This page was updated 11/19/2007

PRAYER & MEDITATION: JEA

We seek God alone but we find God in our lives among others.

We are not a hermit people, going off alone to meditate;

Rather, we are a service people, living our lives in love and compassion.

Our values are the values of community: tolerance and peace and hope –

Not for ourselves alone but for all people in all places.

O God who is found, not in Heavens far away,

But in loving, caring, creative people – our families, friends, neighbors,

And most importantly in one sense, the strangers we have yet to meet.

Oh, we are an individualistic, quirky, eccentric people, we UUs.

However, this does not mean we have abandoned the great vision

Of a world of peace with justice, of compassion as well as comfort.

Welcome back to our liberal and liberating community.

We are a home for those who extend an open hand and a warm heart

To all who seek them. We are a home for thinking people –

Not all the time of course, for we can truly enjoy life –

Yet we are a people for whom our world must make some sense,

And we try to build a land whose citizens care for one another,

Who are sensitive to differences and trusting of similarities.

Welcome back. Help us build a better world for all of us. AMEN.

When I was a kid, I was fascinated by ponds. My grandfather’s farm had a small pond -- no fish but a million frogs. He had a milking barn and two hay barns. One hay barn sat by a small stream that flowed from a spring near the chicken coop. This stream ran through the pig sty – the pale, hairless skin of pigs cannot take the heat, so they cover themselves with mud in the summer. Along with my brother and an occasional cousin or two, we would build a dam on this little stream and create a pond.

We would get away with such foolishness as long as we destroyed the dam and let the water run freely before we left to climb up in the haylofts or find some other source of troublemaking. For ponds turn brackish quickly, especially if near several pigs! The difference between a pond and a lake is simple: a lake has a stream of water draining it, so that water flows through it. A pond has no outlet; the water gathers and is used or evaporates.

Of course, I didn’t tell you this bit of information so you would know more about my childhood visits to my grandparents’ farm nor to test your knowledge of pools of water. Churches and religious movements are either ponds or lakes. There is a fresh flow through them, and they are vital and alive, or they have no outlet, existing just to collect what drains into them.

Walt Whitman, in his usual dynamic and sometimes outlandish way, reminds us that we can be like lakes, our outlets leading to a further mingling of the seas along life’s journey. Our personal lives and our religious lives need not be dead ends, ponds rather than lakes and the rivers flowing from them. We are "seas mingling" or we are dead ends along life’s journey.

The modern human dilemma is a balancing act: freedom and society. The modern world began with the Enlightenment discovery of freedom: real freedom, personal, social, political freedom. The ancient world had few notions of freedom; freedom simply meant one was not a slave.

Even now, too many people think of freedom in terms of the most ancient of peoples, like those surviving i in the Australian outback. This is the freedom of the hunter: no clock to punch, no boss, every person judged by his abilities within a narrow range of survival skills. No traffic lights or speed limits, no laws about the sale of spirits, tobacco, or other drugs.

Of course this is mostly wishful thinking. Anthropologists teach us that ancient societies were tightly knit by strict codes of social conduct, with food and sex taboos, religious strictures, and the iron laws of caste and class. Greater than all these restrictions was their overwhelming ignorance. Beyond certain pragmatic notions of hunting and gathering—many of which were stunningly wrong—even the brightest lacked the knowledge of today’s fifth-graders! Technology was primitive and wisdom largely psycho-social.

Ancient peoples gathered in villages, then cities, seeking greater protection and increased financial security, just as surely as water flows into creeks, rivers, and oceans. They formed political, religious, and social groups to battle chaos, crime, and anarchy. That ancient hunter-gatherer kind of freedom was willingly exchanged for urban peace and prosperity. We cannot imagine how short and brutal was life for our ancestors. Yet, just as children laugh in ghettoes, so art, poetry, song, and dance grew in the city. Some people began to think more rigorously, coordinating human insights into useful systems of understanding: secular and religious philosophies.

Meanwhile, more mundane social forces dominated the thinking of most people—as it does today. Slavery from war and economic oppression still defined the opposite of freedom for most people. Since they were no longer hunters and gatherers, freedom became what we can get away with for most folks. Limited by their times and cultures, few thinkers, poets, or artists were able to imagine freedom as we know it today.

Critics of the dehumanizing forces in urban life decry bureaucracy and social pressure, but forget earlier conditions of village and nomadic life. Individual and political freedom did not develop until commerce and technology finally coalesced in the early Middle Ages (or Late Dark Ages) to create first the Enlightenment and quickly on its heels the Reformation. (I will lead a reading course of Thomas Cahill’s new history of the Early Middle Ages in the fall is you are interested.) Universities were begun, scientific rigor led to technological revolutions in daily life and even greater revolutions in philosophy and religion. Humanism is the name given to the radical idea that individuals had rights and responsibilities not even Kings could abrogate.

Freedom is a high value for Unitarian Universalists because it is so basic to our understanding of what it means to be a human being. Since our ancestors did not have this same sense of human worth and dignity, we might say that we have evolved mentally or spiritually rather more than we have evolved physically. The mental gymnastics of our forebrains dominate human lives while all our animal cousins rely much more on their senses and their physical traits for survival. Our freedom is an evolution of our ability to think and act and make choices – to be free of physical determinism.

Freedom begets democracy, and democracy begets tolerance, and tolerance begets greater compassion and creativity. These are the high values of a modern religion. They relate closely to the high values of ancient religions and their modern descendents, but only in an abstract sense. Ancient religions tended to be highly compassionate toward their own, but highly intolerant of strangers and enemies – all those who were not members of the tribe or clan or society. We are a religion that goes beyond compassion for our friends and neighbors and demands compassion for our enemies too.

In a couple of weeks, I join the new rabbi, Marla Spanjer, and other ministers for a panel on forgiveness. In discussing this topic with her, I mentioned that forgiveness is an essential virtue in the modern world. Both democracy and tolerance depend upon forgiveness, for we cannot live together if we harbor ancient grudges and blood feuds against those who are different from us. Today’s modern world demands religious sensitivity as much as the ancient world, even more, one might say, since it demands that our clannish and tribal religion be expanded to include all other people in its net of those to be treated fairly and justly.

We can imagine this as a stream of freedom emerging from many small individual sources and flowing over time to great rivers and, finally, to the sea itself. Let us look forward to that future time when tolerance draws all human beings into one great family without regard to color or caste, to race or religion, to gender or sexual identity.

Let us be part of that river flowing to the sea.

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