The Music We Make Together

By the time you read this I will be in New Orleans, attending the annual conference of Unitarian Universalist professional religious educators from across the United States and Canada. This is my first visit to post-Katrina New Orleans. I am excited to finally see for myself what has been, is being, and still needs to be done there.

This conference is entitled "Transforming the Jericho Road." As Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said to Andrew Young, according to John Hope Bryant, "I am tired of picking up people along the Jericho Road. I am tired of seeing people battered and bruised and bloody, injured and jumped on, along the Jericho Roads of life. This road is dangerous. I don't want to pick up anyone else along this Jericho Road. I want to fix...the Jericho Road. I want to pave the Jericho Road, add street lights to the Jericho Road; make the Jericho Road safe (for passage) by everybody."

This is a different conference from the previous ten or so LREDA Fall Conferences I have attended in my tenure as this church's religious educator. We religious educators are not going to sit in a cavernous conference room and soak up the wisdom of a renowned presenter or presenters. No. We are, instead, going to get out into New Orleans and work. We are going to do what we can do together and then reflect on what we have done in a small group of eight to twelve people. Experiential learning. Service Learning. These are terms for this sort of learning. It is my own preferred learning style. It is the learning method used in Clinical Pastoral Education, such as my summer chaplaincy at the University of Tennessee Medical Center. It is what our "Faith in Action" 3rd -5th grade group did this past Sunday when they visited the Ecumenical Storehouse to deliver donations from our church and to stock the shelves. It is religious education at its most authentic and effective.

I plan to bring back to you what I learn. I will have stories. Stories of New Orleans, of inclusivity, of making a difference, of failure and disappointment, of hope. I plan to come back to you changed--someone for whom a veil has been lifted. I plan to bring back to you a stronger vision of how to "weave social action, worship, and learning into a seamless garment, worn by the congregation (church's long range plan)." I plan to come back with ideas that help this congregation grow into our potential. We say we "sing a song of Beloved Community (church's vision statement)", and I say that is true. But I also say we can sing much more loudly, much more boldly, and much more harmoniously--much more in tune with our surroundings and our times. I say there is some "soul music" in us that is yet to be sung. We need to sing out!

Now, I love to sing and I am an okay singer, but I am no soloist...well, maybe in the shower. I suspect that most of you are in a similar singing situation. But that's okay. It's the music we can make TOGETHER that is the real song. I look forward to sharing what I've seen and done and learned that can help us "sing a song of Beloved Community" and "weave social action, worship and learning into a seamless garment." Meanwhile, keep those singing muscles in shape!

My son Sam's 3rd grade teacher closed each school day with "Miss you 'til tomorrow!" I'll piggyback on that-- "Miss you 'til next week!"

In faithful and fruitful partnership,
Tandy

Thoughts from Tandy Scheffler

“Religion is like sexuality: if you don't teach your children about it, they will learn it on the street.” ~Rev. Dr. Tony Larson, Unitarian Universalist minister

Last Sunday, I circled up with three moms for our first “The Art of Unitarian Universalist Parenting” Sunday 11 a.m. session. We began by sharing one thing we learned from our parents when we were children and they our primary religious educators (as all parents of children are.) Here is some of what we said. We learned to live by ethical principles--how to be fair and generous people who work for the larger good. We learned the practice of church going--that church is what we do together as a family on Sundays and we go to remind us of who and whose we are. We learned that religion is something we can make up our own mind about. We all agreed that what our parents taught us they taught by who they were and what they did more than by what they said.

In Michelle Richards's book Tending the Flame, she shares a story from family educator Bill Doherty. When Bill's son was seven, he asked what happens to us after we die. Being a former Catholic fleeing dogmatism, Bill feared imposing his own beliefs, so he said, “Well, some people believe that after we die, we go to heaven forever. Other people believe that when we die, our life is over, and we live on through the memories of people who have known and loved us.” The son was not so easily satisfied: “But what do YOU believe, Dad?” After additional sidestepping, Bill finally admitted that he believes we live on in the memories of those who loved us, to which his son replied, “Well, I'll believe what you believe for now, and when I grow up, I'll make up my own mind.”

Children NEED to know what their parents believe. This is a documented developmental step in faith formation. First, we catch our beliefs from our family. Later, we examine those beliefs and form our own conclusions. Sharing beliefs is not indoctrination; it is meeting children where they are developmentally and providing appropriate guidance. Just as we guide our children to make ethical choices, so we provide our children with a foundational understanding of the meaning and mystery of life.

This means that, as parents, we need to get comfortable with what we believe about the big questions of life. What happens when we die? Why is there war? Who was Jesus? Why are there so many different religions? Does God exist? What do we mean by “God”?

This means that we need to get comfortable with intentionally sharing our faith—naming the compass points that guide our lives and give us direction and purpose—that higher good to which we are faithful.

This means that we need to attend to our own faith formation. We need to grow and nurture our own souls.

I invite you to make our “Art of Unitarian Universalist Parenting” circle larger by joining us when next we meet at 11 a.m. on Nov. 5. (every first Sunday of the month.) I hope you will attend other faith formation sessions, as you are able. The overarching goal of every gathering is to help each person grow deeper and find their way to a “home” in a church group. It might be in the small group that meets on Thursday evenings. Or possibly in the choir, or on the Adult Faith Formation Team or Memorial Committee. Or a group newly formed to explore spiritual practices together. Whatever group it turns out to be, may that group be comprised of fellow seekers journeying in community—learning together, caring for each other, and being of service to others.

May it be so. Amen and Blessed be.

Scarlet Cord

This is an inspirational poem by Tom Hoornstra, Keweenaw UU Fellowship, Houghton, MI, who attended our Celebration Service at the UUA-GA. He was inspired after hearing our Celebration Service.

Scarlet Cord

How often I’ve seen it: God’s secret servants,
guardian angels, some of them human;
the saving stroke, the outstretched hand,
the line flung to save the drowning man;
the cord strung across a Jericho doorway,
marking the ones set aside for protection;
the scarlet streak on Israel’s dwellings,
the five scarlet wounds flowing rivers of healing,
the signs of His covenant-love on the altar,
seals of betrothal, standing to witness:
“This one is mine, and noone may touch them!”

And there is a River faithfully flowing
down through the years of my life’s many seasons,
like a thread running through a tapestry, weaving,
binding the wounds and stitching the edges,
the ripped, ragged seams, the gaps in-between
these striving attempts and sad incompletions,
the things I did and my heart’s real intentions;
A touch of grace when I least expect it,
a song in the night, the words of a poet,
the music contained in a reddening sunset;
a face in the crowd, the smile of a sister,
the soft, secret force which binds us together.

And so I have found that it’s not by compulsion,
nor by decree, nor force of persuasion,
doctrines, religions, organizations
that a heart is redeemed and bound to another,
but by covenant-love, faithful, persistent,
the gentle betrothal of spirit to spirit.
Prophet of old, truly you saw it…

“Not by might, not by power, but by my Spirit”,
says the Lord Almighty. Zech. 4:6


The grace we can experience when we’re emptied enough, transparent enough in our feeling and perception, to see the beauty in one another and in Creation all around us, and so walk in the harmony, grace, and blessedness of that beauty.


Dear Oak Ridge UU's,

I attended, and loved, your improvisational worship at GA. The music and message struck some chords with my own experience, as expressed in poetry: see Attached.

Tom Hoornstra, Keweenaw UU Fellowship, Houghton, MI.

Inspiration for April

Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark, in the hopeless swamps of the approximate, the not-quite, the not-yet, the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish, in lonely frustration for the life you deserved, but have never been able to reach. Check your road and the nature of your battle.

The world you desired can be won. It exists, it is real, it is possible, it is yours.

Ayn Rand
Russian-born American Author

Repaying Gratitude

“To the generous mind the heaviest debt is that of gratitude, when it is not in our power to repay it.”

--Benjamin Franklin

Experience the Miraculous

The truth is, we don’t need to expect a miracle to experience the miraculous. Life itself is a miracle. Our very being is predicated against impossible odds, odds infinitely more daunting than winning the lottery. Going back to the very first human beings, all our ancestors lived to puberty, chose the only mate they could have chosen for us to exist, made love at the only possible moment and united the only possible sperm and egg to keep our tenuous prospects alive. Then go back a billion years further, all the way to the ur-paramecium. And back billions of years before that, hedging the earth’s bet on the combustion of gasses and the pinball of stars. A single, unbroken thread connects us to the very moment of creation. The Universe was pregnant with us when it was born.

—Rev. Forrest Church, UU 21st Century

Raise Your Arms to the Skies

There is guidance for each of us, and by lowly listening, we shall hear the right word. Certainly there is a right for you that needs no choice on your part. Place yourself in the middle of the stream of power and wisdom which flows into your life. Then, without effort, you are impelled to truth and to perfect contentment.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 19th-Century

If the only prayer you said in your whole life was,
"Thank You,"
that would suffice.

—Meister Eckhart, 14th-Century,
German Philosopher

Let us pray to the God

Let us pray to the God who holds us in the hollow of his hands — to the God who holds us in the curve of her arms — to the God whose flesh is the flesh of hills and hummingbirds and angleworms — whose skin is the color of an old black woman and a young white man, and the color of the leopard and the grizzly bear and the green grass snake — whose hair is like the aurora borealis, rainbows, nebulae, waterfalls, and a spider's web — whose eyes sometime shine like the evening star, and then like fireflies, and then again like an open wound — whose touch is both the touch of life and the touch of death — and whose name is everyone's, but mostly mine.

And what shall we pray? Let us say,
"Thank you."

— Rev. Max A. Coots, 21st Century UU

Gratitude

When the mind knows, we call it knowledge.
When the heart knows, we call it love.
When the being knows, we call it prayer.

—Osho, 20th-Century Indian Mystic


An Accounting Of Gratitude
The grateful soul of the wise person is the true altar of God.

I say to myself: Be thankful.

Be thankful for the happiness you have known in times past, the moments of mirth and ecstasy, the years of health. How many of your dreams have come true; promises, long deferred, have so often at last been made good.

Be thankful for the dearness of your loved ones, the fidelity of your friends, the courtesy and kindness repeatedly shown you by total strangers.

Be thankful that your fears have again and again proven groundless, that you have survived so many close calls, so many narrow escapes; and that the same good fortune has generally followed your children in their misadventures, and your friends likewise.

Be thankful not only for the joys that have accompanied your way, and the unnumbered gifts of a kindly providence. Master the harder art of gratitude for life’s sterner lessons. You have known pain, pain that has given you warning of unseen dangers. You have known failure, failure that shattered false hopes of easy victory, and toughened your spirit for renewed efforts. Having made mistakes, you have learned important lessons. Having encountered obstacles, you have found courage and endurance to surmount them. Having known sorrow and loneliness, you have discovered that even these have quickened your sympathy, and taught you your need of others.

Be thankful, then, that so much you have not sought and would have by-passed if you could, nonetheless has proved enriching to your experience. Even in life’s dark labyrinthine ways and bitter moments, the person of faith and hope can trace the workings of a mysterious wisdom, and impartial providence, a more than human love.

—Philo Judaeus, First-Century, Jewish Philosopher and Historian

Animoto.com

In February, We Revere

This month, as we focus on experiencing wonder — of the earth around us, of the beauty in even these cold, rainy days of winter — we also celebrate and cherish love — of our partners, of our friends, of our children, and of our church. Langston Hughes poem, “Wealth,” resounds with reverence of goodness, kindness and love:

From Christ to Ghandi
Appears this truth —
St. Francis of Assisi
Proves it, too:
Goodness becomes grandeur
Surpassing might of kings.
Halos of kindness
Brighter shine
Than crowns of gold,
And brighter
Than rich diamonds
Sparkles
The simple dew
Of Love.

Love, as simple and beautiful as drops of dew, is more wondrous than all the riches of the world. Let us cherish the ones who bring love to our lives. Let us focus on reverence towards the divine, the earth, and each other, as the song “What Wondrous Love Is This” reminds us. Let us find, as Jane Kenyon does in her poem, the secret porch of heat and light where the green moss grows in the midst of winter. — Margaret Hoff

Reverence

Gratitude bestows reverence, allowing us to encounter everyday epiphanies, those transcendent moments of awe that change forever how we experience life and the world.
—John Milton

Ethics is nothing else than reverence for life.
—Albert Schweitzer

Pursue some path, however narrow and crooked, in which you can walk with love and reverence.
—Henry David Thoreau

Fullness of knowledge always means some understanding of the depths of our ignorance; and that is always conducive to humility and reverence.
—Robert Millikan

Worship means reverence and humility it means revering your real self and humbling delusions.
—Bodhidharma

Sacred Love

1246
The minute I heard my first love story
I started looking for you, not knowing
how blind that was.

Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere.
They’re in each other all along.
— Rumi

The moment I have realized God sitting in the temple of every human body, the moment I stand in reverence before every human being and see God in him - that moment I am free from bondage, everything that binds vanishes, and I am free.
—Swami Vivekananda

That sense of sacredness, that thinking in generations, must begin with reverence
for this earth.
—Paul Tsongas

Revere Minute Gifts

Depression in Winter

There comes a little space between the
south side of a boulder
and the snow that fills the woods around it.
Sun heats the stone, reveals
a crescent of bare ground: brown ferns,
and tufts of needles like red hair,
acorns, a patch of moss, bright green....

I sank with every step up to my knees,
throwing myself forward with a violence
of effort, greedy for unhappiness—
until by accident I found the stone,
with its secret porch of heat and light,
where something small could luxuriate, then
turned back down my path, chastened
and calm.
—Jane Kenyon

Revere Friendship, Revere Love

What Wondrous Love Is This
What wondrous love is this,
O my soul, O my soul!
What wondrous love is this, O my soul!
What wondrous love is this
That brings my heart such bliss
And takes away the pain of my soul, of my soul
And takes away the pain of my soul

When I was sinking down,
Sinking down, sinking down,
When I was sinking down, sinking down,
When I was sinking down
Beneath my sorrows ground,
Friends to me gather’d round,
O my soul, O my soul,
Friends to me gather’d round, O my soul

To love and to all friends, I will sing, I will sing,
To love and to all friends, I will sing
To love and to all friends who
Pain and sorrow mend,
With thank unto the end I will sing, I will sing,
With thanks until to the end I will sing.

—American Folk Hymn,
New words by Connie Campbell Hart, UUA

Revere Life, Wonderful Life

An Old Cracked Tune
My name is Solomon Levi,
the desert is my home,
my mother's breast was thorny,
and father I had none.

The sands whispered, Be separate,
the stones taught me, Be hard.
I dance, for the joy of surviving,
on the edge of the road.
-Stanley Kunitz


Reverence

The air vibrated
with the sound of cicadas
on those hot Missouri nights after sundown
when the grown-ups gathered on the
wide back lawn,
sank into their slung-back canvas chairs
tall glasses of iced tea beading in the heat

and we sisters chased fireflies
reaching for them in the dark
admiring their compact black bodies
their orange stripes and seeking antennas
as they crawled to our fingertips
and clicked open into the night air.

In all the days and years that have followed,
I don't know that I've ever experienced
that same utter certainty of the goodness of life
that was as palpable
as the sound of the cicadas on those nights:

my sisters running around with me in the dark,
the murmur of the grown-ups' voices,
the way reverence mixes with amazement
to see such a small body
emit so much light.
—Julie Cadwallader-Staub

Through Science, We Revere Nature

Science is not about control. It is about cultivating a perpetual condition of wonder in the face of something that forever grows one step richer and subtler than our latest theory about it. It is about reverence, not mastery.
—Richard Powers

In every true searcher of Nature there is a kind of religious reverence, for he finds it impossible to imagine that he is the first to have thought out the exceedingly delicate threads that connect his perceptions.
—Albert Einstein

A religion old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the universe as revealed by modern science, might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths. Sooner or later, such a religion will emerge.
—Dr. Carl Sagan

Check out uuworld.org: Why Unitarian Universalists Need a Language of Reverence

Title: uuworld.org : Why Unitarian Universalists Need a Language of Reverence
Link: http://gotaf.socialtwist.com/redirect?l=-690311960065158561011

"I see at least three different purposes for which we might find a language of reverence useful: to respond in the moment to our experiences of awe and communion; to describe those experiences to others; and to solicit such experiences, both in ourselves and in others." - Kendyl Gibbons

In January, We Resolve To Grow

In January, we are given the gift of new beginnings with a new year. Many of us choose to start anew and improve our lives. We resolve to eliminate unhealthy habits, to loose our sluggish ways, to reduce the clutter of our busy lives, to shed our materialistic ways. We resolve to spend our time more wisely, to contribute more of our talents, time, and love to the world around us, to work for justice, deepen our wisdom and bring new meaning into our lives.

In January we resolve to grow: spiritually, mentally, and communally. As much of nature is in hibernation, we will begin to sprout new growth beneath the brown leaves of the winter forest. We promise, to ourselves and each other, to unfurl new strengths, responsibilities and enlightenment. As we resolve to grow — to expand our boundaries and stretch our tentacles up and outwards, reaching for the bright blue skies — we also resolve to burst into blossom.

Resolve to Be Radiant

Vow to be valiant;
Resolve to be radiant;
Determine to be dynamic;
Strive to be sincere;
Aspire to be attuned.
 —William Arthur Ward

Resolve to be thyself: and know, that he
Who finds himself, loses his misery.
—Matthew Arnold

Your success and happiness lies in you. Resolve to keep happy, and your joy and you shall form an invincible host against difficulties.
—Helen Keller

Courage is a moral quality; it is not a chance gift of nature, like an aptitude for games. It is a cold choice between two alternatives; the fixed resolve not to quit, an act of renunciation that must be made not once but many times by the power of the will.
—Richard John McMoran Wilson

Resolve is Faith

Religion is our human response to the dual reality of being alive and having to die. Knowing we are going to die not only places an acknowledged limit upon our lives, it also gives a special intensity and poignancy to the time we are given to live and love. The fact that death is inevitable gives meaning to our love, for the more we love the more we risk losing. Love’s power comes in part from the courage required to give ourselves to that which is not ours to keep: our spouses, children, parents, dear and cherished friends, even life itself. It also comes from the faith required to sustain that courage, the faith that life, howsoever limited and mysterious, contains within its margins, often at their very edges, a meaning that is deceptive.
—F. Forrester Church



A mature faith is honest; of one piece. It is lived. It is not just a set of boundaries and pietisms. It is a serious effort to conduct life according to principles and ideals. It is emotional; heart-swelling. It is even naïve. In spite of uncertainty, it does not rule out leaps of faith. Finally, it is free, not bound by tradition, inheritance, geography or the passing parade.
—Jack Mendelsohn, UU minister