August 28, 2016
Valerie Luna Serrels

INTRODUCTION

Perhaps like many of you this week, I’ve been riveted by stories of the alliance of various indigenous tribes coming together to oppose the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline, a $3.7 billion project which will run through sacred ancestral land in the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in North Dakota. Seeing photos and video of 60 different native American tribes standing together in solidarity on the banks of the Cannonball River gives me hope, but it also brings me back to another time in the not-so-distant past when white colonial powers first expropriated land and destroyed an entire civilization for our own use and profit. Not much has changed in our imperialistic mindsets, pointing to the hard truth that we seem to have a knack for not learning from our past sins and failures. The greed and subjugation that defined our nation’s founding remains unchanged generation after generation, showing up in different scenarios and contexts, but repeating the same pattern of disconnection.

Of course, this knack for not learning from our history is not limited to the United States, but seems to be a universal theme. Throughout human history, underneath this unchanging orientation toward imperialism and domination is a system of economics, based on a philosophy of mind that values profit and advancement for the few over relationship and the common good for all. And at the heart of this system are human beings who have become so disconnected within, from one another, and from the Earth, that we now face cataclysmic unintended consequences.

CALL TO JOURNEY:

This morning I’d like to talk about this connection between the state of our world right now, the greed that drives the injustice of our dominant systems, and our unexamined, unintegrated psyches. Perhaps we’ll get a glimpse into why our patterns of greed and domination seem to be stuck on repeat. And maybe we’ll see a way to liberate ourselves from the demands of these old patterns. Looking at these connections requires us to take a journey. Not to a foreign land, not with a passport, but with courage and a roadmap to our own psyche, to integrate what Depth Psychology founder, Carl Jung described as our Shadow. This path is not linear, but has many windy turns, ups and downs. It’s actually more of a descent, to the underneath of the soul. It is a journey at the core of our faith and at the core of being fully human, fully alive, fully connected with God and all things. It is the path of individuation – this quest for wholeness.

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Church and State HUU service 7.17.’16 –

Robin McNallie: Intro of Ben Fordney

When Ben Fordney was alive, he on a number of occasions would introduce me as a guest speaker in the history classes he was teaching at Blue Ridge Community College and JMU’s Lifelong Learning Institute. So I now, with some real sadness, get briefly to do the same for him. Before his first retirement, Ben had a distinguished career in the foreign service, including a posting to South Vietnam in the ‘60s during the war there. No career could have suited him better, for he was, I can sincerely say, one of the most gracious, reasonable, and civilized men I have known in my long life. After that, Ben came to Harrisonburg and earned a master’s degree in American history from JMU. He was a leader in the local Democratic Party, serving at once time as chair of the city Dems. Besides himself running for political office, he helped campaign for other candidates. He unflaggingly promoted liberal causes, most especially tighter gun legislation. This morning’s presentation, “Church and State,” includes an abridged version of a talk that Ben gave to the local interfaith association some years ago which Chris and I attended. We thought then that it would be good to have him do a Sunday service here addressing the same issue, and Ben sent us a copy of his lecture. Somehow that service never quite materialized. Although Ben is not here to read his words, I believe the wit and reasonableness of the living man are still present.

Reading of Ben Fordney’s paper:

RELIGION OF THE FOUNDING FATHERS
Ben F. Fordney
Two questions come to mind: What were the religious beliefs of the Founders, and perhaps more importantly, what kind of nation did they want to create: a Christian America or a secular nation? One common thesis that some historians advance is that they were Deists who wanted a secular state. They embraced a radical Enlightenment philosophy that considered religion only in terms of religious freedom Others believe the Founders were evangelical biblical literalists Christians who created a Christian nation. Out of this comes the belief of American exceptionalism – the idea that America has a divine mission- a City Upon a Hill, as governor John Winthrop said at the time of the Puritans.
When you delve into this question and read the extensive historical treatment of the faiths of the Founders, you begin to understand that there are no simple answers to these questions. Most of the Founders were complicated men and it is impossible, in the case of most of them, to put them into definite categories.
Most historians but certainly not all, do not believe that most of the Founders accepted all the tenets of Christianity, in fact some scorned and mocked it. Few, however, were outright deists, in other words, believing in a clockmaker God who allowed the world to run by natural forces. [Read more…]

On July 3, 2016 Ray Hertzler, Beryl Lawson, Linda Dove, and Amy Thompson presented “Perspectives on Evolution.”

Linda A. Dove

In 2006, in his last book, Evening Thoughts, Wendell Berry, cultural historian and eco-theologian, was concerned about our human devastation of Planet Earth through our aggressive commercial industrial Western culture. As a Catholic monk, he argued that this destructive behavior was sanctioned and encouraged by Christianity. (As you know, most UUs were Christian for many centuries until recently, and some still are).

Berry made these points:

• The Christian Church rejected the earlier feminine Earth-dwelling deities and made God into a patriarchal deity above and separate from the natural world. The result was that we humans withdrew our previous reverence for the sacred in nature and, having created God in our own image, we saw ourselves as spiritual and separate from nature which we viewed as merely material.
• Secondly, the Christian story of redemption encouraged us to see ourselves as saved and so separate from and transcendent over nature. Thus we could treat the natural world as a resource to be exploited for selfish human benefit.
• Third, since the Cartesian division of the world into mind and matter, we have claimed mind for ourselves and we have “de-souled” nature, adopting a metaphor of the world as mechanistic, and mere machinery for human use.
• This in turn has led us to use technology to overwhelm and dominate nature—to undermine natural population limits, to preserve our lives and delay death, to extinguish other life-forms, and to subvert the entire chemical composition of the Planet in a way that it cannot easily remedy.
• Finally, Berry argued, the Christian theology that gave us the vision of a transcendent destiny in some heavenly other world served also to diminish our concern for other, “inferior” life-forms and our living Earth.

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By Leah Rampy, Ph.D
March 6, 2016

I’m very grateful for the opportunity to be with you today. Thank you, Joni, and to all of you for inviting me.

How was your week? Did you find yourself calm, centered, and peaceful; breathing deeply; living joyfully and fully in the present?

If you’re like many people, there were a number of times when you were distracted, worried, fearful, or anxious, times when your mind wouldn’t stop racing. Perhaps sleep was illusive and you found yourself tired and out of sorts.

There are indeed a multitude of seemingly valid reasons why we are stressed and anxious. The political scene, climate change, money, the weather, our families, our jobs, relationships – all are fodder for our busy minds. We know that stress isn’t good for our health – and we feel stressed about that!

Our conversation today invites us to imagine finding healing in nature. I’d like to explore with you what we know and what we surmise about nature as a source of healing and wholeness.

Fortunately this isn’t a new topic and we have some research to guide us. For example, a study in the 80’s showed that patients recovering from surgery healed faster, needed less medication, and had fewer post-surgery complications if they were able to look out the window at leafy trees instead of a brick wall. [i]

Last year, researchers from the U of Chicago surveyed over 30,000 people in Toronto and found that residents reported feeling better and having fewer health problems when there were more trees on their street. [ii]

The gardeners among us were no doubt happy to hear that a strain of bacterium in the soil has been found to trigger the release of serotonin, which in turn elevates mood and decreases anxiety in lung cancer patients – and in mice. Isn’t it great to have another excuse to spend time in our gardens?[iii]

In March of 2011 a new study published in the New England Journal of Medicine reported that children who grow up on traditional farms are 30-50% less likely than other children to develop asthma.[iv]

The very soil beneath our feet makes wonderful contributions to our health! In a teaspoon of that soil, there are more microbes than there are people on earth. This amazing underground community cycles nutrients and water to plants, connects plants allowing them to strengthen their natural defenses against pests and ultimately contribute to our health through the food we eat.[v] And I might add, soils are the largest terrestrial carbon sink on the planet.[vi]

So we’ve noted ways that nature may help us to heal from surgery, to elevate our mood, help to prevent certain illnesses, and contribute to our overall health. I find this fascinating and wonderful. And yet I wonder: Is there more?

I was sad one day and went for a walk;
I sat in a field.
A rabbit noticed my condition and came near.
It often does not take more than that to help at times —
to just be close to creatures who are so full of knowing,
so full of love that they don’t — chat,
they just gaze with their marvelous understanding.[vii]
–St. John of the Cross – Spanish mystic lived in 1500’s

I’ve worked for and led programs and pilgrimages with Shalem Institute for many years. Shalem is an ecumenical organization started over 40 years to reclaim the Christian contemplative tradition, enriched by insights from Eastern religions. Living contemplatively: more fully present and alive to each sacred moment. Being fully awake requires that both the mind and the heart are open and available to what is in this moment. The ancient mystics sometimes referred to this as “mind in heart.”

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December 13, 2015
by Rev. Kirk Ballin

READINGS

RESPONSIVE READING # 651 “The Body Is Humankind (7 Billion)” Norman Cousins

TO A COMMON PROSTITUTE Walt Whitman

Be composed–be at ease with me–I am Walt Whitman, liberal and
lusty as Nature,
Not till the sun excludes you do I exclude you,
Not till the waters refuse to glisten for you and the leaves to
rustle for you, do my words refuse to glisten and rustle for you.
My girl I appoint with you an appointment, and I charge you that you
make preparation to be worthy to meet me,
And I charge you that you be patient and perfect till I come.
Till then I salute you with a significant look that you do not forget me

BETTER TO LIGHT CANDLES Merle Shain

It is better to light candles
than to curse the darkness.
It is better to plant seeds
than to accuse the earth.
The world needs all of our power
and love and energy,
and each of us has something that we can give.
The trick is to find it and use it,
to find it and give it away.
So there will always be more.
We can be lights for each other,
and through each other’s illumination
we will see the way.
Each of us is a seed,
a silent promise,
and it is always spring.

SERMON: POWER AND CONSCIENCE

The Inherent Worth and Dignity of Every Person…. 7 Billion People…. A World Community with Peace Liberty and Justice for All….. That is our Challenge… Our Means is The Right of Conscience and the Use of the Democratic Process….

The human species is the ONLY, the ONLY species that has the power to destroy EVERY form of life on this planet. Maybe not each of us individually could pull this off, but the means exist for someone or someones to destroy everything from the smallest microbe to every animal, plant, and human on the planet. What an absolutely remarkable Power we have as a species! There is no such threat of such power against us as a species from any other species – except, perhaps, from ourselves.

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October 4^th, 2015 by Joni Grady

Welcome to another step in my attempt to make sense out of an increasingly irrational world. When I picked the title, Reality Check, I had a rather different talk envisioned, one dealing only with the painful bifurcation of my life and the lives of everyone involved to any extent with that most dreadful task, saving the only livable planet we seem to have. In one part of my life, the dreaming world, we try to remember to vacuum the rugs and take out the trash, put money into Sophie’s college savings and reserve a beach house for Christmas. In this world, which seems so familiar, so pleasant, a bad problem is not finding the type of tea I like at Martin’s or getting stuck at too many red lights. A serious issue means the AC has gone out and the mattress needs replacing. And a tragedy would of course be sickness or death amongst family or friends. In this world, mainstream media news means killings, wars, politicians and celebrities. Sometimes on the front page or at the top of the hour but usually hidden on the inside or never heard or shown at all are floods, heat waves, droughts, wildfires, and storms. These, thank goodness, are simply “acts of God” that come and go randomly around the world but, happily, rarely in the Peaceful Valley. (Or at least that’s what I thought until Tuesday when the dreaming world intersected the waking world and an unusual (new normal?) storm dropped 4 inches of rain and a lot of it ended up in my basement.) Both worlds were interrupted by an actual Reality check!!

Normally, in the other, equally real, weirding-climate, waking world that I also live in 24/7, the minor day-to-day issues revolve around making sure there are enough materials for tabling at the Farmers Market, getting out the word for various events and keeping the CAAV facebook page up-to-date. (CAAV, for those new to the area, is the Climate Action Alliance of the Valley.) The more complicated ones involve designing a display to draw people in at the International Festival when they really just want to eat and have fun, not be bothered by inconvenient truth, and planning next month’s educational forum (which is, in case you’re interested, the inside story on fighting western forest fires, from training to living in camp to the actual hard and very dirty work of controlling a wildfire, brought to us by Sophie’s dad Alan Williams.) And the news I read is all climate, all the time: some good, some bad, some optimistic, some terrifying.

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September 27, 2015
by J. Barkley Rosser, Jr.

“Thou shalt have no other gods before me.

“Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.”

“Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the LORD thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me.”

Holy Bible, King James Version, Exodus 20: 3-5 (First three of the Ten Commandments)

“God does not forgive idolatry, but He forgives lesser offenses for whomever He wills. Anyone who sets up idols beside God, has forged a horrendous offense.”

Sacred Qur’an, Surah 4, Verse 48

(List of objects identified as being possible idols in different parts of the Qur’an include 1. calf, statues 2. other gods 3. Jesus 4. Jinns 5. children 6. humans 7 intercessors 8. Satan 9. property 10. dead prophets, messengers, saints 11. God’s servants 12. ego 13. religious sources other than God’s words 14. religious leaders and scholars 15. creating sects 16. dividing believers)

“Verily the most grievously tormented people amongs the denizens of Hell on the Day of Resurrection would the painters of pictures.”

Sahih Muslim (Hadith, alleged quotations of Prophet Muhammed), vol. 3, no. 5271, (p. 1161), on authority of Abu Mu’awiya.

Note that nowhere in either the Qur’an or the Hadith is making an image of the Prophet Muhammed specifically forbidden, and in the Qur’an the Prophet never called for the punishment of painters.

So today we have headlines about radical Islamists engaging in attacks and destruction of objects based on the ban on idolatry. In January, 12 people were killed at the offices of the French satirical magazine, Charlie Hebdo by people protesting alleged disrespectful cartoons of the Prophet Muhammed. Last month (August) saw the destruction of the nearly 2,000 year old Temple of Bel at Palmyra, Syria, by members of Da’esh, ISIS/ISIL/Islamic State. They also killed 83 former Director of Antiquities there, Khalid al-Assad, who refused to reveal to them locations of hidden objects on the site. In March 2000, the Taliban in Afghanistan destroyed the world’s two largest statues of the Buddha at Bamiyan, which had been made in the 6^th century.

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