadness. It means we are experiencing that full catastrophe. Sadness might be the opposite of happiness, but it isn’t the opposite of joy – it’s part of the joy, because it’s part of life.

There are those universal needs: sustenance, safety, love, understanding or empathy, creativity, recreation, belonging, autonomy, and meaning. Those needs impel us to devise strategies to meet them. And that’s our boulder to keep pushing on. That’s what we care about.

What we don’t have to care about is whether the boulder will stay on the hilltop. Or whether we can get someone else to push it for us. Or whether we can distract ourselves from the pushing, or forget about it with substances. Just push on. Pay attention to your pushing, pay attention to observing the wonder of the boulder rolling down the hill again – how elegantly it rolls!

If we stop thinking life should be other than exactly what it is, we find the joy in it. No, the boulder won’t stay on the hilltop. Who cares?

Amen.

Training in Compassion 12: Put It In Context

Our Training in Compassion today is: Put it is context. Whatever difficulty you are experiencing, take a moment to put it in context.

What context? The context that the distinction between self and other is an empty illusion. The absolute context, that there is no self and other. There's only Being, and there's only Love, which is Being sharing itself with itself without impediment and with warmth. It just happens to look like you and me to us because this is how our minds and sensory apparatus works.

"Put it in context" means seeing your situation and what you are experiencing in the context of this love without boundary. All the disturbances of your life -- all your confusion, which is to say, your resistance, your pain, your fear, your grief, your frustrated desires, and so on – put all of this in the absolute context.

This means we look at the underlying reality of our disturbance. What is actually going on when we are upset or angry? If we unhook ourselves from the blaming and the wishing and the self-pitying, and look instead at the actual basis of what is in fact going on, what do we see? We see time passing. We see things changing. Moment by moment, time slips away and things transform. The present becomes the past -- or does it become the future? And yet as soon as we examine "now" it is gone.

Every moment of your life, all your moments of pain or despair or confusion – those, too, are moments of your own inherent wholeness, your inherent perfection. This is a fact, whether you see it or not. Learning to see it is the path of wisdom.

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For the full version of this post: SEE HERE.

Authentic Selves

Our Unitarian Universalist Association selects a Common Read each year recommended for Unitarian Universalists across the country to read and talk about. But didn’t I already preach about this year’s Common Read? It was the book by Rabbi Danyi Ruttenberg, On Repentance and Repair, where Rabbi Ruttenberg drew on the medieval Jewish philosopher Moses Maimonides to lay out and explain some really helpful ways that we can repair relationships that have been wounded or broken. I preached about it, we had classes about that book.

Ruttenberg’s book was actually the Common Read for 2023-24, and we were getting to it a little later in 2024. There is another Common Read for 2024-25, and that is this collection of first-person accounts celebrating Trans and Nonbinary People and their families, titled Authentic Selves. Each of its 35 chapters tells the story of a trans or nonbinary person, and many of the chapters also have statements from family members telling their story – partners, siblings – often parents.

What’s amazing and moving about the amassed stories is how different they are – how many permutations there are of assigned-at-birth – which might be male, female, or intersex – with gender identity, which might be male, female, both, neither, something else, or none – with gender expression, for which the possibilities are as infinite as the person’s imagination. It's a great book to start looking at as we prepare for hosting the Trans lives festival on Sat Mar 29.

Our job – our mission here at First Unitarian Des Moines – is to love radically, grow ethically and spiritually, and serve justly. Today, let’s focus on that first part: Love radically.

To love radically means unconditional acceptance, compassion, and kindness. It doesn’t mean that protective use of force is never called for, but a commitment to love radically does make us more hesitant to resort to it. Loving radically means curbing the fearful impulse to employ protective use of force first and ask questions later. So, yes, this means taking some risks. There’s a chance of being vulnerable and getting hurt when we could have been more protective. So radical love requires the courage to take that chance – to ask questions first unless the danger is immediate and extreme.

Radical love also requires the courage to stand against injustice, oppression, and discrimination, even when that is difficult. To love radically means even when we do have to go to protective use of force, we do so in the most compassionate, kind, and accepting way we can.Loving radically means not judging, not blaming, not expecting others to change. Loving radically means recognizing the inherent worth and dignity of all individuals, regardless of their gender or gender identity or gender expression. Loving radically means recognizing and challenging our own biases, privileges, and limitations to become a more loving and compassionate person. Because it is radical, it is counter cultural.

Loving radically is not transactional. It welcomes reciprocity, but it stays away from any precise measurement of who has done what for whom. Radical love requires being imprecise about that – because being precise means you’re being transactional, means you’re thinking quid pro quo rather than a beautifully vague reciprocity.

Radical love includes yourself, so it doesn’t mean being a slave to other people’s needs. Your needs also count – but radical love recognizes that one of those needs is to help others, because their suffering is yours. So no one has to earn your positive regard, your respect of their dignity.

To love radically is to commit to unconditional solidarity in which all beings, just because they exist, are worthy of being loved. Radical love refuses to flatten people into roles, labels, or projections. Radical love’s enemy is judgmentalism and its allies are curiosity and a willingness to embrace complexity.

To love radically is a deliberate act of resistance, of liberation, and of deep presence – disrupting systems that thrive on fear, hierarchy, and disconnection—systems that benefit when we believe we are separate, unlovable, or alone.

There is a close connection between love and understanding, as the Vietnamese Zen monk Thich Nhat Hanh emphasized:

“Understanding and Love are not two separate things, but just one. To develop understanding, you have to practice looking at all living beings with the eyes of compassion. When you understand, you cannot help but love. And when you love, you naturally act in a way that can relieve the suffering of people.”

He added:

“Understanding is the very foundation of love. If understanding is not there, no matter how hard you try, you cannot love . . . Understanding is love’s other name. If you don’t understand you can’t love.”

So the better we understand, the better we can love.

There are some things we all simply need to know about gender identity – so that we can understand and love radically. Gender identity means a person's internal, deeply-held sense of their own gender, which may or may not align with the sex they were assigned at birth. Gender identity is different from gender expression which is how one presents oneself to the world. In our culture clothing styles, hair styles, make-up and certain behaviors are key ways a person can express gender.

A person's gender identity can be:
Cisgender (aligning with the sex assigned at birth)
Transgender (not aligning with the sex assigned at birth)
Non-binary (identifying as neither male nor female, or both)
Genderqueer (identifying as something outside the traditional male/female binary)
Agender (not identifying with any gender)
Or Bigender (identifying as both male and female).

There’s a lot of possibilities and it can be hard to understand – but love helps us understand and understanding helps us love.

We should all be familiar with the formula, "insistent, persistent, consistent." Children do sometimes have a phase of experimenting with or exploring gender expressions. Of course, give them the space to experiment and explore – it can be fun to try out all kinds of roles and expressions. If they are genuinely transgender then they will be insistent, persistent, and consistent about it.

• Insistent: is the child you had thought was a girl adamant that ze is a boy. Or is the child you had thought was a boy adamant about that ze is a girl?
• Persistent: The child's cross-gender identification persists over time.
• Consistent: The child's cross-gender identification is consistent across different contexts and with different people, rather than just being something ze expresses at home or with certain friends.

There seems to be an increase in this country in transgender identification. In a recent survey of over 2 million American adults, the number of 18-24 year olds identifying as transgender quintupled in 9 years, from 2014 to 2023 – from 0.6% to 3% of that age cohort.

We are not sure why these numbers are going up. Growing awareness and acceptance, and decreased stigma, may be a factor in more people being willing to come out. Improved data collection as survey design has improved may be a factor in getting more accurate numbers on what has long been true. Increased access to information might be leading to people recognizing themselves in an identity description they wouldn’t otherwise have thought possible. Some research also suggests that there might be environmental factors, such as prenatal hormone exposure, that contribute to the development of transgender identities. We don’t know how much weight each of these factors would have, but whatever accounts for the growing numbers, it’s not mass Satanic possession.

Lots of cultures have a role for nonbinary people. The Navajo Nadleehi could have been assigned either male or female at birth, but they embody both male and female qualities and fill a respected spiritual and social role.

The Lakota Winkte is typically a male-bodied person who takes on a female role in ceremonial or artistic functions.

The Zuni Lhamana are male-bodied in traditionally female roles respected as mediators and craftspeople.

The Omaha mixuga have cross-gender roles, often involved in rituals or crafts.

The Cheyenne Hemaneh are “Half-man, half-woman” individuals with spiritual or social importance.

The Cree recognized gender-diverse people with unique roles.

The Ojibwe language has a term for people with a man’s body and a woman’s heart.

Looking beyond indigenous North American cultures, in Samoa the traditional culture had Fa'afafine: people assigned male at birth who live and identify in a feminine gender role and are a recognized third gender with social functions seen as natural and important.

Cultures from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Nepal have the Hijra: also recognized as a third gender. Hijra can include transgender women, intersex people, and others who don’t fit neatly into male-female binary. They traditionally had important ceremonial roles.

In Thailand the Kathoey are transgender women or effeminate men, visible often in entertainment or beauty industries. Gender fluidity is normalized.

In parts of the Balkans, particularly northern Albania, some women take on male gender roles and live as men. They are called sworn virgins, and are treated as such, though it’s not based on internal gender identity as we think of it.

The Bugis culture in Indonesia recognizes five genders: men, women, masculine women, feminine men, and bissu, which are gender-transcendent shamans.

Gender is a cultural construct, so of course all the ways nonbinary genders are constructed varies from culture to culture. Most cultures have found some need to recognize and form norms for more than just two genders. That’s an overview of some of the basics that I want us all to know.

Let me tell you my gender story. In the spirit of the book, Authentic Selves, of people telling their stories of finding their way to who they are, I wanted to tell you this morning my own personal story with the concept of gender identity. Sharing my reflections and experiences about my own journey toward self understanding might help you think about yours.

I’m not sure I have a gender identity. It’s clear that I do have a sexual orientation. As a teenager, I was interested in girls in a way that was strange and mysterious and terribly awkward, yet undeniable. My inner, authentic me had this desire for intimacy with someone from roughly half of humanity that felt quite different from the kinds of relationships I felt inclined to have with anyone from the other roughly-half of humanity. Very puzzling. Very ordinary, apparently, yet still very puzzling.

This meant that other people’s gender mattered to me in that way – my own gender, not so much. For some people it’s the other way around. For a bi-sexual person, a prospective romantic partner’s gender doesn’t matter to them in that way – though their own sense of gender identity maybe does. I'm the reverse of that.

I don’t mind presenting as male, and I have the biology that commonly goes with that: testosterone, and reproductive organs, and facial hair, and a low voice, and male pattern baldness, height that’s average for a man but is two standard deviations above the mean height of women, larger hands, more pronounced Adam’s apple – the whole package of traits that often but not always go together. Living life the way that the society I grew up in expects of males has just been easier – the wardrobe is easier, the socially expected grooming is quicker, and I’ve gotten accustomed to being treated the way society treats people it thinks are men.

But none of that means I identify as male. It just means others identify me as male, and I acquiesce to that. If, from my birth, my parents had told me I was a girl, dressed me the way other girls were dressed, had me grow my hair long and put bows or ribbons in it occasionally, taught me to value being “pretty,” and had somehow kept me from finding out about the anatomical differences between me and the other girls, I suspect I’d have gone along with that, too.

I don’t feel the presence of an inner true and authentic “me” in there that would have rebelled against gender assignment as a girl –nothing that would have told me, “this feels wrong.” I feel fine with how I’m perceived and treated as a man, but I don’t feel a strong internal sense of 'maleness' beyond that.

It is possible that I am deluded. Always worth considering. I might be so cisgendered that I don’t even notice it – so comfortable in the match between my assigned-at-birth sex and the gender expression I am content to display that I imagine I would be that comfortable in any gender – when, in fact, I would not have been as comfortable being raised a girl as I imagine I would have been. I don’t know. Maybe.

There are some clues that suggest I might not be self-deluded to think I don’t have a gender identity. First, the literature on gender identity recognizes people like me. For instance, I read that,

“A lot of cis-men and cis-women don’t feel a strong gender identity but don’t notice it because everything about their social role feels frictionless. The idea that everyone must have a deep, internal, self-defining gender identity is itself a kind of cultural assumption—but not a universal truth. Some people have strong gender identities; others don’t. That’s all part of the natural diversity of human experience.”

For a second clue that maybe inner gender ambiguity is, for me, authentic rather than delusional, there is the story of my name. My name is Steven Meredith Garmon. From birth through ninth grade, I went by Steven and in high school shortened it to Steve. When I went away to college at age 18, I decided to go by my middle name. I share that middle name with my father, who was Gerald Meredith Garmon, and with his father, who was Orion Meredith Garmon (which means his initials were OMG). Apparently, naming boys Meredith is a Welsh thing, and my paternal line goes through Wales.

Partly, I liked the hint of dark romance about it – Meredith seemed to my 18-year-old self like the kind of person you might find brooding on a moor, like Heathcliff or Ravenel. But mostly, I wanted a name that was gender-ambiguous – in fact, in the US it’s much more often a girl’s name – and that was attractive to me. It was convenient that I didn't have to make up a gender ambiguous name but could switch to using one I happened to already have.

It was 1977, and people didn’t know much about transgenderism – I’d never heard the phrase gender nonbinary. The term more often used back then was transvestite, which was usually understood to mean men dressing in women’s clothing -- that was their kink, as we might say today, but we didn’t understand it the way we now understand gender identity.

I didn’t want to change the way I dressed – which was invariably sneakers, blue jeans, and a t-shirt in summer and a sweatshirt in winter – which was also the uniform of a lot of the young women at my college. I was in favor of unisex everything. Down with constraining gender norms! I wasn’t interested in presenting as female because I disapproved of the very idea that there should be any such thing as “presenting as female.” We should all, I felt, abandon the concepts of masculinity and femininity, in favor of simply “human.”

When I look back on that 18-year-old, ze was actually pretty militantly anti-gender-identity. Forty-eight years have gone by since then, and the world has changed, and I’ve changed. I was wrong to think gender identity was as dispensable as, back then, I hoped it was. For a lot of other people, it’s clear to me now, gender identity is no more dispensable for them than sexual orientation is for me. On a gut level, I don't really get that. I don't feel it. But on a cognitive level, I've now heard from a number of people who say they do have a clear gender identity (which usually comes to light because that gender identity doesn't match what they were assigned at birth), and I have to believe them. On a heart level, love and understanding go together and call for welcoming acceptance. Feeling what they feel on a gut level is not required.

Yet the fact that I thought the way I thought as an adolescent does suggest that being agender-ish really is, for me, authentic. I have been, from youth, pretty insistent, persistent, and consistent about that. You’ve been hearing it when I declare my pronouns as "ze/zir or he/him."

For many people “being a boy or man” or “being a girl or woman” – or even being both or being neither -- is a crucial part of their sense of who they are – I’m just not one of them. And for those who do have a clear gender identity, for some it matches what they were assigned at birth and for others it just doesn’t.

The key, as the book title suggests, is finding and being our authentic selves. But what is authentic for you? We are, all of us, a hodge-podge of conflicting desires trying to balance. We have internalized messages some of which contradict other messages we have internalized. We try to construct the most coherent sense of who we are, and whose we are, that we can, but it’s never fully coherent – we all have some tensions and contradictions in us. So how do we be authentic? Which of your contradictory ideas and desires are your authentic ones?

To answer that question, let’s go back to that idea of loving radically, and apply that to ourselves. Remember, radical love is not transactional. Loving radically yourself is also not transactional. If you’re thinking: “if I be this way, there’s something I’ll get out of it,” that’s being transactional with yourself. You’ve got an internal quid pro quo going on.

It’s not that transactions are always wrong. You go to the grocery store, you buy groceries – it’s a transaction. You need the food, and the people at the store and all their suppliers need your money to meet their needs. We need transactions, but we also need close relationships with family and friends that aren’t transactional – that are reciprocal in an imprecise way -- I called it “beautifully vague reciprocity.”

And sometimes we need to be transactional with ourselves for a bit. We tell ourselves, “I don’t really want to be in this role, it feels a little awkward for me, or a lot awkward, but I can do it for now and it’ll help meet some needs and keep me safe.” To love radically ourselves means that we aren’t always so transactional. Sometimes there’s being what you want to be just for its own sake, not because it gets you anything you could put your finger on. It’s at those times that we are our authentic selves.

So: may your authentic self – whatever it might be -- shine ever brighter. Amen.

Training in Compassion 11: Be Grateful to Everyone

Be grateful to everyone. Very simple but very profound.

We began life entirely dependent on others, and, while we now exercise greater autonomy than infants, we are still dependent on others to grow our food, till the soil, transport the food, staff the stores where we get it. We depend on others to make our cars and pave the roads and extract and refine the fuel. Make our clothes and our homes. But more.

It's thanks to others and their presence and effort that you have friendship and love and meaning in your life. It’s thanks to others that we are who we are. They cared for us, taught us, gave us the language that we think in – the language in which we tell ourselves the story of who we are, what we’re trying to do, what we’re feeling. We didn’t invent this language that constitutes ourselves.

The idea of an independent, isolated, atomized person is impossible. Every thought in our minds every emotion that we feel, every word that comes out of our mouth, every material sustenance we need to get through the day, comes through the kindness of and the interaction with others.

And not only other humans. Our nonhuman companions, the wildlife that sustain ecosystems that sustain us, and the animals whose pain and flesh provides food for some humans all contribute to making us who we are. Indeed, the whole of the earth, the soil, the sky, the trees, the air we breathe and water we drink constitute us. We not only depend on all of this, we are all of it and it is us.

Gratitude is the happiest of attitudes: you simply cannot be grateful and unhappy at the same time. So be grateful to everyone all the time.

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For the full version of this post: SEE HERE.

Training in Compassion 10: No Blaming

Whatever happens, don't ever blame anyone or anything else. Take responsibility. Don't blame others, and don't blame yourself either. "Take responsibility" doesn't mean directing blame at yourself.

We often blame ourselves and have been doing so most of our lives. We are constantly feeling guilty about everything, and if we are not guilty, we are ashamed. You don't need to blame yourself for the situation you find yourself in. Just take full responsibility for what to do now that you're in that situation.

Even if it's actually someone's fault, you really can't blame them. Something happened, and since it did, there is nothing else to be done but to make use of it. Everything that happens, disastrous as it may be, and no matter whose fault it is, has a potential benefit, no matter how bad it may seem at first.

No blaming means you take the full appreciation and full responsibility for everything that arises in your life, no matter whose fault it is. No blaming is a tremendous practice of cutting through the long human habit of complaining and whining, and finding on the other side of all of that the strength to turn every situation into the path.

The important point is to accept that what has happened has actually happened. Accepting reality and accepting that you are now responsible for how to respond, you figure out what to do next. Sometimes this is especially hard to do. Try your best to stay present and patient and not let your mind run away with you.

Here you are. This is it. It is not some other way -- it is this way. There is no place else to go but forward into the next moment.

Repeat the slogan -- "No blaming" -- as many times as you have to.

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For the full version of this post: SEE HERE.

Money, money, money

Here is what I have to say today. I'll say it now, and I'll say it again at the conclusion. It is this: Through the practice of generosity, we are connected, made whole, better able to be the people we want to be.

Generosity isn’t entirely about money, but it does include money. Money, money, money. If you are unusually self-aware, you might have noticed a very slight feeling of tightening or closing at just the mention of the word. If you're that self-aware and spiritually evolved, you may have allowed that reaction to pass on as quickly as it arose. If you didn’t notice it, that doesn’t mean it’s not in there pulling the strings your reactivity unconsciously.

Research suggests that simply having the idea of money planted in mind has a tendency sometimes to reduce inclinations toward generosity. So I’m taking a risk by just saying the word money. I’m hoping that knowing about human psychology around money will allow us to consciously override the usual reactivity.

The average income per person worldwide is less than $10,000 a year. Perhaps your income is a little above the world average. Our very wealth itself can make us less generous, if we let it – if we don’t intentionally counter-act the effects of wealth through the practice of generosity.

In one study, experimenters enlisted undergraduates to play monopoly, two players at a time, but with different rules. One randomly selected player started the game with $2,000 of monopoly money, got $200 for passing Go each time, and threw two dice for every move – which, you may recall, is the normal way monopoly is played. Let’s call this player Bob. The other player, let’s call him Bill, started with $1,000, got $100 for passing Go each time, and threw one die for every move. “The students play for 15 minutes under the watchful eye of two video cameras, while down the hall researchers huddle around a computer screen, later recording the subjects’ every facial twitch and hand gesture.” What happens? Initially Bob "reacted to the inequality between him and his opponent with a series of smirks, an acknowledgment, perhaps of the inherent awkwardness of the situation. 'Hey,' his expression seemed to say, 'This is weird and unfair, but whatever.' Soon, though, as he whizzes around the board, purchasing properties and collecting rent, whatever discomfort he feels seems to dissipate.... He balloons in size, spreading his limbs toward the far ends of the table. He smacks his playing piece as makes the circuit – smack, smack, smack – ending his turns with a board-shuddering bang!...As the game nears its finish, [Bob] moves his [piece] faster....He’s all efficiency. He refuses to meet [Bill’s] gaze. His expression is stone cold as he takes the loser’s cash."

Privilege can function to shut down compassion – if we don’t consciously decide not to let it. Another study “showed through quizzes, online games, questionnaires, in-lab manipulations, and field studies that living high on the socioeconomic ladder can, colloquially speaking, dehumanize people. It can make them less ethical, more selfish, more insular, and less compassionate than other people.” In one experiment, wealthier people were more likely to take candy from a bowl of sweets designated for children. If there is such a thing as entitlement culture, it is more often the wealthy who feel most entitled. As psychologist Paul Piff concludes, “While having money doesn’t necessarily make anybody anything, the rich are way more likely to prioritize their own self-interests above the interests of other people. It makes them more likely to exhibit characteristics that we would stereotypically associate with, say, [jerks]....People higher up on the socioeconomic ladder are about three times more likely to cheat than people on the lower rungs.”

The extent to which people with money behave as if the world revolves around them was further illustrated in another study. Paul Piff and this research team “spent three months hanging out at...a gritty, busy corner with a four-way stop....[They] would stake out the intersection at rush hour, crouching behind a bank of shrubs… and catalog the cars that came by, giving each vehicle a grade from one to five. (A new-model Mercedes would be five; an old, battered Honda would be one.) Then the researchers would observe drivers’ behavior. A third of people who drove grade-five cars, Piff found, rolled into the intersection without first coming to a compete stop....‘Upper-class drivers were the most likely to cut off other vehicles even when controlling for time of day, driver’s sex [as it appeared to be to the observers], and amount of traffic.’"

A similar experiment tested "drivers’ regard for pedestrians....A researcher would enter a zebra crossing as a car approached it. The results were more staggering....Fully half the grade-five cars cruised right into the crosswalk. ‘It’s like they didn’t even see them,' [said Piff]."

Timothy Judge (Notre Dame), Beth Livingston (Cornell), and Charlice Hurst (U of W. Ontario) published a study, "Do Nice Guys -- and Gals -- Really Finish Last?" “Subjects were asked to assess whether they had a forgiving nature or found fault with others, whether they were trusting, cold, considerate, or cooperative. Then they were given an agreeableness score. Men with the lowest agreeableness earned $42,113 in a given year; those with the highest agreeableness earned $31,259."

In another study researcher Kathleen Vohs merely planted the idea of money in subjects' minds. As the subjects filled out questionnaires, some of them were in a room with Monopoly money present (left over from a prior monopoly game), and some were not. "Vohs got her result only after the ¬subject believed the session was over. Heading for the door, he would bump into a person whose arms were piled ¬precariously high with books and office supplies. That person (who worked for Vohs) would drop 27 little yellow pencils, like those you get at a golf course. Every subject in the study bent down to pick up the mess. But the money-primed subjects picked up 15 percent fewer pencils than the control group." (Miller) That’s just from the thought of money planted by having Monopoly money nearby.

Vohs stressed that money-priming did not make her subjects malicious — just uninterested. She said: 'I don’t think they mean any harm, but picking up pencils just isn’t their problem.'

Over and over, Vohs has found that money can make people anti-social – less pro-social. She primes subjects by seating them near a screen-saver showing currency floating like fish in a tank or asking them to descramble sentences, some of which include words like bill, check, or cash. Then she tests their sensitivity to other people. In her Science article, Vohs showed that money-primed subjects gave less time to a colleague in need of assistance and less money to a hypothetical charity. When asked to pull up a chair so a stranger might join a meeting, money-primed subjects placed the chair at a greater distance from themselves than those in a control group. When asked how they’d prefer to spend their leisure time, money-primed people chose a personal cooking lesson over a catered group dinner. Given a choice between working collaboratively or alone, they opted to go solo.” (Miller)

In some ways, on some measures, there may be a plus side. Thinking about money makes people more oriented to efficiency and productivity – like Bob, the advantaged monopoly player who became all efficiency. Money-focus encourages thoughts of self-sufficiency: less willing to help, but also less interested in being helped. Research so far hazards no guess as to where the tipping point is after which personality transformation kicks in – and that point is surely highly variable from individual to individual.

There is a basic human tendency to protect what we have, and the more we have, the stronger the tendency to put our energy into the having. It requires intentionality to avoid being sucked into that pattern. So we come to the spiritual practice of generosity. Deliberate generosity counter-acts that self orientation. Warm-heartedness also reduces blood pressure, anxiety and stress and improves health.

You’ve got however much money you’ve got. How much of it can you give away and still meet your material needs? Give it away. We can make it into something that connects us to others, that connects us to the world’s suffering. Otherwise, it will be a force of disconnection, tending to makes us less social, less caring. Give it away as a regular practice – weekly if possible.

You will never meet a generous person who was bitter or a bitter person who is generous. That bears remembering. Generosity and bitterness are incompatible. It’s not entirely clear whether generosity causes reduction in bitterness, or reduction in bitterness causes generosity – just as it isn’t always clear whether wealth causes disagreeableness or disagreeableness facilitates wealth acquisition. Either way, they go together.

Generosity – also known as hospitality, kindnesss, largesse, benevolence, bounteousness, magnanimity, openhandedness, warmheartedness, compassion – life as overflow – enriches our lives. When we live from an awareness of abundance rather than in the grip of the delusion of scarcity, generosity becomes possible. And generosity grows through practice.

To develop in an area requires disciplined commitment. The skilled athletes are not the ones who exercise when they happen to be in the mood for it. The skilled poets or musicians do not just write poetry or rehearse when they feel like it. They show up for daily practice, whether they feel like it or not. Generosity develops in us through a disciplined commitment to develop it as a way of being.

The baseball catcher and later manager and coach, Yogi Berra, once said, “You can’t think and hit at the same time.” He meant that we have to show up for the discipline of training our habit muscles, so that the habit muscles can be our guide when, as in most of what we do in the days of our lives, there isn’t the time or the inclination to think them through very much. For hitting, as for many actions, we must rely on habits, so the formation of the habits we'll need is crucial. For that matter, even when there is time for reflection, the way we think is governed by the feelings and values formed as habit.

Consider the story I’ve heard of a woman getting off a subway train. As she readies for climbing the steps into the cold outside air, she reaches into the pockets of her coat for her gloves. She finds only one glove. The other must have fallen out of her pocket. She turns around and looks back into the subway car, and she can see the seat where she had been sitting, and, sure enough, there’s her other glove on the seat. But now the doors are closing. She won’t have time to get back in and retrieve her glove. So she takes the glove she has, and throws into the subway onto the seat next to its mate – just as the doors close.

I love that story. One glove isn’t going to do her much good, but now somebody else can have the complete pair. That’s the reflex of a person who has cultivated generosity as a deep habit of being, a habit of the heart. It’s the reasonable thing to do, but if you rely on reason, the train will be long gone before you’ve worked it out. Random acts of kindness and senseless beauty flourish as the fruits of disciplined habit-formation that is not at all random or senseless.

I picked up this story from my colleague Rev. Terry Sweetser. Rev. Sweetser remarked:

"You know she must have lived a long life of generosity, a life of wild and creative generosity of spirit, to be able to think so quickly, to act so urgently and healthily, to know precisely in that moment what would bless the world right then and there. It happened in an instant, but that was planned giving through and through. Something in her past, or everything in her past, prepared her for her gesture -- habits of living and giving practiced and refined her whole life long."

As a piece of the happy discipline of generous giving, the piece that has to do with giving away our money, it will help to think in terms of percents. This gift comes from you. It is you, so place it in the context of your overall income. Are you giving away twenty percent? Ten percent? Five percent? I ask you to decide the percent first – what percent are you going to give away? Maybe this year it can be a higher percent than last year. After you’ve decided the percent, do the math and figure out what dollar amount that comes to. Don’t start by thinking about a dollar amount. Start by thinking about a percent.

Percent of what? The general guidelines would be AGI – adjusted gross income. Certain vital expenses are subtracted, but itemized or standard deductions are not. Adjusted Gross Income is the benchmark used by researchers into giving rates. And what percent of your AGI do you choose to give?

The traditional “tithe” for the church is 10 percent. The Torah, the central part of the Hebrew Bible, also known as the first five books of the Old Testament (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy), set forth law requiring that a tenth of all produce, flocks, and cattle be given to support the Levites, the priestly class in ancient Israel. The Torah also emphasized assistance to foreigners, orphans and widows, those in need, in addition to the tithe of support for the priestly class. The Christian Testament mentions no specific rules about tithing. Jesus is simply clear that we are obligated to be cheerfully generous to those in need.

The tithing rules in the Torah were based on the religious and social system of ancient Israel and on an agricultural economy. The Torah is not authoritative for us. Even it were, it does not address modern-day questions about what percentage we should give, how much to the church and how much to other charities. Still, I do find there’s something psychologically significant about 10 percent – just move the decimal over one place, and that’s what you give away. If you’re just starting out with generosity practice, giving away 10 percent is a good start. Those who have been at it longer, or are better established in life, can think about higher percentages.

Giving is a crucial part of your spiritual life, a necessary component of your spiritual growth, and growing ethically and spirituality is the mission of this congregation. It is our business – it is our mission -- collectively to encourage compassion in each other. It's really good for us to do this.

"Research from the University of British Columbia and Harvard Business School shows that spending money on someone else — as little as $5 a day — can significantly boost your happiness. Students who practiced random acts of kindness were significantly happier than those who were not given this task. In another study, college students were given money and directed to either spend it on themselves or spend it pro-socially (on activities meant to benefit other people). Participants who spent it pro-socially were happier at the end of the day than those who spent it on themselves." (Mark Ewert, The Generosity Path, 2)

Part of your giving goes to charities. Charitable giving is an important spiritual practice. For this part, I encourage looking at website called givewell.org. They’ve put thousands of hours into researching which charities are most effective, dollar for dollar, and are underfunded. They search for the charities that save or improve lives the most per dollar. Right now, their charities include the Malaria Consortium, which dispenses malaria prevention medicine. The Against Malaria Foundation, which provides mosquito nets to reduce risk of exposure to malaria. Helen Keller International which provides supplements to counteract vitamin A deficiency in children under 5. And New Incentives, and organization that provides cash incentives for routine childhood vaccines. Those are some good charities to receive a portion of the percentage that you set aside for giving away. They are listed at givewell.org.

Other websites you might take a look at:
Giving What We Can http://www.givingwhatwecan.org/
80,000 Hours http://80000hours.org/
The Life You Can Save http://www.thelifeyoucansave.org/
Effective Animal Activism http://www.effectiveanimalactivism.org/

Peter Singer mentions these websites in his TED talk where he makes the point that helping others is a requirement of an ethical life. Singer addresses the questions: How much of a difference can I make? Am I expected to abandon my career? Isn't charity bureaucratic and ineffective anyway? Isn't it a burden to give up so much?

Once you’ve decided the total percentage you’re going to give away – for the sake of the wellbeing of others, and for the sake of your own spiritual wellbeing – then there’s the question of how much of that goes to support your congregation and its programs. If you determine a percent first, then calculate what dollar amount that comes to, your pledge amount will probably not be a nice round number. But you’ll know it’s a nice round percent.

For your congregation's thriving, and for your thriving as a part of it, I suggest thinking in the range of three to five percent of adjusted gross income. Again, the more well-established you are in life, the higher the percentage can be. If you’re a young couple just starting out, two percent is a level of generosity you can feel really good about.

Pledging is a part of the meaning of membership, a part of what makes membership meaningful, and part of your spiritual practice and development. Through the practice of generosity, we are connected, made whole, better able to be the people we want to be.

May it be so. Amen.