ministry

Re-dedication Sunday

/ uurevjeff

I would like to put out there the suggestion that Unitarian Universalist churches consider placing the last Sunday of July on their liturgical calendars as Re-dedication Sunday, in memory of the event on July 27, 2008 at the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church. We did this at our service last Sunday at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation at Shelter Rock, resulting in a ritual that many in attendance found deeply moving.

I include much of non-sermon text below as the context for the service. The intent was to recognize that our sanctuaries are sacred spaces into which we bring much emotion throughout the year. The idea of Re-dedication Sunday is to cleanse our worship rooms of the past year’s accumulation of pain, anxiety, fear, and despair so that healing may begin anew.

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Re-dedication of Worship Center Service Elements

Call to Worship

The first peace…is that which comes from within the souls of men when they realize their relationship, their oneness, with the universe and all its powers, and when they realize that at the center of the universe dwells the Sacred, and that this center is really everywhere, it is within each of us. This is the real peace, and the others are but reflections of this. The second peace is that which is made between two individuals, and the third is that which is made between two nations. But above all you should understand that there can never be peace between nations until there is first known that true peace which is within the souls of men.
— Black Elk in The Sacred Pipe: Black Elk’s Account of the Seven Rites of the Oglala Sioux (1953)

Chalice Lighting

Let there be light!
Let it shine in dark places,
in moments of pain,
in times of grief,
in the darkness of hatred, violence, oppression,
where there is discouragement and despair.
Wherever darkness is to be put to flight,
Let there be light!
— Gordon McKeeman, Unitarian minister quoting Genesis 1:3 (from 1997 UUMA Worship Materials Collection)

Remembrance

Spirit of Life and Love that we know by many names, enter this space as we honor those whose lives were lost on Sunday, July 27, 2008. One year ago tomorrow, a man entered the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church in Knoxville with a shotgun. In a few short moments, the violent expression of his hate and frustration left two people dead, several wounded, and many shaken with trauma. We remember and honor those directly affected by the shootings at the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church. We also remember and honor our own feelings we have experienced and will continue to experience related to this and other similar events.

We light a candle in memory of Gregory Joseph (Greg) McKendry Jr., of Knoxville, Tennessee. He was an usher and board member of the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church.
We light a candle for Linda Kraeger. She was a member of the Westside Unitarian Universalist Fellowship in Farragut, Tennessee.

We take time now to remember the joys and the pains that entered through these doors today. We reach out to those who have come in today with heavy hearts; those who are struggling; those among us who are grieving; those who are caring for a loved one; those who are anxiously waiting for an unknown future, and all who are living with illness. We remember those who are home bound or hospitalized or, for whatever reason, could not be present with us today. May their names and faces be brought to mind. May they be assured that they have not been forgotten, and by our reaching out may they know that their presence is missed. Let us also celebrate the accomplishments and successful passages of life events we share today.

Just like our tools of technology, we occasionally need to reboot our lives so that we can better respond to life’s challenges and welcome life’s happiness. We need to cleanse our minds of outworn thoughts of guilt or shame. We need to cleanse our souls of outworn ways of living and being. Throughout the past year, this worship center has been a receptacle for the emotions brought in by the highs and lows of our lives. Just as we need help recovering from the challenges and the excitement of life, we should periodically cleanse our sacred spaces. Today, let us set about the work of cleansing ourselves and our religious home for the busy work in the year to come.

Offering

You may have noticed these boxes to my right. Standing on the Side of Love is a public advocacy campaign, sponsored by the Unitarian Universalist Association, promoting respect for the inherent worth and dignity of every person. Standing on the Side of Love will confront exclusion, oppression, and violence based on identity. Based in the aspiration to create beloved community, the campaign will pursue social change through advocacy, public witness, and speaking out in solidarity with those whose lives are publicly demeaned. All people, not just Unitarian Universalists, are invited to stand, speak, worship, march, roll, and live on the side of the love. Now, in the spirit of remembrance and of unconditional love, I ask the ushers to come forward to collect our morning offering to support the work, the witness, and the wonder of this religious community.

Ritual of Re-Dedication

When I first heard of the events in Knoxville one year ago, I felt a sick dread in the pit of my stomach. Beyond the senselessness of the act, as a long-time religious education teacher and as a parent, I was particularly struck by the occurrence of the act during a children’s play. All that day, I read updates of the news, seeking more facts; seeking information; searching for some reason or explanation.

I talked with others about the event so that I could share my emotions and pain. For we know that by sharing our pain, we can work toward lessening its debilitating impact on us. We can imagine moving beyond these initial emotions toward response, toward action, toward reconciliation. That is the nature of resilience.

Sometimes, we come here on Sunday mornings to share our pain…our pain of anger, our pain of fear, our pain of frustration, our pain of sadness. By sharing in covenant our love for each other and for all of humankind, we build on the knowledge that a shared joy is doubled in the sharing and that a shared pain is half a pain.

I ask you now to rise and form a circle. In this circle of our congregation, let us today re-dedicate this worship room as sacred space. As the chalice, the symbol of our living tradition, is passed among you, hold it for a moment and place into this vessel the fire of your own commitment to this place. May the combined power of our thoughts and feelings cleanse this space of the past year’s accumulation of anxiety, fear, and despair, so that healing can begin anew.

As this flame consumes a year of pain, may this chalice represent the foundation of that joy that is our commitment to the inherent worth and dignity of every person. We remember not only the love we have for the victims of terrible events, but for anyone whose life is so bereft of compassion, that violence against others seems their only recourse. We remember to love and to forgive those who, either through mental illness, their own suffering from abuse or violence, or other challenges of life, must be held accountable for their own acts of violence perpetrated on others. Our commitment to justice, equity, and compassion in human relations calls on us to do this.

As we pass our chalice, let us join in singing the hymn Comfort Me.

Benediction

Please join hands for our closing words. For centuries, Unitarian Universalists have offered to the world the promise of hope; the promise of a world without hate; the promise of a world with equity and justice; the promise of a world without violence. Together, we here present affirm to build hope, for a hope shared can become a vision for the world. Now, more than ever, let us challenge ourselves in the coming year to stand on the side of love, offering the world in this sacred space the promise of hope.

Blessed be, Amen, and Let it be so.

Another Definition

/ uurevjeff / 4 Comments

My attention recently has been drawn to words, particularly terms that challenge religious atheists. Another word brought to my attention in the past month deals with ministerial authority and discernment. That word is humility.

In my congregational polity class, we were asked from whence we will draw our authority as ministers. The author of one of our readings presumed that the pulpit for “serious” preachers has dimensions that are “scary and threatening.” Now, I might be willing to accept “daunting,” but the only nervousness I have when I am in the pulpit is simply the desire for service elements to go as I have planned. And even then, when worship goes in unplanned directions, the results can be amazing.

My source of authority, in the pulpit and throughout my ministerial development, has been human courage. As an historian, and particularly as a fan of Unitarian Universalist history, I cannot help but be infused with the numerous instances of courage displayed by my predecessors over the centuries. The enormous sacrifices paid by some, from imprisonment to even death, evidence the cost paid for our liberal faith. The bravery of countless women and men to commit heresy (“to choose”) when that choice ran counter to the dominant paradigm of society reveals the depth of our convictions. The dedication of our religious ancestors to acts of justice, acceptance, and compassion indicate the essential place of love in our collective theology.

When I stand in front of a congregation, I walk a path trod by many hundreds of others who have committed themselves to this task. I stand for the freedom paid for by the toil, sweat, tears, and even blood of comrades gone before. I speak with my own authentic voice since our commitment to polity does not bind me to creedal statements or hierarchies beyond the people I serve. I speak from my own experience because I can trust the wisdom and the capacity to reason of my congregants to think for themselves and to apply what they hear to their own lives. And, I prophesy because, as the author of that same article stated, I must say what I say and never compromise because that is how we grow and learn and be with each other.

When I have doubts, or question why I should assume this mantle of responsibility, all I have to do is to remember that I am not in the pulpit alone. I am with Arius and Origen, Servetus and David, the Polish Brethren, Murray and Ballou, Channing and Parker, and hundreds of current ministers and seminarians. My source of authority is the human courage to choose, to sacrifice for one’s beliefs, and to open oneself to others freely.

But, it has been pointed out to me that I can come across as “confident,” even “egocentric.” I have been cautioned to hone my humility. So, let’s look at this word “humble.” According to Wiktionary, the two meanings include:

1. Near the ground; not high or lofty; not pretentious or magnificent; unpretending; unassuming; as, a humble cottage.
2. Thinking lowly of one’s self; claiming little for one’s self; not proud, arrogant, or assuming; lowly; weak; modest.

Some of these meanings are, indeed, worth cultivating. As I become a minister, I am endeavoring to avoid being pretentious or arrogant, to pretending to be something I am not, or to assuming that I am more than I am.

But I find little value in thinking of myself as lowly and weak. And while I do not see myself as above others, I do represent the search for the loftiest of human concerns; our attempts to engage with our ultimate purposes. I am just a catalyst, here to play a small role to facilitate the reaction between souls and between each individual and the universe. Our liberal religious tradition is magnificent, and as its representative in that moment in time behind the pulpit, I would do it a disservice to aspire too much to modesty, and to regard it with too little pride.

Of course, the lines drawn here are thin. I can only hope that those listening to my sermons or reading my words sense the sincerity with which I present them. Not just as a candidate for the ministry, but as a human being, I aspire to greatness and to encouraging greatness in others. That is a humbling goal, but one that I strive achieve with every fiber of my being.

Gross National Happiness

/ uurevjeff
I am thinking of moving to Bhutan.

Seriously, though, while there are certainly problems with any effort like this, I applaud the effort at grand vision. We assume that the way things are in the world are “natural” and somehow intrinsic. I find it refreshing to see that someone somewhere thinks otherwise and imagines a better way.

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Published Date: 10 May 2009
By Seth Mydans in Thimphu, Bhutan
Forget quantitative easing, fiscal stimulus or liquidity injections. Gross national happiness could be the way forward. The tiny Buddhist kingdom of Bhutan, high in the Himalayan mountains, is working on a rather different answer to the global economic meltdown than the rest of the world. “Greed, insatiable human greed,” said Prime Minister Jigme Thinley, describing
what he sees as the cause of today’s economic catastrophe in the world beyond the snow-topped mountains. “What we need is change,” he said in the whitewashed fortress where he works. “We need to think gross national happiness.”

The notion of gross national happiness was the inspiration of the former king, Jigme Singye Wangchuck, in the 1970s, as an alternative to the gross national product. Now, the Bhutanese are refining the country’s guiding philosophy into what they see as a new political science, and it has ripened into government policy just when the world may need it, said Kinley Dorji, secretary of information and communications. “You see what a complete dedication to economic development ends up in,” he said, referring to the global economic crisis. “Industrialised societies have decided now that GNP is a broken promise.

“Under a new Constitution adopted last year, government programmes – from agriculture to transportation to foreign trade – must be judged not by the economic benefits they may offer but by the happiness they produce. The goal is not happiness itself, the prime minister explained, a concept that each person must define for himself. Rather, the government aims to create the conditions for what he called, in an updated version of the American Declaration of Independence, “the pursuit of gross national happiness”.

The Bhutanese have started with an experiment within an experiment, accepting the resignation of the popular king as an absolute monarch and holding the country’s first democratic election a year ago. The change is part of attaining gross national happiness, Dorji said. “They resonate well, democracy and GNH. Both place responsibility on the individual. Happiness is an individual pursuit and democracy is the empowerment of the individual.

“It was a rare case of a monarch’s unilaterally stepping back from power, and an even rarer case of his doing so against the wishes of his subjects. He gave the throne to his son, Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck, who was crowned in November in the new role of constitutional monarch without executive power.

Bhutan is, perhaps, an easy place to nimbly rewrite economic rules – a country with one airport and two commercial planes, where the east can only be reached from the west after four days’ travel on mountain roads. No more than 700,000 people live in the kingdom, squeezed between the world’s two most populous nations, India and China, and its task now is to control and manage the inevitable changes to its way of life. It is a country where cigarettes are banned and television was introduced just 10 years ago, where traditional clothing and architecture are enforced by law and where the capital city has no stoplight and just one traffic officer on duty.

If the world is to take gross national happiness seriously, the Bhutanese concede, they must work out a scheme of definitions and standards that can be quantified and measured by the big players of the world’s economy.” Once Bhutan said, ‘OK, here we are with GNH,’ the developed world and the World Bank and the IMF and so on asked, ‘How do you measure it?'” Dorji said, characterising the reactions of the world’s big economic players. So the Bhutanese produced an intricate model of well-being that features the four pillars, the nine domains and the 72 indicators of happiness.

Specifically, the government has determined that the four pillars of a happy society involve the economy, culture, the environment and good governance. It breaks these into nine domains: psychological well-being, ecology, health, education, culture, living standards, time use, community vitality and good governance, each with its own weighted and unweighted GNH index.All of this is to be analysed using the 72 indicators. Under the domain of psychological well-being, for example, indicators include the frequencies of prayer and meditation and of feelings of selfishness, jealousy, calm, compassion, generosity and frustration, as well as suicidal thoughts.

“We are even breaking down the time of day: how much time a person spends with family, at work and so on,” Dorji said. Mathematical formulae have even been devised to reduce happiness to its tiniest component parts. Every two years, these indicators are to be reassessed through a nationwide questionnaire, said Karma Tshiteem, secretary of the Gross National Happiness Commission, as he sat in his office at the end of a hard day of work that he said made him happy. Gross national happiness has a broader application for Bhutan as it races to preserve its identity and culture from the encroachments of the outside world.”How does a small country like Bhutan handle globalisation?” Dorji asked. “We will survive by being distinct, by being different.

“Bhutan is pitting its four pillars, nine domains and 72 indicators against the 48 channels of Hollywood and Bollywood that have invaded since television was permitted a decade ago. “Before June 1999 if you asked any young person who is your hero, the inevitable response was, ‘The king,’ ” Dorji said. “Immediately after that it was David Beckham, and now it’s 50 Cent, the rap artist. Parents are helpless.” So if GNH may hold the secret of happiness for people suffering from the collapse of financial institutions abroad, it offers something more urgent here in this pristine culture.”Bhutan’s story today is, in one word, survival,” Dorji said. ” Gross national happiness is survival; how to counter a threat to survival.”

Draft Statement of Conscience on Peacemaking

/ uurevjeff / 4 Comments

While I do not object to the contents of the current draft Unitarian Universalist Statement of Conscience on Peacemaking, it simply does not go far enough to garner my support as a statement of vision and aspiration. Therefore, I intend to submit my thoughts in the coming weeks, possibly as a prelude to a formal suggestion for amendment at General Assembly. I have drafted language that I might use in these discussions. I share them with you to solicit your feedback, so that I can be as clear and effective as possible. I would appreciate your reactions to the following.

The present draft Unitarian Universalist Statement of Conscience on Peacemaking leaves insufficient room for me as a pacifist to enter in affirmation. The Theological Principles expressed are those of a pacifist. However, the assessment of Where We Stand permits too great a latitude for armed aggression and the self-perpetuating cycle of violence to continue from one generation to the next. I cannot condone the use of military force as a method to inflict the will of one group of peoples over another, regardless of the sincerity of the purpose. Those who live by the sword will always find justification in “humanitarian purposes” and “self-defense.”

The proposed statement represents an admirable first step. However, I need this Statement to clearly express a Unitarian Universalist vision of future human society. In order to open space for me in the document, I respectfully suggest the following words be inserted just before the final sentence of the draft.

Unitarian Universalists envision a future society free of violence and oppression, of unlimited justice and freedom, without which there can be no peace. Humankind took thousands of years to hone its knowledge and fashion its skills and behaviors as war makers; it will take time to fully reclaim our human legacy as peacekeepers. We pray that someday all men and women will live with peace in their hearts and love for each other. Until that time, in reverence for all life, we covenant to practice peace by minimizing violence at all levels of human interaction.

Saving My Own Life

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The journey toward ministry can be frantic, and I have epitomized just how crazy that trip can be for the past three years. Lately, however, my body has been talking to me, telling me that maybe the time has come to slow down…just a little. Fortunately, I have been listening.

Last Monday night, I was having dinner with a new acquaintance in the Upper West Side, near Columbia University. I took the subway early to explore the area on a gorgeous spring day. At one point, I sat on a bench on a traffic island in the middle of Broadway where it crosses 103rd Street. I sat and read and just soaked in the City. I called my son to share the moment with him, but he wasn’t home.

Later that night, I felt sick – sharp chest pain, short breath, and eventually vomiting, which made me think I had some kind of bad reaction to my spicy dinner. A diagnostician I am not. At 8:00 Tuesday morning, my son returned my call. He had been up all night (ah, to be 22 again) and knew I would be awake. When I told him I was sick, he insisted that I get to the hospital. He persisted until I relented and drove to the emergency room (yes, the nurses yelled at me for that, too).

By the time I lumbered into the ER, my heart rate was 240. It seems I had been in arrhythmia for hours. They shocked me to return my heart to a normal rhythm (not an experience I recommend). The doctor told me that if I had waited much longer, I would have likely passed out and died.

Twenty-four hours later, they installed a defibrillator in my chest. My prognosis seems very good, although I will not ever again be able to use a cell phone in my left ear, or have a long list of other machines within six inches of the device. Now, I am recuperating at home contemplating all of this, and have come to the following conclusions.

  • I owe my life to my son, to his stubborn insistence that trumped my stubborn resistance;
  • I owe my life to the relationship I have with my children, whom I love deeply; and
  • I owe my life to setting aside the time to take a brief moment to sit and watch life pass by.

I am more committed now than ever to my ministry, to getting the most out of every day I have, and to letting go of petty, unimportant trivia that bombards our lives. And, part of my ministry will become sitting on park benches in the middle of major thoroughfares, or other opportunities to just experience life in all its flavors.

Ya Gotta Love Facebook

/ uurevjeff

Any doubts I might have had about Facebook are gone. Today I received an email and friend request from a person I had lost track of and who utterly changed my life more than 20 years ago.

In 1985, I was taking doctoral classes in Business, mainly as a credential for advancement in the university administration. Things went well for a couple of terms. But, during the summer of 1986, I was fed up with the way doctoral students were treated. A fellow student named Joyce sensed my frustration and talked me into going out for a drink.

As I ranted about everything from classes to the state of the world, she told me that I sounded like a brochure she had just picked up at a church the past Sunday. The brochure was an introduction to Unitarian Universalism, of which I knew nothing at the time.

Within weeks, I belonged to a fellowship. I only lasted one more term in the doctoral program and lost track of Joyce until today. And here I am, getting close to the end of my preparation to become a Unitarian Universalist minister.

Would I have found this religious tradition anyway? Who knows? I had not found it after 30 years of life and 20 years of searching for a religion that made sense. But for that chance conversation, and for Joyce’s compassion and caring, I might never have started down the path toward my call to ministry.

Is it any wonder that I believe in synchronicity? We just never know what impact even the smallest effort of reaching out to another person can have on their lives. Joyce, thank you so much for reaching out to me and starting these wheels in motion.

The Value of Good Times

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One of the reasons I began blogging was to express opinions about “big picture” issues and to discuss matters of ultimate importance. Usually, my posts border on the serious (perhaps ranting), because something has riled me up or otherwise made my hair stand on end.

Not today, folks. Today, the house special pizza with everything on it is free to all. Pull up a chair for yourself and your own muse and enjoy a slice on the house.

Oh, don’t get me wrong…the world is still a mess. The economy is in the crapper, basic human rights remain in jeopardy across the globe, and our vision of beloved community seems a distant dream. Tomorrow, I may well go nuclear and blast some new injustice.

But, today, I am happy. And, there is nothing wrong with that. In fact, I highly recommend it to everyone.

Why am I so happy that I risk my daily pizzatorium profits sharing my joy with you? There are many reasons, but the biggest of them is that after years of worthwhile work raising a family and helping others, I am pursuing my dream. I am preparing for a life in ministry – a life of hard work and commitment, a life that is enormously rewarding, and a life that my experiences have forged for me. I am living in a tiny apartment watching my life savings dwindle away, and I couldn’t care less because I am doing what I love to do.

I’ve got my computer, Coltrane on the stereo, fresh-brewed coffee, and you, gentle reader. I’m working at a church that is amazing, but still can use my talents. I am meeting interesting people, exploring the greatest city on Earth, and entering a living historical tradition of courageous men and women who changed the world. And, for the first time in a long time, I’ve got the ability to appreciate it all and know just how lucky I am to have the chance to do the same.

That, of course, is the issue. Every day, people tell us how to live our lives. Companies spend millions to tell us what to buy, what new disease lurks in our future, and how to eat, smell, and look. Bosses tell us how to act and think. Society tells us what is right and wrong. And all of them pretend to tell you how to be happy.

Do you know how to be happy? This is how. Sit down and figure out for yourself what you want to do with your life. Then go do it. It really is that simple. Write down your goal on a piece of paper and post it on your refrigerator. Then make everything in your life serve that goal.

Is it easy? Of course not. Nothing worth having ever is. But, no one in the world can do it for you. And here is the secret. If you are putting off your goal because you are trying to help someone else achieve their goal, it doesn’t work. Because, in the end, you can’t fully help others until you have helped yourself. Until you have pursued your own goal, you are not in the right frame of mind to help another achieve theirs.

Is entry into the ministry a sacrifice? You bet – just ask any seminarian. The discernment process of becoming a minister is painful and frightening, and successful completion of the process causes wounds and loss. But, only by surviving this process, by thriving in this process and achieving this goal, can we as ministers help others to do the same.

So enjoy your pizza. Because when you leave the pizzatorium, I want you to think about your goal in life, whether you are on a path to achieve it, and if not, why not.

Grand Reopening of the Pizzatorium in New York!

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My muse sleeps soundly in a corner of the kennel, resting after another challenging January of classes at Meadville Lombard Theological School. In the meantime, my life flies like pizza dough, stretching, awaiting an unknown assortment of toppings. After 42 years in Pittsburgh, I moved to New York City this week. I am now living in a first floor apartment in Forest Hills, just a few blocks from the 71st Street subway station and access to all this metropolis has to offer. After taking my son to Penn Station for the return train ride home, I walked up to Times Square. I stood in the center traffic island, along with the throng of tourists, gawking at the sight.

Throughout the week, I walked and explored the neighborhood. I am a five minute walk from groceries and hardware; laundry and pharmacy; bank, bagels, and Barnes and Noble; and any number of restaurants. Today, I found half a mile south on Metropolitan Avenue: a comics/collectibles store (run by a Pittsburgh Steelers fan!), a German restaurant, and an Irish pub.

And my apartment is small enough to force me to venture out often. I have all of the necessities of life — books, music, my World War I posters on the walls, computer, and a bed. Sadly, I actually must begin working in another week. In the meantime, I was invited to the Metro NY LREDA winter retreat, which will provide a chance to catch up with some old friends and meet new colleagues. The retreat takes place in Murray Grove, the historic Universalist landmark of Thomas Potter and John Murray. What an awesome way to begin my internship – by touching base with this significant heritage of our movement.

So, my dough lies waiting. I can only imagine what inspiring condiments life has in store.

A Network of Gratitude

/ uurevjeff

This past Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, his Network of Mutuality words inspired me. The events of the past few weeks move me to write about my own life’s network.

Entering the ministry elicits a broad range of emotions, from the exhilarating and passionate to the fearful and daunting. A life of ministry presents many paradoxes … crowded solitude … powerless authority … an overwhelming sense of knowing and being inadequately.

Throughout the journey, incredible people dedicate themselves to our call. Their love and support remind us of the importance of our quest, the viceral need for our ministries.

  • To the members and staff of the First Unitarian Church of Pittsburgh — you will always be my home church; the gardeners who provided the fertile soil to plant the seeds of my call.
  • To the children and youth I served — you fed my call and watched it grow toward maturity.
  • To religious educators everywhere — you welcomed my contributions, validated my gifts, and continue providing support for my expanded call.
  • To my fellow seminarians — you walk the road with me in love, and I eagerly anticipate years of mutual support and enduring care.
  • To my colleagues in New York — I eagerly anticipate our year together, having already experienced your inviting arms of welcome.

Specifically during the recent weeks, let me also thank the following people:

  • Betty, a warm and tireless pillar of First Church, thank you for your encouragement and for coordinating a farewell that touched me and epitomized the work of teaching congregations.
  • Laura, after walking many miles together, you freed me to follow my call — I wish you life’s greatest happiness.
  • Jen, my co-pilot for many years at First Church, I can only hope to work with someone as talented and caring in my future churches.
  • Linda, your engaging warmth and professionalism made finding exactly the apartment I wanted in New York not only successful, but enjoyable.
  • Jennifer, an amazing and vibrant woman, your hospitality will endure in my heart and mind long after two weary nights for my body.

To all those who have gone before us…

To my parents who gave me my tools of humanity…

To my children who continue to teach me…

To those who share my passions and struggle for a better world…

To everyone I will meet and spend time with on this road of life…

Thank you.

A Story of Heresy

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During the last session of my Oral Traditions class here at Meadville Lombard Theological School this week, we ended with a storytelling festival. I thought about what story I wanted to tell, and came back to the story that is central to who I am as a Unitarian Universalist, an aspiring minister, and as a person.

You see, for me, the history of Unitarian Universalism centers on heresy. I take the meaning of heresy literally from the Greek hairesis, to choose. From Arius and Origen in ancient times, to Servetus and the Polish Brethren in the Middle Ages, to Theodore Parker and the Humanist Manifesto to modern times, our religion has been about free choice, and the free practice of religion. That story for me is best told by a fairy tale.

Once upon a time years ago, lived a young man named Henry. Henry was not a king or a prince; he wasn’t a famous soldier or a general. He was a simple man just like everybody else. He dreamed dreams like other people. He studied hard in school like other people. He grew up and began working like other people. And, he lived by a code of ethics that influenced the choices he made throughout his life.

For instance, when Henry’s parents fell on hard times, he gave up some of his goals and used all the money he had saved to secure a home for them. When Henry married, he and his wife worked for years building their own home. As his children grew, Henry scrimped and saved all of the money he could, so that they would have a chance at a better life. Henry worked for 50 years and retired. After 50 years of marriage, his wife died. Henry died peacefully a few years later. And, his children and grandchildren continue to live happily ever after.

I know Henry’s story does not make a very glamorous fairy tale. I see no Pixar productions of Henry’s life anytime in the future. There are no mythical creatures, enchanted frogs, or genies who grant wishes. No talking animals populate the narrative, and nothing happens by magic. This fairy tale contains only the choices made throughout a lifetime and the consequences of those choices. Probably every one of you here today knows a Henry, or can identify yourselves in many ways with my father. Much of his story occurs in many typical lives.

My father’s parents immigrated to America from Eastern Europe around the turn of the 20th century. My grandfather was skilled in construction using timber – not a promising vocation for a nation of steel and skyscrapers. But, he chose to come to America to find a better life. My grandmother was excommunicated by the Catholic Church for divorcing her abusive husband. She chose to come to America to live free of dogma and oppression. They met and married here, raised four children, and struggled through the Great War, the Great Depression, and another great war.

When my father returned home from the Pacific in 1945, he could have joined the thousands of servicemen entering college. Instead, he chose to invest his life savings buying his parents a farm. He then took a job as a draftsman and worked his way up the ranks in a division of a major Pittsburgh corporation. He chose a job that allowed him to spend many hours each day at home with his family. And, he chose to spend his weekends volunteering to run his children’s activities, serving his city and his church, and carrying on his father’s tradition by creating works of art out of wood.

To my father, one’s investment choices reflect one’s values. He treasured family. He believed in neighborhood and community. He respected the creative process. Most of all, he was a futurist. No matter how distressing the news, or cruel the fates, my father could see the potential for good in a situation. With enough hard work and commitment, people can always make the world a better place. Sometimes, a helping hand or a just reward is all it takes for humankind to achieve its potential for good.

My father taught me many of the values that comprise my own philosophy of life. In the end, without family, community, love of and for others, and self-respect, money and possessions cannot fulfill our lives. His life may not have been the stuff of fairy tales, but he provided me with all of the will to dream and the desire to achieve them that I will ever need. Our stories require no magic lamps and leprechauns to grant us our wishes. We only need the will and the courage to make choices.