February 4, 2024
By Rev. Kirk Ballin

READINGS FOR LOVE AND ONLY LOVE

1.” Soberingly, despite all our advances in technology and material resources, we are not much more advanced in the art of delivering emotionally healthy childhoods than generations before us. The number of breakdowns, inauthentic lives, and broken souls shows no marked signs of decline… We are failing to offer one another tolerable childhoods not because we are sinful or indifferent, but because we still have so far to go before we know how to master that improbably complicated subject: Love… Love is a skill not an emotion…” – 18 different authors, “The School of Life: An Emotional Education”

2. “Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word “love” here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace – not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.” – James Baldwin, “The Fire Next Time”

3. “Understanding someone’s suffering is the best gift you can give another person. Understanding is love’s other name. If you don’t understand, you can’t love ^“. Thich Nhat Hanh – “True Love”

4. Although some two hundred kinds of viruses are known to infect, sicken, or kill us, as the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 has most recently hammered home, that’s only one part of the picture. Viruses also keep us alive.

“Despite the devastating effects of viral diseases, the viruses that count most in our lives are crucial not in disease but in health and in all aspects of life,” says Eugene Koonin, an expert on the genetics of evolution and viruses at the National Institutes of Health’s National Center for Biotechnology Information. – The Magazine, Harvard Medicine

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January 7, 2024

Rekindling the Light by Merle Wenger

I would like to open this sharing part of the service with a message provided by our UUA President Sofia Betancourt in a sermon we might air at a later date.  The sermon focuses on the seeds we are planting for new year and the expectations we have for their fruit.

(I paraphrase)During Covid we weaved our faith into community care. We built magical bridges and those bridges bring us into the present but require tending. When times are difficult it takes beauty and magic from unexpected places to hold us together–beauty and science and magic can weave together a path that leads us into hope–keep us connected when stress seems to pull us apart .  What is it that we most long to focus our energy toward for 2024.  What are you most proud of from 2023, what seeds are most precious from the last year in this congregation, that we can use as seeds for the new year?  She believes Unitarian Universalists are most ready even when ideologies of separation and hatred are lauded around the nation, even when the bridge of connection threatens to fall.  There is a power and hopefulness as each of us set our power and intentions for the New Year, without waiting for sunshine or better weather to do the work of new growth.

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November 19, 2023
by Linda Dove, Chris Edwards, Robin McNallie, and David Lane

Apple Communion

Beryl’s apples fall
for Kroger boxes to enclose and keep
till Sunday service-goers take and eat
as many as they will.

Through blue September
days they fall, through nights that darken, lengthen,
end all summer.  They fill one season, yes.  But 
empty first another.

Fall apples then, the windfall sign that times
and marks a season’s end -- that speak
their sermons not in stone, come down
all flesh and skin and stem as if uncursed

from ancient Eden.  Take and eat.
But first in every fallen thing, every
gift time takes and gives, like these old emblems
of a fallen world, see good.

David Lane 

Autumn, Sky and Earth

Above me this November day, I track
A thin contrail, stretched across the sky.
Like a clothesline it seems against the span of blue,
The sight so warmly domestic that the ground I tread
Becomes, itself, suddenly raw and derelict—
Fallen leaves, some strewn and curled, like conch shells,
Others plastered flat, as if tattooed
Into the roadway under my feet,
And scarecrow trees, a leaf or two still on them
Like dangling gloves, beckoning the complaining
Crows grokking somewhere by now
Beyond the circle of workmen, who are
Staring down a backhoe-dug trench, they are
About to fill in with a load of gravel.
The digger clown in Hamlet, if present now,
Would no doubt in dark drollery have
A punning word for that trench’s filler:
‘Grave-All.’

Robin McNallie

Emily Dickinson was a private poet of the romantic era and not appreciated until her many-back-of-the-envelope poems were discovered and published after her death. Many of her poems were about the natural world she watched from her window and about life’s big transitions such as birth, loss, mortality and eternity.

# XLV

As imperceptibly as grief
The summer lapsed away.—
Too imperceptible, at last,
Too seem like perfidy.

A quietness distilled
As twilight long begun,
Or Nature. spending with herself
Sequestered afternoon.

The dusk drew earlier in,
The morning foreign shone,—
A courteous, yet harrowing grace,
As guest who would be gone.

And thus, without a wing,
Or service of a keel,
Our summer made her light escape
Into the beautiful.

Emily Dickinson. The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson.

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November 5, 2023
©Rev. Janet Onnie

A few weeks ago the weather was unseasonably warm for the Saturday morning Staunton Farmer’s Market.  As I shouldered my way through a bumper crop of chatting adults, unleashed children, and many, many dogs, I remembered a column by Perry Bacon Jr. who was bemoaning his inability to find a religious community for himself and his daughter.  He wrote, “The Saturday farmers market in my neighborhood and a weekly happy hour of Louisville-area journalists provide some of what church once did for me: consistent gathering of people with some shared values and interests.  I’ve made new friends through both.  And there are plenty of other groups and clubs I could join.  But none of those gatherings provide singing, sermons and solidarity all at once.”

            Singing, sermons, and solidarity all at once.  This is what religious institutions provide: a framework for meaning-making, rituals marking the passage of time, creating and supporting communities, and inspiration to take prophetic action.  Through the pursuit of these four tasks, religious folks might also experience a sense of wonder, discover some new truth about themselves or the world, or even have an encounter with the divine. 

            We are living in a country where a significant portion of the population is lonely, anxious, depressed, angry, and/or frightened.  At the same time attendance our religious institutions – where comfort and belonging were traditionally found — are in freefall.  This morning I want to take a look into the impact of these times on our religious institutions and how responding with generosity will help propel us through these hinge times. 

Hinge times are periods in human history that happen every 500 years or so where everything social, economic, political, cultural, religious – you name it – is shaken to the foundations and comes out reconfigured.  Religious institutions are not exempt.  For example: 500 years ago the Great Reformation gave birth to the Protestant church and served to revitalize the Roman Catholic Church as well.  Now, 500 years later, social unrest in the 1960s ushered in the end of the Christian era in the Western world.  In the same way that the Great Reformation began with Dr. Martin Luther in 1517, we find ourselves living in a time of upheaval. Hinge times are not good news for hind bound institutions, but they didn’t then – nor do they now – negate the need for communities of inspired meaning-makers where one could bring one’s whole self without fear of censure. This deeply human need to belong to something larger than oneself is not going away any time soon.

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What does it mean to be truly human and fully alive in the twenty-first century?

by Tom Hook
August 20, 2023

We shall be known by the company we keep

by the ones who circle round to tend these fires.

It is time now, and what a time to be alive.

In this Great Turning we shall learn to lead in love.

These words from MaMuse might seem conflicting to the times we are living in. With the immense knowledge humankind possesses at present, and the myriad of crises the global community faces today we must ask ourselves:

What does it mean to be truly human and fully alive in the twenty-first century?

As I begin, I would like to say as a Catholic that I am a follower of Jesus and the Cosmic or Universal Christ which means to say that I believe Love will eventually “win the day”, both on our planet and the entire Universe. That is my hope and that is my prayer.

I would like to examine the question of being truly human and fully alive with the following voices:

• Pierre Teilhard de Chardin – Catholic Jesuit Priest and Geologist (1881 – 1955)
• Thomas Berry – Cultural Historian and Geologian (1914 – 2009)
• Diana Butler Bass – Biblical Historian, Theologian, and Author (1959 – )
• Craig Schindler J.D., Ph.D. – Dr. Schindler received his B.A. magna cum laude from Stanford University and holds a law degree from Stanford Law School and a Ph.D. in psychology and religion from the University of California at Berkeley and Graduate Theological Union. Author of The Great Turning.

You may recall I have mentioned Teilhard in some of my earlier talks.

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August 6, 2023
© Rev. Janet Onnie

          In 1971 John Lennon wrote the wildly popular song, “Imagine”.  Some of the lyrics, “Imagine there’s no heaven, No hell below us,” is core Universalist theology.”  No one is damned, all are saved.  What I find problematic, however,  is the lyric, “Imagine there’s no countries, nothing to kill or die for – and no religion too.” 

And also no religion??  The implication is that religion is the basis for all conflict and if we could just do away with religion the whole world will be at peace.  I take issue with that idea.  The impulse to look beyond oneself for truth and meaning – religion – is a basic human construct.   Religion takes the rap for a lot of human misery.  But I don’t think the religious impulse in and of itself is the problem.  Karen Armstrong’s book “Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence” informs and supports my view.  She’s written an astonishing journey from prehistoric times to the present.  It’s not an easy read, but Armstrong had an idea there was something more to the accepted view of religion as the cause of violence.  She believed the idea had merit before she saw the truth of it.  Her belief drove her to do research into the subject which resulted in a dense 528-page book that makes the compelling argument that it is the struggle for power, not religion, that is the source of violence. 

I don’t intend to give a book report this morning or to argue with John Lennon.  Instead what I’d like us to consider that believing may be a prerequisite to seeing.  Belief in a thing does not always depend on seeing – on visual perception.  In fact, the ability to perceive a thing may hinge on belief – belief in the possibility that the thing can exist.  We see this in all fields of human endeavor: in literature, in art, in science and engineering, in technology, and in our own lives and relationships.

Let me give you a concrete example.  My beloved is red-green color blind.  It’s a trait common in the male of the human species.  Nelson absolutely cannot differentiate between the colors red and green.  He can only see a red bird in a green tree when I point out that there’s a male cardinal in that tree.  Or a red flower on that bush.  Or a red anything against a green background.  He can only distinguish the colors as separate when someone he trusts points it out to him; when he BELIEVES there’s something to see.  Furthermore, when he thinks that it’s important to try to see it in its entirety, if only to please me.

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By Andy Schmookler
July 16, 2023

Who are we human beings by nature? Why has our story been such a troubled one? What do we need to do to achieve the kind of world we want?

As a civilization, we have not had adequate answers to those questions. And an important part of the reason for that is this: We have not been seeing ourselves in the perspective that shows us some fundamental truths about the story of our species.

For millennia, humankind developed its answers without good knowledge of how we came to be, or of how we were related to the living world around us. It’s only for a handful of generations that people have known

• that time did not begin mere thousands of years ago,
• that we humans emerged out of the whole 3.5 billion year history of Life-on-Earth,
• that the great majority of the history of our species preceded the rise of civilization.

Such knowledge – such an Evolutionary Perspective — has come to us too recently, apparently, for our civilization to trace all the profound implications of that understanding for answering those basic questions about “The Human Story.”

Our present understanding suffers from both

• traditional belief systems that were developed when people had no idea of how the civilized world they saw around them related to the whole story of Life-on-Earth, and thus did not see the profound implications of the evolutionarily unprecedented step of a creature taking the step homo sapiens took onto the path of civilization;
• the incompleteness of the newer secular worldview that, while recognizing the basic insight of the Darwinian idea, has not drawn all the important conclusions that Evolutionary Perspective should lead us to.

The Evolutionary Perspective can correct some important inadequacies in both the pre-Darwinian traditional belief systems and in the recently developed secular worldview that includes at least the fact of biological evolution.

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