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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by Bill Faw
July 2, 2023

INTRODUCTION

Happy Birthday, America. Happy 247^th Birthday. What kind of a nation are you? What kind of government do you have?

Let us begin to answer that by considering this distinction between “nation” and “government”.  The “nation” constitutes the land and the people, while the “government” is the network of administrative, legislative, and judicial forces which governs the nation.     

 Christian nationalists generally blur that distinction and suggest the double claim that we were founded as a Christian Nation with a Christian Government. Let us look at both parts of this claim.

First Claim: U.S. As a “Christian Nation”

In their claim of the U.S. being a Christian Nation, Christian Nationalists often state that the founders and the vast majority of people in the U.S. have been pious Christians from the beginning.      

They do not seem to realize – or they ignore — a fact that most of you know: that many of our founders, such as Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, and Franklin, were rational deists who were considered heretics by orthodox Christians, and who saw orthodox Christian beliefs as being dangerous superstitions; and that in 1776 as few as 4% to 30% of the people in the colonies were formal church members – the lowest level in American history, according to religious historian Martin Marty (1985).

There have been many cycles of growth and decline in Christian self-identification,      with a gradual growth up to the 1950s when about 90% of U.S.  adults self-identified as Christian – a level kept until the mid-1970s. But, since then, there has been a constant and sometimes rapid decline in Christian beliefs – the 90% has shrunk to 63%, with all signs of continual decline!      

Yet, despite all of these changes, even today’s 63% or so of Christians is a far higher percentage than that of any other religion (Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu – each 2% or less)      or of atheists plus agnostics (10% combined); and far more Christian self-identification than the 10% to 20% in most European countries. So, in a “majority rules” sense, we might be considered sort of a “Christian nation”.

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This poem. by Linda Dove, was part of the Tight Lines service by Richard Foust. It was read at the end of Richard’s talk.

How often nowadays do you look long at
that framed photo of your father on the dresser,
his young smile fixed on you and mother?
How often do you take time to imagine

his hand cradling you when you were born,
his hand tossing balls when you were ten,
his hand doing high-fives with you way back when,
his hand, as he aged, trembling, rough and worn?

Remember how he made you chop wood
for an hour when you skipped school or swore,
how he yelled Up to bed with you and don’t slam the door
when you fussed about your mother’s food.

Or maybe you recall the soft side of the man
the man who wept when the dog was lost,
the man who tossed and hugged your new born son
and told him his grandpa was his greatest fan.

And have you ever touched your father’s shoulder
and asked him what fatherhood has meant to him?
Have you ever sat down with him and told him
I love you and have loved you it seems for ever.

Linda Ankrah-Dove ©
June 2023

by Richard Foust
June 18, 2023

We have been fascinated with water and rivers since ancient times. D?gen Zenji, the Buddhist philosopher, made the following statement in the “Mountains and Waters Sutra” in 1240 A.D.

From ancient times wise people and sages have often lived near water. When they live near water, they catch fish, catch human beings, and catch the way. . . . Furthermore, there is catching the self, catching, catching, being caught by catching, and being caught by the way.

Most of us are familiar with the words of Norman Maclean, taken from the last paragraph of his novelette titled “A River Runs Through It.” Perhaps you have seen Robert Redford’s film of the same name.

Eventually, all things merge into one, and a River runs through it. The river was cut by the world’s great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs.

I am haunted by waters.

“A River Runs Through It” used flyfishing as a vehicle to tell a story about people. The stories focus on the events and the interactions between Norman Maclean, his brother Paul, and their father, a Presbyterian minister. Flyfishing for trout in the Big Blackfoot River was a passion with the Maclean men. The book begins with the following paragraph:

In our family, there was no clear line between religion and flyfishing. We lived at the junction of great trout rivers in western Montana, and our father was a Presbyterian minister and a fly fisherman who tied his own flies and taught others. He told us about Christ’s disciples being fishermen, and we were left to assume, as my brother and I did, that all first-class fishermen on the Sea of Galilee were fly fishermen and that John, the favorite, was a dry fly fisherman.

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by Tom Hook
June 4, 2023
I am “delighted” to be with you again this beautiful Sunday morning! I’m always humbled by your gracious response to what this “seeker” has to say about our journey through this world. So, again, I say “Thank You”.

Let me begin with two questions:
How can we be joyful in a world, in a moment like this?
How can we NOT be joyful in a world, in a moment like this?

After all, we are alive today. We are taking each breath without the need to decide whether to do so or not. We awakened this morning to Mother Earth teeming with beauty and all forms of life. We live on what we, so far as we know, the only planet sustaining life through a series of evolutionary “perfect scenarios”! So many blessings, so many delights!

Much of what I have to say this morning is inspired from The New York Times Best Seller, “The Book of Delights” by Ross Gay. Ross Gay is an American poet, essayist, and professor who won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award for his 2014 book, Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, which was also a finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry.

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by Sandy Greene
May 7, 2023

Opening – Martha Sider (Thomas Rhodes)      

“We come in a variety of colors, shapes, and sizes.
Some of us grow in bunches.
Some of us grow alone.
Some of us are cupped inward,
And some of us spread ourselves out wide.
Some of us are old and dried and tougher than we appear.
Some of us are still in bud.
Some of us grow low to the ground,
And some of us stretch toward the sun.
Some of us feel like weeds, sometimes.
Some of us carry seeds, sometimes.
Some of us are prickly, sometimes.
Some of us smell.
And all of us are beautiful.
What a bouquet of people we are!”

Welcome to all! Welcome to our spiritual garden where we are nourished by and find hope in our search for meaning, the support we offer to each other and our pursuit of justice.

Good morning from your rookie facilitator. I’m Sandy Greene, a new member here.

Thank you, Barbara, for helping to arrange all our beautiful flowers this morning for the 100^th Flower Communion.  And thank you Martha, for providing so many years of welcoming for this communion, and for helping me to bloom into a welcomer too.   Martha said, “Let the spirit guide you.”  Good advice for us all.

Chalice Lighting – Nancy Barbour

We light the chalice with the words of Jennifer McGlothin

“As the first hint of green begins to peek through the barren ground
As that little sprig grows into a healthy stem
As that stem grows into a stalk and forms a bud
As that bud slowly opens with each new day
To form a yellow daffodil
Let us be, like that first hint of green, renewed by the warm of the sun’s rays
And ready to emerge with a new energy, ready to face the day.
We light this chalice to bring a glimmer of that warmth into our space.”

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