by Linda Dove
May 1, 2022

Our Conscious Living Adults group has heard this before. A soldier before the battle of Waterloo is reported to have prayed, “Dear God, if there is a god, save my soul, if I have a soul.”

I’ve decided I’m no longer going to tiptoe around the “God” word. As UUs we’re often reluctant to refer to God with a capital “G”  for fear of offending our Humanist or Atheist members and friends. And many of us migrated from religions discomforted by their rituals, absolutist creeds and dogmas, or literal acceptance of scriptures. Or we felt distanced by religion’s imperial, patriarchal set-ups and power-grasping—God distanced at the church altar with the priests, or Gods idolized in statues or icons in the temple, or God literally being born human in an implausible way.

UUs have never tolerated discomfort well and have been rebels and innovators. In the third century AD proto, as you know, the Unitarians broke away from the mainstream Catholic creed because they rejected the anthromorphic image of God as literally three in one, father, son and holy ghost: hence unitarianism. We heard last week how Thomas Jefferson rejected the Son as God but accepted him as a great moral teacher.  The Universalists broke away from mainstream Protestantism discomforted by the portrayal of an angry, jealous father-figure with a dominating ego. They couldn’t reconcile a judgmental God consigning people to heaven or hell with a kindly, forgiving God, a God who cares personally for individuals. There’s a familiar story about the personal God. A rabbi was a poor man and kept praying God would win him the lottery. Eventually, he whined, “God, why won’t you grant my prayer?” God replied, “Rabbi, just meet me halfway. Go buy a ticket!” But, of course, the idea of such a God also makes UUs uncomfortable. We can’t get our heads round the contradiction of a God that intervenes with our free will and personal responsibility for democratic and social justice activism, all ideas dear to our UU principles. And, finally, there’s the big either/or question of God’s part in evil, as well as good.

More positively, many folk, of course, associate God with the beauty of religious worship—music, art, sculpture, architecture—that all religions inspire. For Christianity, one commentator said something like: “Without Bach’s music, God would be a completely 2nd.-rate figure.”  And it’s a common experience for religious practices and artefacts to inspire ecstasy. Ordinary people as well as mystics are sure there’s a God after such transcendental experience. I’ve had three such experiences in nature but they confirmed for me, not faith in God, but an inner knowing that there’s a field beyond what my limited human faculties can grasp. Those ineffable moments enhanced my awe of nature, the cosmos, and the unnecessary fact of my tiny life; and this firm unknowing continues for me to this day—call it spiritual unknowing, if you will. Meanwhile, some atheists and agnostics say the idea of God is merely a place-holder until our minds and technology solve the mysteries of life and death and the cosmic creation.

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by Linda Dove
January 23, 2022

Good morning. I’m going to talk common sense today! But I’ll disappoint you if you think I’m preaching revolution against the Brits as did Tom Paine in his 1776 pamphlet entitled Common Sense.

No, my focus this morning is on everyday sense-making, one of our three HUU tenets, as you know. [#1 Know Thyself-Temple at Delphi] I’ve always been interested in how we humans make sense of ourselves, each other, our world, and the cosmos, and how we come to our truths, questions pondered, of course, by philosophers and spiritual teachers all through the ages.

First, let me confess I’m in love with the proposition that Consciousness is the Cosmos becoming aware of itself and I’m trying to live my life inside the poetry of those words. But I’m not talking directly about all-pervading consciousness as Dave Pruett did so elegantly last Sunday. I do, though, build on a similar perspective.

As Dave mentioned, extreme materialists assert that matter is the stuff of the universe and they dismiss non-material consciousness. That’s a big issue in itself for another time. But others do offer insights on the biology and physiology of our awareness, recently much helped by functional MRI imaging. Antonio Damasio, an influential neurobiologist, says our sense-making is entirely embodied.

Briefly, my nervous system and my five senses send signals to my brain. My brain translates them into feelings of pain or pleasure and alerts me to what I need to avoid or go for. In this way, my feelings help maintain my body in homeostasis, healthy balance. [2. Shakespeare] My brain converts the basic pleasure or pain to feelings of well-being or suffering and to refined emotions—joy, love, grief, say, or anger, envy, hatred. My brain translates all these feelings into what these biologists call mental images, visual, auditory and so on. And my feeling of being aware is also, they say, composed of mental images; basically abstractions of experiences, re-presentations. My sad feeling in my body becomes a mental image.

I’m not a natural scientist like some of you, but as a lay student I find this approach convincing—up to a point. It leaves some big questions hanging, though. I have time to mention one or two.

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by Dave Pruett
January 16, 2022

The Dilemma

The late cultural historian and Catholic priest, Thomas Berry wrote: “We are in trouble just now because we do not have a good story.  We are between stories.”

The “we” to which Berry refers is the human race, certainly the Western world. No one with eyes to see can deny that humanity is facing simultaneous existential crises: pandemics, climate instability, aging nuclear weapons on hair triggers, extreme disparities in wealth and power, failed states, and the rise of authoritarianism.

On the other hand, it seems a tad naïve to suggest that these difficulties all stem from a broken story.

When Berry speaks of our “story,” he means  our “mythology.” Mythology gets short shrift in Western culture. It shouldn’t. Mythology is what anchors the human soul to the cosmos. It’s the metanarrative that patterns through parables how we ought to relate to our fellow human beings, our fellow creatures, our planetary home, and the cosmos at large, including the Creator.  It’s no surprise that things fall apart when we get this story wrong.

When Berry says “we are between stories,” he refers to the tension between established religious mythology and the newer and emerging scientific story.

For centuries, Western humans took comfort from a religious story that went something like this: Humans were created by divine fiat, in the image of God. Thus, we are superior to the other creatures.  We occupy the central point—Earth—of a cozy universe consisting of a few planets and a few thousand stars. And Earth is our resource, over which we have “dominion.”

The scientific story burst on the scene in 1543 with the publication of Copernicus’ On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, which upended Ptolemy’s earth-centered cosmology.  In the five centuries since, we’ve learned that the universe is anything but cozy. Vast beyond measure, it consists of some 100B galaxies each populated by 100B stars. Nor do we occupy the center of the cosmos. Rather, we exist in an ordinary solar system on one arm of a spiral galaxy, the whole shebang having originated 13.7B years ago in a cataclysmic event called the Big Bang.

Thanks to Darwin, it gets worse.  We’re the product not of divine decree but of random mutations operating over eons. And we differ not in kind from the other creatures, only in degree.

Which story are we to believe? It’s like having two parents, one of whom tells us how special we are and the other how ordinary. “Do we really have to make the tragic choice,” asks Nobel laureate Ilya Prigogine, “between an antiscientific philosophy and an alienating science?”

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By Rev. Kirk Ballin
December 5, 2021

READINGS

1.Out of the Stars by Robert Weston

Out of the stars in their flight, out of the dust of eternity,
here have we come,
Stardust and sunlight,
mingling through time and through space. Out of the stars have we come,
up from time.
Out of the stars have we come. Time out of time before time
in the vastness of space,
earth spun to orbit the sun,
Earth with the thunder of mountains newborn,
the boiling of seas. Earth warmed by sun, lit by sunlight;
This is our home;
Out of the stars have we come. Mystery hidden in mystery,
back through all time;
Mystery rising from rocks
in the storm and the sea. Out of the stars, rising from rocks
and the sea,
kindled by sunlight on earth,
arose life. Ponder this thing in your heart,
life up from sea:
Eyes to behold, throats to sing,
mates to love. Life from the sea, warmed by sun,
washed by rain,
life from within, giving birth,
rose to love. This is the wonder of time;
this is the marvel of space;
out of the stars swung the earth;
life upon earth rose to love. This is the marvel of life,
rising to see and to know;
Out of your heart, cry wonder:
sing that we live.

2. Empire of Ants: The Hidden Worlds and Extraordinary Lives of Earth’s Tiny Conquerors by Foitzik & Fritsche 2020

Firstly, a note of interest:

“Nobody knows how many ants there are in the world. Some scientists estimate that there could be around ten quadrillion…if you lined up all the ants in the world, they could form a chain reaching from the sun to Earth and back 344 times”

“These days, humans consider themselves rulers of the world. Yet the world would be quite happy without us. Imagine what would happen if all the humans on the planet disappeared…Of course, humanity is a part of nature, but in many ways our behavior is no longer in balance with its natural cycles…You might say that we humans are more of a curse than a blessing for life on Earth.”

3. The Free Mind: William Ellery Channing

I call that mind free which masters the senses, and which recognizes it’s own reality and greatness: which passes life, not in asking what it shall eat or drink, but in hungering, thirsting, and seeking after righteousness.
I call that mind free which jealously guards it’s intellectual rights and powers, which does not content itself with a passive or hereditary faith. Which opens itself to light whencesoever it may come, which receives new truth as an angel from heaven.
I call that mind free which is not passively framed by outward circumstances, and is not the creature of accidental impulse: which discoveries everywhere the radiant signatures of the infinite spirit, and in them finds help to it’s own spiritual enlightenment.
I call that mind free which protects itself against the usurpations of society, and which does not cower to human opinion: which refuses to be the slave or tool of the many or of the few, and guards it’s empire over itself as nobler than the empire of the world.
I call that mind free which resists the bondage of habit: which does not mechanically copy the past, nor live on it’s old virtues, but which listens for new and higher monitions of consciousness, and rejoices to pour itself forth in fresh and higher exertions.
I call that mind free which sets no bounds to it’s love: which, wherever they are seen, delights in virtue and sympathizes with suffering, which recognizes in all human beings the image of God and the rights of God’s children,and offers itself up a willing sacrifice to the cause of humankind.
I call that mind free which has cast off all fear but that of wrongdoing, and which no menace or peril can enthrall: Which is calm in the midst of tumults, and possesses itself, though all else be lost.

4. P.T. Barnum:

“I base my hopes for humanity on the Word of God speaking in the best heart and conscience of the [human] race. The Word heard in the best poems and songs, the best prayers and hopes of humanity. It is rather absurd to suppose a heaven filled with saints and sinners shut up all together within four jeweled walls and playing on harps, whether they like it or not… To the Universalist, heaven in its essential nature is not a locality, but a moral and spiritual status, and salvation is not securing one place and avoiding another, but salvation is finding eternal life. Eternal life has primarily no reference to time or place, but to quality. Eternal life is right life, here, there, everywhere…The present life is the great pressing concern.”

5. Review of “The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity” (Graebner and Wengrow, 2021), from the Atlantic Monthly periodical, October 2021, by William Deresiewicz

“The bulk of the book…takes us from the Ice Age to the states (Egypt, China, Mexico, Peru). In fact, it starts by glancing back before the Ice Age to the dawn of the species. Homo Sapiens developed in Africa, but it did so across the continent, from Morocco to the Cape, not just in the eastern savannas, and in a great variety of regional forms that only later coalesced into modern humans. There is no anthropological Garden of Eden, in other words – no Tanzanian plain inhabited by “mitochondrial Eve” and her offspring. As for the apparent delay between our biological emergence, and the actual development of culture—a gap of many tens of thousands of years—that, the authors tell us, is an illusion. The more we look, especially in Africa (rather than mainly in Europe, where humans showed up relatively late), the older the evidence we find of complex symbolic behavior.”

HOLDING THE HUMAN STORY: AN ECOLOGY OF FREEDOM

Emerging on Earth as single-celled somethings roughly 4 billion years ago to the current species of Homo Sapiens who can go to the moon and back and do a few other things, that is the Human Story.

The Soul Matters (curriculum guide) for this month is Joy. But I already spoke to Joy and Courage some months ago. November’s theme was Holding the Human Story. November was also Indigenous Heritage Month. So, I was interested in this topic from a desire to look at the whole human story. But I found that I was particularly challenged when I came across by chance or divine intervention the very recently published book I referred to in the Atlantic Monthly Review. The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. I just couldn’t ignore this remarkable and inspiring undertaking of a book, but neither could I read the entire thing in a week! Over 550 pages of text plus 166 pages of footnotes and bibliography! Yet, it caused me to pause and realize that so much of the point of addressing the Soul Matters: Holding the Human Story is to address how our understanding of human history has failed to address the injustices inflicted upon groups of people by a male dominant and often white culture. That if we are to hold the human story in the metaphorical cup of our hands we must hold all of humanity in our cupped-hands, not just the human story as told to us by a dominant, exploitive, unjust self-serving culture that thrives on inequality and exploitation for its power and existence. Instead, a critical and transforming perspective must be practiced and taught that rectifies and rewrites this self-serving history of inequality and exploitation, and thereby, instead, empowers a humanity that witnesses freedom as a universal condition, not something meted out and defined by an authoritarian culture that is sustained by inequality – regardless of the social and governmental pretense of equality and liberty for all. Confronting institutionalized racism in our American Democracy, founded upon principles of all human beings being of equal value, is a case in point. These are efforts to address the inherent historical inequalities of our human cultures.

The book, the Dawn of Everything, however, which was initially intended to address this historical inequality, essentially holds that we can’t truly address these inequalities while continuing to uphold the system that is dependent upon inequality for its existence. A cultural system founded upon and grounded in inequality will always revert to some kind of inequality to perpetuate the system.

Reforming a cultural system that has sustained itself on the exploitation of others will only find other ways to exploit others.

When the reality of the ideals of the equal value of all human beings as held up by our Declaration of Independence is consistently and fundamentally compromised and undermined by the technocratic reality of the directing dominant culture, those ideals will never be truly realized.

So, the authors of the Dawn of Everything, purposefully discard the intention of reforming this gross pathological clash of the ideals of equality vs. the reality of the inequality practices of our culture. Instead, they try to identify how this dominant arrogant culture of exploitation came to evolve by redefining our understanding of human history. The authors particularly take to task the influences of the western philosophers, Rosseau and Hobbes, whose ideas shaped the lens through which the human story we have been taught came to be written. For Rosseau, it was the idealized and glorified image of the Noble Savage, of indigenous early peoples who are a closed system of goodness uncorrupted by so called civilization. The perhaps unintended consequences of such thinking has been to actually minimize and dehumanize the Noble Savage, indigenous peoples as not really being part of the human reality. The authors liken this to treating  indigenous peoples as sock-puppets.

 While Hobbe’s philosophy added to the image of the indigenous people as being reflective of a humanity that is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”! A modern society is thereby requiring a commitment to a centralized state of a government of bureaucracies and required standards, with a single, central authority. Material gain, as provided by increasing technological accomplishments, is the measure of progress. The authors hold out that this historical template designed by the Rousseauian influence that boxed and labeled indigenous people and their cultures as separate from the collective human story, and the arrogant Hobbesian autocratic and technocratic flavored society became the map that has brought us to a current point of evolutionary crisis.

What the authors are advocating is that a true knowledge of human history is one that is grounded in and includes understanding of the creative, experimental, and multiple environmental and social contexts of early human societies, what the Authors call the “indigenous critique”. The authors do this through an incredible investigation of anthropological and archaeological data, while confronting and even refuting the established interpretations of human history that have shaped our dominant world view. The authors very effectively, meaning through rigorous academic research, show that the myriad of indigenous, early human cultures are a profound source of insight, information, and inspiration for not only the rewriting of human history but for the re-creation of what being human is all about.

The authors contend that we are stuck in what we think being human is; stuck in an idea as defined by the narrow, arrogant, original sin, technologically driven, aggressive culture shaped by the dismissive act of simplifying and thereby dehumanizing the made-up Noble Savage in contrast to the Enlightened modern human beings that further evolve as masters of the world. Instead, we, masters of the world, are being faced with an existential crisis never known by humanity, as highlighted by the excerpt from the Empire of Ants. “These days, humans consider themselves rulers of the world. Yet the world would be quite happy without us.”

Instead, the authors of the Dawn of Everything plea for the fostering of what they call the “ecology of freedom” where the creativity and imagination of being human is freed from this stuck idea of what it means to be human. Our fostering a culture in “an ecology of freedom” is one that must seek guidance, education, and inspiration from our indigenous early human past, a cultural ecology that expands our understanding of what freedom truly is. A culture that is not being dictated by what Channing infers to be the culture of tyranny. “I call that Mind Free which resists the bondage of habit and, which does not mechanically copy the past, nor live on its old virtues, but listens for new and higher monitions of conscience, and rejoices to pour itself forth in fresh and higher exertions.”

Which brings me to Unitarian Universalism. What a profound and powerful expression of this “ecology of freedom”! 

Both Universalism and Unitarianism emerged out of denouncing and breaking away from the dominant and theological tyrannies of their days. Universalism gave freedom to the literal human soul in affirming, within the Christian concept of Salvation, that Salvation would be for all human beings not just for the chosen few. That God Loved All of His Creation. As P.T. Barnum stated: Universalism “is the best heart and conscience of the [human] race!”

Unitarianism challenged the tyranny of the mind as imposed by the authoritarian interpretation of the Bible. Instead, the early American Unitarians saw that God gave humans the gift (freedom) of reason to understand scripture, and that Jesus was a gift in true human form to be an example of how to be a godly human. And then some of those Unitarians like Emerson, Fuller, and Parker expanded that to a Transcendentalist understanding of the Divine, the Oversoul being inherent in all of Creation. This freed the authority of religion from any one belief system to the authority of religion being inherent to the conscience of each human being, fostering the evolution to the UUism of today rooted in and nourished by our 7 Principles.

Probably, more than any other American religious movement, Unitarian Universalism most poignantly reflects the American ideals of human freedom as expressed in the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution. And in doing so, UUism, at least in word, seeks to counter the dominant human culture of inequality, exploitation, and injustice as fostered by our myopic interpretation of human history. UUism, in spirit, seeks to foster this necessary “ecology of freedom” to engage with our evolutionary and existential crisis. That is what drew me to this body of human intention, to Unitarian Universalism!

But an “ecology of freedom” demands not being confined by the tyranny of the dominant culture. Yet every second of our waking lives and probably even in our sleep-dreams we swim in the dominant culture of tyranny. But our 7 Principles are like the protrusion of the leg-like appendages of the early forms of life crawling out the Sea. “Out of the Sea to the land…rising to walk and to fly out of the sea trembled life”.  It is only in actually exercising (not just reading or saying) our 7 UU Principlesthat our ecology changes from one of resigned accommodation of tyranny to one of an initially trembling ecology of freedom. Our 7 UU Principles as inspired by the ecology of freedom given shape by our American democratic ideals fertilized by the historical experiments and creativity of our indigenous ancestors contain the means to change the course of human evolutionary history.  

But that can only happen if more and more or us nurture the means to foster the ecology of freedom, to truly exercise and live out our 7 Principles, and thereby extract ourselves out of this culture of tyranny in which we live.

Unfortunately, we humans have come to accept, to be resigned to, that we are the best we humans can do. This doesn’t have to be, and, frankly, it can’t be the best we can do, because, otherwise, we are more of a curse than a blessing.

The Earth can live quite happily without us….

And in that Spirit, let me share with you this excerpt, from In the Spirit of the Earth, published in 1992 (Johns Hopkins University Press), by, and get this, Calvin Luther Martin, a once acclaimed mainstream historian (Rutgers University), whose perspective on history was profoundly changed by indigenous perspectives. It reads:

“…we stand in urgent need of a new center of historical consciousness…one that does not forget. History must bite the bullet and drastically redefine its context -its memory… But many will reply, we can’t go back!… to which I reply, we never left, we never left our true real context. Homo [Sapiens] is still here on this planet, abiding in our most fundamental and necessary nature by its fundamental and necessary terms. We left that context only in our fevered imagination. It all began as an act of imagination, an illusory image – most fundamentally an image of fear, and so the corrective process must likewise begin with an image. Let us relearn what hunter-gathers knew to the core of their being, that this place and processes (even death) always take care of us – that Homo’s citizenship and errand rest not with any creed or state but with “that star’s substance from which we have risen.”  May our 7 Principles help give shape to the image of our trembling legs emerging out of a culture of tyranny into an ecology of freedom.

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November 21, 2021
by Linda A. Dove

As you all know, one of the earliest Thanksgiving celebrations was in October 1621 when the Plymouth colonists, together with the Wampanoag people, gave thanks for the harvest. Or perhaps it was earlier in Virginia in 1619, or later in Winthrop’s Massachussets in 1637, or even President Lincoln’s Union victory celebration in 1863. But nowadays, we celebrate the holiday this week, the fourth Thursday in November, thanks to FDR’s official edict in December 1941.

Thanksgiving was new to me when I came to this country. And I had to research its history from scratch. A kind American acquaintance once invited me home to a traditional Thanksgiving dinner. But I learned I would be the only stranger at the table among 17 family members, all of them devout Southern Baptists. So I said thank you, made my apologies, and chickened out. That was a lost opportunity on my part.

As a new and naive immigrant I was puzzled about what I heard about this supposedly giving-of-thanks holiday. It seemed, strangely, that lots of families dreaded the occasion. People worried about chaos at airports and on the roads as they travelled far and wide in snow and storm to join distant relatives and friends! They worried about all the household preparations, having enough beds and, of course, the meal! About abandoning their diets or upsetting their digestion because they faced the prospect of stuffing themselves (sorry) with rich food—turkey, ham, sweet potatoes, green beans, pumpkin pie—and at a very strange time—late afternoon!

And on top of all these worries, I heard people complain about having to stay tight-lipped, as Dee’s hymn mentioned, and as Paul Britner said last week, to avoid big fights or conflict over controversial issues—granddad’s politics, sister’s flirting with anyone in pants, second-cousin-once-removed boasting about cheating on his taxes, Dad getting drunk and kissing everyone.

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by Linda A. Dove
September 26, 2021

Good morning.

Our long absence from HUU has made me realize how attached I am to our schoolhouse in its lovely gardens and location. This gets me thinking about the physical aspect of church buildings, what religious meanings they convey, and how they do it.

My mother and I used to explore old churches in England. She loved the modest ones in country villages—every one unique in style. We also visited the early-Gothic cathedrals like Lincoln, the late-Gothic like Salisbury, and the classical Romanesque like Wren’s rebuilt St. Paul’s.

In America, from the 1500s, European settlers built churches that reflected the denominations of Britain, Ireland and Europe—mostly Catholic in Maryland, Episcopalian in Virginia, Puritan in New England, as well as Methodist, Congregationalist and Universalist. Soon immigrant Quakers entered Pennsylvania and spread out, as did Mennonites, Brethren, Baptists in the mid-west and south, Scots-Irish Catholics from the northeast, and Hispanic Catholics in the south and west. All these, and more, immigrant denominations, of course, had different takes on Christian theology, its practice, and church building styles.

Of course, this is a sweeping historical simplification, but I hope it’s a bit of context for my talk. And I choose to talk only about western Christian churches, not, say, temples and mosques, because it was this Christianity that gave birth to UU-ism.

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By Dan Spitzner
September 19, 2021

Calling the Four Directions: Text by Jane Carnwath. Read by Sue Miller.

Grandmother and Grandfather of the EAST — Spirits of the morning, of inspiration, of new beginnings. We ask you to give us your clarity of thought, your quickness, your creativity, and your courage.

Grandmother and Grandfather of the SOUTH — Spirits of joy and spontaneity, of the day at its height. Grant us your gifts of deep emotion, of empathy, of warm hearts and of caring for one another. Let your rich imaginative powers infuse our endeavours.

Grandmother and Grandfather of the WEST — Spirits of the gathering dark, of the shadow, the unknown, of mystery, and magic. Give us the strength to confront and explore our own darkness and fear, for the insights they contain.

Grandmother and Grandfather of the NORTH — Spirits of  completion, of acceptance, of integration, and individuation. Help us to take the hard decisions that sometimes face us, that we may achieve reconciliation, balance, wisdom.

Music: Because the service was virtual it was necessary for music to be pre-recorded. I contributed the following two recordings for the service. The first one, “Harvest Moon” was played as a call to worship. The second, “Wish You Were Here” was played immediately following the message.

• “Harvest Moon” by Neil Young. Performed by Dan Spitzner.

Click here to link to the recording.

• “Wish You Were Here” by Pink Floyd. Performed by Dan Spitzner.

Click here to link to the recording.

Message: “Seeds of Harvest,” by Dan Spitzner

Good morning. Today I speak to you during a season of harvest, a time of gratitude for the seeds planted long ago, which have since germinated, survived into maturity, and have now blessed us and the world with their fruits.

The author Pauline Campenelli writes that in her corner of the world, in the northeast United States, September is the time of the grape harvest, the squash harvest, and the corn harvest, as well as a time to harvest a variety of herbs. In the Celtic lunar calendar, the first full moon after the Autumn equinox is called the Wine Moon, in acknowledgement of the grape harvest. However, a parallel tradition calls it the Harvest Moon, for the reason that it provides light to continue pulling in the harvest past sundown. When days begin to grow shorter, and there is still a great deal of outdoor work to do, a bright moon is a welcome blessing.

Many who follow an earth-based spiritual path celebrate the Autumn Equinox as Mabon, the second of three harvest festival days in the Wheel of the Year, an annual cycle of eight festival days inspired by ancient Celtic seasonal calendars. The first harvest festival took place on August 1, and was celebrated as Lughnassadh, a time when the first fruits of the year are harvested, when people bake bread, and when it may just start to become noticeable that the days are getting shorter. Mabon, the second harvest festival–which is celebrated right about now–, is a time of balance and harmony, when the lengths of day and night are equal. It is sometimes called the Pagan Thanksgiving. This time of year moves us ever closer to Samhain, the third harvest festival, which falls on October 31. This festival day marks a major shift of the spiritual year, when darkness takes over light, and the last of the harvest is brought in.

When we look past Samhain, we are aware that the treacherous season of winter is on the horizon. This is not only a time of darkness, but of death, as the trees, having already put on their blazing display, lose their leaves and go dormant; plants die, and animals enact their meticulous strategies against starvation and other risks of winter. When I stand face-on against a cold winter wind, I find that these risks are palpable, despite our modern protections.

In a book called “Wintering,” the author Katherine May reminds us that the stillness such as one finds in winter is a time for recentering. She writes of the healing power of cold, and also of metaphorical winters–that is, of fallow periods in our lives–when stasis can enable metamorphosis, and when metaphorical seeds may be planted, setting in motion the journey to a future harvest.

This is the cycle that I would like to explore today: the front half of the cycle is from harvest to winter, and the back half is from winter to harvest. Around the Autumn equinox, these seasons are in balance with each other, and each is in balance with itself: The energy and joy of harvest is balanced by its anticipation of a dark season ahead. The treacherousness of winter is balanced by its stillness, hence its enabling of reflection and recuperation.

I have mentioned in past sermons that my own spiritual path is polytheistic, and syncretic–that is, it draws on multiple religious traditions. It is particularly inspired by neo-Pagan practices associated with the pre-Christian religions of Scandinavia and the Germanic regions.

As part of my own spiritual practice, I have recently become fascinated by an ancient writing system known as the runes. The runes themselves are, on one hand, the letters used in this writing system; on the other hand, over the centuries each rune has taken on a mystical meaning, and together they are at the center of a set of pagan devotional practices. This morning I would like to bring in a “runic” perspective to explore our theme.

Historically, rune writing is found most prominently carved into stones that were erected across Scandinavia throughout the middle ages. On these so-called runestones, the purpose of rune writing is functional language: stones were erected to memorialize family members and prominent individuals, some of whom had traveled to distant lands but never returned. Rune writing was influential to J.R.R. Tolkien, author of the Lord of the Rings fantasy novels, who invented runic systems and included them in his writings.

As I mentioned, the runes themselves are the letters used in those writing systems. Some runes were misused by the Nazis as symbols of their abhorrent ideology, and some are misused today by white-supremicist hate groups. Nevertheless, there is growing energy within the modern pagan movement to reclaim the runes by using them in the manner of their authentic purposes, which includes their mystical purposes.

The runes’ mystical uses are varied. They are attested in reports of ancient divination and spellwork that date from Roman times, and feature prominently in Norse mythology. In the 1970’s, the runes were popularized for their use in divination, as a counterpart to tarot and other oracular systems.

In divination, any of a number of creatively-fashioned procedures are used to draw a subset of runes, which might then be arranged within a template, after which the entire arrangement is interpreted according to the runes’ mystical meanings. Some may say that I am talking about “fortune telling,” but that description is too simplistic. As I see it, the purpose of divination is to help a person to organize their perspectives and priorities around a given topic or question. I will apply the runes today in a similar fashion, as a tool that would offer perspective on our theme.

There are several runes that are relevant to the cycle of harvest and winter. Following convention, I state them using their Old Germanic names.

JERA is specifically associated with harvest. It is taken as an expression of transformation across seasonal cycles, and of balance between primal forces, which must be achieved for life to flourish.

ISA is associated with ice, stasis, and inertia. An image associated with this rune is the “broad bridge” created when water becomes frozen over. It is slippery and treacherous if attempting to cross, but its glistening beauty can inspire retreat into the stillness of inner-awareness.

HAGALAZ is associated with hail. Ancient poems about the runes describe an individual hailstone as an “ice egg.” Though hail can be a destructive force, which is out of our control, the ice-egg metaphor emphasizes that melted hail nourishes the land. This rune is representative of ice becoming a support for new life, and new harvests.

Finally, we have INGWAZ, which is associated with the fertility god Freyr. He is said to have been the seed-ancestor of multiple royal houses across northern Europe.

Let us start with JERA, the rune of harvest.

This is a joyful rune, and I connect to it through a recent metaphorical harvest that is symbolized by a milestone I reached this past summer… I turned fifty years old. This significant birthday had been on my radar for some time, and when it finally arrived I felt very good about stepping across that threshold. Because I am in a good place, personally and spiritually, after having overcome personal history of confusion, self-destruction, and sadness, it felt like a harvest of life experience, grown from seeds that were planted long ago. I will come back to this in a moment.

But first, I would like to share with you the story of my favorite non-metaphorical–actual agricultural–harvest. This took place decades ago, but not in my childhood. Yet, metaphorically speaking, that is when the seeds were planted. Growing up in the country, I was raised in part by an eccentric and curious father with a farming background. He was a hobbyist farmer and I was surrounded throughout childhood by his experimentation. Later, I would forget about this early attachment I had to the land; I would become anchorless, immersed in professional pursuits, and swept away by the puzzling world I had stepped into upon moving away from my little hometown.

The favorite harvest I would like to tell you about took place during my early adulthood, when I was living in North Carolina, and had begun to feel confident enough professionally to put energy into home. I planted my first garden as an adult. As I planned, and shopped for plants, and planted, I rediscovered joys that I had not experienced since those days with my father during childhood.

My North Carolina garden turned out to be a mess. Despite my enthusiasm, I did not know how to take care of most of what I had planted; all of my squash plants developed mold, and quickly perished; however, my strawberries–my strawberries!–they flourished, and gave me more delicious fruit than I knew what to do with. Unbeknownst to me, I had planted June-bearing strawberries. You may know that, in contrast with everbearing strawberries, June-bearing varieties produce their whole crop in a short time period of just a few weeks. The fruit is lucious, sweet, and simply delicious. Once a few berries started to ripen, they all started to ripen. Each night for several weeks I’d fill up a large colander of strawberries. In my memory, this overwhelming success I had achieved in that one small corner of my garden completely overshadowed the numerous shortcomings of the rest of the garden.

This brings me to ISA, the rune of ice.

I still celebrate a great period of stasis in my life, which ultimately led to rejuvenation. This metaphorical winter began in 2014. At the start of that year, I was in the last gasps of a crumbling marriage, which had ended by summer. I was then on my own, trying to figure out how to be a single father. Most of my social connections were linked to my ex-wife. So it was just me. But that state of aloneness turned out to be a state that I embraced for its opportunity to heal and grow. In fact, I do not remember that period as especially lonely. During that time I established a healthy relationship with myself. I established spiritual practices that connected me more closely to the divine and felt more authentic than any I had practiced before. These practices became a salve, and eventually an anchor of my social self. They were seeds that grew into bountiful harvests of connection to human spiritual communities, to friendships, and to love, family, and eventually to an uplifting life-partnership. These were seeds that allowed me to face my fiftieth birthday with joy.

The HAGALAZ rune reminds us that harvest is messy; and it is hard work. Those who reap in the fields during the season of Mabon do not have it easy. They work hard under the light of the Harvest Moon. HAGALAZ is both destructive and nourishing. It reminds us that life does not move in straight lines.

In Katherine May’s book, “Wintering,” she highlights the stirring fact that when certain deciduous trees lose their leaves, the buds of new leaves are already in place. That is, even as the tree’s cycle moves toward stasis, it has taken its first steps toward a new and fruitful season. Such is the energy of HAGALAZ, the ice-egg

This brings us to INGWAZ, the rune of the seed-ancestor; the rune that expands the seed-to-harvest concept across generations.

Ancestry is a challenging topic in the context of pagan spirituality. Some groups problematically misinterpret the virtue of showing reverence to ancestors as implying that particular ancient populations are to be granted superior status. This is clearly wrong. It is wrong not only for its elitism, but for its reduction of ancient cultures to stereotypes and caricatures. In my experience, the wisdom of ancestors is best accessed when reverence is directed toward specific individuals, not their ethnic group or general culture.

The ancestor I hold with special reverence is my father, the eccentric farm-hobbyist I mentioned in my comments about JERA. When he died, it was sudden, and unexpected. It came during my teenage years, at a time when I really needed a dad. But the seeds that he and my mother had planted sustained me in no small way through the years after. My father’s death opened an expanse of emptiness at the core of who I thought I was. Not a day goes by that I do not wish that he was still here. Yet, the memories of that optimistic, love-filled home environment remained; and when the time was right, those memories allowed me to start planting metaphorical strawberries, and to eventually grow a love-filled environment around which I would wrap my own dearest ones. The journey was not easy, as no harvest ever is.

Harvest time, then, as JERA reminds us, is more than the end of a growth season, but a moment in a full seasonal cycle, and a majestic expression of seeds that had been planted before. ISA reminds us of the coming tests of our resilience and fortitude during winter, and opportunities to sow the seeds of future harvests. HAGALAZ reminds us that harvest is not easy work, nor is the path to harvest, which is almost never the straight path we might want it to be. INGWAZ reminds us to not only celebrate the seeds we ourselves have sown, but the seeds sown in us by those who came before.

In addition to these four runes that I have brought forth to explore our theme, perhaps it would be useful to add a fifth rune, one whose ascribed meaning would remind us to cherish what we harvest today. In existing runic systems there are many candidates for such a rune; for example, the FEHU rune has the ascribed meaning of abundance, which may just as well be the abundance of harvest. However, if I were to be imaginative, perhaps I would invent a rune that would have that meaning of cherishing what we harvest. Perhaps it would be symbolized by a strawberry–or, better, gallons of delicious strawberries–to remind us to stay optimistic, and to not become fearful of the mold that has destroyed our squash plants, but to revel in the successes at the corners of our gardens. Let us water them and allow those seeds to grow.

Additional reading, resources, and comments: Provided by Dan Spitzner

• Pauline Campenelli is the author of my go-to resource on the Wheel of the Year festivals. The book is “Wheel of the Year: Living the Magical Life”

• Two good books on mystical uses of the runes are as follows

“Taking Up The Runes,” by Diana L. Paxson

“Nordic Runes: Understanding, Casting, and Interpreting the Ancient Viking Oracle,” by Paul Rhys Mountfort.

There are many other good books available, but these two are my favorites. To be clear, these are not history books, but discuss the runes from a modern pagan spiritual perspective.

• The book “Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times” by Katherine May, was published in November 2020. You can read well-written reviews from NPR (click here) and The Guardian (click here), among other outlets.