Rev. Janet Onnie
September 1, 2024

Last week Rev. Paul Britner described ministry, quoting Gordon McKeeman, as ‘the quality of a relationship between and among human beings that beckons forth hidden possibilities.’  Rev. Britner gave striking examples of individuals doing ministry.  I need only to look around at HUU and see equally striking examples of people doing ministry.  So why did you feel you needed a minister?  To address that question that I’ll need to reference our history.  Back to 1648 – more than 100 years before the American Revolutionary War.

In August 1648 a group of ministers from Massachusetts and Connecticut gathered in Cambridge, Massachusetts to craft a declaration of principles of church government and discipline, forming a constitution of the Congregational churches; the churches from which we evolved. The Cambridge Platform is the foundational document upon which our free faith rests.  It almost nothing to do with matters of doctrine and belief but is very specific about the ways in which groups of like-minded people – congregations – would be in communion – in association– with each other.   It defined matters of church officers, ministry, membership, and cooperation between churches. Another way to say it is the Cambridge Platform is a statement of behavioral expectations rather than beliefs.  The Cambridge Platform is a statement of behavioral expectations rather than beliefs.  Although changes in practice were being made as early as the second generation, the Cambridge Platform remains a defining document for the denominations, including Unitarian Universalism, that continue to practice congregational polity. Of the 65 congregations that voted to ratify the Platform in 1648, 21 of them are members of the Unitarian Universalist Association today. 

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by Rev. Kirk Ballin
August 18, 2024

The Dash
by Linda Ellis

I read of a man who stood to speak
at the funeral of a friend.
He referred to the dates on the tombstone
from the beginning…to the end.

He noted that first came the date of birth
And spoke the following date with tears,
But he said what mattered most of all
Was the dash between those years.

For that dash represents all the time
that they spent alive on earth.
And now only those who loved them
know what that little line is worth.

For it matters not, how much we own,
the cars…the house…the cash.
What matters is how we live and love
and how we spend our dash.

So, think about this long and hard.
Are there things you’d like to change?
For you never know how much time is left
that can still be rearranged.

If we could just slow down enough
to consider what’s true and real
and always try to understand
the way other people feel.

And be less quick to anger
and show appreciation more
and love the people in our lives
like we’ve never loved before.

If we treat each other with respect
and more often wear a smile,
remembering that this special dash
might only last a little while.

So when your eulogy is being read
With your life’s actions to rehash…
Would you be proud of the things they say
About how you spent YOUR dash?

“ONE OR TWO THINGS”
Mary Oliver (Devotions)

1
Don’t bother me.
I’ve just
been born

2
The butterfly’s loping flight
carries it through the country of the leaves
delicately, and well enough to get it
where it wants to go, wherever that is, stopping
here and there to fuzzle the damp throats
of flowers and the black mud; up
and down it swings, frenzied and aimless; and sometimes
for long delicious moments it is perfectly
lazy, riding motionless in the breeze on the soft stalk
of some ordinary flower

3
The god of dirt
came up to me many times and said
so many wise and delectable things, I lay
on the grass listening
to his dog voice,
crow voice,
frog voice, now,he said, and now,
and never once mentioned forever,

4
which has nevertheless always been,
like a sharp iron hoof,
at the center of my mind.

5
One or two things are all you need
to travel over the blue pond, over the deep
roughage of the trees and through the stiff
flowers of lightning – some deep
memory of pleasure, some cutting
knowledge of pain.

6
But to lift the hoof!
For that you need
an idea. 

7
For years and years I struggled
just to love my life. And then
the butterfly
rose, weightless, in the wind.
“Don’t love your life
too much,” it said,
and vanished
into the world.

OPINION

Invisible and Exposed — but adaptable, as only the old can be

“The superpower my…friends and I share is that we have learned to adapt to changing circumstances, like England’s peppered moths that, during the Industrial Age, darkened in tandem with the arrival of soot. My colleagues and I gladly adapted to bifocals, hearing aids, Depends, custom orthotics — whatever we needed to keep our standard of living as high as possible. (My husband and I thought of registering for wedding gifts at the local Jack’s Durable Medical Equipment and Pharmacy.) We’ve learned to adjust when things go wrong, rather than try to control things. How do we know things will go wrong? Because that is the nature of life”. Anne Lamott, WP June 4, 2024

__________________________________________________________________

The initial title for this sermon was “Getting Old: We’re All Doing It!” … But in reflection, I felt the better title is “Aging: Everybody’s Doing It!”    The word “old” has too much presumption, stigma, categorization, deterioration, and unpoetic finality to it! So, although I appreciate the rest of Lamott’s comments, I take issue with her use of the word “old”.

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by Tom Hook
August 11, 2024

            Good morning and thank you for having me again.  This was a short notice situation as your scheduled speaker, Valerie Luna Serrels, had to cancel for this Sunday for personal reasons.  

            I suspect several of you are somewhat familiar with the Enneagram.  I first was exposed to it in 1990 during my Spiritual Direction studies.  Over the years I have become more and more intrigued with this personality typology and how it can (and does) help us to become more self-aware of our actions and hidden motivations.  It also helps to clarify the motivations and actions of those with who we are in relationship. I also covered it briefly in a talk here back in the summer of 2021.

What is the Enneagram?  The word pronounced “any-a-gram” comes from the Greek word enna meaning nine and gramma meaning points/signs/figures. 

            The Enneagram presents nine personality patterns arranged in a diagram as points arranged around a circle, numbered clockwise from 1 to 9.

            Briefly, the Enneagram says that there are nine ways of experiencing the world and reacting to it.

            These personality patterns (or points of energy) are labeled as:

1. The Reformer – perfectionist – the good person
2. The Helper – the loving person
3. The Motivator – performer – the effective person
4. The Individualist – the romantic – the original person
5. The Thinker – investigator – the wise person
6. The Loyalist – fearful – the loyal person
7. The Enthusiast – spontaneous – the joyful person
8. The Leader – the challenger – the powerful person
9. The Peacemaker – laid back, pleasant – the peaceful person

The Enneagram tells us that people with each of these nine personality types live with an unconscious motivation that causes them to respond to life in a way so consistent that it becomes the driving force shaping their lives.  This unconscious motivation gives each type a unique understanding of life, people, and the world.  And, each type has its own unique way of reacting to others, the world, and situations.

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July 7, 2024
By Bill Faw

Good morning! This is my 14th message for HUU since September, 2018.  Today we look at the interesting question: Is history flat (basically staying the same), circular (getting better, then worse, in cycles), inclining (getting better), or declining (getting worse)?

PARTS ONE AND TWO: HISTORY FLAT AND/OR CIRCULAR

For classic portrayals of both the ‘flat’ and ‘circular/cyclical’ views of history, let us turn to good old Ecclesiastes from the Hebrew Bible, from 2400 or so years ago.

I invite you to join me in dramatically reading outload, together, the grand poetic words on the back of our OOS, the top half, from Ecclesiastes Chapter 1, proclaiming that History is flat and unchanging. I’ll read the first verse and then you join in.

Ecclesiastes 1:1-10:

The words of the Teacher the son of David, king in Jerusalem. 

Vanity of vanities, says the Teacher, vanity of vanities! All is vanity.

What do people gain from all the toil at which they toil under the sun?

A generation goes, and a generation comes, but the earth remains forever.

The sun rises and the sun goes down, and hurries to the place where it rises.

The wind blows to the south, and goes around to the north; round and round goes the wind, and on its circuits the wind returns.

All streams run to the sea, but the sea is not full; to the place where the streams flow, there they continue to flow….   

What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done; there is nothing new under the sun.

Is there a thing of which it is said, “See, this is new”?  It has already been, in the ages before us. 

Hmm!    Nothing new under the sun, what has been done is what will be done.     History does not improve or get worse. It is flat as a pancake.    But this means there is no hope for improving things:

 “What do mortals get from all the toil and strain with which they toil under the sun? For all their days are full of pain and their work is a vexation; even at night their minds do not rest. This also is vanity.”       

And even the rare person with Ecclesiastes’ wealth and education has little hope: “I applied my mind to know wisdom and to know madness and folly. I perceived that this also is a chasing after wind.”

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June 30, 2024

Upwellings

© Linda Ankrah-Dove

As if in unchanging tidal currents solitude brings me
me quiet soothings in my peaceful home.
My body floats, my mind calms, spacious
with the lulling cycles of the once-steady seasons.

I think of our mammal cousins—whales
slow-swinging easy with the ceaseless ocean rhythms,
rising to breathe the essential air,
blowing rainbow spouts across the sloping waves.

But in these frenetic times, the climate calendar’s constant clangings
trigger me. And I feel just how our mammal cousins startle
when oil-rigs and mining drills roil their waters
and sonar blasts bruise their brains.

I have choice. In my peaceful home, I choose to stay away from clamor.
But the whales? The vast tankers of the world crowd them out,
contaminate their only home—China’s chicken, oil from the Gulf,
Thai shrimp, Brazilian steel, fashion jeans from Bangladesh.

Our own rigs and tankers ply polluting particulates and poisons
from port to port. The whales choke on metal caps,
starve on krill stuffed with microscopic specks of glass and plastic,
suffocate in a soupy mercurial and nitrogenic air.

It’s as if the oceans’ hidden hollows are hoarding for the apocalypse—
Plastic cups, plastic knives and forks, cigarettes, beer bottles,
baked-bean cans, burger wrappers, fishing nets, and, for the end of days,
aspirins, antacids, stool softeners and anesthetizing opioids.

For my peaceful home, for my spacious days, for the lulling of my mind
as if on gentle ocean waves—for all that grace—I am grateful.
But I so weep for our big, imperiled cousins and I so struggle how
to do to them no more harm in my living ways.

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June 16, 2024

HUU Minute with Judith Dreyer

I am preparing a talk for LLI as part of a class offered by the Master Gardeners. I have been researching the “flip side of invasives” for several reasons…to flip the narrative from war on specific plants to what they are trying to tell us and, more importantly, what they are doing for us. As you can imagine, I’m going “out on a limb” here. (pun intended)

I am looking at specific troublesome species. Guess what? As Merle calls our little woodland area The UU Arboretum, many so-called invasives live here.

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By Rev. Janet Onnie
May 12, 2024

            Among other events on the May calendar is Mother’s Day.  This holiday is celebrated in the U.S. and in several other countries around the world today.  This is a day when many of my colleagues flee their pulpits.  To address the complexity of the individual experiences with their birth mother – or lack thereof – regardless of nationality — is to guarantee push-back from almost everyone.  It also ignores the men who have nurtured children and supported women’s efforts in their endeavors.  The seed of Mother’s Day is about much more than the individual women who gave birth to each of us.  It began with the recognition that war was a male-generated prerogative and that women, whose sons were sent off to be killed or maimed in these wars, had little to say about the matter. 

In 1907 Julia Ward Howe wrote, “Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience. We women of one country will be too tender of those of another country to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.”  She concludes her Mother’s Day for Peace proclamation with “In the name of womanhood and of humanity, I earnestly ask that a general congress of women without limit of nationality may be appointed and held at some place deemed most convenient and at the earliest period consistent with its objects, to promote the alliance of the different nationalities, the amicable settlement of international questions, the great and general interests of peace.”

            Here we are 117 years later.  How is this call for plurality of voices to promote peace working out for the women of the world?  The women in Gaza?  The women in Israel?  The women in Ukraine? Even the women of America, whose bodies are being forced to produce “[children] to be trained to injure other [children].” 

Read more: PLURALITY and the IOWA SISTERHOOD

            These are not good times for women or, frankly, anyone who has a mind and spirit to nurture young ones into a yearning for peace.  But there are times and places, when women DID have the power to promote the great and general interests of peace.  One such time was in the turn of the twentieth century on the great plains of the United States.  This morning we’ll turn to our Unitarian Universalist history and the story of the Iowa Sisterhood.

About the same time Julia Ward Howe and Ann Jarvis were campaigning to make a Mother’s Day of Peace a national holiday, a group of women were preoccupied with birthing and nurturing Midwestern churches. We don’t hear much about these women of the 1880s and 90s because it was not so long ago that our only accounts of recent Unitarian and Universalist church histories were preoccupied with the male personnel and their perspective.  But revisionist scholarship has established that these women – the ministers’ wives, missionaries, deaconesses, and all-round lay workers – were actually doing what ministers did without the recognition or the salary.  These efforts are reported in the book, Prophetic Sisterhood, by Cynthia Grant Tucker. 

The women I’m about to sketch out for you did achieve the title and office of minister.  Some of the first women ordained in the United States in the mid-1800s were Universalist or Unitarian.  These women allied themselves with the radical wing of the liberal religion called rational Christians or liberal Christians rather than Unitarians.  Why?  Because they charged that the self-described ‘liberals’ who clung to the old patriarchal concepts of deity and excluded women from leadership roles were misrepresenting themselves. 

These women, and those who shared their thought, were the precursors to Humanist thinking.  Humanism, with all it’s implications for pluralism, was not in the ascent in the Unitarian world in the turn of the 20^th century.  Few women were allowed to serve in full-time ministries, and those who did serve were vulnerable, isolated, and lonely.  Author Cynthia Grant Tucker put it this way: “However unorthodox in their theology and committed to other reforms, the liberal religionists were as a rule quite reluctant to alter the sexes’ assigned roles, and this was especially true when it came to the ministry.  The number of women who had the interest and nerve to take on the opposition and prove themselves in pastorates was a minuscule cluster that seemed like a great gathering only to the women themselves when their hopes got the better of them.”  When their hopes got the better of them.  Remember that phrase.

(slide 1) Despite the lack of encouragement, in the 1880s and 90s twenty or so extraordinary women claimed their role as ordained minister and banded together to serve churches throughout the Great Plains.  Life was hard in the Plains states.  There was not much glory to be earned by bringing liberal religion to the settlers of the area, many of whom immigrated from Catholic Germany and Ireland and Lutheran Scandinavia.  The few male ministers who ventured out to the Plains quickly gave it up.    

Thus, ministry in the Plains was scarcely recognized in the Eastern seminaries and religious hierarchy.  This meant they were also remote from that hierarchy’s rules and control. It was a place where women were accepted for their willingness to step in and serve, for their tenacity in the face of hardship, and for their ministry.  As an aside, this reminds me of my experiences of ministry in the Southern United States generally and Florida particularly.  There’s a lot to be said for being out of the orbit of the mothership.

Isolation aside, recent scholarship suggests that one reason for the success of the Iowa Sisterhood was the non-academic, pastoral approach these women brought to their churches. They were committed to a ministry that went beyond once-a-week, exegetically-perfected pulpit appearances.  Instead, the women ministers devoted themselves to raising church families all during the week, manifesting the popular metaphor of ‘church home.’ In other words, unlike their brother clergy, they walked the talk.  Their sermons and worship services, Sunday School programs, and church socials enunciated the ideas and practical needs of family and home. So did the down-to-earth architecture, utilitarian furnishings, and domestic use of interior space in the church buildings they designed. 

The Sisterhood’s androgynous blend of business management, sound preaching, and maternal caretaking met the distinctive demands of those who broke with the orthodox church in the West.  Not only did frontier parishioners face the problems of poverty, sickness, and climate, but they were regarded as heretics of the worst kind by their orthodox neighbors.  Nontrinitarians were ostracized and persecuted; they were made the object of scorn at public revivals and had their businesses boycotted.   

What the settlers longed for were not academic orators but sympathetic ministers with an optimistic faith.  They wanted ministers to enfold them in right, supportive communities and lighten their everyday load.  Though the women clergy were barred from attending the Unitarians’ Harvard, this very exclusion helped educate them as no Eastern school could have.  They learned about what it meant to be a minority of outsiders on the frontier and not the established religious group in New England.  They knew and addressed the need for their churches to serve as rural outposts of rationality and human warmth that could offer protection, comfort, and spiritual nourishment.  It was filling that need – not the law of supply and demand – that explained their enormous success in developing strong congregational life, impressive membership growth and financial prosperity.

Who were the members in these early midwestern congregations? In researching this chapter of our history I became was curious about those congregants who had sought spiritual lives outside the accepted orthodoxy brought by the immigrants.  I did a deep dive into the U.S. Census from 1880, looking at population data for each state or territory where these women ministered.  Not surprisingly the aggregate of “Negroes, Chinese, Japanese, and Indians” was less than one percent of the total population.  Less than one percent.  Now, in 2024 the needle has scarcely moved.  Identified ethnic members in those same – albeit re-worded – categories in our UU congregations is about one and a half percent of the total membership.  I leave you to contemplate the implication of these numbers for our aspirations for Pluralism.

While you’re doing that I want to emphasize the role of men – specifically one man – in establishing women in ministry in the Midwest.  Jenkin Lloyd Jones, a pioneering Unitarian minister, missionary, educator, and journalist, was a staunch ally of the Iowa Sisterhood.  He expanded the built up much of the structure of the Western Unitarian Conference.  At the turn of the 20^th century there was tension between the churches of the Western Unitarian Conference (WUC) and the conservative New England leaders of the American Unitarian Association (AUA).  The AUA didn’t want their missionary money to fund radical ministers – that would be the women ministers — and churches in the West.  At the 1872 meeting of the WUC, Jones proposed that “It would be much better for the West if the Association dropped [sending money] entirely and we were obliged to raise our missionary funds ourselves!” Three years later he got his wish. 

It was a happy day for the Sisterhood when Jones took the Western Unitarian Conference helm.  In his weekly Unity Jones celebrated the efforts that women were making in pulpits and parish service, declaring that they were the strength of the Western movement, “quite as much if not more than the men.”  When the century came to a close, there was scarcely a liberal pulpit in Iowa and the contiguous states that had not at some time had a woman conducting its services. Any liberal brother who so much as hedged on the issue was taking the risk of putting his reputation and contract in jeopardy.

            There are 22 of these women named in Tucker’s book, The Prophetic Sisterhood. Rather than naming all of them I want to give you an example of women who birthed the idea of bringing their version of Unitarianism and Universalism to the Plains settlers and nurtured communities into vibrant outposts of free religion under physical conditions that are unimaginable today.  As we recognize them pay attention to the number of them who were active in the women’s suffrage movement. Let us see the faces of some of these women. And one man who supported them.

(Slide 2) Florence Buck  co-pastored churches with Marion Murdock and served as associate secretary of religious education for the AUA.Because of the crusade for suffrage Buck and her female colleagues had tenuous and often tense relationships with those at denominational headquarters in Boston.

(slide 3) Mary Augusta Safford was the driving force behind the network of women who dominated the liberal ministry on the frontier in the late 19^th century.  She pastored churches in three cities and organized seven more, which were self-supporting so as to be independent of Eastern patronage. 

(slide 4) Eliza Tupper Wilkes was a strong mentor for Mary Safford.  With the support of her husband she spent forty years in the upper Great Plans starting new churches that opened positions for women. Wilkes was honorary vice president of the National Woman Suffrage Association, representing South Dakota, in 1884.

(slide 5) Helen Grace Putnam spent her early adult hood as a music teacher and editor before she decided in middle age to enter the Unitarian ministry.  In 1890 Putnam launched her mission in Jamestown, North Dakota and local lore has it that she played piano in the saloon in exchange for the use of an upstairs hall for Sunday services. During this period she also organized a congregation in Detroit Lakes, Minnesota, over 140 miles away.

(slide 6) Celia Parker Woolley was one of the “super six” – the inner circle of women ministers on the frontier.  She served parishes in and around Chicago but, unwilling to compromise what she believed, she left her church work after four years and in 1904 forged a new ministry – a neighborhood house called the Frederick Douglass Center — to promote better race relations and serve the disadvantaged.  In 1906, she co-founded the Frederick Douglass Woman’s Club, one of the few interracial women’s clubs in Chicago.

(slide 7) Fannie Barrier Williams was an African American teacher, social activist, clubwoman, lecturer, and journalist who worked for social justice, civil liberties, education, and employment opportunities, especially for black women. With Celia Woolley she was active in the development of the Frederick Douglass Center in Chicago. She was part of the group that started the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (the NAACP), along with Frederick Douglass, Ida Wells Barnett, Frances Watkins Harper, and W.E.B. DuBois.

(slide 8) In appreciation for Jenkins Lloyd Jones many of churches founded by the women of the Iowa Sisterhood were named “All Souls” or “Unity”. 

(slide 9) But despite the grassroots Western success of these women and their churches it did not translate into wider denominational acceptance. The women were seen as an embarrassment among the clergy back in Boston. By the turn of the 20th century, society in general experienced a reassertion of male authority. Unitarianism’s leaders began a concerted return to a more manly ministry to revitalize the denomination. The move of rural populations to the cities further undermined the Sisterhood’s efforts and congregations.  Most of the women ministers were rushed into retirement. Others left to pursue work in peace, suffrage, and social work movements. Yet they remained vocal to the end about the rights of women and the place of church in society.  

The Iowa Sisterhood let their hopes get the better of them.  Although it was not a large movement, in its time and place it was a shining vision of women called to minister and men called to support their work.  And it empowered women to claim their right to an equal place in the social, cultural and economic life of the United States. Now, almost 250 years later, over fifty percent of Unitarian Universalist pulpits are filled by women, some of whom identify as lesbian or transgender or ‘other’.  The leadership of the UUA identifies as female.  We, as an association, have made significant strides in diversifying the gender balance serving our congregations. 

I want to be clear that my intent today is not to denigrate the role of women as mothers.  Instead, I’d like us to consider expanding our definition of mothering to include all genders who birth an idea and nurture it into being for the betterment of humankind. As Unitarian, Julia Ward Howe, observed: “It was hardly surprising that fighting for suffrage felt like a sacred duty when one’s religion was based on the same democratic beliefs as one’s claim to the full rights of citizenship.” The same might be said that the fight for a world in which a plurality of voices is the norm.  We Unitarian Universalists continue to struggle to implement our aspiration of pluralism. As in the past, our congregation members and leaders continue to be predominantly Caucasian.  Nevertheless, the explicit inclusion of Pluralism in the proposed Article 2 of our Association’s bylaws, indicates that, like the Iowa Sisterhood, we continue to let our hopes get the better of us.  Propelled and sustained by these hopes we will someday move toward a more perfect union, in our relationships, in our communities, and in our world.  May it be so. Amen.