by Richard Wolf
March 2, 2014

I’m here this morning to invite our consideration of an apophatic mystery we call “Time”. I like Time, it’s one of the only things I’m been able to really count on. So far, anyway, Time seems to have been on my side. Maybe for you, too.

Particularly, what about Time here at Sunday Service? How does our experience of Time here connect with yet remain distinct from our routine and home lives? How do experiences of Sunday Services pertain to each day as well as perhaps extending over months or years? But even if you are new or relatively new here, your experience could be just as full and round as someone who has been coming here for twenty two years, though with very different content. Sunday Service takes place in an eternal way, across and beyond many movements of time.

People say that Time is God’s way of making sure everything doesn’t happen at once. I’d agree, though my preferred nomenclature for the Big G is Formation Mystery, or FM. Sometimes Time flies, and then other times (hopefully not now) it drags; yet Time always seems to be pushing, flowing (fastly or slowly) forward, whatever direction that is.

Time as such is the popular chronological time. Chronos time rules material creation in all forms. Chronos Time is cycles and seasons, our setting of time’s movements mathematically according to nature’s cycles: sun or moon calendars, clocks, watches, schedules.

[Speaking to the mystery of Chronological Time, The Book of Ecclesiastes begins with words like these:

“One generation departs and another generation arrives; while the Earth abides forever. The sun rises and the sun goes down, then discretely transits to the same place it arose.

The wind goes toward the south, and turns around to the north; in motion continually, always to cycle around again.

All the rivers run into the sea, yet the sea is not full. To the place from which the rivers come, there they return again.

All things engage in their works, hidden in mystery to human people.”

Chronos Time clearly does works of its own, beyond human control. The reading reminds me of expressions like “time marches on” and “time and tides wait for no man”, sayings that speak to the relentlessness of time’s demands. Yet the reading tells of this same Time being the Great Mystery which empowers the works of nature.

[Sun, moon, stars, and waters are moved by powers both strong and subtle, far beyond human influence. As constituted of mostly water, our own biorhythms connect with Moon and tides. Sun and starlight effect our moods; our ingestion of plants and animals effect our body chemistry, and natural cycles govern our own and everyone’s procreation. We are material creatures. And we can’t get any younger, as far as we know.]

But if Time is always flowing forward, wouldn’t it also somehow ebb, draw back, or fold? Occasions of inspiration, vivid recollections, dreams, or visions are in the realm of Kairos Time. A drawing-back from the flowing progression of Chronos time takes place, like the ebb of ocean tides and evaporation in the water cycle.

Kairos can be translated as “the right moment,” It also means “weather”. Another translation refers to the openings of a weaving. [Is past woof and future warp or vice versa?] Kairos time is when you know the time is right: when a work of art is complete; when the right words are said or heard. Kairos is the timing behind why you and I are present here. It’s about when something happens that can’t be explained or accounted for, maybe a spiritual or intellectual inspiration, an unexpected opening of one’s presence in time.

Last Sunday, for me anyway, the service was so integrated that it seemed over just minutes after it started. On similar Sundays, I’ve lost track of time, finding my present awareness of the “now” heightened; or maybe I felt a touch or word, or had some kind of enlightenment. Sometimes even some kind of an “aha” moment has occurred.

[Other times, I have to confess, I’ve slipped into chronic distractions and judgments. I’ve thought to myself (I’ll let you fill in some blanks) “This could be a little bit too ______________ for me.” or “I shouldn’t be thinking about his or her ___________________.” or “This ______________isn’t one I would have chosen.” I’m happy to report that on such occasions I’ve almost always been able to return myself to an appropriate place (whatever that is) in collective consciousness for Sunday Service.]

As I reflected on personal Sunday Morning experiences of Time, with consideration for preparing these words, I looked at how Time’s flowing could be akin with Chronos Time, and Time ebbing akin with Kairos Time. Our Chronos time here is dependably from 10:30 to 11:30 Sunday mornings. Our Kairos Time here is always indeterminate: an opening for the entry of insights, distractions, surprise instructions, or signs could happen at any time. I like to see the program as set though always in –process. This way even congregants who attend every Sunday never attend the same Sunday Service twice.

I propose to you that at least an acknowledgement of Kairos time enhances the quality of spiritual practices, including the quality of a Sunday Service. When we gather here, to what extent do we detach from chronological time, while keeping to a schedule, to allow for experience that is beyond the linear, beyond the rational? [We might also consider our detatchment from excessive rationalization or judgment, times like those fill-in-the-blank examples just earlier.]

[Kindly leave watches, cellphones, and egos at the door. Kindly also leave any extra “umbridge” you might have, so that we have enough for when others might need to take some.]

[Religious traditions mark entry and exit from Kairos time with particular rites, signs, and symbols. Catholics remember Baptism with Holy Water upon entry and exits from worship spaces. Lakota people engage prayer bundle and smudging rituals before and after inipi. We ring a bell, raise our voices, join our hands. Like many worship traditions, we include times of silence, or the use of certain word formulas (“so may it be”). Rituals like these invite a drawing back, an ebbing, of the ordinary forward push of chronological time. Portals and passageways are opened.]

Our lives take place somewhere between being unconscious slaves in Chronos and realized co-creators in Kairos. Our reading from Ste.-Exupèry directs us to stop and realize how our consciousness of each successive “now” extends seven generations into past and future. He speaks to the ebb and flow of generations, suggesting that heritage is transmitted via moments of memory and meaning within our own lifetimes, as well as via whatever material symbols our descendents may inherit –rituals, mementos, furniture, real estate, trusts,… He invites us to step aside from the push toward the future and the pull of the past in order to stand in a present-place as active owners of heritage and destiny. His words empower the shaping of a uniquely situated personal history, beyond constraints of our life as a time-line. Can we draw back from the rapid flow of culture to realize what keys we’re to give and which passwords we’re to transmit? How do we balance inheritance and legacy?

Toward closing, what about the waiting part? We are always between Time moving us forward or drawing us back, but does Time wait? Can Time pause or stand still for a while? I think “yes” but only for a little while, if we ask and wait, too. Sometimes Time just waits on its own. To ask time to wait is to acknowledge an overlapping place between Chronos and Kairos, a limbo place of transition. Maybe Time waits when its manifestations are under consideration, like those tiny particles that alternate being and doing, form and energy. Time waits at gateways between Chronos and Kairos forms of itself, a place we are now. Maybe Times waits when a bird stops and looks at you.

In Nature, time seems to wait in the overlapping of waves, and when the Moon is completely full or new. Time waits when breath is held or needs to be caught, like when you’ve been laughing or crying too hard. Where there is movement there must also be no movement somewhere, somehow, sometime, to be the ground or source from which movement proceeds.

One Kairos opening which recently helped me was the apparent mistake of the inclusion of the Walt Whitman reading in today’s program. Was it a typo that # 659 was listed instead of the Ste- Exupèry reading, #249, with which I’d been working? Was this a miscommunication, a mistake, someone else’s idea, a Kairos event, or all of the above?

Let’s take a look at it — # 659. Many levels of application are possible, but please consider a few in particular. Take a look at the second stanza, the first that the assembly will read. The words could suggest that a congregant’s quality of presence here is what really shaped our Sunday Order of Service, not the decisions of your Sunday Services Committee. The eighth stanza speaks to the free availability for entry into Kairos Time anytime. And the last, words from which I’ll repeat as our Benediction, speak of the essential value of any present “now” as the only place from which we can fully appreciate our situation in and out of Time.

Let’s engage in this reading together. Then just rest in a brief no-time silence, before we have some community dialog.

#659: For You

Brief Silent Reflection

Dialog

Community Sending Forth

Benediction: “Happiness,…knowledge,.. this place, … this hour.”

[An adaptation from the beginning of the Book of Ecclesiastes:]

“One generation departs and another generation arrives; while the Earth abides forever. The sun rises and the sun goes down, then discretely transits to the same place it arose.

The wind goes toward the south. And turns around to the north; in motion continually, always to cycle around again.

All the rivers run into the sea, yet the sea is not full. To the place from which the rivers come, there they return again.

All things engage in their works, hidden in mystery to human people.”

 

 

This talk was given as a segment of HUU’s Jan. 26, 2014 Sunday service about teachers. It followed reflections by educators David Lane on his work with JMU student teachers, and Mary Hahn on her years teaching in Rockingham County schools.

I’m not a teacher. I have huge admiration for teachers, including my husband Robin, my son Eddie, and, as an education reporter, all those I met who keep helping young people learn while weathering SOL’s and all trends thrust upon them. I discovered long ago I couldn’t be them. Remember a ‘’60s game called “If you were a book, who would you be written by?” When I was starting my work life, my answer might have been William Golding, whose characters in his bestseller reminded me of some students I got as a substitute teacher. (That was Lord of the Flies. I hope that, no thanks to me, those kids’ lives have turned out well.)

Golding had been a writer-in-residence at then-Hollins College – one among scores of famous writers, including Eudora Welty and Flannery O’Connor, brought to that campus by Louis Rubin – subject of my tribute, who died this fall, three days short of 90. As a publisher; author of more than 50 books; and mentor to countless writers, Louis is credited with making Southern literature a respected scholarly field. Last year, the visiting author for what has become Hollins’s Louis D. Rubin, Jr. Writer-in-Residence Program was Natasha Trethewey, national poet laureate.

So it seems amazing Louis corresponded with me for more than 40 years!

He talked to our classes about great works having universal application, with the intriguing example of the Japanese devouring translations of William Faulkner. I think that’s where I first consciously learned to appreciate how stories can go deeper than the limits of literal experience, into what Faulkner called “the human heart in conflict with itself.”

When Louis explained Huckleberry Finn’s “All right, then, I’ll go to hell” moment, I learned how a great story challenges without preaching. When Huck refuses to betray his friend Jim, a runaway slave, he chooses between the “morality” he’s been taught and his own conflicting, decent instincts.

A classmate, then, who did become a college teacher recalls when her first class with Louis, teaching Proust, felt like expecting to be seated at a banquet but instead being ushered into the kitchen to see the food being cooked. His approach inspired her work.

At our “girls’ school”/later to be “women’s university,” Louis encouraged us to have it all – careers, families, everything. Follow our talents, hopes and dreams to the limit! Nothing new now (and some may call it too much work), but then, worlds were opening.

Creative writing seminar met Wednesday evenings in Louis’s basement. Third house on the right on Faculty Row. (If American literary sites received blue plaques, like in the U.K., the basement entrance to that otherwise nondescript mid-century rancher would deserve one at least as much as the ancient, picturesque cottage-like schoolhouse so-marked in Salisbury where Golding taught, perhaps to early prototypes of Ralph, Jack and Piggy.) Those of us who read and discussed our work in the Rubin basement ranged from faculty and graduate students, down to sophomores. The ranks included Annie Dillard, Lee Smith and Henry Taylor.

The year my class graduated, 1967, Louis moved on to UNC-Chapel Hill. He remained incredibly generous with the time he gave ex-students. His comments on our work could be tough but could be lavish in praise.

His son Robert hiked the Appalachian Trail (as did my son Eddie). After I’d told Louis about reading Robert’s book on that hike, Louis answered, “He’s a much better writer than I am.” This winter Robert said Louis had valued his work “much higher than it probably deserved, but I imagine that’s true of most of us. He was a generous soul.”

For Louis’s memorial, recalling his and his wife Eva’s Unitarian wedding (a match that would last more than 60 years), his brother said the couple rolled their eyes when the minister recited “the night has a thousand eyes.” (I Googled the phrase and found there have been at least three different songs with that title. I wonder if the one quoted was an 1895 poem; might it have appeared in an early UU hymnal?)

Before academia, Louis’s career was journalism. He wrote a memoir about that, optimistically titled An Honorable Estate. He was city editor in Staunton, and worked for the AP with our friend Jim Geary. In 1956, after graduate study at Johns Hopkins, he became associate editor at the Richmond News-Leader. Years later when I asked Louis about his career there, at a time when I’d become uncomfortable with the biases of those I worked under, he told me about waking up and growing disgusted with the Richmond paper’s crusade against school integration. He moved to Hollins soon after that. He said his reasons for the move were complicated. Of course, journalism’s loss was Hollins’ gain.

He liked to repeat a quote by H.L. Mencken, “Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.”

Louis was pragmatic. He honored his Jewish heritage, but didn’t do mysticism or theology. Yet in his final illness, we heard he told a visitor (when he was quite alert), “I’ll see you again. There are other worlds, you know.” He’s buried in a family plot at Temple Beth Elohim, in Charleston, S.C., where he grew up.

Some obituaries called Louis “curmudgeonly.” He had that side, especially while going deaf – but it doesn’t capture him. Just before the long strange trip that would land me in Harrisonburg, while driving my old heap on a job search, I blew off a forecast of heavy snow. In March? No way. So I blundered head-on into The Blizzard of March ’93. Spun 360 on the interstate. No fun, but it made a good story later. Here’s Louis’s response to my report, from a letter I’ve saved these 20 years: “As for your escapades on icy roads, you’re fortunate to have emerged so harmlessly. Next time you had better listen to the weather bureau; they called that storm, and predicted how bad it was likely to be, several days ahead. These days they are quite accurate. What I do every November is have a set of steel-studded snowtires put on my car’s drive wheels. They can handle ice… The only cost is having them put on and taken off. Moreover, they have the fortunate effect of keeping the ice and snow away from these parts; it hasn’t iced up or snowed in three years.” In the same letter, he gave me a job-search tip that I wonder now why I didn’t follow.

Sometimes I think calling a memorial a “Celebration of Life” is euphemistic, but Louis’s “wake” two weeks ago at Hollins felt like a true celebration. I wish he could have heard what we all said, and even what I’m telling you now – and no doubt, made corrections.

–Chris Edwards

By Noel Levan
November 17, 2013.

Many years ago I wrote with some regularity, in journals, poetically, and with a questioning that I now sometimes miss.

I wrote, “Standing upon the threshold of knowing, the cosmos, has no floor.” I thought at that time that I had a glimmer of understanding regarding how the world worked and what part I played in ‘the grand scheme of things’. I thought too that fathoming the cosmos was very like standing upon a threshold to a room that had no floor. That I could imagine myself knowing even an infinitesimal portion of all there may be to fathom about ‘life, the universe and everything’ was to me, laughable. And I did laugh. I do laugh, often, deeply and with 

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by Rev. Emma Chattin
October 10,2013

Lighting the Chalice

Reading

The candle wick and the flame stand apart, each one from the other.
And yet together, they become something more,
burning together without burning up,
a thing of lasting illumination, and a cradle of warmth in the chalice.
May we, like the wick and flame, learn to unite our differences
into something much more than we could ever be apart.

First Reading Genesis 11: 1-9

Throughout the earth, people spoke the same language and used the same words. Now, as they moved eastward, they found a valley in the land of Shinar and settled there. They all said to one another, ‘Let us make bricks, and bake them in the fire.’ They used bricks as building stones, and bitumen for mortar. Then they said, ‘Let us build ourselves a city, and a tower whose top can reach to heaven. Let us make a name for ourselves, to keep us from being scattered over the face of the whole earth.’ YHWH came down to see the city and the tower these mortals had built. ‘They are a single people with a single language,’ YHWH said. ’And this is but the beginning of their undertakings! Now there will be nothing too hard for them to do. Come, let us go down and confuse their language so that they can no longer understand one another.’ So YHWH scattered them over the face of the earth, and they had to stop building the city. It was named Babel, because YHWH confused the language of all the earth. It was from there that YHWH scattered them over the whole earth.

Second Reading

~from Robert Lawrence Smith in A Quaker Book of Wisdom:

Life Lessons in Simplicity, Service, and Common Sense

Nonviolence has always been the most paradoxical, counterintuitive, and optimistic of Quaker ideals. Ever since Cain settled his conflict with Abel through premeditated murder, violence and the lust for dominance and revenge have been viewed as inevitable aspects of human relations. The ancient Greeks saw war as a natural state of affairs: “All things come into being and pass through strife,” Heraclitus wrote. And throughout time, nations, tribes, and individuals have readily turned to weaponry to exert control or settle differences- while their poets and balladeers celebrated war heroes and the glory of battle.

In the seventeenth century, the first generation of Quakers suffered the consequences of their pacifism when hundreds were routinely jailed for refusing to serve in the king’s militia. In the Revolutionary War, most Quakers refused to bear arms, but an estimated 500 were “read out” of their Meetings for joining up with the colonial forces. Abraham Lincoln, at the height of the Civil War, wrote to a prominent Friend, Eliza Gurney, “Your people, the Friends, have had, and are having a very great trial. On principal and faith, opposed to both war and oppression, they can only practically oppose oppression by war. In this hard dilemma, some have chosen one horn, and some have chosen the other.”

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by Elizabeth Ihle
October 27, 2013

Readings:

All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first, the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms.
And then the whining school-boy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress’ eyebrow. Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon’s mouth. And then the justice,
In fair round belly with good capon lined,
With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances;
And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slipper’d pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side,
His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

William Shakespeare, As You Like It, Act 2, scene 7, 1599

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September 1, 2013
by J. Barkley Rosser, Jr.

1. For most people, Labor Day has become an end of summer holiday for having a barbecue and shopping (now rivaling Black Friday), or even a day for changing clothing rules, such as the end of wearing white during the summer (particularly womens’ shoes). Its origins and purpose are mostly forgotten or only vaguely thought of. We shall consider the question of the meaning of Labor Day and UU views of it from a historical perspective.

2. The celebration of the 50^th anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom this past week should remind us of the link between labor concerns and broader civil rights concerns. The director of the March was A. Philip Randolph, who was also the founder and longtime president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the mostly African-American group who worked the Pullman sleeping cars. In 1941 he threatened such a march, which led FDR to end racial discrimination in hiring in federal jobs. Randolph had been an active supporter of the US Socialist Party and also close the Progressive movement from the 1920s on.

3. Labor Day was first celebrated in Toronto, ON, Canada, the only other nation besides the US that has a celebratory holiday on the first Monday of September honoring workers and the labor movement in 1872, with “labour festivals” celebrated annually after that. The first Labor Day in the US was celebrated in New York on Tuesday, September 5, 1882, in New York, organized by the Central Labor Union, a part of the Knights of Labor, in support of the 8-hour working day, which would become the central demand of a rising international labor movement. It was marked by a parade, speeches, along with music and eating. In 1884 the date was shifted to the first Monday of September, and Labor Day parades have been held on that date in New York ever since, with the practice rapidly spreading to other cities in the US. Ministers and priests were also encouraged to preach about the labor movement on the day before Labor Day, “Labor Sunday,” which is today, and I am following in this tradition.

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August 25, 2013,
by Gabriela Luschei

This is the poem that Tom Endress read during the service Gabriela offered at HUU.

The Cool Web, by Robert Graves

Children are dumb to say how hot the day is,
How hot the scent is of the summer rose,
How dreadful the black wastes of evening sky,
How dreadful the tall soldiers drumming by.

But we have speech, to chill the angry day,
And speech, to dull the rose’s cruel scent.
We spell away the overhanging night,
We spell away the soldiers and the fright.

There’s a cool web of language winds us in,
Retreat from too much joy or too much fear:
We grow sea-green at last and coldly die
In brininess and volubility.

But if we let our tongues lose self-possession,
Throwing off language and its watery clasp
Before our death, instead of when death comes,
Facing the wide glare of the children’s day,
Facing the rose, the dark sky and the drums,
We shall go mad no doubt and die that way.