Faith-based Resilience
Sermon given at the Brookfield Unitarian Universalist Church
April 28, 2019
by Rita Schiano
I’ve not been at church much this past year. It’s nothing to do with this congregation of people, or with our minister, or my need for down time on a Sunday when my week has been hectic.
Honestly, for the longest time, I wasn’t sure what was keeping me out of here.
And then, on one of those few occasions when I was here, Wendy approached me about doing a service this year. I hesitated, thinking I don’t feel much like coming to church lately, so why would I want to do a service?
Being a worship leader is something I’ve always been honored to do in years past. Yet, when Wendy asked me that day, my thought was to say, “I have nothing to give. I’m having a crisis of faith right now.”
But I tamped down my initial reaction, kept my mouth shut, and took a few moments to think before I answered. I thought, maybe I wasn’t alone in these feelings I’d been having. Maybe there are a few people who sit in these pews who are also having, on some level, a crisis of faith.
Since I’m standing up here today, I obviously said ‘yes’. But I did so for selfish reasons. My hope was that if I agreed to do a service, to find a sermon topic . . . and reading to support the sermon . . . maybe it would help me figure out what the heck was going on with me, and perhaps in the process, shed some light on what a few of you might also be feeling.
I was raised a Roman Catholic. And even though I left that church long before I joined this little stone church that rocks, my belief in God, in a Higher Power, had waxed and waned throughout most of my adult life.
At first, what would challenge my faith were more philosophical questions, all of which turned out to be philosophical historical arguments for the existence of God, and not much more.
Theists, for example, used substance dualism, or Cartesian dualism, to make the claim for an independent "realm" of existence that’s distinct from the physical world. Kind of like the one Neo experienced in The Matrix, where his mental experiences occurred in a realm separate from the one that hosted his body.
Yet, none of my past philosophical quests addressed what I’ve been questioning these past few years. . . . What I’ve been perseverating about was less about arguments for the existence of God, and more pragmatic meta-ethical questions.
Regardless of which side of the political divide you stand on, I think we all can admit that we are living in morally and socially trying times. Pandora’s box is wide open. And we can’t just blame the removal of the lid on the era of Trump.
Xenophobia cemented its footing in this country after 9/11 under President George W Bush, and racism took on a whole new stronghold with the ascendancy of President Obama.
I was shocked that people I know, or thought I knew, would send via e-mail or posts on social media, demeaning and racist memes and cartoons about the President and Mrs. Obama.
And while those of us here expressed personal outrage, in the larger social sphere, racism and xenophobia . . . which always has existed on some level. . . had been allowed to thrive and flourish exponentially for the past two decades.
I think I took my eye off the ball because I was blinded by the presumption of hope.
I felt so much hope in the social progress that was being made in our country … particularly in the Obama years. And that hope, I think, became a set of blinders, akin to what we put on a racehorse, to keep it focused on the straight and narrow path.
But those blinders of hope also kept me from truly seeing the depth of hatred that had insinuated itself into our country this century.
We are teetering on a moral and ethical precipice. In our current social and political landscape, moral and ethical questions—about racism, xenophobia, immigration, climate change, and the senseless violence that demands gun control — must, I believe, be addressed with great urgency because the soul of our country is at stake.
Every time I hear someone say, even hear myself say, “I can’t listen to it anymore” I get frightened. That in our wanting to shut down, tune out … we are allowing the voices of hate to get louder and louder with a megaphonic reach.
Barb Hale, in her eloquent sermon a few weeks ago wrote, “We are living in an era, when it is incredibly easy to access all the pleasures and all the ills of the world, but that makes it an incredibly difficult time too, doesn’t it? Like never before, we can see the big picture. We can see so much, that it almost causes a kind of paralysis. There’s so much…so much” she wrote, “I feel like turning away. What can I do? What can you do? What can we do?”
In our second reading today, Isla Reddin wrote about 7th skill of resilience which is Being Able to Find Purpose and Meaning in life -- being able to make sense out of what is happening and find meaning in it.
This resilience skill is critical if we are to manage the feelings that are aroused in a crisis. And make no mistake, these are times of crisis.
Finding purpose and meaning are keys to finding the motivation to take action in times of crisis. Our thoughts and actions must be aligned in order for us to take effective steps forward.
The 8th Resilience Skill . . . Being Able to See the Big Picture . . . can often free us from the pain of the moment. It is a state of mind that permits other perspectives to enter our consciousness and opens us to our own creativity.
Reddin reminds us that while it is important to see what is, it is also very important to remember that people and events are connected into a larger energy flow.
But it’s what is feeding much of that energy now that is challenging our resilience. Human energy flow is powered by thoughts and emotions. It’s a cycle. Thoughts and the emotions attached to those thought, feed and strengthen one another resulting in behavior.
The danger these days is that we are inundated with thoughts and the ensuing emotions that are based on misdirection and propaganda, alternative facts and lies. And the resulting behaviors are evident in the church and synagogue and temple shootings and the actions of arsonist; the senseless, violent attacks on people of color or Middle Eastern ethnicity.
To reiterate Barb Hale: “What can I do? What can you do? What can we do?”
Blogger Bill Tammeus, former Faith columnist for The Kansas City Star, in examining the role of faithful resilience in the Trump era explored the obligations and sense of responsibility for which people of faith understand themselves to be accountable.
“Resilience,” he wrote, “is a reflection -- perhaps indirect but important, nonetheless -- of the resilience that people of faith have demonstrated and incarnated for a long time.”
He went on to examine resilience in the three Abrahamic faiths -- Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
“The Jewish people,” he writes, “have been subject to several thousand years of oppression and bigotry, the most evil example of which is the Holocaust, in which Adolf Hitler's . . Nazis almost achieved the goal of exterminating European Jewry. But the world's approximately 15 million Jews have not gone away, have not quit thinking of themselves as a people, have not stopped contributing to the world.”
“The Jewish people are nothing if not resilient.
“Christianity,” he writes, “once it separated from Judaism, began with what seemed like a crushing defeat -- the death of the Messiah. But on Easter, the experience of the resurrection turned that around . . . and followers of Jesus were energized (in fact, directed) to go into all the world and share the good news.
“Over history, Christians were a persecuted minority. Ask those who died at the hands of Roman emperors. Ask those today being persecuted in many countries around the world.
“But, from a tiny band of followers in a small territory in the Middle East, Christianity has become the most populous religion in the world.”
Christians are nothing if not resilient.
“When the Prophet Muhammad introduced Islam to the Arabian Peninsula in the Seventh Century,” Tammeus continues, “He at first had so much difficulty having his message accepted . . . that he was forced to escape Mecca and set up camp in Medina. But eventually, Muhammad managed to spread Islam well beyond where it started.
“Islam, too, however, once established was challenged and beaten back in various ways, including in the Christian Crusades, and more recently by radicals who have brought a vicious kind of notoriety to the religion that its traditional observers don't deserve. And yet today, Islam has grown to be the second most populous religion in the world.”
Muslims are nothing if not resilient.
Tammeus presented good examples of faith-based resilience, yet, like him, when I think about the American Christians who identify as evangelical, I can’t help but wonder . . . what has made them lose their moral compass and be seduced by an ultranationalist, “misogynistic fabulist?” And how, too, I wonder will they, can they, find their way back?
I can only hope that those Evangelical Christians are nothing if not resilient.
Tammeus ended his blog with these words: “It's time for people of faith to denounce such language and to trust in their own experience of resilience -- not because of secular history . . . but because they understand such resilience to be of divine origin, even if [they] don't know quite how [they] will get from here to back on [their] collective feet.”
Barb Hale reminded us of Edward Everett Hale’s words: I am only one, but I am one. I cannot do everything, but I can do something. And I will not let what I cannot do interfere with what I can do.
She also reminded us to not turn away. To keep our eyes open.
And I want to add to Barb’s message: that as difficult as it is to listen to the dreck being spewed and spun, we have to keep our ears open, too. ….. And we must be vocal and vigilant because we cannot allow those megaphonic, single-note chants to keep echoing.
Our capacity for resilience, which neuroanatomists now believe is hard-wired into the brain, is one of our greatest gifts. . . . And resilience, when buttressed by faith and by hope, is indomitable.
Faith, like hope, is a choice. Faith is, in some ways, synonymous with hope; both clearly see a future beyond the present. Yet, faith is more rooted in accepting the present as a path to the future.
As Susan Salzburg wrote in her book Faith: “Faith is the capacity of the heart that allows us to draw close to the present and find there, the underlying thread connecting the moment’s experience to the fabric of all of life. It opens us to a bigger sense of who we are and what we are capable of doing.”
Hope focuses on optimism, which is the Resilience Skill #1. However, as President Obama said, “Hope is not blind optimism. It’s not ignoring the enormity of the task ahead or the roadblocks that stand in our path. It's not sitting on the sidelines or shirking from a fight.
“Hope” he said, “is that thing inside us that insists, despite all evidence to the contrary, that something better awaits us if we have the courage to reach for it, and to work for it, and to fight for it.”
“Every difficulty in life” wrote Epictetus, “presents us with an opportunity to turn inward and to invoke our own submerged inner resources. The trials we endure can and should introduce us to our strengths.”
It is those inner resources and those strengths that are now what we know to be our resilience.
At this moment in time, I believe the ball is in our court. But the time for baseline play is over. We have to go to the net and our return must be swift, powerful, and immediate before the ball is no longer even on the court.
In times such as these, we must dig deeply.
We all possess strengths we might not realize we have.
We all possess resilience skills we might not realize we have.
And as Unitarian Universalists, we all possess a faith-based resilience rooted in principles that affirm a free and responsible search for truth and meaning, and a goal of a world community with peace, liberty, and justice for all.
Amen. And blessed be.
Sermon given at the Brookfield Unitarian Universalist Church
April 28, 2019
by Rita Schiano
I’ve not been at church much this past year. It’s nothing to do with this congregation of people, or with our minister, or my need for down time on a Sunday when my week has been hectic.
Honestly, for the longest time, I wasn’t sure what was keeping me out of here.
And then, on one of those few occasions when I was here, Wendy approached me about doing a service this year. I hesitated, thinking I don’t feel much like coming to church lately, so why would I want to do a service?
Being a worship leader is something I’ve always been honored to do in years past. Yet, when Wendy asked me that day, my thought was to say, “I have nothing to give. I’m having a crisis of faith right now.”
But I tamped down my initial reaction, kept my mouth shut, and took a few moments to think before I answered. I thought, maybe I wasn’t alone in these feelings I’d been having. Maybe there are a few people who sit in these pews who are also having, on some level, a crisis of faith.
Since I’m standing up here today, I obviously said ‘yes’. But I did so for selfish reasons. My hope was that if I agreed to do a service, to find a sermon topic . . . and reading to support the sermon . . . maybe it would help me figure out what the heck was going on with me, and perhaps in the process, shed some light on what a few of you might also be feeling.
I was raised a Roman Catholic. And even though I left that church long before I joined this little stone church that rocks, my belief in God, in a Higher Power, had waxed and waned throughout most of my adult life.
At first, what would challenge my faith were more philosophical questions, all of which turned out to be philosophical historical arguments for the existence of God, and not much more.
Theists, for example, used substance dualism, or Cartesian dualism, to make the claim for an independent "realm" of existence that’s distinct from the physical world. Kind of like the one Neo experienced in The Matrix, where his mental experiences occurred in a realm separate from the one that hosted his body.
Yet, none of my past philosophical quests addressed what I’ve been questioning these past few years. . . . What I’ve been perseverating about was less about arguments for the existence of God, and more pragmatic meta-ethical questions.
Regardless of which side of the political divide you stand on, I think we all can admit that we are living in morally and socially trying times. Pandora’s box is wide open. And we can’t just blame the removal of the lid on the era of Trump.
Xenophobia cemented its footing in this country after 9/11 under President George W Bush, and racism took on a whole new stronghold with the ascendancy of President Obama.
I was shocked that people I know, or thought I knew, would send via e-mail or posts on social media, demeaning and racist memes and cartoons about the President and Mrs. Obama.
And while those of us here expressed personal outrage, in the larger social sphere, racism and xenophobia . . . which always has existed on some level. . . had been allowed to thrive and flourish exponentially for the past two decades.
I think I took my eye off the ball because I was blinded by the presumption of hope.
I felt so much hope in the social progress that was being made in our country … particularly in the Obama years. And that hope, I think, became a set of blinders, akin to what we put on a racehorse, to keep it focused on the straight and narrow path.
But those blinders of hope also kept me from truly seeing the depth of hatred that had insinuated itself into our country this century.
We are teetering on a moral and ethical precipice. In our current social and political landscape, moral and ethical questions—about racism, xenophobia, immigration, climate change, and the senseless violence that demands gun control — must, I believe, be addressed with great urgency because the soul of our country is at stake.
Every time I hear someone say, even hear myself say, “I can’t listen to it anymore” I get frightened. That in our wanting to shut down, tune out … we are allowing the voices of hate to get louder and louder with a megaphonic reach.
Barb Hale, in her eloquent sermon a few weeks ago wrote, “We are living in an era, when it is incredibly easy to access all the pleasures and all the ills of the world, but that makes it an incredibly difficult time too, doesn’t it? Like never before, we can see the big picture. We can see so much, that it almost causes a kind of paralysis. There’s so much…so much” she wrote, “I feel like turning away. What can I do? What can you do? What can we do?”
In our second reading today, Isla Reddin wrote about 7th skill of resilience which is Being Able to Find Purpose and Meaning in life -- being able to make sense out of what is happening and find meaning in it.
This resilience skill is critical if we are to manage the feelings that are aroused in a crisis. And make no mistake, these are times of crisis.
Finding purpose and meaning are keys to finding the motivation to take action in times of crisis. Our thoughts and actions must be aligned in order for us to take effective steps forward.
The 8th Resilience Skill . . . Being Able to See the Big Picture . . . can often free us from the pain of the moment. It is a state of mind that permits other perspectives to enter our consciousness and opens us to our own creativity.
Reddin reminds us that while it is important to see what is, it is also very important to remember that people and events are connected into a larger energy flow.
But it’s what is feeding much of that energy now that is challenging our resilience. Human energy flow is powered by thoughts and emotions. It’s a cycle. Thoughts and the emotions attached to those thought, feed and strengthen one another resulting in behavior.
The danger these days is that we are inundated with thoughts and the ensuing emotions that are based on misdirection and propaganda, alternative facts and lies. And the resulting behaviors are evident in the church and synagogue and temple shootings and the actions of arsonist; the senseless, violent attacks on people of color or Middle Eastern ethnicity.
To reiterate Barb Hale: “What can I do? What can you do? What can we do?”
Blogger Bill Tammeus, former Faith columnist for The Kansas City Star, in examining the role of faithful resilience in the Trump era explored the obligations and sense of responsibility for which people of faith understand themselves to be accountable.
“Resilience,” he wrote, “is a reflection -- perhaps indirect but important, nonetheless -- of the resilience that people of faith have demonstrated and incarnated for a long time.”
He went on to examine resilience in the three Abrahamic faiths -- Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
“The Jewish people,” he writes, “have been subject to several thousand years of oppression and bigotry, the most evil example of which is the Holocaust, in which Adolf Hitler's . . Nazis almost achieved the goal of exterminating European Jewry. But the world's approximately 15 million Jews have not gone away, have not quit thinking of themselves as a people, have not stopped contributing to the world.”
“The Jewish people are nothing if not resilient.
“Christianity,” he writes, “once it separated from Judaism, began with what seemed like a crushing defeat -- the death of the Messiah. But on Easter, the experience of the resurrection turned that around . . . and followers of Jesus were energized (in fact, directed) to go into all the world and share the good news.
“Over history, Christians were a persecuted minority. Ask those who died at the hands of Roman emperors. Ask those today being persecuted in many countries around the world.
“But, from a tiny band of followers in a small territory in the Middle East, Christianity has become the most populous religion in the world.”
Christians are nothing if not resilient.
“When the Prophet Muhammad introduced Islam to the Arabian Peninsula in the Seventh Century,” Tammeus continues, “He at first had so much difficulty having his message accepted . . . that he was forced to escape Mecca and set up camp in Medina. But eventually, Muhammad managed to spread Islam well beyond where it started.
“Islam, too, however, once established was challenged and beaten back in various ways, including in the Christian Crusades, and more recently by radicals who have brought a vicious kind of notoriety to the religion that its traditional observers don't deserve. And yet today, Islam has grown to be the second most populous religion in the world.”
Muslims are nothing if not resilient.
Tammeus presented good examples of faith-based resilience, yet, like him, when I think about the American Christians who identify as evangelical, I can’t help but wonder . . . what has made them lose their moral compass and be seduced by an ultranationalist, “misogynistic fabulist?” And how, too, I wonder will they, can they, find their way back?
I can only hope that those Evangelical Christians are nothing if not resilient.
Tammeus ended his blog with these words: “It's time for people of faith to denounce such language and to trust in their own experience of resilience -- not because of secular history . . . but because they understand such resilience to be of divine origin, even if [they] don't know quite how [they] will get from here to back on [their] collective feet.”
Barb Hale reminded us of Edward Everett Hale’s words: I am only one, but I am one. I cannot do everything, but I can do something. And I will not let what I cannot do interfere with what I can do.
She also reminded us to not turn away. To keep our eyes open.
And I want to add to Barb’s message: that as difficult as it is to listen to the dreck being spewed and spun, we have to keep our ears open, too. ….. And we must be vocal and vigilant because we cannot allow those megaphonic, single-note chants to keep echoing.
Our capacity for resilience, which neuroanatomists now believe is hard-wired into the brain, is one of our greatest gifts. . . . And resilience, when buttressed by faith and by hope, is indomitable.
Faith, like hope, is a choice. Faith is, in some ways, synonymous with hope; both clearly see a future beyond the present. Yet, faith is more rooted in accepting the present as a path to the future.
As Susan Salzburg wrote in her book Faith: “Faith is the capacity of the heart that allows us to draw close to the present and find there, the underlying thread connecting the moment’s experience to the fabric of all of life. It opens us to a bigger sense of who we are and what we are capable of doing.”
Hope focuses on optimism, which is the Resilience Skill #1. However, as President Obama said, “Hope is not blind optimism. It’s not ignoring the enormity of the task ahead or the roadblocks that stand in our path. It's not sitting on the sidelines or shirking from a fight.
“Hope” he said, “is that thing inside us that insists, despite all evidence to the contrary, that something better awaits us if we have the courage to reach for it, and to work for it, and to fight for it.”
“Every difficulty in life” wrote Epictetus, “presents us with an opportunity to turn inward and to invoke our own submerged inner resources. The trials we endure can and should introduce us to our strengths.”
It is those inner resources and those strengths that are now what we know to be our resilience.
At this moment in time, I believe the ball is in our court. But the time for baseline play is over. We have to go to the net and our return must be swift, powerful, and immediate before the ball is no longer even on the court.
In times such as these, we must dig deeply.
We all possess strengths we might not realize we have.
We all possess resilience skills we might not realize we have.
And as Unitarian Universalists, we all possess a faith-based resilience rooted in principles that affirm a free and responsible search for truth and meaning, and a goal of a world community with peace, liberty, and justice for all.
Amen. And blessed be.
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