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?â€I say: “For all I know,
Wait, and let Time go by,
Til my change come.†—
â€Just so,†The star says: “So mean I: —
So mean I.â€
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.
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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. [Read more…]