By Mary Hahn
January 17, 2021

I woke up one morning and saw the frost on the roof and on the grass and I looked out at the mountains that stood strong like an unbreakable sentry that has stood guard over the valley for millions of years. The mountains are the soul of the region. To understand the mountains is to know ourselves. During our brief lifetime we see little change; they appear much the same. My mind drifted back to the times in which we live. The acrimony and the pain that we face as a nation seems overwhelming.  My mind started racing and then I look back at those mountains that have witnessed things of history and folklore. I thought about the Indians who used to roam these lands and the change that was forced upon them by Europeans. The Indians used the Valley in the shadows of the Blue Ridge for farming. The fertile Valley of the Shenandoah was home to the Monacan Indian nation for 10,000 years where they harvested crops and hunted deer and bear. They eventually were pushed west by the European settlers.

The mountains witnessed Black people working in servitude and a war between the states that should’ve torn us apart. By 1820 there were over 2423 Slaves in the Shenandoah Valley. One in seven was enslaved. The Shenandoah Valley strongly supported the confederacy to preserve the slavery. Whites reacted slowly to new laws where people were considered people Instead of property. The south past laws for segregation called the Jim Crowe laws. All this while the mountains remained vigilant.

They saw us preparing for a world war and a pandemic at the turn of the last century. During the 1918 pandemic in Virginia, schools, churches and a variety of public places closed their doors during the pandemic peak. (Sound familiar?) Newspaper obituaries were filled with names of young men and women whose lives had been cut short by the influenza.

They were around during the economic fall of 1929 but most of these people that lived in their shadows were too poor to tell. Unemployment began to rise rapidly in 1931, farm prices plummeted and the state government cut spending to maintain a balanced budget and relief rolls rose sharply. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt initiated the civilian conservation Corps which built the Skyline Drive.

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By Tom Hook
January 10, 2021

IMAGINE THAT! Can I? Can we?

When I chose this video for this morning, it was before the devastating attack on our Democracy this past Wednesday.

This video, titled “The Great Reversal” is based upon Isaiah 60. Isaiah wrote this for the Jewish exiles who are returning to Jerusalem after their captivity in Babylonia.

Cyrus of Persia, who had defeated the Babylonians, allowed the Jewish exiles to return to Jerusalem and even provides funds to finance the rebuilding of the temple.

There must have been excitement and a glimmer (just a glimmer) of hope for the Jewish people. That they might imagine a brighter future given this new opportunity.

“Look up, Love, take your eyes off the ground, show your face!

Have the courage to see, not only the problems, but the one who remains with you holding the Light!

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By Les Grady
December 27, 2020

As part of the service, Linda Dove read RUBAIYAT FOR PLANET EARTH.

So, what’s an apocaloptimist?  The urban dictionary definition is “someone who knows it’s all going to hell, but believes it’ll turn out OK,” with “it” being the country, the environment, humanity, or something else.  For me, it’s the climate.

I’m an engineer, and most engineers are, by nature, optimists.  We solve problems, which requires optimism.  If a problem is so large and complicated that it’s hard to be optimistic about its solution, we break it down into its component parts, for which solutions can be found, thereby retaining our optimism.

When I first became an advocate for solving the climate crisis, around 14 years ago, I was terribly naïve, because like Dr. Spock on Star Trek, I thought that logic and facts would rule the day.  That if I could explain the science in clear and logical terms, people would accept the fact that the developed world’s fossil-fuel driven economic system was causing the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere to increase, thereby causing Earth to warm.  Furthermore, that they would see the obvious solution – stop putting fossil CO₂ into the atmosphere and deploy systems to take some of it back out.  Boy, was I deluded.

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By Tom Hook, November 8, 2020

Quote – bell hooks (author & social activist)

What Does It Mean to be a People of Healing? pdf format

Rarely, if ever, are any of us healed in isolation. Healing is an act of communion.

Healing is an act of communion? Let’s ponder that a bit…. Here we are in the midst of a worldwide pandemic of Covid-19, racial and civil unrest, economic uncertainty, and just five days from one to the most vicious, divisive elections in history and we hear from bell hooks that healing is an act of communion?

I believe that for any of us to heal, or to aid in the healing of others, we must take a broad, holistic approach combining all the resources available to us.

Let’s face it….we are in time of great disruption, and without the inner work of contemplation (or mindfulness) and the outer work of action (in community) we stand the chance of seeing society, as we have known it, devolve into further chaos. We must heal in order to survive as a species and as a planet.

From the late Fr. Thomas Keating we hear these parting words: “The only path forward for the survival of our species and perhaps even our planet is a path of nonviolence, of contemplation and action prioritizing justice and solidarity, an affirmation of Oneness and the interconnectedness of all things, which science confirms, and spirituality has always known on its deepest level.”

So where might we begin to examine healing and being healed?

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By Anna Karola
August 9, 2020

When I sat down yesterday to take one last look at this talk, I came across this quote from Hildegarde von Bingham. She was a poet, composer, mystic far ahead of her place and time. She was a Renaissance woman before the Renaissance, who led a monastery north of the Alps. In her holistic understanding of the universe, she expresses herself in one sentence and expresses my talk in this one sentence. Born in 1098, she predates me by over 1000 years and yet, I cannot improve upon what she said. In her understanding of the Universe, the inner shows itself in the outer, and the outer reflects the inner. The individual reflects the cosmos, and the cosmos reflects the individual. 

With this thought let us take a moment to be grateful for what connects us all, through the ages, our breath. Gently close your eyes and just breathe. What does this breath feel like? Is it smooth? Easily in, easily out? Does it have a bit of a catch, almost like a deeply hidden sob? Our breath holds our life. It holds our sorrows, our dreams, our life. It asks nothing of us, and it stays with us giving us life. It asks nothing of us, and it connects us to all life. The breath I breathe now passed through millions of other humans, animals, plants and rocks to get to me. Some call this breath God. It connects us to the Oneness of all life and reminds us that we are all interconnected.

My talk today is a summation of my own experiences leading to my philosophical view of Oneness. It is the belief that we are all expressions of a Source seeking to realize itself through our individual experiences. It is the belief that what we are seeing in the external world today is an expression of the Shadow side of each one of us. The Shadow contains significant power, it contains the creative potential within each of us for creation or de-creation or destruction. If this Shadow is not embraced with Love it becomes malevolent, seeking attention rather like a neglected and abused child. It is the result of all the hurts and traumas and experiences, we have had, which our ancestors have experienced and passed down to us, sometimes called karma.

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Bill Faw
June 14, 2020

On March 8, I was the last in-person speaker at this church. Sorry: I did not mean to shut you down!       

In the ‘lemonade out of lemons’ category: the shutdown has given me a chance to watch most of the HUU services on Zoom with Martha, and then watch my Bridgewater Church of the Brethren services later via YouTube.  This has allowed me to see some excellent sermons from both inspiring churches!

I ended my March 8 talk with the possibility that humans may have evolved the capacity of wonder and awe, meditation and worship, as the fittest way to communicate with God or some divine dimension of reality.        

Indeed, these last 3 months have tilted my balanced prayer & meditation sessions toward more earnest prayers – to a partially known and partially unknown God, seen through a glass dimly.

My talk today will be much more autobiographical and much less abstract than my last talk – or my two earlier talks.  

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May 31. 2020
Paula Bennet

Good morning. I wonder if there is a school of unlearning. You see, we all bring into adulthood—- identities, childhood lessons, and personal philosophies that we have acquired along the way. Some of these identities and lessons are good for us. A strong work ethic, compassion, empathy, and more. They help us feel happy and peaceful. Other lessons, unfortunately, contribute to our anxieties, make us skeptical, or perhaps just make life more difficult than it needs to be. When Thea first read this book to me, it struck me because many times peace is less about our own identities and personal philosophies and more about what we do with them. Peace can be about growing a garden or taking a nap.

Researcher Carol Dweck and her colleagues became interested in student attitudes about failure. She coined the term “growth mindset” and this idea has been generalized beyond just student achievement. Growth mindset, as opposed to “fixed mindset” is about the belief that effort makes us stronger. Growth mindset posits that change is possible. That changing even the simplest of our beliefs can have a profound impact on nearly every aspect of our lives.

I suspect that as we navigate adulthood, we are similar in that some of the lessons we carry with us from childhood enrich our lives and contribute to times of peace and well being.

For some, there are lessons, identities, and philosophies that can cause us to feel inadequate, sometimes like we are drowning and possibly aren’t measuring up to our own or others expectations.

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