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.

by J. Barkley Rosser, Jr.
August 15, 2021

It has been widely argued that New England transcendentalism was the first genuinely Americanintellectual movement, strongly influencing philosophy, theology, politics, and literature. Many date its clear beginning to the first meeting of the Transcendental Club on September 12, 1836, never really a club rather than a series of meetings. That first meeting had only three participants: two Unitarian  ministers, Frederic Henry Hedge who hosted and initiated it and George Putnam, along with Ralph  Waldo Emerson, who had stopped being Minister of the Unitarian Second Church in Boston in 1832 , following the death of his first wife and his developing doubts about communion and Biblical miracles.

Later male “members” (attendees of the meetings) included Bronson Alcott, experimental educator and  father of Louisa May Alcott, the author of Little Women; Theodore Parker, abolitionist and Unitarian minister whose parishioners in his West Roxbury church included the abolitionist leader, William Lloyd Garrison; Henry David Thoreau, author of “An Essay on Civil Disobedience” and Walden, which exalted mystically merging with nature in accordance with Hindu and Buddhist views; William Henry Channing, nephew of the main founder of the American Unitarian Association in 1825. William Ellery  Channing, who resisted transcendentalism even as his views influenced the movement; and George Ripley, journalist and Unitarian minister who would found the utopian Brook Farm experiment in 1841 in West Roxbury (which would fail in 1847).

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Presented by Chris Edwards and Robin McNallie
July 4, 2021

Video:
Democracy, by Leonard Cohen

Chalice reading:

Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation, are people who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning; they want the ocean without the awful roar of its waters. Power concedes nothing without a demand; it never did and it never will.  Frederick Douglass

I:

On The 1619 Project (CE) — In August, 1619, a ship with about 20 African captives from what is now Angola docked in Virginia near what is now Hampton. The pirates in charge sold them to colonists. Slavery in America began with those men and women, the first among 12.5 million to come in chains across the Atlantic. Almost two million failed to survive that dreadful Middle Passage.

Asphyxiation was a hazard. Captives were confined below deck, where oxygen could get too low for a candle to burn. Centuries later, during Ireland’s potato famine, the same conditions would prevail on a “coffin ship,” so-called because only about 70% of passengers survived, such as the ship a young barrel-maker named Patrick boarded in 1849. Patrick debarked in Boston, where he would die from cholera, but only after marrying and having 5 children. The family might have seen those ads that said “Irish need not apply,” but some of Patrick Kennedy’s progeny did well. His great-grandson was President John F. Kennedy.

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by April Moore
May 30, 2021

A few months ago, here at HUU, I expressed a great joy about something that had unexpectedly come into my life—a folder of my mother’s writings from long ago.  Apparently, when I’d received the folder a couple of years ago from my sister, I’d stashed it in a closet and forgotten all about it. But a couple of months ago I came across it.  

This folder was stuffed with more than 40 typed stories and essays.  From the return address on the first page of each one, I could tell that the writings spanned decades, from the late 1930s to the mid-1970s. 

I realized I held in my hands a treasure, the fruits of my mother’s creative efforts over much of her adult life.

Oh, my God!  Reading these stories has had a profound effect on my heart. 

For starters, the quality of Mom’s writings stunned me—many were expertly structured, beautifully worded, and insightful.  My mom was truly an artist, and I had never realized it!

But it is the way these stories restored my parents to me that had the profound impact on my heart.  Although both my parents died a long time ago, I am re-experiencing them, vividly, at different stages of their lives.  For instance, I can see my dad through my mom’s loving eyes, as a young man, and then as the more mature man he was during my childhood. 

And reading a harrowing account of how a moment of carelessness by my parents when they were young nearly cost my sister her life when she was just three years old.  Mom wrote poignantly about  that brush with tragedy and how it changed her as a mother.

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by Tom Hook
April 11, 2021

When I first began to review this topic from Soul Matters of “Becoming”, I must admit that I was a bit perplexed and challenged. After all, most of us present here today – including myself – would be categorized in the camp of “aging out”.

So what else do we need to Become? After all, we have weathered so much in our brief stay on Mother Earth. Wars, unrest, pandemics, the re?emergence of racism. Can’t we just rest? Put our feet up and relax for the rest of the journey?

Sometimes. There certainly is a place for that. However, let me suggest that we ponder the “Story” of our life to this point and ? with courage ? the “Story” of our future.

Pádraig Ó Tuama in his poem Narrative Theology #1 writes: And I said to him

Are there answers to all of this?
And he said
The answer is in a story
and the story is being told.

And I said
But there is so much pain
And she answered, plainly,
Pain will happen.

Then I said
Will I ever find meaning?
And they said
You will find meaning
Where you give meaning.

The answer is in the story
And the story isn’t finished.

“You will find meaning where you give meaning. The answer is in the story and the story isn’t finished.”

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