December 2, 2012
by Keo Cavalcanti

Taoism has been my practice for almost 25 years, almost half of my life. The centerpiece of this practice is a little book, the Tao Te Ching, written some 2,500 years ago (for those interested in a good translation, I recommend the edition translated by Gia-Fu Feng and Jane English, published by Vintage Books). There are other Taoist writings that are part of the Chinese collection of philosophical classics, but the Tao Te Ching is central. NOTE: The link will take you to an online version of the translation.

In the novel Roderick Hudson writer Henry James proposes an interesting definition of happiness: “True happiness… consists in getting out of one’s self. But the point is not only to get out – you must stay out. And to stay out you must have some absorbing errand” (I got this quote and the title for the sermon from Janna Malamud’s book, An Absorbing Errand, Counterpoint Books, 2012).

The thought of finding happiness through a distraction is too delicious to ignore. So, this Sunday morning I’m inviting you to consider its possibilities. I am hoping that you will be intrigued with the notion of an absorbing errand too. In his novel Henry James seems to be saying that perhaps the only way we can be saved from our intense self-absorption, from our relentless preoccupation with ourselves, is to find a distraction; a distraction that shifts our focus of attention…

But James is also saying something else. He is saying that this is no simple, small errand. This errand must be absorbing. It must be entrancing, captivating. It must be something that makes us forget all other pressing matters. It must be something that keeps us occupied, immersed and engrossed in both its practice and logic.

An Absorbing Errand in pdf format

October 21, 2012
by Richard Wolf

Two decades ago, in the mountains of North Carolina, I worked with two Mayan day-keepers.  I learned a time-keeping system for interpreting 13 tones and 20 glyphs, counting in concurrent cycles, within constructs of larger numbered patterns. 

As with western astrology, one can look to the tone and glyph of one’s birth date for clues as to identity, orientation, or mission.  My entry count and glyph are 2 – Cimi.  This date signifies a polarized orientation (2), together with the further polarizing Cimi as “world-bridger”, also translated as “death”.

The motion or role of Cimi is equalization through polarization.  This sounds and is daunting but especially resonates with the “mission” aspect of my situated life-form.   “Division toward Unity” might be my personal motto.  But Mayan day-keeping isn’t really our topic today. I just present this to offer some background and qualification for my offering you this particular talk, initially entitled “Our Unwelcome Familiar”, which evolved into “…the same motion.”, and now into the current working title of “…to the same motion.  1725.”. 

Reverend Emma Chattin and Noel Levan, offering our past two Sunday messages, provided some fascinating threads of paradox and duality.   I thought I’d dare us to take a few more steps, if you want to go, toward a few more indefinite, apophatic dualisms:  ones like birth / death;  living / dead; us / them;  then-of-the-past / then –of-the-future.  That third one could also be seen as harmonic tension between the disguised opposites of linear time and eternity.  I invite us to consider our own traditional or emergent apophatic supports, the unique and shared ways we live beyond grief and survive through loss.

[Read more…]

October 14, 2012
by Noel Levan

Each week I sit with people who are at odds with one another, in my capacity as a mediator at the Fairfield Center downtown. I listen intently as they lambast one another, accuse one another, deride, demean, power-trip, and so much less frequently collaborate for their mutual well-being and the well-being of their children. The relationship that they once en-joyed having gone south, will never return. I see all too frequently that these individuals have a paucity of interpersonal communication skills, lack general awareness, and are living in fear; of victimization and of poverty. I see poverty of words, poverty of ideas and poverty of action, and every time, when the case is finished, when I’ve typed up the agreement that will go before a judge for ratification, I am exhausted from my effots. I’ve done my best to assist these people to make better sense of their situation, to improve their awareness of the potential for better communication and thought-full actions; in short, to care about each other. I also, more-often than not sigh, in great relief, recognizing how immensely blessed I am, in so many ways.

The mediation process is (for me) about getting to “what works”. My directive to clients is, “We’re here to create a document that will work for you and your children, for the foreseeable future.” I talk with clients about how they know that things change in their lives and whatever we come up with today may only be workable for them until such time as something changes significantly enough to warrant changing the document, so that it continues to work for them.

That’s mediation. It’s empowering people toward just solutions to difficult and ongoing, relationship-based interactions.

When I sit with them and witness all the extremes of their emotions, part of my job is to reflect it back; acknowledge and praise their participation (under less-than-ideal circumstances), validate their feelings and ensure that the other person is present to hear those feelings. I know that quite often it’s hard to hear that you’ve caused another pain, and it’s also hard to forgive and move on; particularly when there are children who (hopefully) benefit from the presence of each of their parents.

My observation in mediation and in my own relationships bring me (almost forcibly) to consider how our world “works” and/or doesn’t work.

Over the years my views have changed; who’s haven’t?

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September 23 2012
by H. B. Cavalcanti

All preaching is an exercise in metaphorical analysis. We compare things similar in some ways but dissimilar in others; hoping that in sorting out the differences we may derive some insight and wisdom for the journey.

This morning, I want to invite you look at your life as a garden. Clearly, this comparison has clear limitations – our lives are far more important than a small patch of land. But there are parallels too intriguing for us to pass up on such interesting exercise.

Think, for instance, of the seasonal nature of both lives and gardens. Think of the labor and craft that is involved in creating meaningful patterns out of sheer wild growth. Think about the transforming qualities that cultivating a plot bring into our lives; or the deep satisfaction in engaging in a fulfilling practice.

I believe that metaphorical analysis counterbalances our Western ways. As heirs of the Enlightenment, we are prone to dwell on rationality. We tend to use reason to study things. By taking them apart and deductively putting them back together we measure evidence, explain variations, find correlations in their interactions. Rationality allows us to replicate other people’s experiments, to test reality for what it is…

Obviously, this kind of rationality has served us well on a good number of fields (mine included). It has launched both industrial and informational revolutions. It has greatly improved the way we produce goods and services. It has created efficient and effective labor-saving devices for home and work. And it has organized urban life on unbelievable scale – from highway traffic to electric grids to health care to waste and water treatment.

Rationality follows a predictable pattern – it is linear, it sequences events, it tests hypotheses in a fastidious and careful way. Thus, it allows us to organize the rhythms of our everyday life in an orderly sequence that has provided us with great comfort and much progress.

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Linda A. Dove

July 28, 2012.

I was born on a Saturday. And you probably all know the ditty? Saturday’s child works hard for a living.

This morning I’m going to talk about my work and ask you to share about yours.

I owe much of who I am today to the different types of work I’ve done in my life.

After many other jobs, I was a World Bank official in international aid for 19 years. I’ll use just that job as an example of my theme.

In your OOS, there’s a brief (if simplistic) guide to the main facts about the World Bank.

Let me give you a feel for the grassroots efforts the World Bank makes in developing countries—work that doesn’t often get into the media.

And then I’ll share with you how my Bank work helped me affirm what values I wanted to live by.

I’ll tell you a bit about just one little project in Bangladesh when I was a new recruit in the Bank.

I’ve chosen a project in education since you’ve all been to school, many of you have worked in education, and some of you know firsthand the desperate conditions in very poor countries.

Like so many others, I was in the international aid field through a wish to make some difference in the world. But any naïve idea I had about having lots of personal power to do this in the short-term was quickly blown away by reality.

You all know how controversial international aid is, and that’s a whole other discussion.

Today, I want to emphasize the complexity of the path from hard work to results—

from designing a project to actually improving people’s lives.

[Read more…]

May 13, 2012

Presented by Joni Grady and Norman Lawson

The tag on our OOS says “One Journey, many paths.”  There are many kinds of journeys but we can assume that this is talking about a spiritual journey, the spiritual journey that we are all on, whether we realize it or not.

What might the nature of a spiritual journey be? What is the destination of such a journey?  It is a journey we start as soon as we can talk and perhaps before. As a child we always were asking “why”. Are we still asking “why”?  Where did we come from? Why are we here? Where is it all heading? How can I help others on their journeys?  Ultimately we all are looking for the answers to the most basic questions a human being can ask. Why with a capital W.

We each have traveled and are traveling this path in different ways.  This morning we give two of our members an opportunity to speak of their own spiritual journeys so we may better know them and perhaps take something from them to help us on our own spiritual journey.

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First Reading: #592 The Free Mind by William Ellery Channing

Second Reading Samuel Eugene Stevens, from Science and Superstition, 1914: 

“Thought—honest, free, outspoken, is the most valuable contribution intellect can make to human welfare. ..The purest pleasure and highest happiness are only the fruit of mental action exercised in the endeavor to understand the nature of things.”

Spiritual Odyssey: The inner compass and the magic church bus

By Joni Grady

I did try to be a good Methodist:  I sang in the choir, I played piano for Sunday School, I belonged to MYF and learned to play cards in our ‘den of iniquity’.  I even taught vacation Bible school one summer.  And my parents religiously attended church– on Easter and Christmas—and Wednesday night prayer meeting the year I played the organ.  But I always knew I wasn’t sincere, couldn’t buy into the Apostles Creed.  So you can imagine my relief when the Music Librarian at Rice University told me my junior year that I was probably a Unitarian, and Les and I began attending First Church in Houston.   Clearly my parents felt the same way : they started attending Emerson Unitarian Church  a few years later—even when it wasn’t a holiday– and continued as active UUs when they joined us in Clemson.

It was when my mom began digging into my father’s genealogy that I learned I was a birthright UU—not only is Unitarian founding father William Ellery Channing a distant cousin but so is Universalist preacher and theologian Hosea Ballou.  (We will quickly pass over the even more distant relationship to Cotton Mather.)  A closer relationship was uncovered to my Great-Uncle Samuel Eugene Stevens of Hartland, Vermont, self-published author of Science and Superstition from which I took my second reading. 

So my spiritual inner compass, perhaps genetically engineered by some fortuitous accident of birth, and with the help of a librarian, guided me to Unitarian-Universalism in 1961, for which I would thank God if I believed in Her.  Not that we attended church much while we were in school but some of you know how it is when you start having kids.   In 1970 I took my infant son Ross and became part of that interdependent web of life known as UU religious education, often separate from the adults but always loads more fun and serving to nourish me and my charges on a great spiritual adventure.  Where else would I have had the chance to learn that leaving a Christmas pageant bale of hay in the RE room would lead to Crayola colored mouse droppings in the yarn drawer??  Or that the ravens dangling from an old tennis racquet would bring pizza to Elijah in the desert?

I didn’t do children’s RE all the time, however, and I realize now, more than 40 years after first becoming an active UU, that the words I heard in the adult services, and the people I knew at the UU Fellowship of Clemson and have grown to know here, were gently nudging me onward as well.  How many times did I have to sing “Our world is one world,” hear “Deeds, not creeds,”  and “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world, indeed it’s the only thing that ever has,” before I realized they were speaking to me?  How long did I have to watch others going about the tasks of justice-making in ways large and small before I felt a real need to join them?  Probably for as long as it took Sophie to appear on the scene and me to realize how unpleasant climate change was going to make her life.  I suppose you could say that one thread of my journey has been my mother- and grandmother-hood, as Ross and Megan led me into Religious Education and Sophie into activism.

I am not the sort of spiritual seeker who feels the necessity to read and explore philosophy and religion on my own—though I am fascinated by the research in neurobiology, just as Uncle Sam and my parents would have been.  I’d rather read a good mystery any day.  And I am not the sort of person to go out and found a movement on my own.  For my spiritual journey I need a ‘magic church bus’ that works on UU Principles instead of the laws of physics and runs on our Sources instead of fossil fuel.  I need a ‘bus’ full of people on their own journeys willing to share their insights and experiences, their passions for social justice and good food,  people to sing “May I have this dance with you?”  with love and compassion.   Therefore I will always be grateful  to that lovely woman, Madith DeZurko,  who pointed me to the UU bus stop and said, “Get on, you’ll really enjoy the ride.”

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Norman Lawson’s spiritual Journey

I grew up in Rockville Centre on Long Island, NY and it was rural living at that time-1930.  I was into ornithology at an early age although my parents were not outdoor people.  I was shy to a distressing degree.

My first acquaintance with a really fascinating person was with the phys-ed director at Antioch College. I was his shadow for several years and was swept along in such activities as cross-country running, archery golf, gymnastics and muck running.  He was an original thinker in designing new sports activities.

When I was drafted at the beginning of World War II I was already a convinced conscientious objector and a thorough pacifist.  After a year of discussion and combat with three draft boards I was finally sent to camp in the woods for several years.  They wanted objectors out of circulation.

One interesting job I was recommended for while in camp in Northern California was three months of fire tower duty.  Good old Mad Rock Station, 144 steps up to the cabin and seven days a week attendance.  I did not get much smoke action but I did get to know Thoreau’s Walden. Thoreau was becoming more and more familiar and important to me.

Shortly after returning to New York City at the end of the war, my family bought a farm just north of the city and I got married and built a house.  The farm operation didn’t work out so I went back to college for a year and finally taught seventh grade biology for fifteen years.  There was also time to raise four kids somewhere in there.

To go back a bit in time, our parents and we three kids, age eight for me, left the Methodist Church and took up with the United Lodge of Theosophists. The philosophy of Theosophy has been my consuming religious interest since then.  The principles of Unitarian Universalism are fine and strong but on my death bed they will leave me breathless and thoughtless.  What comes after that? Is this life the end? Are all my efforts toward betterment going to be lost? Do I not have a tomorrow to look forward to and to work for?  Does my soul just dry up and float away into nothingness?

In the afterlife why not just reap what you earned and what you really deserve, mostly good with a little bit of not so good.  So there you have reincarnation and another chance for learning and improvement.  Anything else would be a waste. Come back and see if you can’t do better.  What else would you expect?

The law of Karma says that when ever you make a choice of action you are inevitably and unavoidably choosing the reaction, spitting into the wind, as it were.  These are part of one event.  The only way to talk around karma is to admit a world of utter confusion.

Add Karma and Reincarnation to your daily list of think about and you might be surprised.

By Lisa Ellison
February 5, 2012

To live is to engage in work. The body engages in constant work – the lungs filling with air, the heart pumps. Our minds engage in problem solving, learning, and decision-making. Together the body and mind take action. Life is the only job we do not apply for and the only one where termination is guaranteed after an unspecified number of years. We are not given explicit job descriptions. We may or may not know our qualifications. We may spend the whole time wondering why we are here.

I’m asking you to consider that your life is spiritual vocation –something important, something filled with purpose, something that is wonderful just as it is, in whatever shape it’s in. A vocation is a summons or strong inclination to a particular state or course of action. It comes from the Latin “vocatio,” which means summons. Spirituality from a counseling perspective is the search for meaning. It’s the journey into the self where we discover who we are, who we want to be, how we connect to others, how we make meaning, and where we find hope. For some people spirituality is tied to religion, for others it’s not. Some people say they do not have any spirituality. That is also spirituality.

Our job as spiritual sentient beings is to make meaning from our experiences. We do this all of the time whether we want to or not. It’s how we’re wired. We cannot help but do it. Things are good, bad, pleasurable, painful, worth our time or a waste of time. The question we must ask ourselves is not whether we engage in spirituality at this level, but how we do it. Do we make meaning in ways that quiet the soul, promote compassion towards ourselves and others and instill hope and resilience, or do we make meaning in ways that promote hatred, division, mistrust, and despair for these are also spiritual practices. I believe that spirituality has to have a heart/head connection. So many times I’ve heard people say I understand it intellectually, but I don’t feel it in my heart, and so things do not change. If we do not connect to that innermost part of ourselves, we cannot move forward in our lives.

The world is a mess. It’s always been that way. Most of the time I think we spend our lives trying to avoid the mess. That’s usually my first inclination. Pain, struggle, suffering –let’s pass on that! Suffering can be seen as bird shit on your shoulder, something to complain about, get rid of, and hate. The more pain a person feels the more chances they have to feel lonely, unhappy, and unfulfilled. These are real possibilities. At certain times in my life, that’s been my experience. But suffering is also filled with blessings. If a bird shits on your shoulder, more than likely you’ll look up. You may see a beautiful sky. Suffering and struggle offer us the opportunity to ask why, and to engage thoughtfully in the meaning-making process. Most importantly, it offers us a chance to understand the human condition – to experience empathy that allows us to connect with others and have compassion. We can say that we’ve been there. We understand. When we haven’t been there we are more likely to lose our patience and feel baffled by someone’s attempt to simply do the best they can at any given moment.

As a budding counselor, I am fascinated with how we make meaning in our lives. In fact, my job is to sit with people while they engage in this process. I usually hear the painful, confusing parts, the things people wish had not happened, or want to undo – regrets, injuries, fears, grief. I hear the questions Randy talked about a couple of weeks ago: How do I feel normal again? What do I need to do to be normal? I hate the word normal because it sets up false expectations. There is no “normal.” There’s common and uncommon, centered, and uncentered. I think that’s what people want – to feel like they are understood and standing on solid ground. I am amazed by the courage that people can show in the face of insurmountable odds, and the ways they find stability and hope in the midst of utter despair. [Read more…]