Unfinished Business
Sermon given on April 22, 2018
By Barbara Hale
As soon as I watched the car pull away with my Harry Potter books inside, I knew I had made a mistake. I thought that after reading them twice, I was most likely done with them and in a frenzy of down-sizing, I put them in a box to be donated to the UU church in Monson for their bookstore.
I did manage to keep one that had slipped under my bed and was not on a bookshelf, so with Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows still in my possession, I began my collection again.
I can’t quite put my finger on what it is that I love about those books: The celebration of friendship and love, courage and self-sacrifice, good triumphing over evil, I suppose. Maybe it’s just the way J.K. Rowling puts one word next to the next word next to the next word etc. In any case, I have now once again completed my set thanks to the fact that my kids like easy suggestions for birthday and holiday gifts and soon I will dive back into the world of Hogwarts, Diagon Alley and go searching for horcruxes.
So you can imagine what I thought when I opened up Facebook one day and saw an entry about Harry Potter with my sister Susan’s response being that she read Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone to her grandson Aaron, couldn’t get through it fast enough and never picked up another Harry Potter book again.
With my hands poised above my keyboard, I almost shouted, “What?! How can you say that? Harry Potter is the best!” But I didn’t. I paused instead, shut the screaming pie hole in my head and typed something like, “I loved the Harry Potter books, but they aren’t for everyone.”
Now, I could have pushed her and said that she should try them again, she just didn’t understand what they were about, she needs to read them as an metaphor for life or something like that, but I decided instead to accept the reality that my sister Susan, to whom I am very close, will never agree with me about the “fact” that the Harry Potter series is the best thing since sliced bread and leave it at that.
And in truth, while we are different in our reading habits, Susan and I do share a proclivity for bloody murder mysteries and often recommend books to one another.
We also share a concern for social justice issues, but we do think about the issues from different angles.
For much of her adult life, Susan, a devout Catholic, has worked as a fundraiser for Glenmary Home Missioners, a Catholic mission organization that serves the needy in the rural south in the United States. This group does wonderful work now mostly concentrated on the Latino immigrant population. Serving God is definitely part of my sister’s motivation for as it says in the Bible, Proverbs chapter 19 verse 17, “One who is gracious to a poor man lends to the Lord, And He will repay him for his good deed.” I think that Susan has faith that her God will ultimately make things right if not here on earth, then in some afterlife situation.
And I am a Humanist, an atheist who firmly believes that we humans alone are responsible for our actions and it will only be us who will make the ultimate difference whether for good or for bad in this, our only home. And I have faith in human reason, altruistic morality and the natural world. Or as said so succinctly by Václav Havel, who served as the first president of the Czech Republic, “The salvation of this human world lies nowhere else than in the human heart, in the human power to reflect, in human meekness and human responsibility.”
To me, this is an example of how faith, like one’s taste in books, is a subjective thing. We all have faith of some kind, even if it’s only the faith that the approaching driver will stop if the light is red. But I would be surprised if any two of us truly and totally believe the same things, even within creedal religions. Faith really is like a fingerprint or a snowflake.
But Susan and I agree to disagree on what inspires us, because in the end we both want the same things: peace and justice in this world for one and all. We both believe in the inherent worth and dignity of all people. And we both cherish having the time to settle down with a good bloody murder mystery. So what if Susan is Catholic and doesn’t like Harry Potter? I have decided (even when it’s not that easy because Susan being the oldest of seven is just a wee bit bossy) that I will accept her just the way she is.
My sister and I are a microcosm of the way I wish we handled religion in our society. She and I don’t talk about it much, but we both know how the other feels. We agree that we don’t agree, but we agree that it is our right to believe what we feel in our hearts and know in our heads. I know that Susan must occasionally include me in her prayer. She may even pray that I will someday see the light. And I hope for nothing but good things for her. The wishes are the same, but our individual faiths just lead us to handle the wishes a bit differently.
I often wonder how we can do this in the wider world. In a world where Protestants and Catholics, Jews and Muslims, well, sadly these days just about anybody and Muslims, Buddhists and Hindus, fundamentalists and free-thinkers just can’t seem to get along. How can we as a society peacefully and respectfully agree to disagree on religion? How can we quit saying just try it again, you don’t understand what my religion or atheism is all about? How do we convince people that faith is a subjective thing?
Now, I have to admit to something that probably happens to most everyone who writes a sermon at some point. And it’s that I got to this spot in this sermon writing and could not go on for a very long time. That’s because although I am a natural born optimist – well, maybe not in the vein of Ned Flanders or Pollyanna. But I do generally feel that things will turn out for the best and I live my life with hope being its centerpiece. Even so, I found that I really couldn’t find anything much that was hopeful about this subject of religious freedom, tolerance and acceptance in today’s world.
This feeling of hopelessness for me is often exacerbated after I read blurbs like this one I found in the Huffpost one day. It read: “When Sonia Sotomayor was a U.S. Supreme Court nominee, (Jeff) Sessions (he was then a US senator and, unless something happened overnight or I haven’t been paying attention, he is still our current Attorney General…anyway) Sessions apparently thought this practicing Catholic wasn’t religious enough. He pontificated during the hearing, ‘If you don’t believe in a higher being, maybe you don’t believe there is any truth.’ At the Faith and Freedom Coalition’s Road to Majority conference in June, Sessions said he wanted to keep a ‘secular mindset’ off the Supreme Court, a mindset he claimed was directly contrary to the founding of our republic.” [1]
Now, I don’t know about you, but articles like these give me the heebie jeebies and it truly frightens me to think that there are people in our country who really believe such things and those people are presently in power. This is not because I don’t think that Mr. Sessions and his ilk have every right to their own faith and beliefs, but because this kind of talk implies that they believe that my faith is not good enough and their mission is to push their own faith at me, on me and in my life whether I want it and believe it or not. To me, it flies in the face of the First Amendment of the Constitution and it also implies that I should consider the questions of religion and faith answered and complete. But I can’t do that.
My personal journey was long and hard when it came to religion and I would guess many of yours were too. One would be wrong if one thought that I just woke up one morning and decided that it would be cool to be an atheist. Nothing could be further from the truth. I struggled and spent a lot of time thinking about the religion of my youth and religion in general before I came to the personal conclusion that traditional religions made no sense to ME. The key words here are “to ME.” I didn’t decide to stop believing in a deity to spite my parents or siblings. I didn’t decide to live my life with humanist instead of Roman Catholic values to spite the priests and nuns who taught me in school. I didn’t decide to walk through the doors of this UU church just because I am a contrarian. No, I went through a thorough and often distressing search and this search will not be complete until I am no longer able to think. Because I truly believe the message in the meditation this morning: that we should consider that our lives are always unfinished business; that we should imagine that the picture of our being is never complete; that we should allow our lives to be works in progress.
So as I was mulling over the idea of subjective faith in my mind, I kept coming back to the Fourth Principal, in which we UUs affirm a free and responsible search for truth and meaning. And while I was looking at different writings about the fourth principal, it dawned on me (with a big DUH!) that Unitarian Universalism is the only denomination that truly values this freedom enough to make it part of its affirmation, even if it means that someone may decide that being a Unitarian Universalist isn’t for them.
The Rev. Paige Getty of the UU Congregation of Columbia, Maryland does a good job illuminating the spirit of the Fourth Principle here. She writes:
“As responsible religious seekers, we recognize that we are privileged to be free, to have resources to pursue life beyond mere survival, to continually search for truth and meaning, to exist beyond bonds of dogma and oppression, and to wrestle freely with truth and meaning as they evolve.
“This privilege calls us not to be isolated and self-centered, believing that our single perspective trumps all others, but rather to be humble, to be open to the great mysteries of truth and meaning that life offers. And those mysteries may speak to us through our own intuition and experience—but also through tradition, community, conflict, nature, and relationships.
“As a faith tradition, Unitarian Universalism makes sacred the right and responsibility to engage in this free and responsible quest as an act of religious devotion. Institutionally, we have left open the questions of what truth and meaning are, acknowledging that mindful people will, in every age, discover new insights.”[2]
UUs thrive on looking at the world with open eyes and open minds. But we often encounter people who don’t. So what can we as UUs do in our society to encourage the tolerance and acceptance of our own and others’ beliefs? How do we spread the word that faith is not a one size fits all? While it seems clear to me that we are not going to be changing many minds over night outside these walls, here in this little stone church, we are doing a righteous thing, because we are teaching our children the very important exercise of being open to “the great mysteries of truth and meaning that life offers.”
But what about outside these walls? Being a believer in asking Google when I need an answer to difficult questions, I took to the internet to help me figure out what can be done when we are in a position where we have to deal with adults who are not open and not tolerant. Fully realizing that some people, maybe like Jeff Sessions, for example, are simply closed to hearing anything that doesn’t conform to their own set of beliefs, the best advice I could come up with was from a Professor of Religious Studies at Northern Virginia Community College, Laura E. Shulman. It was not clear to me what religion, if any, Professor Shulman adheres to, but these words of hers are worth taking in:
“It is often noted that teaching tolerance has to begin at home, with the parents. But what if the parents are intolerant? How can we get intolerant adults to be more tolerant? I can think of several ways to deal with intolerant adults,” she writes
“So, if the (probably) greatest predictor of religious affiliation is geography (which it probably is), how can any one religion claim exclusive truth? The reality is that followers of this religion would believe largely different things if they were born in a different country. To claim that your religion is exclusively true and valid, is (I think) to deny this realization.”[4]
As members of the UU faith, we must and will continue to affirm and promote a free and responsible search for truth and meaning regardless of where geography happens to place us. But as Rev. Getty points out, “This privilege calls us not to be isolated and self-centered, believing that our single perspective trumps all others, but rather to be humble, to be open to the great mysteries of truth and meaning that life offers.”
So let’s get down to it. What’s your favorite food today? What’s your favorite book this month? What’s your favorite faith right now?
The Fourth UU principle challenges us to not become stagnant in our thinking but to leave ourselves open to new thoughts and new ideas. We do not have to hurry to mold the masterpiece or to rush to finish the picture. We do not need to be impatient to complete the drawing. Look around you. This is a large, diverse, interesting, sometimes terrifying, but mostly beautiful world. And here we can find so many new things to discover if we work to keep our minds open. From beckoning birth to dawning death we are in process and always there is more to be done, more to learn, and more to appreciate. So let us celebrate the power of the incomplete and let us continue to explore, for life is always unfinished business.
May it be so.
Meditation used on April 22, 2018
Life is Always Unfinished Business
By Richard S. Gilbert
In the midst of the whirling day,
In the hectic rush to be doing,
In the frantic pace of life,
Pause here for a moment.
Catch your breath;
Relax your body;
Loosen your grip on life.
Consider that our lives are always unfinished business;
Imagine that the picture of our being is never complete;
Allow your life to be a work in progress.
Do not hurry to mold the masterpiece;
Do not rush to finish the picture;
Do not be impatient to complete the drawing.
From beckoning birth to dawning death we are in process,
And always there is more to be done.
Do not let the incompleteness weigh on your spirit;
Do not despair that imperfection marks your every day;
Do not fear that we are still in the making.
Let us instead be grateful that the world is still to be created;
Let us give thanks that we can be more than we are;
Let us celebrate the power of the incomplete;
For life is always unfinished business.[5]
[1] https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/what-people-dont-criticize-about-sen-jeff-sessions_us_5874f8eae4b0a5e600a78eca
[2] https://www.uua.org/beliefs/what-we-believe/principles/4th
[3] http://www.religioustolerance.org/religious-intolerance-causes-solutions-observations.htm
[4] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-big-questions/201107/culture-shapes-religious-belief
[5] https://www.uua.org/offices/people/richard-s-gilbert
Sermon given on April 22, 2018
By Barbara Hale
As soon as I watched the car pull away with my Harry Potter books inside, I knew I had made a mistake. I thought that after reading them twice, I was most likely done with them and in a frenzy of down-sizing, I put them in a box to be donated to the UU church in Monson for their bookstore.
I did manage to keep one that had slipped under my bed and was not on a bookshelf, so with Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows still in my possession, I began my collection again.
I can’t quite put my finger on what it is that I love about those books: The celebration of friendship and love, courage and self-sacrifice, good triumphing over evil, I suppose. Maybe it’s just the way J.K. Rowling puts one word next to the next word next to the next word etc. In any case, I have now once again completed my set thanks to the fact that my kids like easy suggestions for birthday and holiday gifts and soon I will dive back into the world of Hogwarts, Diagon Alley and go searching for horcruxes.
So you can imagine what I thought when I opened up Facebook one day and saw an entry about Harry Potter with my sister Susan’s response being that she read Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone to her grandson Aaron, couldn’t get through it fast enough and never picked up another Harry Potter book again.
With my hands poised above my keyboard, I almost shouted, “What?! How can you say that? Harry Potter is the best!” But I didn’t. I paused instead, shut the screaming pie hole in my head and typed something like, “I loved the Harry Potter books, but they aren’t for everyone.”
Now, I could have pushed her and said that she should try them again, she just didn’t understand what they were about, she needs to read them as an metaphor for life or something like that, but I decided instead to accept the reality that my sister Susan, to whom I am very close, will never agree with me about the “fact” that the Harry Potter series is the best thing since sliced bread and leave it at that.
And in truth, while we are different in our reading habits, Susan and I do share a proclivity for bloody murder mysteries and often recommend books to one another.
We also share a concern for social justice issues, but we do think about the issues from different angles.
For much of her adult life, Susan, a devout Catholic, has worked as a fundraiser for Glenmary Home Missioners, a Catholic mission organization that serves the needy in the rural south in the United States. This group does wonderful work now mostly concentrated on the Latino immigrant population. Serving God is definitely part of my sister’s motivation for as it says in the Bible, Proverbs chapter 19 verse 17, “One who is gracious to a poor man lends to the Lord, And He will repay him for his good deed.” I think that Susan has faith that her God will ultimately make things right if not here on earth, then in some afterlife situation.
And I am a Humanist, an atheist who firmly believes that we humans alone are responsible for our actions and it will only be us who will make the ultimate difference whether for good or for bad in this, our only home. And I have faith in human reason, altruistic morality and the natural world. Or as said so succinctly by Václav Havel, who served as the first president of the Czech Republic, “The salvation of this human world lies nowhere else than in the human heart, in the human power to reflect, in human meekness and human responsibility.”
To me, this is an example of how faith, like one’s taste in books, is a subjective thing. We all have faith of some kind, even if it’s only the faith that the approaching driver will stop if the light is red. But I would be surprised if any two of us truly and totally believe the same things, even within creedal religions. Faith really is like a fingerprint or a snowflake.
But Susan and I agree to disagree on what inspires us, because in the end we both want the same things: peace and justice in this world for one and all. We both believe in the inherent worth and dignity of all people. And we both cherish having the time to settle down with a good bloody murder mystery. So what if Susan is Catholic and doesn’t like Harry Potter? I have decided (even when it’s not that easy because Susan being the oldest of seven is just a wee bit bossy) that I will accept her just the way she is.
My sister and I are a microcosm of the way I wish we handled religion in our society. She and I don’t talk about it much, but we both know how the other feels. We agree that we don’t agree, but we agree that it is our right to believe what we feel in our hearts and know in our heads. I know that Susan must occasionally include me in her prayer. She may even pray that I will someday see the light. And I hope for nothing but good things for her. The wishes are the same, but our individual faiths just lead us to handle the wishes a bit differently.
I often wonder how we can do this in the wider world. In a world where Protestants and Catholics, Jews and Muslims, well, sadly these days just about anybody and Muslims, Buddhists and Hindus, fundamentalists and free-thinkers just can’t seem to get along. How can we as a society peacefully and respectfully agree to disagree on religion? How can we quit saying just try it again, you don’t understand what my religion or atheism is all about? How do we convince people that faith is a subjective thing?
Now, I have to admit to something that probably happens to most everyone who writes a sermon at some point. And it’s that I got to this spot in this sermon writing and could not go on for a very long time. That’s because although I am a natural born optimist – well, maybe not in the vein of Ned Flanders or Pollyanna. But I do generally feel that things will turn out for the best and I live my life with hope being its centerpiece. Even so, I found that I really couldn’t find anything much that was hopeful about this subject of religious freedom, tolerance and acceptance in today’s world.
This feeling of hopelessness for me is often exacerbated after I read blurbs like this one I found in the Huffpost one day. It read: “When Sonia Sotomayor was a U.S. Supreme Court nominee, (Jeff) Sessions (he was then a US senator and, unless something happened overnight or I haven’t been paying attention, he is still our current Attorney General…anyway) Sessions apparently thought this practicing Catholic wasn’t religious enough. He pontificated during the hearing, ‘If you don’t believe in a higher being, maybe you don’t believe there is any truth.’ At the Faith and Freedom Coalition’s Road to Majority conference in June, Sessions said he wanted to keep a ‘secular mindset’ off the Supreme Court, a mindset he claimed was directly contrary to the founding of our republic.” [1]
Now, I don’t know about you, but articles like these give me the heebie jeebies and it truly frightens me to think that there are people in our country who really believe such things and those people are presently in power. This is not because I don’t think that Mr. Sessions and his ilk have every right to their own faith and beliefs, but because this kind of talk implies that they believe that my faith is not good enough and their mission is to push their own faith at me, on me and in my life whether I want it and believe it or not. To me, it flies in the face of the First Amendment of the Constitution and it also implies that I should consider the questions of religion and faith answered and complete. But I can’t do that.
My personal journey was long and hard when it came to religion and I would guess many of yours were too. One would be wrong if one thought that I just woke up one morning and decided that it would be cool to be an atheist. Nothing could be further from the truth. I struggled and spent a lot of time thinking about the religion of my youth and religion in general before I came to the personal conclusion that traditional religions made no sense to ME. The key words here are “to ME.” I didn’t decide to stop believing in a deity to spite my parents or siblings. I didn’t decide to live my life with humanist instead of Roman Catholic values to spite the priests and nuns who taught me in school. I didn’t decide to walk through the doors of this UU church just because I am a contrarian. No, I went through a thorough and often distressing search and this search will not be complete until I am no longer able to think. Because I truly believe the message in the meditation this morning: that we should consider that our lives are always unfinished business; that we should imagine that the picture of our being is never complete; that we should allow our lives to be works in progress.
So as I was mulling over the idea of subjective faith in my mind, I kept coming back to the Fourth Principal, in which we UUs affirm a free and responsible search for truth and meaning. And while I was looking at different writings about the fourth principal, it dawned on me (with a big DUH!) that Unitarian Universalism is the only denomination that truly values this freedom enough to make it part of its affirmation, even if it means that someone may decide that being a Unitarian Universalist isn’t for them.
The Rev. Paige Getty of the UU Congregation of Columbia, Maryland does a good job illuminating the spirit of the Fourth Principle here. She writes:
“As responsible religious seekers, we recognize that we are privileged to be free, to have resources to pursue life beyond mere survival, to continually search for truth and meaning, to exist beyond bonds of dogma and oppression, and to wrestle freely with truth and meaning as they evolve.
“This privilege calls us not to be isolated and self-centered, believing that our single perspective trumps all others, but rather to be humble, to be open to the great mysteries of truth and meaning that life offers. And those mysteries may speak to us through our own intuition and experience—but also through tradition, community, conflict, nature, and relationships.
“As a faith tradition, Unitarian Universalism makes sacred the right and responsibility to engage in this free and responsible quest as an act of religious devotion. Institutionally, we have left open the questions of what truth and meaning are, acknowledging that mindful people will, in every age, discover new insights.”[2]
UUs thrive on looking at the world with open eyes and open minds. But we often encounter people who don’t. So what can we as UUs do in our society to encourage the tolerance and acceptance of our own and others’ beliefs? How do we spread the word that faith is not a one size fits all? While it seems clear to me that we are not going to be changing many minds over night outside these walls, here in this little stone church, we are doing a righteous thing, because we are teaching our children the very important exercise of being open to “the great mysteries of truth and meaning that life offers.”
But what about outside these walls? Being a believer in asking Google when I need an answer to difficult questions, I took to the internet to help me figure out what can be done when we are in a position where we have to deal with adults who are not open and not tolerant. Fully realizing that some people, maybe like Jeff Sessions, for example, are simply closed to hearing anything that doesn’t conform to their own set of beliefs, the best advice I could come up with was from a Professor of Religious Studies at Northern Virginia Community College, Laura E. Shulman. It was not clear to me what religion, if any, Professor Shulman adheres to, but these words of hers are worth taking in:
“It is often noted that teaching tolerance has to begin at home, with the parents. But what if the parents are intolerant? How can we get intolerant adults to be more tolerant? I can think of several ways to deal with intolerant adults,” she writes
- For one thing, we can model more tolerant attitudes by our own actions and the words we speak.
- We can also share with others what we do know of other religions that they may not be aware of. A little education can go a long way to making someone think twice about their assumptions. We can start out with "did you know that..." or "it might surprise you to learn that..."
- We can also begin by sincerely listening to their perspective, trying to understand why they feel and think the way they do. This would be a demonstration of our respect for them (more "modeling" of tolerance toward them). As the Golden Rule suggests: they just might "do unto us" as we are doing unto them. If we listen to them, then they may be more open to listening to our own alternative perspective. In this way we can start a dialogue and, in time, a bit of our own tolerance may rub off on the other.”[3]
“So, if the (probably) greatest predictor of religious affiliation is geography (which it probably is), how can any one religion claim exclusive truth? The reality is that followers of this religion would believe largely different things if they were born in a different country. To claim that your religion is exclusively true and valid, is (I think) to deny this realization.”[4]
As members of the UU faith, we must and will continue to affirm and promote a free and responsible search for truth and meaning regardless of where geography happens to place us. But as Rev. Getty points out, “This privilege calls us not to be isolated and self-centered, believing that our single perspective trumps all others, but rather to be humble, to be open to the great mysteries of truth and meaning that life offers.”
So let’s get down to it. What’s your favorite food today? What’s your favorite book this month? What’s your favorite faith right now?
The Fourth UU principle challenges us to not become stagnant in our thinking but to leave ourselves open to new thoughts and new ideas. We do not have to hurry to mold the masterpiece or to rush to finish the picture. We do not need to be impatient to complete the drawing. Look around you. This is a large, diverse, interesting, sometimes terrifying, but mostly beautiful world. And here we can find so many new things to discover if we work to keep our minds open. From beckoning birth to dawning death we are in process and always there is more to be done, more to learn, and more to appreciate. So let us celebrate the power of the incomplete and let us continue to explore, for life is always unfinished business.
May it be so.
Meditation used on April 22, 2018
Life is Always Unfinished Business
By Richard S. Gilbert
In the midst of the whirling day,
In the hectic rush to be doing,
In the frantic pace of life,
Pause here for a moment.
Catch your breath;
Relax your body;
Loosen your grip on life.
Consider that our lives are always unfinished business;
Imagine that the picture of our being is never complete;
Allow your life to be a work in progress.
Do not hurry to mold the masterpiece;
Do not rush to finish the picture;
Do not be impatient to complete the drawing.
From beckoning birth to dawning death we are in process,
And always there is more to be done.
Do not let the incompleteness weigh on your spirit;
Do not despair that imperfection marks your every day;
Do not fear that we are still in the making.
Let us instead be grateful that the world is still to be created;
Let us give thanks that we can be more than we are;
Let us celebrate the power of the incomplete;
For life is always unfinished business.[5]
[1] https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/what-people-dont-criticize-about-sen-jeff-sessions_us_5874f8eae4b0a5e600a78eca
[2] https://www.uua.org/beliefs/what-we-believe/principles/4th
[3] http://www.religioustolerance.org/religious-intolerance-causes-solutions-observations.htm
[4] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-big-questions/201107/culture-shapes-religious-belief
[5] https://www.uua.org/offices/people/richard-s-gilbert
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