Rev. Cynthia A. Snavely Sunday, September 14, 2003

A little girl went off to play in her neighborhood and came home much later than her mother expected. "Where were you!" her mother asked, and the little girl answered that her friend's bicycle had broken and she had had to stop and help. “But sweetheart," her mother said, still exasperated, "You don't know anything about fixing bicycles." "I know, Mom," said the little girl, but I had to stop and help her cry."

That is what Unitarian Universalists teach our children.  We don’t know ourselves how to fix bicycles or in religious terms, what God is like or if there is a god or what happens after we die or if anything happens after we die, but we know that people the world over ask the questions and ponder and laugh and cry.  We teach our children to be a part of that asking and pondering and laughing and crying.

We don’t give our children answers.  We don’t tell them to just take it on faith if they ask questions.  We encourage them to ask questions.  We even teach them to ask the questions.  Exploration is the religious way.  If one asks how the world was made that is a scientific question.  If one asks why the world was made that is a religious question.  Why are things as they are?  Is there some plan for this world?  For me and my life?  Does it matter what I do?  Why do bad things happen?  Why do good things happen?  Why do I hate?  Why do I love?  Am I alone in this world?  Is there someone to travel my life road with me?

Sophia Lyon Fahs, a Unitarian Universalist religious educator, wrote in her book, Today’s Children and Yesterday’s Heritage, “The religious way is the deep way, the way with a growing perspective and an expanding view.  It is the way that dips into the heart of things, into personal feelings, yearnings and hostilities that so often must be buried and despised and left misunderstood.

“The religious way is the way that sees what physical eyes alone fail to see, the intangibles at the heart of every phenomenon. 

“The religious way is the way that touches universal relationships, that goes high, wide and deep, that expands the feeling of kinship.

“And if God symbolizes or means these larger relationships, the religious way means finding God; but the word itself is not too important.  It is the enlarged and deepening experiences that bring the growing insights and that create the sustaining ambition ‘to find life and find it abundantly’ that really count the most.

“When such a religious quality of exploration is the goal, any subject, any phenomenon, any thing, animate or inanimate, human or animal, may be the starting point.”

Explore in order to find life and find it abundantly.  The answers have not all been found and written down in a book or books, not the Koran, not the Bible, not the Vedas.  Those are records of other people’s religious exploration and they may be helpful in our religious journey, but they do not lay out the answers to all our questions.  Two hundred years ago in this country dark skinned people asking questions about freedom might have been told that God cursed Noah’s son Ham and so they were meant to be enslaved.  That is not a religious answer if one considers the religious way to be the way that expands feelings of universal kinship and seeks to find life and find it abundantly.  A boy today who asks why he has sexual feelings for boys and not for girls might be told by some that the Bible says those feelings are sinful and that he is bound for damnation.  That is not a religious answer.  It does not help him to find life and find it abundantly.  It does not give him a sense of universal kinship. 

We as Unitarian Universalists affirm the inherent worth and dignity of every person.  It doesn’t matter if some religious text says that women should be subordinate to men and dark skinned people should be enslaved to white or that there are classes of people down to untouchables or that gay and lesbians are evil or that people with mental illness are possessed by demons.  They are wrong. 

Sure in our principles and purposes we say that the living tradition we share draws from many sources, including wisdom from the world’s religions.  But we say that the wisdom we draw from the world’s religions should inspire us in our ethical and spiritual life.  In each of our list of sources we list not just what the source is but what we seek to find in that source.

“The living tradition we share draws from many sources: Direct experience of that transcending mystery and wonder, affirmed in all cultures, which moves us to a renewal of the spirit and an openness to the forces that create and uphold life….

In other words if you think God tells you to go into a village and destroy all the men, women, children and cattle think again about that voice is God even if there is a story just like yours in the Bible.  If you think the Spirit is directing you to abandon your wife and child to go on a spiritual journey think again about that spirit even if that is just what the Buddha did.  Is that voice deep within you leading you to be open to something that will create and uphold life?  Don’t go by what others did.  Ask the question yourself.

The living tradition we share draws from many sources including “Words and deeds of prophetic women and men which challenge us to confront powers and structures of evil with justice, compassion, and the transforming power of love.”  Mother Teresa, Gandhi, Dr. King, Bishop Tutu were/are all prophetic people, but every word that escaped their lips was not prophetic.  They were all human.  Test their words. Test their deeds. Do the words or the deeds you are considering confront powers and structures of evil with justice, compassion and the transforming power of love?  If not, then those words, those deeds are not prophetic.

I want my children to admire Gandhi’s nonviolent struggle for self-rule in India.  I do not want my children to emulate his diet.  We teach our children both to admire and to question their heroes and heroines’ words and lives.

The living tradition we share draws from many sources including “Wisdom from the world’s religions which inspires us in our ethical and spiritual life; Jewish and Christian teachings which call us to respond to God’s love by loving our neighbors as ourselves; Humanist teachings which counsel us to heed the guidance of reason and the results of science, and warn us against the idolatries of mind and spirit; Spiritual teachings of Earth-centered traditions which celebrate the sacred circle of life and instruct us to live in harmony with the rhythms of nature.”

Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, Taoism, Judaism, Christianity, Humanism, Animism all have something to teach us.  Unitarian Universalists should not be illiterate in the stories and teachings of these ways.  We should  have knowledge of them all.  But we teach our children not to make idols of any one way. 

I love a passage from Bertold Brecht’s play, Galileo.   The translator is Eric Bentley.  “Every day something is found.  Even the centenarians have the young shout in their ears what new thing has been discovered.  Much has been found already, but more can be found in the future.  And so there is still much for new generations to do.  The old teachings, believed for a thousand years, are on the point of collapsing.  There is less wood in the beams of these structures than in the supports which are supposed to hold them up.  But the new knowledge is a new building of which only the scaffolding is there.  Even the teaching of the great Copernicus is not yet proved.  But (humanity) will soon be properly informed as to its dwelling place, the heavenly body where it has its home.  What is written in the old books does not satisfy (humanity) any more.

            “For where Belief has sat for a thousand years, there today sits Doubt.  All the world says, yes, that is written in the books, but now let us see for ourselves.

            “The most celebrated truths are tapped on the shoulder.  What never was doubted is doubted now.

            “And thereby a wind has arisen which blows up the gold-brocaded cloaks of princes and prelates, so that fat or skinny legs are seen beneath, legs like our legs.

            “The skies, it has turned out, are empty. (The people) laugh merrily at that.

            “But the water of the earth drives the new distaffs, and five hundred hands are busy in the rope and sail shops at the dockyard making a New Order.

            “Even the sons of fishwives go to school.  In the markets, the new stars are talked about.

            “It was always said that the stars were fastened to a crystal vault so that they could not fall.  Now we have taken heart and let them float in the air, without support, and they are embarked on a great voyage  -- like us, who are also without support  and embarked on a great voyage.”

            We do not give our children religious supports to fall back on.  We tell them to make the voyage.  Explore their feelings, their yearnings, even their hostilities.  Ask the questions.  Not just how but also why.  We teach our children not to be afraid to reject old answers.  We teach them that they can find new answers, and we teach them that they can live and live abundantly with just the question and no answer.   

 When there is no answer they can still laugh, they can still cry.  And when they laugh or  they cry with others even that is a religious act.

A little girl went off to play in her neighborhood and came home much later than her mother expected. "Where were you!" her mother asked, and the little girl answered that her friend's bicycle had broken and she had had to stop and help. “But sweetheart," her mother said, still exasperated, "You don't know anything about fixing bicycles." "I know, Mom," said the little girl, but I had to stop and help her cry."

That is what Unitarian Universalists teach our children.   

Let us pray using a prayer adapted from one written by our Unitarian Uniiversalist Association  President, Bill Sinkford for September 11, 2002. Please enter the space of silence and honesty, which is known by many names.

Let us pray.

Babies are born and we dedicate ourselves to them. People die and we memorialize their lives, laughing and crying as we grieve our loss. Marriages and partnerships are formed and blessed. Triumphs and tragedies enter our sanctuaries with us as we gather.

Life goes on. And our ministry together tries to hold it all: the joys and the sorrows, the pleasure and the pain, the fullness and the emptiness. All enter here with us. Our coming together bears witness to the power of love, and the possibility of community.

For what should we pray?

(24) months ago, our illusions of security, our sense of safety were shattered. How many times have we heard and said: "Since September 11th…," as if by saying those words, we could somehow control the reality of grief, loss, anger and fear; the reality that there are those in our increasingly divided world who see us differently from the way we see ourselves. We say those words- "since September 11th"- as if we could gain dominion over their meaning. Yet as we have grieved and feared, raged and anguished through this last year, life has gone on.

For what should we pray, then, (2) year(s) later?

Should we pray for peace?

Peace in our lives and peace in our world? Should we pray for an end to grief, freedom from fear, an end to violence? But is it not our own hands that must make it so?

Yes; despite our failures to achieve peace in our own hearts, still we pray for peace. We pray for an end to grief for those who lost loved ones on September 11th and since September 11th, for those working in rescue and recovery efforts and for those members of our nation's armed services who stand in harm's way. And we pray for those, no less bereft, who have endured losses unrelated to September 11th that have been overshadowed by that communal tragedy.

Should we pray for safety?

A sense of security, confidence, trust that the universe welcomes our presence and offers a home for our spirit? But at whose expense are we willing to seek safety for ourselves?

Yes, we pray for safety, but we also pray for those profiled, jailed and deported since September 11th, and ask forgiveness from those whose safety has been sacrificed in our attempt to guarantee our own.

Should we pray for wholeness?

A world in which Muslim and Jew can live together, a world in which gay and straight, men and women, Black and white and brown and red and yellow encounter one another not in fear but in thanks? But can we ourselves-do we-live with such integrity?

Yes, we pray for wholeness, in our world and in our own lives.

Should we pray for our nation?

Can we learn to define our national interest in a way that acknowledges we share a single destiny with all our neighbors on this small blue planet? Can our policies recognize at what cost in human suffering American privilege has been purchased?

Yes, we pray for our nation.

We pray for all these things. And, gracious spirit, we pray for ourselves. It is so hard to trust. Everywhere we look, reality contradicts our yearning to hope. It seems that we must walk alone, even through the valley of the shadow of death. We pray for the willingness to walk with one another, for we know we will need to walk together if we are ever to make justice and peace real.

For there are no hands on earth but ours. And our hands seem so few and our abilities so small in the face of such great need for healing.

There are no hands on earth but ours. So we pray for the strength to try. We know how real the brokenness of this world is, but we will not give brokenness the last word.

So we pray for an end to grief, for peace, and safety. We pray for our nation. And we pray for ourselves, that we might feel the spirit of life and the stirrings of compassion. Help us resist both fear and complacency. Help us give life the shape of justice. Help us know that we can collude with love. Help us live as if wholeness can happen, and by our living, help us to make it so.

Amen.

What Do Unitarian Universalists Teach Our Children?

Rev. Cynthia A. Snavely

Sunday, September 14, 2003

A little girl went off to play in her neighborhood and came home much later than her mother expected. "Where were you!" her mother asked, and the little girl answered that her friend's bicycle had broken and she had had to stop and help. “But sweetheart," her mother said, still exasperated, "You don't know anything about fixing bicycles." "I know, Mom," said the little girl, but I had to stop and help her cry."

That is what Unitarian Universalists teach our children.  We don’t know ourselves how to fix bicycles or in religious terms, what God is like or if there is a god or what happens after we die or if anything happens after we die, but we know that people the world over ask the questions and ponder and laugh and cry.  We teach our children to be a part of that asking and pondering and laughing and crying.

We don’t give our children answers.  We don’t tell them to just take it on faith if they ask questions.  We encourage them to ask questions.  We even teach them to ask the questions.  Exploration is the religious way.  If one asks how the world was made that is a scientific question.  If one asks why the world was made that is a religious question.  Why are things as they are?  Is there some plan for this world?  For me and my life?  Does it matter what I do?  Why do bad things happen?  Why do good things happen?  Why do I hate?  Why do I love?  Am I alone in this world?  Is there someone to travel my life road with me?

Sophia Lyon Fahs, a Unitarian Universalist religious educator, wrote in her book, Today’s Children and Yesterday’s Heritage, “The religious way is the deep way, the way with a growing perspective and an expanding view.  It is the way that dips into the heart of things, into personal feelings, yearnings and hostilities that so often must be buried and despised and left misunderstood.

“The religious way is the way that sees what physical eyes alone fail to see, the intangibles at the heart of every phenomenon. 

“The religious way is the way that touches universal relationships, that goes high, wide and deep, that expands the feeling of kinship.

“And if God symbolizes or means these larger relationships, the religious way means finding God; but the word itself is not too important.  It is the enlarged and deepening experiences that bring the growing insights and that create the sustaining ambition ‘to find life and find it abundantly’ that really count the most.

“When such a religious quality of exploration is the goal, any subject, any phenomenon, any thing, animate or inanimate, human or animal, may be the starting point.”

Explore in order to find life and find it abundantly.  The answers have not all been found and written down in a book or books, not the Koran, not the Bible, not the Vedas.  Those are records of other people’s religious exploration and they may be helpful in our religious journey, but they do not lay out the answers to all our questions.  Two hundred years ago in this country dark skinned people asking questions about freedom might have been told that God cursed Noah’s son Ham and so they were meant to be enslaved.  That is not a religious answer if one considers the religious way to be the way that expands feelings of universal kinship and seeks to find life and find it abundantly.  A boy today who asks why he has sexual feelings for boys and not for girls might be told by some that the Bible says those feelings are sinful and that he is bound for damnation.  That is not a religious answer.  It does not help him to find life and find it abundantly.  It does not give him a sense of universal kinship. 

We as Unitarian Universalists affirm the inherent worth and dignity of every person.  It doesn’t matter if some religious text says that women should be subordinate to men and dark skinned people should be enslaved to white or that there are classes of people down to untouchables or that gay and lesbians are evil or that people with mental illness are possessed by demons.  They are wrong. 

Sure in our principles and purposes we say that the living tradition we share draws from many sources, including wisdom from the world’s religions.  But we say that the wisdom we draw from the world’s religions should inspire us in our ethical and spiritual life.  In each of our list of sources we list not just what the source is but what we seek to find in that source.

“The living tradition we share draws from many sources: Direct experience of that transcending mystery and wonder, affirmed in all cultures, which moves us to a renewal of the spirit and an openness to the forces that create and uphold life….

In other words if you think God tells you to go into a village and destroy all the men, women, children and cattle think again about that voice is God even if there is a story just like yours in the Bible.  If you think the Spirit is directing you to abandon your wife and child to go on a spiritual journey think again about that spirit even if that is just what the Buddha did.  Is that voice deep within you leading you to be open to something that will create and uphold life?  Don’t go by what others did.  Ask the question yourself.

The living tradition we share draws from many sources including “Words and deeds of prophetic women and men which challenge us to confront powers and structures of evil with justice, compassion, and the transforming power of love.”  Mother Teresa, Gandhi, Dr. King, Bishop Tutu were/are all prophetic people, but every word that escaped their lips was not prophetic.  They were all human.  Test their words. Test their deeds. Do the words or the deeds you are considering confront powers and structures of evil with justice, compassion and the transforming power of love?  If not, then those words, those deeds are not prophetic.

I want my children to admire Gandhi’s nonviolent struggle for self-rule in India.  I do not want my children to emulate his diet.  We teach our children both to admire and to question their heroes and heroines’ words and lives.

The living tradition we share draws from many sources including “Wisdom from the world’s religions which inspires us in our ethical and spiritual life; Jewish and Christian teachings which call us to respond to God’s love by loving our neighbors as ourselves; Humanist teachings which counsel us to heed the guidance of reason and the results of science, and warn us against the idolatries of mind and spirit; Spiritual teachings of Earth-centered traditions which celebrate the sacred circle of life and instruct us to live in harmony with the rhythms of nature.”

Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, Taoism, Judaism, Christianity, Humanism, Animism all have something to teach us.  Unitarian Universalists should not be illiterate in the stories and teachings of these ways.  We should  have knowledge of them all.  But we teach our children not to make idols of any one way. 

I love a passage from Bertold Brecht’s play, Galileo.   The translator is Eric Bentley.  “Every day something is found.  Even the centenarians have the young shout in their ears what new thing has been discovered.  Much has been found already, but more can be found in the future.  And so there is still much for new generations to do.  The old teachings, believed for a thousand years, are on the point of collapsing.  There is less wood in the beams of these structures than in the supports which are supposed to hold them up.  But the new knowledge is a new building of which only the scaffolding is there.  Even the teaching of the great Copernicus is not yet proved.  But (humanity) will soon be properly informed as to its dwelling place, the heavenly body where it has its home.  What is written in the old books does not satisfy (humanity) any more.

            “For where Belief has sat for a thousand years, there today sits Doubt.  All the world says, yes, that is written in the books, but now let us see for ourselves.

            “The most celebrated truths are tapped on the shoulder.  What never was doubted is doubted now.

            “And thereby a wind has arisen which blows up the gold-brocaded cloaks of princes and prelates, so that fat or skinny legs are seen beneath, legs like our legs.

            “The skies, it has turned out, are empty. (The people) laugh merrily at that.

            “But the water of the earth drives the new distaffs, and five hundred hands are busy in the rope and sail shops at the dockyard making a New Order.

            “Even the sons of fishwives go to school.  In the markets, the new stars are talked about.

            “It was always said that the stars were fastened to a crystal vault so that they could not fall.  Now we have taken heart and let them float in the air, without support, and they are embarked on a great voyage  -- like us, who are also without support  and embarked on a great voyage.”

            We do not give our children religious supports to fall back on.  We tell them to make the voyage.  Explore their feelings, their yearnings, even their hostilities.  Ask the questions.  Not just how but also why.  We teach our children not to be afraid to reject old answers.  We teach them that they can find new answers, and we teach them that they can live and live abundantly with just the question and no answer.   

 When there is no answer they can still laugh, they can still cry.  And when they laugh or  they cry with others even that is a religious act.

A little girl went off to play in her neighborhood and came home much later than her mother expected. "Where were you!" her mother asked, and the little girl answered that her friend's bicycle had broken and she had had to stop and help. “But sweetheart," her mother said, still exasperated, "You don't know anything about fixing bicycles." "I know, Mom," said the little girl, but I had to stop and help her cry."

That is what Unitarian Universalists teach our children.   

Let us pray using a prayer adapted from one written by our Unitarian Uniiversalist Association  President, Bill Sinkford for September 11, 2002.

Please enter the space of silence and honesty, which is known by many names.

Let us pray.

Gracious spirit of creation, dear God.

A new church year begins. Life goes on.

Babies are born and we dedicate ourselves to them. People die and we memorialize their lives, laughing and crying as we grieve our loss. Marriages and partnerships are formed and blessed. Triumphs and tragedies enter our sanctuaries with us as we gather.

Life goes on. And our ministry together tries to hold it all: the joys and the sorrows, the pleasure and the pain, the fullness and the emptiness. All enter here with us. Our coming together bears witness to the power of love, and the possibility of community.

For what should we pray?

(24) months ago, our illusions of security, our sense of safety were shattered. How many times have we heard and said: "Since September 11th…," as if by saying those words, we could somehow control the reality of grief, loss, anger and fear; the reality that there are those in our increasingly divided world who see us differently from the way we see ourselves. We say those words- "since September 11th"- as if we could gain dominion over their meaning. Yet as we have grieved and feared, raged and anguished through this last year, life has gone on.

For what should we pray, then, (2) year(s) later?

Should we pray for peace?

Peace in our lives and peace in our world? Should we pray for an end to grief, freedom from fear, an end to violence? But is it not our own hands that must make it so?

Yes; despite our failures to achieve peace in our own hearts, still we pray for peace. We pray for an end to grief for those who lost loved ones on September 11th and since September 11th, for those working in rescue and recovery efforts and for those members of our nation's armed services who stand in harm's way. And we pray for those, no less bereft, who have endured losses unrelated to September 11th that have been overshadowed by that communal tragedy.

Should we pray for safety?

A sense of security, confidence, trust that the universe welcomes our presence and offers a home for our spirit? But at whose expense are we willing to seek safety for ourselves?

Yes, we pray for safety, but we also pray for those profiled, jailed and deported since September 11th, and ask forgiveness from those whose safety has been sacrificed in our attempt to guarantee our own.

Should we pray for wholeness?

A world in which Muslim and Jew can live together, a world in which gay and straight, men and women, Black and white and brown and red and yellow encounter one another not in fear but in thanks? But can we ourselves-do we-live with such integrity?

Yes, we pray for wholeness, in our world and in our own lives.

Should we pray for our nation?

Can we learn to define our national interest in a way that acknowledges we share a single destiny with all our neighbors on this small blue planet? Can our policies recognize at what cost in human suffering American privilege has been purchased?

Yes, we pray for our nation.

We pray for all these things. And, gracious spirit, we pray for ourselves. It is so hard to trust. Everywhere we look, reality contradicts our yearning to hope. It seems that we must walk alone, even through the valley of the shadow of death. We pray for the willingness to walk with one another, for we know we will need to walk together if we are ever to make justice and peace real.

For there are no hands on earth but ours. And our hands seem so few and our abilities so small in the face of such great need for healing.

There are no hands on earth but ours. So we pray for the strength to try. We know how real the brokenness of this world is, but we will not give brokenness the last word.

So we pray for an end to grief, for peace, and safety. We pray for our nation. And we pray for ourselves, that we might feel the spirit of life and the stirrings of compassion. Help us resist both fear and complacency. Help us give life the shape of justice. Help us know that we can collude with love. Help us live as if wholeness can happen, and by our living, help us to make it so.

Amen.