HUU Community Cafe

Presented by Merle Wenger
Sunday January 2, 2011

Chalice Lighting:  “We Dreamers”

We dreamers–
architects of the soul
take a lifetime,
to meditate,
sketch,
create,
like Corbusier or I M Pei;
then choose
the bricks and stones,
to build a self
that suits us well
and makes others
cock their heads
and notice. Continue reading Fantasies, Dreams and Intentions

November 7, 2010

One of the services that everyone seems to enjoy is one we present a couple of times a year. We ask for two volunteer participants who are willing to share their own spiritual journey with the Fellowship. This morning Rich Sider and Laura Dent each shared their own spiritual journey.

Rich Sider

When Judith asked me to participate in this service, my first thought was, I haven’t had much of a spiritual journey.  A theological journey, yes, but a spiritual journey?  I wish I could say I’ve traveled further.

I’ll come back to my spiritual journey, or lack thereof, in a moment, but let me tell you a little about my theological journey first.

I was born in Zimbabwe, then Southern Rhodesia, to Brethren in Christ missionary parents.  The BIC denomination is not the same as the Church of the Brethren.  It is one of the Anabaptist related groups, though, with a Wesleyan holiness flavor.  In short, my parents were devout evangelical pacifist fundamentalists in the separatist mold of conservative Mennonites.  The world was basically evil and in need of salvation and the only important thing in life was to be “right with the Lord.”

Although I never accepted the separatist aspects of my parents faith, I tried to make the evangelical framework work up through college.  As some of you who share a similar background may have also experienced, it involved numerous attempts over the years to confess my sins and renew my faith in and commitment to the tenets of evangelical Christian faith.  The problem for me was that it never worked.  I could never experience the joy and freedom from my evil ways that a “personal relationship with Jesus Christ” was supposed to produce.

After college and marriage, Martha and I went off to southern Africa with the Mennonite Central Committee, the international service organization of the Mennonite Church.  Even though we weren’t into the missionary thing, the concept of responsibility to be of service had taken hold, and has affected my whole working career, all of which I have spent working for non-profits.

So, we entered the second phase of our theological journey – the liberal Mennonite pacifist phase.  I think I can use the pronoun “we” safely because Martha and I have been fortunate in that regard – our theological pilgrimages have coincided pretty well.  In this theological environment, service to others was the key to meaning and peace.  Unfortunately, while I believe deeply in the importance of service to others, I didn’t find the meaning and peace I was seeking in that path either.

During the 18 years I worked for MCC, including 4 in Guatemala in the early 1980s during the height of the civil war there, Martha and I came to reject the Christian faith claim to be the only truth.   We came to see we were certainly no better or more connected to the transcendent than the many who by happenstance had been born into a different religious framework and culture.  To think they were somehow condemned because of this just became too inconceivable to consider anymore.  And although many in the liberal Mennonite community share this view but have remained within it, we became increasingly uncomfortable with what is essentially a “don’t ask, don’t tell” approach to theology.  People who believe differently than Christian orthodoxy just don’t talk about what they believe.  We also became increasingly uncomfortable with the words spoken and sung in worship – words emphasizing dualism between the saved and unsaved, good and evil, material and spiritual, and anthropomorphizing the mystery many call God.  Continue reading Our Spiritual Journeys

Once in a while a UU says they have trouble with the first UU Principle: “The inherent worth and dignity of every person.” I heard that more than once this past Sunday. A scene from the 1980s film “Ironweed” which somehow got burned into my memory seems to illustrate that principle. A homeless, [...]

July 25, 2010
GLBTIQQ PRIDE SUNDAY
by Rev. Emma Chattin

Proud of What? ~ Bringing The Other Home

How do we celebrate our differences?
Perhaps we begin by celebrating that we are different.

First Reading ~ Luke 19 : 1-9

Jesus entered Jericho and made his way through the town. There was a man there named Zacchaeus. He was the chief tax collector in the region, and he had become very rich. He wanted to see who Jesus was, but he was too short to see over the crowd. So he ran ahead and climbed a sycamore-fig tree beside the road, for Jesus was going to pass that way.

When Jesus came by, he looked up at Zacchaeus and called him by name. “Zacchaeus!” he said. “Quick, come down! I must be a guest in your home today.” Zacchaeus quickly climbed down and welcomed Jesus with great delight. But the people were displeased. “He has gone to be the guest of a notorious sinner,” they grumbled. Zacchaeus stood his ground and said, “I will give half my wealth to the poor, and if I have cheated people on their taxes, I will give them back four times as much!” Jesus responded, “Today salvation has come to this home, for this is what it means to be a true descendant of Abraham and Sarah.”

Second Reading ~ from “Who Is Your Other”, by Eliacin Rosario-Cruz.

The children of the Enlightenment inherited the meticulous process of scientific classification. Following this process, everything was given its own place. But this process did not belong to the sciences alone—our communities of faith adopted this hard model of categorization as well. Categorization of this kind is no different from the behavior we frown upon in the Gospels when teachers of the law tried to manipulate and domesticate Jesus. While in Jesus we see the completion of the law, this truth was not accessible to the priests, Pharisees, and other religious professionals. They were neck deep into the myth of being the only ones who truly knew the right teachings, the accepted societal rules, and correct spiritual behavior. And then a callous craftsman with sawdust still in his hair, from a little town that nothing good was known to come out of, came to be the Other who would disturb the boring parade of sameness. Continue reading Proud of What? ~ Bringing The Other Home

A Talk By James J. Geary
Delivered before the Harrisonburg Unitarian Universalist Church
16 May 2010

Chalice Reading

The chalice is a symbol. We need symbols in our lives; we can’t do without them.
We utilize hundreds of symbols every day, including the words we use.

What does the chalice symbolize for you?

For me the chalice symbolizes itself — fire. Think about fire. Fire is energy. Fire is the essence of the universe. Fire is everything. Everything is from fire. Our sun, from which we come, from which we gain sustenance, is fire. The stars, from which we have come, are fire. We are fire, slow-burning, very complex fires. The stars are energy in action. Our sun is energy in action. And we, carrying within us the life force, are energy.

Like the Hindu god, Shiva, fire is the creator and destroyer of worlds. Fire is life, fire is death, fire is we, fire is the essence of the universe.

Talk 5%. A Very Long Spiritual Journey

Good morning.

Well, here we are — again. Oh, I know I said I was 95 per cent sure my last talk was really my last talk. That’s the meaning of the 5 % in the title of today’s talk.
I had a five percent chance of speaking again.

I have a piece of trivial news. Two days ago I turned 96. I don’t believe it!

I have a couple of readings:

The first is a short poem by the famous English novelist, Thomas hardy. The title
is: Waiting Both

A star looks down at me,
And says: “Here I and you
Stand each in our degree:
What do you mean to do, —
Mean to do?”I say: “For all I know,

Wait, and let Time go by,
Til my change come.” —
”Just so,” The star says: “So mean I: —
So mean I.”

The following reading is an excerpt from Pleasures, a poem by the California poet, Robinson Jeffers.

There is a higher pleasure;
To lie among cold stones my older bothers — God knows I am old enough,
But not like granite — to lie quietly embarnacled
Under the film of surf and look at the sky,
I strain the mind to imagine distances
That are not in man’s mind: the planets, the suns, the galaxies, the super galaxies, the incredible voids
And lofts of space: our mother the ape never suckled us
For such a forest: the vastness here, the horror, the mathematical unreason, the cold awful glory,
The inhuman face of our God: It is pleasant and beautiful.

=============

During the past 20 years, I have enjoyed some inspiring services from members of this fellowship, especially personal spiritual journeys. So I thought I’d try to interest you in mine..

In this talk I discuss the two principal intellectual loves of my life, philosophy and natural beauty.

I‘ll begin this talk with a mental picture, a picture of me crying when I was about 11 years old.. I had been promised I could visit with a family friend on his orchard estate for a few days. And then the promise had been withdrawn; and I was weeping. And my Uncle Leslie said something strange. He said the grief I was suffering was balanced by the joy I had felt when the promise was first made.

I couldn’t handle that. What he said certainly didn’t do anything to assuage my hurt feelings. But I remembered it. Little could I have imagined, however, that the philosophy or psychology that my uncle expressed would become one of the two sustaining pillars of my mature philosophy of life. Continue reading 5%. A Very Long Spiritual Journey

By Rev. Emma Chattin
March 14, 2010

First Reading
John 6:1-13
Feeding The Five Thousand

Some time later, Jesus went to the other side of the Sea of Galilee– also called Lake Tiberias –and a huge crowd followed him, because they saw the signs he gave by healing the sick. Jesus climbed the hillside and sat down there with his disciples. It was shortly before the Jewish feast of Passover. Looking up, Jesus saw the crowd approaching and said to Philip, ‘Where are we to buy bread for these people to eat?’ Jesus knew what he was going to do, but asked this to learn Phillip’s response. Philip answered, ‘Six months’ wages would not buy enough bread to give each of them a little mouthful!’ One of the disciples, Andrew, Simon Peter’s brother, said, ‘There is a child here who has five barley loaves and two fish. But what are they among so many people?’ Jesus said, ‘Make the people sit down.’ Now there was a great deal of grass in the place; and as many as five thousand families sat down. Then Jesus took the loaves, gave thanks, and distributed them to those who were seated; so also with the fish, giving out as much as they could eat. When the people had eaten their fill, Jesus told the disciples, ‘Gather up the leftover pieces, so that nothing gets wasted.’ So they picked them up, and filled twelve baskets with the scraps left over from the five barley loaves.

Second Reading
Adapted from~
Jesus and Buddha as Stories by Professor David Loy

…. Our minds need stories just as much as our bodies need food. ‘Story’ in this case means….all our mythologies, folktales, legends, epics, novels, philosophies, ideologies, including, of course, our religious beliefs. Just like food builds and rebuilds our bodies, stories build and rebuild our minds (or spirits, if you prefer) because it is through them that we learn what the world is, who we are, what is important in this world, and how we are to live in it. ….. If we look at religion-stories from this perspective, we can appreciate them in a different way. Continue reading What Feeds You?

Sunday service by Robin McNallie
3.28.2010

Readings:
1) “thy eyes look to me mild. Out of maize @ air/ your body’s made and moves. I summon, see,/ from the centuries it./I think you won’t stay. How do we/ linger, diminished, in our lovers’ air,/ implausibly visible, to whom, a year,/ years, over interims; or not;/ to a long stranger; or not; shimmer @ disappear.”
John Berryman, “Homage to Mistress Bradstreet”

2) “Sometimes the sun is only shadowed by a cloud that we cannot see his luster although we may walk by his light, but when he is set, we are in darkness till he arise again. So God doth sometime veil His face but for a moment that we cannot behold the light of His countenance as at some other time.”
Anne Bradstreet, “Meditation 50”

When I agreed to do this morning’s service, I was in the middle of reading Sarah Vowell’s well-received 2008 book on the 17th c. Massachusetts Bay Puritans, “The Wordy Shipmates.” I recommend it highly. Vowell, an audaciously cheeky commentator on that society, is also true to the historical record and shrewd in her judgments on it. She is essentially a stand-up comedian doing a sort of antic impression of Perry Miller, Harvard University’s pre-eminent authority on the New England Puritans and the later Transcendentalists. Although Vowell doesn’t seriously contradict H. L. Mencken’s oft recycled definition of Puritanism as “the sneaking suspicion that someone somewhere is having a good time,” she does suggest that there are, at least, a few redeeming qualities to Puritan society which should perhaps come as good news to UUs since our Unitarian branch is the evolved offspring of Puritan congregationalism; we won’t be harmed either from owning up to that dour and dyspeptic past or knowing it more fully. Since Vowell devotes considerable space to Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson, we can infer that a positive attribute she finds in the Massachusetts colony is the quality of the dissenters it produced—before banishing them to Rhode Island.

I would like, however, to direct my own remarks to another woman of that patriarchal world not covered by Vowell, the other Anne—Bradstreet. To students seeking to pass their masters exams in American Literature Anne Bradstreet is the answer to the question: “ What poet was the first in the English speaking New World colonies to have a volume of poetry published in London in the year 1650?” The title of that book, probably supplied by a market savvy publisher of the time, is “The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America.” Anne, incidentally, was peeved initially, because her brother-in-law had delivered the draft of it to London without her knowledge. The universal moral here: Keep your best china and all loose manuscripts hidden when having your in-laws over. Continue reading MISTRESS ANN BRADSTREET: GODLY AGNOSTIC

Eric LaFreniere addressed HUU members and friends gathered for the Stewardship Sunday luncheon. His comments follow.

Greetings!

In case you don’t know, my name is Eric LaFreniere, and I’m chair of your HUU Membership Committee.

Recently I’ve had the opportunity to reflect on the idea of HUU membership as membership in a kind of [...]

Encountering Divinity Through Community (Or…. Is It The Other Way Around?)

January 10, 2010
by Rev Emma Chattin

Words of the Mystics -  Thoughts for Reflection

“The minute I heard my first love story I started looking for you, not knowing how blind that was. Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere. They’re in each other all along.”
~ Jalal ad-Din Rumi (Persian Poet and Mystic, 1207-1273)~

“You are not a human being in search of a spiritual experience. You are a spiritual being immersed in a human experience.”
~ Teilhard de Chardin quotes (French Geologist, Priest, Philosopher and Mystic, 1881-1955) ~

“The trouble is that everyone talks about reforming others and no one thinks about reforming [themselves].”
~ Saint Peter of Alcantara quotes (Spanish Mystic and Founder of the Discalced (i.e. barefooted) Friars Minor. 1499-1562)~

Every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson ~

“Your task is not to seek love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.” ~ Jalal ad-Din Rumi ~

“(said of God ): If this is the way you treat your friends, it’s no wonder you have so few!”
~ St. Teresa of Avila ~

Vocatus atque non vocatus, Deus aderit.
( Bidden or not, God is present. )

A  statement that Carl Jung discovered among the Latin writings of Desiderius Erasmus (1466-1536), who declared the statement had been an ancient Spartan proverb. Jung popularized it, having it inscribed over the doorway of his house, and upon his tomb.

The fault of others is easily perceived, but that of oneself is difficult to perceive.  The faults of others, one lays open as much as possible, but one’s own faults one hides, as a cheat hides the bad dice from the gambler. ~ (Buddha, Dhammapada, vv. 252, 253) ~

Reading

~ from Nevada Barr in Seeking Enlightenment Hat by Hat: A Skeptics Guide to Religion

Church is for finding and adoring God in community: with others, through others, because of others, in spite of others.  Only by finding this place of human interaction, focused around the need for the spiritual, was I able to recognize God in other people, and so in myself.  Without community, how would I learn to share?  Who would I help?  How would I learn to accept help? … Community is God rubbing elbows and passing the tuna casserole, a place where we can snuggle down with the Divine.  Though I’d never have suspected it when I began this spiritual journey, God is not separate from people.  Sure we’re hypocrites, liars, boasters, blasphemers, and cheats, but we are God’s hypocrites, liars, boasters, blasphemers, and cheats.  The spark is in each of us.  When we work together for what we sincerely hope is good, worship together in the belief we will touch God, sing together in the hope (God) hears our praises, then the spark is fanned, and God becomes as visible in us as God is in new snow, or a sunrise, or in a mountain lake.

Sermon

Good Morning.   And welcome on this very binary morning of 01 10 10.

My father would begin all of his Sunday morning services with “Welcome all who gather here today, this is God’s House”,  and I learned at an early age exactly what that meant.

We were stationed at Mt Carmel Methodist church in Covington, VA, and whenever I heard that phrase, I always took some pride in it.  After all, THIS was God’s house.  Our place.  Our little church was where God lived.

As I went to school, I had Jewish & Catholic friends, and while I knew some of the differences between us, I took a secret sanctimonious pride… that our little church was God’s place, God’s pad. This pride continued to swell in me, until one day, I blurted out to one of the church members that this was God’s house, Mt. Carmel was where God lived.  The member, I can’t remember his real name, but everyone called him Chestnut, looked down at me with that bristly burry flattop haircut of his (which my have been the source of his nickname), and pointed to the front of the church.  Behind the altar and pulpit, at the very forward part of the church, hung a HUGE burgundy velvet curtain as a backdrop.  Chestnut told me that God lived behind that curtain. Continue reading Encountering Divinity Through Community