Hear, O Unitarian Universalists!

Rev. Ana Levy-Lyons

August 23rd, 2008

Unity Temple Unitarian Universalist Congregation

Oak Park, IL

Sh’ma Yisrael, Adonai elohenu, Adonai echad. Observant Jews will repeat this statement when they first wake up in the morning and last thing before they go to bed at night. A traditional translation would be: Hear, O Israel, Adonai is our God, Adonai is one. It’s not a prayer, exactly. It’s a statement of faith -- an affirmation. And it’s followed by a passage from the Bible that tells us to remember this truth, keep it alive in our consciousness at all times. It says to repeat this truth when you get up and when you go to bed, when you are home and when you are away. It says to teach it to your children, bind it to your hands and your brow, write it on the doorways of your house and your gates. Remember it.

If there’s one thing Jews are really good at, it’s remembering. There are all kinds of Jewish rituals and holidays and foods designed specifically to pass memories from generation to generation. Jews know that if you don’t keep your faith at the forefront of your mind, it’s easy to forget about it. Priorities get out of whack and we become so preoccupied with the management of our lives that we forget the purpose of our lives.

This is a great wisdom that I think we UUs could learn from. We have our faiths, our convictions, our values, but how often do we really remind ourselves of them? How often do we remind ourselves of what God we’re serving, by which I mean the principle we’re serving, the truth we’re declaring to the world, the values we’re expressing with our lives? I think most of us, myself included, go through our lives, generally trying to be a good person, but with most of our energy devoted to the day-to-day matters of being alive in this world; having families, jobs, health struggles, dog troubles, assorted varieties of daily annoyances and pleasures of all kinds.

There is something to be said for having some kind of system for reminding ourselves of why we are here and what our central truth is. A way to zoom the camera out at regular intervals, at least once a day, and get the big, panoramic view; to keep our bearings in the ocean. Reciting a statement of your truth is a way to do this.

When we recite our Covenant here on Sunday mornings, this is what we’re doing. But I think it’s helpful to also have a personal affirmation for daily use as a spiritual practice. Something like the Jewish Sh’ma. Hear, O Israel, Adonai is our God, Adonai is one. A more modern translation might be: Hear, o humans: the unnamable is our God, and God is one. And a UU translation might be: Listen up everyone: the power of love and transformation is our God, and God is one.

This translation not only could be the creed of Unitarian Universalism, but I believe it already is. And I’m going tell you why I think this. The power of love and transformation is our God, and God is one.

First, some history: Unitarian Universalism, as many of you know, is a merger of two separate streams – two denominations with two theologies that were compatible enough that in 1961 they were combined into a single religious body.

Universalists shared the belief that all people would ultimately be saved – nobody would be punished eternally for their sins in a fiery pit of hell. All people would ultimately be reconciled to God – the wounds of the world would be healed. Hosea Ballou’s “Treatise on Atonement” was all about this process of becoming reconciled to God – that God was too loving to damn us all to eternal suffering. Universalists had a sense of God drawing us in, always bringing us back into the fold no matter how far we strayed.

The other stream was Unitarianism – the belief that, rather than a trinity of Gods (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) there was one God. Unitarians thought of Jesus not a God but as a human – a very special human tinged with divinity, but a human nonetheless. This way of thinking in the middle ages was not very appreciated by the Catholic Church which taught a Trinitarian doctrine that was not to be messed with. Those who questioned the Trinity were persecuted and even killed.

So these two theologies comprised Unitarian Universalism – the Universalist half, that God’s loving power ultimately transforms all sin and draws us all to Godself; and the Unitarian half, that God is one.

Interesting that the Sh’ma, that prayer I started with, also has two components. It says two things: Adonai is our God and Adonai is one. It seems to me that there are some very interesting parallels between the two halves of the Sh’ma and the two halves of Unitarian Universalism.

First, “Adonai is our God.” Who is this Adonai character? Adonai is the Hebrew word for lord. But Adonai or lord is not the word that is actually written in the prayer. The word written in the prayer is spelled Y-H-W-H (the word printed on the cover of your order of service). This is the unpronounceable name of God; the holiest name in the Hebrew Bible and the one that expresses God’s complete ineffability. You’re never supposed to even try to pronounce it, because to name God is to objectify God – to make God into a mere being. So Jews will say Adonai or lord or “the name” instead, to preserve that indefinable quality of the divine. I think it’s a very UU notion that divinity is abstract – if you turn it into a “being” that you can name you’ve missed the point.

This God with the unspeakable name introduces itself to Moses in the story of the burning bush. God is telling Moses to lead the Israelites to freedom from slavery and Moses asks, well, who should I say sent me? And God answers with this name. For you English teachers, the name is actually a word that is a future tense reflexive form of the verb “to be.” So it means something like “I will be what I will be.” The fact that God here is expressed in future tense I think is amazing – as if God is that which is in the process of becoming.

Even more significant, this unspeakable name is the name of God that’s used in the Bible almost exclusively to refer to God as the power of love and transformation. While other names, like Elohim, are sometimes used to refer to a God of punishment and judgment, this unspeakable name is used to refer to a God of reconciliation, forgiveness, and love – a God who, for example, would never send anyone to burn in hell for eternity.

This God who we call Adonai was the God that led the Israelites to freedom from slavery, this was the God who told Abraham NOT to sacrifice Isaac [a concept borrowed from Rabbi Michael Lerner’s Jewish Renewal]. This God is the most abstract conception of God and also the most loving, always drawing humans back toward itself when they stray into sin, like Abraham almost did with Isaac.

Adonai is a Universalist conception of God. Adonai is a god that is too big to be contained by primitive human formulas of crime and punishment. Adonai is a god that is too loving to stand by passively while humans suffer from their own sins. Adonai is a god that is in constant process of drawing us back toward itself, making possible reconciliation. Adonai is a god of transformation, constantly teaching us that the world as it is is not the world as it has to be.

So when the Sh’ma says Adonai is our God, it is saying that this power of love and transformation is our God; basically that the Universalist conception of God is our God. And then it says that Adonai is one. God is one! What could be more Unitarian? So we have the Universalist half of the equation and the Unitarian half of the equation. How amazing!

We’ve looked a little at the Universalist half – what about the Unitarian half? What does it mean that God is one? In the Channing passage I read earlier, all it meant was that, well, if you look in the Bible, there’s no mention of the Trinity, so presumably there’s only one God. But what about for those of us who don’t believe in God or who aren’t really concerned with proving that there isn’t a Trinity? What does this mean for us?

I think that for us today, the unity of God can mean the unity of being itself. Our seventh principle, that all of life is an interconnected web, we are all one, and our fate is inextricably bound up with that of the rocks and the whales and the microbes and the molecules. The fate of the wolves in Yellowstone is bound up with that of the farmers and the elk and the aspen trees and the beavers and the fish and other galaxies that we don’t even know about yet.

We are all made of the same basic stuff and our ultimate commitment as UU’s has to be a commitment to that stuff as a whole, not just to certain parts of it that we like better than others. This is what I believe “God is one” can mean for us today.

So we have a UU philosophy with two halves that are amazingly similar to the two halves of the central faith statement of Judaism. And Jews recite this statement every day as a reminder to keep one’s priorities straight and to keep faith at the forefront of consciousness. Maybe there would be some value in us doing this too, using our UU translation, “Listen up, everyone: the power of love and transformation is our God, and God is one.” As a reminder that these should be our guiding principles in life: the oneness of the universe and the literally unspeakable power of love and transformation. This is what we are committed to, this is what we are striving to embody. And we know that we need reminders all the time.

This is why in the Sh’ma prayer, after reciting the affirmation, Jews will recite the Bible passage that tells us to recite the affirmation. It’s like reminding ourselves of our central truth and then reminding ourselves to remind ourselves again in the future. This is how great the risk is that we will forget if we don’t build in mechanisms to remember.

So maybe a UU version of the Sh’ma would read something like this:

Hear, O Unitarian Universalists!

The power of love and transformation is our God, and God is one.

Commit yourself to this truth with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might.

Take it to heart; teach it to your children.

Recite it when you wake up in the morning and when you go to sleep at night,

when you are home and when you are on your journeys.

Keep it in front of your eyes and let it guide the work of your hands.

Keeping the Faith

by Rev. Catherine Torpey

Delivered at the South Nassau Unitarian Universalist Congregation

Sunday, October 12, 2008

READINGS:

From the book The Earth is the Lord’s by Abraham Heschel.  It is a loving description of the life of Hasidic Jews in Eastern Europe until the early twentieth century:

They were sure that everything hinted at something transcendent, that what was apparent to the mind is but a thin surface of the undisclosed, and they often preferred to gain a foothold on the brink of the deep even at the price of leaving the solid ground of the superficial. The words of the Torah, they believed, would not be grasped by means of literal interpretation. Nothing could be taken literally, neither Scripture nor nature. No man, even if he lived a thousand years, would be able to fathom the mysteries of the world. Rabbi Nathan Spira of Cracow in the seventeenth century interpreted in two hundred and fifty-two different ways the portion of the Pentateuch in which Moses pleads with God for permission to enter the Promised Land. A Biblical word, a custom or a saying, was thought to be crammed with a multiplicity of meaning. The plain was too shallow to be true. Only the mystery was plausible, while the one-dimensional, the superficial was inconceivable. Everywhere they found cryptic meaning. Even in the part of the Code dealing with civil and criminal law, they discovered profound mysteries…. The name of Poland, they alleged, was derived from the two Hebrew words po-lin, "here abide," which were inscribed on a note descended from heaven and found by the refugees from Germany on their eastward journey at the time of the Black Death and the attendant massacres of Jews. On the leaves of the trees, the story goes, were inscribed sacred names, and in the branches were hidden errant souls seeking deliverance through the intermediation of a pious Jew, who in passing would stop to say his twilight prayer under the tree.

Considering the itinerary of one's life, who could comprehend where the goals lie? One might go on a journey for the purpose of transacting business, while the true end was to worship in an inn, where the thought of God had never pierced the air, or to render help to a weary man encountered on the road. One might fulfill his destiny without ever intending to….

Once, it is told, Rabbi Israel Ba’al Shem, the founder of the Hasidic movement, looked despondent and sick at heart. When his disciples asked him for the cause, he told them: There was a man who was very wicked. After he died, there was no way of saving him. But God had mercy upon his soul, and it was decreed that the man’s soul should be incarnated in a frog and lie near a spring in a distant land, and should his son ever come to that place and drink of the water of the spring after saying the blessing over the water, the soul would be redeemed. But the son was very poor and had neither the means nor the opportunity to travel to distant places, so God caused that he should become the butler of a rich man who once became ill, and the doctors declared that he would be cured if he went to a certain spa. The rich man went there and took his butler with him. Once while taking a walk together, the butler became unbearably thirsty.  He almost died of thirst.  The reason his thirst was so great was because he was near the spring where the soul of his father was lying, but he didn’t know that of course. When he began to search for water he found a spring. In his great thirst, he forgot to say the prayer, the blessing over the water, and his father’s soul remained unredeemed.  “The Holy One, blessed be He,” concluded the Baal Shem, “did so much to make the redemption of the soul possible, yet all was in vain. Who knows what will be the end of its way?”

SERMON:

In the movie “Castaway,” Tom Hanks stars as a man named Chuck who finds himself marooned on an uninhabited tropical island.  Cargo from the plane he had been flying in washes ashore, and, desperately lonely, he draws a face on a basketball so that he will have someone to talk to.  Chuck names the basketball Wilson.  Several years go by and over time, Chuck, made a bit crazy by his loneliness, imbues Wilson with truly human characteristics.  We see him not only speaking to Wilson, but responding to things that hears Wilson the basketball say.  A complex relationship develops between Chuck and his imagined companion.

Eventually, some flotsam washes ashore which Chuck is able to use to build a raft, and he and Wilson climb aboard.  After many days drifting on the ocean upon the raft, Chuck falls asleep and in the rough water, Wilson the basketball falls off, and into the vast ocean.  Chuck awakens in time to see Wilson drifting away, but not in time to save him.  A bedraggled Chuck swims desperately toward Wilson, the basketball with the face drawn upon it, which bobs up and down helplessly on a current which is rapidly carrying him away.  Wilson!  Chuck cries.  Wilson!  I’m sorry, Wilson.  Wilson, I can’t.  Wilson, I’m sorry.  I’m so sorry Wilson.  I’m sorry Wilson.  I’m sorry.  I’m so sorry.

Chuck’s mourning, his deep regret expresses itself as guilt “I’m sorry,” – an excruciating guilt.  He has failed his friend, Wilson.  His innocent act of falling asleep on a raft has caused his friend to be lost forever at sea.  His effort to secure Wilson to the raft failed, and now Wilson is given over to who knows what fate.

But of course, his friend cannot suffer a horrible fate, because his friend is an inanimate object.  We, the audience, can see plainly that the loss is entirely Chuck’s.  He is mistaken to feel guilt, we know, because there is no moral failing; no harm has been done to Wilson; Chuck hasn’t been the cause of another’s pain.  We see so clearly that what is really happening is that Chuck is grieving.  Chuck is heartbroken.  Yet oh so humanly, Chuck experiences his loss not primarily as his own loss; he experiences his loss as guilt.

He experiences what is his loss and his loss alone as guilt – the pain is transferred, projected, as a harm done not to him, but a harm done by him to someone else.

In this moment in this scene, we observe a man feeling that painful sense of regret and guilt, which all of us can relate to: “I’m sorry.  I’m so sorry I didn’t protect you.  I’m so sorry I let you down.  I’m so sorry that you are suffering because of what I did, or because of what I didn’t do.”  And it could not be more plain that our protagonist, Chuck, has done no wrong.  Ah, the beauty of great literature and film.  We can see with crystal clarity what in real life is so impossibly obscure.  We know beyond a shadow of a doubt that Chuck has done no harm to Wilson.  Chuck has harmed no one.  Chuck has nothing to feel guilty about.  And yet, the pain of his guilt and regret is real; it is true; its power wrenches him.

How often is our loss, our mourning, our sorrow, attended by the companions guilt and regret.  How often does our feeling of guilt indicate that we have, in fact, done something wrong, and how often does it indicate, rather, that we have suffered a great loss which we fear that we cannot handle?  How often does our guilt stem from a deep sense of loss, of powerlessness, of anger at a world which has taken so much away from us?  Are our feelings of guilt a way to direct our sorrow at the most convenient enemy – ourselves.

As a minister, I have rarely observed the death of any person when it was not accompanied by feelings of guilt among those who were close to that person.  I should have told her “I love you” more often; I should have treated him more kindly; I should have been more honest with him; I shouldn’t have been so honest; I should feel sadder at this loss; I shouldn’t feel angry at her for how she died; I should, I shouldn’t, I should have, I shouldn’t have.

Guilt, guilt, guilt, guilt, guilt.  I see how much guilt so many of us carry – for years, for decades, for things that we did, or didn’t do, completely innocently.  We were simply living our lives the best way we knew how and something very sad happened.

And so we need a holiday that tells us to remember all the things we’re guilty of?  Why do we need a special day for wallowing in guilt?

I have heard Yom Kippur described as a day that is intended to afflict the soul.  Many of us have afflicted souls already, thank you very much.  There are things that we feel guilty about that we are not guilty of – our Wilson the basketball guilt.  But do our feelings of guilt bear any relation to the acts of omission or commission in which we have, in fact, caused others pain or harm?  While we are busy feeling guilty about one thing, it may be that we have done or left undone things which really do make a difference in the lives of others.  If a time for atonement is to help us live our lives, then it would be useful to consider the difference between guilty feelings and responsible actions.

In 1994, I traveled to El Salvador with the Fair Trade coffee company, Equal Exchange.  I was part of a delegation of college and graduate school students who went to build relationships between those producing the coffee and those who consumed it.  We lived for part of our two weeks with the campesinos or “peasants” who labored in the coffee fields, and in the case of the Fair Trade coffees, now also cooperatively owned the land.  We met with businessmen in the city as well; we met with journalists and members of the Salvadoran congress.  We learned how the rulers of El Salvador had brutally oppressed and killed those advocating for political and social reform in the recent turbulent decades.  We attended the church where Oscar Romero was shot while saying mass, and met with his friends and associates.  The constant theme was the role the United States had played in supporting corrupt rulers through its provision of training and money and its turning a blind eye to much of what was going on.

For some of the young college students, it was the first time their eyes had been truly opened to the enormous, overpowering influence of US foreign policy on the real lives of people in other countries – countries we hardly think about most of the time.  Over the course of our two week trip, these young people expressed greater and greater feelings of guilt.  As the days passed, there were more and more expressions of, “Oh my God, I am feeling so guilty.  I can’t believe what we’ve done to these people.  I feel so bad.  I don’t know how I can ever feel proud to be American again.”

The feelings of these students was natural – almost inevitable, given what they were hearing and seeing.  Almost every Salvadoran we met urgently wanted to communicate to us the role that the United States had played in their troubles.  They did not wish to excuse the actions of Salvadorans – they just wanted us as Americans to know that our country’s foreign policy had been complicit, and that America did and still would influence the fate of this small country.

One afternoon, as I sat in the back of the van that took us all from location to location, I was listening to the students once again process their guilt.  And in that moment, I was struck powerfully by the difference between feeling guilty and taking responsibility.  Perhaps because I’d been listening to them re-hash the same feelings for several days; perhaps because I was sitting all the way in the back, and therefore couldn’t readily participate in the conversation, and was therefore forced to just listen in; for whatever reason, in that moment, as I listened, something became glaringly obvious to me: their feelings of guilt were actually getting in the way of their contemplating what useful actions they might take.  Their feelings of guilt did not equate with taking responsibility.  Their feelings of guilt had the effect – intentional or not – of avoiding responsibility.  If they had been seeking to take responsibility, I would have heard them saying:

“As an American citizen, what can I do to influence foreign policy in my country so that we as a nation are using our power for good and not for evil?  I don’t like what I’m learning. I don’t want the country I love to be complicit in injustice and oppression, so how can I communicate that to those in power?  What can I do to share my new insights with my fellow citizens?  Should my country have the kind of power it has, and if not, what actions could I take – however small – to alter the balance of power in the world, so that more people have the chance to live in a freer and more just world?”

These young people were still in the early stages of processing everything they were experiencing, so my point here is not that what they were feeling was wrong – only that I became aware of how often we get trapped in worrying about our own feelings of guilt instead of actually asking ourselves what, in fact, we might do about situation which trouble us.  The students were not asking themselves the kinds of questions that would have actually made a difference in the lives of the Salvadorans we had met.

Instead of focusing on responsibility, they were focusing on their feelings of guilt.  They were bemoaning, “Oh, I just feel so bad.”  Their guilt was keeping them looking backward, “Oh, we shouldn’t have been giving that kind of money to the ruling junta.  Oh, how we’ve harmed these people.”

This was, in many ways, Wilson guilt; for none of the college students in that van had trained the Salvadoran military.  None of them had personally authorized any death squads.  Their feelings of guilt were like Chuck’s guilt at the loss of Wilson – really, the guilt was a displacement of loss, sorrow and sadness.  They felt connected to the people we’d met.  They felt great compassion for these campesinos who, before recent reforms and advances, had worked on plantations in a system that person after person described as little more than slavery.  They felt great compassion for the woman whose sons were killed by death squads because they had tried to unionize factory workers.  The students were loving human beings who felt connected to the people they’d encountered, and so they were feeling loss, sorrow, regret – both for the sake of the individuals we’d met and for their own sakes.  What was being expressed as guilt was really the painful loss of what had been a happy naïveté.  What was being expressed as guilt was, underneath, disappointment at their beloved country, disorientation that the world was not nearly as friendly a place as they’d recently believed it to be.

In that moment, in the back of that van, I saw how quickly these students had turned their feelings of sadness, grief and confusion into guilt.  That, in turn, made them ask not, “What can I do to make the situation better” but “What can I do to make myself feel better?”

Our guilty feelings can make us feel as though we are taking responsibility, but often, guilty feelings actually stop us from taking responsibility.  Guilt – especially lingering guilt – has less to do with atoning for sin and more to do with wanting to push away feelings of sadness, sorrow and loss.  Guilt often is a way of protecting ourselves, though it often feels quite the opposite of that.  It protects us from the full weight of loss.

Yom Kippur is a serious holiday with a serious job to do – to help us face the ways in which we have fallen short, and to take the actions that are necessary to make things right.  Wallowing in guilt isn’t – or isn’t meant to be – the point.  In fact, wallowing in guilt may be the very thing we need to confess and turn away from.

I love Abraham Heschel’s description, read earlier, of how the Jews of Europe, in the times before the Second World War, had such a sense of humor about our role in the fate of the world.  None of us can know what ripple effects our actions will have.  So many things happen in this mysterious world, which we never see, we never know, we can never know.  And while we imagine that our innocent, perfectly reasonable actions have caused great calamity, they imbued even self-interested actions with a benevolent purpose known only to God.

So when Jews tried to escape the Black Death in the fourteenth century, and traveled eastward into Poland, it turns out, they told themselves, that the true reason that God wanted them to go to Poland was because of all the branches of the trees in Poland where errant souls were trapped.  Those pathetic souls could only be released by the prayer of a pious Jew – who knew?  The Jews walked along the roadways, and when it came time to say their prayers, they might stop under a tree for the shade, or to lean against the trunk for a back rest.  They didn’t know that the prayers they said under those trees were releasing unhappy souls.  They just finished their prayers, packed their things back up, and went on their way.  They might have spent all day feeling guilty about some imagined fault, never knowing the blessings they had bestowed.

And the butler to the wealthy man, who thirsted so.  He went to the spring for a drink, not to rescue his father’s soul, which was captive in the form of a frog.  He never knew that his ordinary actions had the potential to free his father’s soul – that God had arranged everything for this moment.  He took his sip of water, and forgot in his thirst to say the prayer that would have performed the great miracle.  He went on his way, never any wiser that a great moment had been lost.  He would never know that if he had simply paused, slowed down and given thanks, it would have made all the difference.

That butler was not responsible for ordering the universe.  He wasn’t even responsible for releasing his father’s soul or keeping it captive.  He was only responsible for remember to say thank you to God for the water.

So often, our guilt is accompanied by a scenario we imagine where our actions have caused great suffering to others.  What if, like the Jews who entered Poland, it turned out that our actions were not the cause of suffering, but were the causes of mysterious blessings to ourselves and others?

When Wilson drifted away into the vast ocean, Chuck’s guilt came out of an imagined reality – he imagined a sorry fate for Wilson.  He imagined Wilson in despair.  He imagined Wilson angry at him for having allowed this to happen. This imagined reality arose spontaneously out of his grief.  If he could take the grief on as his own, if he could allow himself to feel the frightening weight of sorrow that was his, then perhaps his imagination might be released to envision a fate for Wilson where Wilson is free.  If Chuck could have felt his loss as his own, perhaps he might have imagined that Wilson had been set on some great adventure, where he would encounter another man on another raft, who needed a companion even more than Chuck needed one.

And what if the students on that delegation to El Salvador could have experienced their sadness and loss as their own, rather than projecting it outside themselves as guilt?  If they allowed themselves the true weight of their sadness, perhaps they might have imagined that all of the difficulties El Salvador had gone through were going to be the catalyst for a new, more dynamic society, with a new and mutually beneficial friendship with the United States.  Perhaps they might have imagined that our presence as a delegation was going to prove some day to have been the beginning of something new and wonderful.

We make up stories in our minds about why the actions we took have had horrible consequences.  If we’re going to make up stories, perhaps in this season of repentance, we ought to take a page out of the book of the Hasidic Jews of Europe.  What if we made up stories that the actions we take yield miraculous benefits for other souls?

So often we imagine that if only we had done things differently, there would have been a better outcome.  But what if it were true that our actions, taken as a whole, have created the best of all possible worlds?  What if mysterious blessings have come to others – people we will never meet or know, because of innocent actions we have taken?  The world is an endlessly mysterious place.  Stranger things have happened.

You know what you’re guilty of?  Imagining that you have been a curse, when in fact, you have been a blessing.

• • •

© 2008 Rev. Catherine Torpey minister (at) snuuc (dot) org

************************************************************************************ Finding Forgiveness

by Rev. John Gibb Millspaugh

Parish Co-Minister, Winchester Unitarian Society

delivered on October 5th, 2008

Imagine this.

Imagine that every autumn, every year, the people of the world attempt to make their peace with those they had slighted, or injured, or wronged in the past twelve months.

Imagine that the task is not so much to smooth things over, or reach a common agreement or compromise, but the task is to own up to the truth. Imagine if someone came to you and said, “I did this. I did this to you, and it was wrong. I botched this thing. I betrayed you thusly. I demeaned you, dishonored you, whether you even knew it. I’d like to ask something of you that you may or may not be willing to consider. I’d like to ask you to forgive me.”

Imagine if Congress and subprime lenders did this. Imagine if family members who meant well, and friends and acquaintances and people who cut you off on the highway did this. Came to you, admitted they botched it, apologized, asked for forgiveness, meant it. Imagine what life would be like each autumn. Imagine what possibilities would open.

Imagine what would happen, if not only they did it, but if you did it. Victoria Safford asks,

Imagine how many deep breaths you would need to take. Imagine how many doors you’d have to knock on, how many phone calls you’d have to make, how many letters, how many lunches and coffees, how many awkward moments with your children and your parents, and with strangers (that cashier to whom you spoke so sharply). Awkward is irrelevant. The task is not about comfort, it is about truth, about wholeness and holiness. Restoration.

How would the world be different if we all lived life this way? Or, a better question: Regardless of what the world does, how would we be different if we paused once a year to take stock, to apologize, to forgive others and ourselves for ways we have fallen short? For times we have “listened to too much noise,” and been “inattentive to wonder.”

In the Days of Awe, the shofar is blown as a wake up call – the sound piercing through our tendency to hurry over the surface of life. It draws the hearer up short, and down deep. Rabbi Alan Lew writes, “It is the sound of the world once again cracking through the shell of its egg to be born. It sounds an invitation, to a journey from denial to awareness, from self-loathing to self-forgiveness, from anger to healing. From staleness to renewal.

The Days of Awe are unusual among world religious holidays in that they do not celebrate any historical event, or any person, or even a season of the spheres. The Days of Awe celebrate the extraordinary human capacity to grow and change and begin anew.

Of course, that capacity is always with us, not just during the Days of Awe. But Rabbi Lew notes the great symbolism to short duration. For just ten days, the Book of Life and the Book of Death are open. We are already in the sixth day. The book is closing. In the same way, we know, on some deep level, that the books of our lives are closing. We may be in the fourth day of ten, or the seventh, but regardless, the time remaining is precious, not to be squandered. We have work to do.

Perhaps more than we allow ourselves to admit, some of that work involves forgiveness. As a Unitarian Universalist, I readily acknowledge: forgiveness is not something I think much about. And I’m not alone. Rev. Paul Mueller writes,

Somehow, when most of us were not looking, forgiveness sort of slipped out of our spiritual and even perhaps our religious lexicon. Understand, I do not think that we meant to lose it, it just kind of happened. We lost track of it as a religious concept. In a way, we kind of put it up in the attic, with some other words that had, over the years, become sort of stiff. Unbending. [The word forgiveness] seemed sort of the equivalent of wearing starched shirts in an era of permanent press fabrics. We never really thought much about it, but forgiveness seemed to say, somehow, more than we meant about our deeds and the needs they often created in us.

I think I personally do not often think about forgiveness because it’s not an easy fit with my theology. I think most people try the best they can. I don’t think of the world in terms of sinners and their sins, atonement and redemption.

Also, I have left forgiveness aside because I have so often seen the concept abused. I spent a summer working as a chaplain at Mass General Hospital, as part of my training for this ministry. Again and again, on the Internal Medicine ward, I’d meet with battered women. For some of these women, it was their second or third time in the hospital. In almost every case, they were preparing to go back to their abuser. They felt that this part of their responsibility as a loving wife, and as religious people. In their churches, they were hearing language like “Forgive and forget” and “Turn the other cheek.”

In promoting unflinching forgiveness, their churches betrayed them. Those ideas about forgiveness, that forgiveness involves forgetting, and requires reconciling no matter what, helped perpetuate abuse. That model of forgiveness is wrong. Forgiveness often involves reconciling, but not in every case, not absolutely. That model of forgiveness is wrong in that it is incorrect: its understanding of what forgiveness is and what forgiveness involves is incorrect. And that model of forgiveness is wrong in that it is morally wrong: it’s pernicious, it is destructive of life.

Depending of how we think of it, forgiveness can be burdensome or libratory. Let me tell you about forgiveness as I understand it, in hopes we can start a conversation about what it is and isn’t, and what role it might play in our lives as Unitarian Universalists.

Someone once said, “Foolish people…neither forgive…nor forget. Well-meaning but naive people both forgive and forget. The wise… the wise forgive, but do not forget.”

The past has much to teach us. If we are to learn from it, we must not forget it but remember it. Forgiveness more often involves remembering than forgetting. Past experiences, ways that we and others have fallen short, even pain has a great deal to teach us. Part of being fully human is making mistakes and harming other beings, and being harmed as well. Forgiveness is not about forgetting the past and thereby increasing the chance we’ll get caught in the same destructive cycles again and again.

Forgiveness is about remembering the past, but responding to it in a new way. Loosening its clutches on us. Shaking off that which binds us, letting the chains drop to the floor, and feeling what it is like to stretch limbs that were beginning to numb or atrophy. Forgiveness isn’t about forgetting the past, it’s about responding to the past from the context of the present: who I am now, and who I am becoming; who you are now, and who you are in process of becoming. Responding to the past from the context of the present.

I have a friend who got hurt by another friend’s callousness, and in 2003, he severed his relationship with her. Just a few weeks ago, though, he learned that she was dying. The book of life was closing. Suddenly his feelings of resentment and pain seemed less important. They were based in the past, in who he was five years ago, and who she was then, not who either of them were today. He realized he still cared about her. He hesitated to reach out to her, worrying he might add to her burden. But he did reach out, and they spoke for hours, and found healing in doing so. Though he still remembers the pain of the injury, he responded to the past from the context of the present. He has found forgiveness.

In that case, forgives involved reconciliation. I don’t think it always needs to. The two are not the same. Forgiveness is a personal response to another’s injustice—“a healing act, centered in the heart.” Reconciliation is a social occurrence that requires two people respecting each other mutually. As Jewish scholars have noted, sometimes reconciliation is possible, sometime is isn’t - but forgiveness doesn’t depend on the other person’s response, and it is always possible. You can forgive someone who is no longer alive. You can forgive someone who you cannot track down. And you can forgive someone who has demonstrated that attempts at reconciliation aren’t safe, people who have demonstrated that they would use your attempt to reconcile to wound you again. Reconciliation is not always possible or wise. Reconciliation is not always possible or wise. But forgiveness is always possible, and is necessary for our sake and for the sake of our own life’s expansiveness, as Debbie Teal wrote in our modern reading.

So I’ve told you what forgiveness isn’t. It’s not forgetting the past, but responding to it in context of who you are in the present, and who you seek to become. It’s not about excusing or accepting bad behavior. It’s not about reconciliation in all cases. But what is it? As we move into considering what forgiveness actually is, I’d like to invite you to get in touch with a situation or a wound that still has a hold on you from the past, that diminishes you. Just hold it lightly. I am not going to ask you to do any forgiveness today. I just want to move this sermon out of the abstract and into the practical. Just hold something lightly in your mind. It could be about forgiving yourself, or another person, or even the universe.

Perhaps you, like me, could use some forgiveness from yourself. For the times of messing up. Botching it. For listening to too much noise, for urges and tendencies you have given into and regret. What would it be like to forgive yourself? Some of us might choose to focus on that.

Others might choose another person or set of people, a family member or a stranger, a leader or a confidant who betrayed or otherwise hurt you sometime in the past, a past that still has some hold on you. So you might choose to think about forgiving yourself, or another person.

And I imagine some of you might choose something more global and impersonal, something about the structure of things that has led us to loss. The loss of a goal, of a dream, of a loved one. Do you see how forgiveness could relate to the structure of things that lead us to loss? I can share an example, for I have known this kind of loss, and the need for this kind of forgiveness. Seven years ago my goddaughter lost her life on the day of her birth. That day I raged, and I raged, and I raged at the universe, at the God, at life, at everything. I sure I’ve not forgiven the universe yet. Some part of me is still ensnared in the anger and sense of impersonal betrayal; I’m not sure I’ve entered back fully yet into the relationship with life, and potential and new possibility. Perhaps, more than the need to forgive myself, or another person, perhaps I need to forgive the universe. Grandiose and irrational as that may be, perhaps I need to forgive the universe for the loss of my goddaughter.

So that’s what it is for me, the situation I’ll focus on as I consider what forgiveness means. What is it for you? Forgiving yourself, or another person, or the structure of things? I invite you to get in touch with a situation that still has a hold on you from the past, that diminishes you. And this is important: at the same time, I invite you to feel the spiritual strength that gives you the wisdom and courage to move toward your life’s potential, and get in touch with that yearning to forgive yourself, or another person, or the universe. I’ll give you a moment.

* * *

What would it mean to do the difficult spiritual work of forgiveness? What would that look like? What is forgiveness?

* * *

Forgiveness is the miracle by which we turn to the good, in spite of wrongdoing, injustice, or injury. It’s the miracle by which we turn toward life’s perpetual processes of renewal. In so doing, we heal the hurt we never deserved.

When we call forgiveness a miracle, we mean, as “No one could suspect, in the nature of things, in the natural cause and effect of things, that anyone should ever forgive.... When we forgive we come as close as any human being can to the essentially divine act of creation.” That’s why forgiveness is miraculous.

There is no process we can go through that will automatically result in forgiveness. Forgiveness cannot be forced by good intent. But we can prepare ourselves for it, make ourselves open to the opportunity, and therefore make it more likely to come about. We can prepare in four ways. Hold it lightly. You’re here now, responding to the past from the context of the present. Responding in four ways.

First, we can remember. We can recall to ourselves the pain of the injury, the thoughtlessness or neglect. We can recall ourselves to not only the pain, but the full range of emotions, the anger, the fear, the bewilderment. We might remember by entering into those difficult emotional spaces once again, or we might remember through a more rational assessment of what happened, and the consequences unfolded from it.

Remembering and uncovering is a process that can take days or years or decades. Remembering is hard to do on your own, because the pain we carry goes deep. So you might consider talking to a friend or family member, or a clergyperson or counselor. In remembering, we’re more helped by that friend who draws us out and accepts the full range of our response just as it is, than we are by the friend who encourages us to quickly forgive. So first is remembering and uncovering, and that might take hours or years.

Next comes a realization: after a certain amount of time, we realize that continuing to focus on the injury and injurer is only extending the suffering, further constricting possibility. That realization presents the need for a choice. Will I keep dwelling in my anger and suffering and outrage? My justified anger, my understandable suffering, my warranted outrage?

Or…or. Or will I focus more on the potential in front of me. This new day. The context of the present, who I am now, and who I am growing to become?

In facing that decision, I am reminded of the folk lore about the tribal elder telling his grandson about the battle the old man was waging within himself. He said, “My grandson, the battle inside me is between two wolves. One is anger and vengeance and hatred and self-pity and guilt and superiority, and that wolf is very hungry. The other is love and creativity and peace and compassion and serenity and forgiveness and he is very hungry too. They are attacking one another, trying to eat one another, and over time, one is sure to win.” The young man asked the old man which wolf would win, and the elder paused, and then replied, “It depends which one I feed.”

We move toward new life when we start feeding the wolf of vengeance only scraps, and actively nurse the wolf of forgiveness. It’s not that we cease to be angry. It’s that anger ceases to prevail.

Forgiveness is a merciful restraint from dwelling destructively in resentment or righteousness. We come to wish ourselves, or others, or the universe well. In spite of everything, we wish betterment and flourishing, with we thereby move ourselves toward healing. Remembering first. Then making a decision about how we want to live. But that’s not the end of the process. Next comes work. The inner work of forming a new attitude toward the person who injured or neglected us. And work of deciding to not pass the pain onto others. You know that you have found forgiveness if you realize you wish for wellbeing of all, even the wellbeing of those responsible. Hard work. Spiritual practice—like prayer, meditation, or another form of focused intent in the presence of the sacred—can be essential to this work. Spiritual practice can be one of the most powerful forces that help us move toward growth and new life.

Remembering, then deciding, then work. Finally comes deepening. With forgiveness, life feels different. Richer. We discover a renewed sense of purpose, a renewed sense of joy, a renewed sense of strength, even if we had not been aware that they were missing. This might be a time of reconciliation. The International Forgiveness Institute says of this phase, “Thus, the forgiver discovers the paradox of forgiveness: as we give to others the gifts of mercy, generosity, and moral love, [we find that] we ourselves are healed.” Lewis Smedes puts it more bluntly: “You set a prisoner free, but you discover that the real prisoner was yourself.”

These are the Days of Awe. The Book of Life is open for such a short time. What about you? Do you yearn to find forgiveness? What would forgiveness look like for you?

Forgiveness is not about forgetting the past, but responding to the past in the context of the present. It’s not necessarily about reconciling with another, or condoning their action, but about finding compassion for them, and a wish for their wellbeing. It’s a miracle that opens us to the expansiveness of life, but only if we prepare ourselves for its possibility. We prepare ourselves by taking stock, remembering. Owning up to what’s real, what still has a hold on us. Then deciding where to put our energy, which wolf to feed, whether to cling to the harm of the past, or reach out to the promise of the present. Then comes the real work, of compassion, and empathy, and wishing for the wellbeing of all. And finally comes the deepening, a new purpose and strength and joy. The miracle.

Debbie Morris mentioned the book by Lawrence Smedes. He writes, “When we forgive…we create a new beginning out of past pain that never had a right to exist in the first place. We create healing for the future by changing a past that had no possibility in it for anything but sickness and death. When we forgive, we ride the crest of love's cosmic wave; we walk in stride with [the sacred source of all], and we heal the hurt we never deserved.”

May it be so for all of us. In this beloved community, may we make it so. Shalom, Namaste, Salaam, Blessed Be, and Amen.

• • •

Victoria Safford. “At One.” Walking Toward Morning. Skinner House Books: 2003.  Written in response to the question of Michael Lerner, “Imagine if the entire society, not just Jews, were to dedicate a ten-day period each year to collective self-examination and communal transformation.”

Safford.

These two phrases from Wendell Berry’s poem, “For the High Holy Days: A Purification.”

Lew, paraphrased.

Rev. R. Paul Mueller, “Sermon for a High Holy Days Remembrance,” 1997.

Didier Pollefeyt, “Forgiveness after the Holocaust,” in David Patterson and John K. Roth, eds., After-Words: Post-Holocaust Struggles with Forgiveness, Reconciliation, Justice, University of Washington Press (February 2004), 55-68, 63.

“If reconciliation is presented as the necessary final point of forgiveness, victims can be blocked in their efforts to forgive. There are cases in which forgiveness should not be followed automatically by reconciliation—for example, after sexual abuse by (former) partners. If we do not separate forgiveness and reconciliation clearly enough…the blurring can be a barrier that prevents the victim’s granting of forgiveness. Even if forgiveness is incomplete without reconciliation, forgiveness has value in itself quite apart from reconciliation. Forgiveness is possible without reconciliation. Reconciliation, however, is not possible without forgiveness.” Ibid.

Smedes, Forgive and Forget: Healing the Hurts We Don't Deserve. (HarperOne: 1996).

Paraphrasing Jeanne Safer, Ph.D. Forgiving and Not Forgiving: A New Approach to Resolving Intimate Betrayal. 1999, Avon Books, New York: 96.

International Forgiveness Institute: “A Process Model of Forgiving.” (International Forgiveness Institute: June 27, 2001).  The other publications of the International Forgiveness Institute develop these four movements of forgiveness in great detail.

• • •

© 2008 Rev. John Gibb Millspaugh jmillspaugh (at) uuma (dot) org

On the Seventh Day….

Rev. Anthony David

August 31, 2008

In the Hebrew Bible it is said that “In six days God made heaven and earth, and on the seventh day God rested, and was refreshed” (Exodus 31:17).

In my life I have encountered this creation myth countless times and know it as the origin of the tradition of the Sabbath; and I thought I knew what it meant until only recently, when I learned that the Hebrew word translated as “refreshed,” vaiynafesh, literally means, and God exhaled. God exhales on the seventh day, says the myth—God breathes out and relaxes. So it must be that on the previous six days, God quickens existence and life with a creative inhale. And here we have a profound picture of the nature of the fundamental reality in which we live and move and have our being. The creative process, ongoing and never ending, in the larger world and in ourselves, has a rhythm to it. Inhale, exhale; inhale, exhale: this is fundamental reality.

And this is the reality I would have us dwell on this morning, as we reflect on the spiritual meaning of Labor Day Weekend. Since the 1880s, it has been a time for honoring the working class and advocating for improved working conditions. It also brings with it a day off from work, wonderful but also bittersweet, since Labor Day has come to represent the end of Summer and the return of Fall endeavors. Soon we will be, with all our activities, inhaling like crazy; but on Labor Day, we exhale, we enjoy.

Take a moment, now, to try an experiment. Inhale deeply. Fill your lungs with air, as far as they will go. Now—don’t stop. Keep on inhaling….

Doesn’t feel good, right? Welcome to life in modern America, where the inhale-exhale rhythm of creation is out of whack. Today there is a constant flow of intense stimuli and endless information, mediated by satellites with their global reach, cable TV with its hundreds of channels, or the Internet, with its infinite connections. And we plug in, using the portable electronic gadgets at our disposal like cell phones, I Pods, Blackberries, and laptops. We plug in, and we inhale the emails, we inhale the images, we inhale the jabber, and we can’t seem to stop even as we end up feeling manic-depressive, feeling fried, feeling exhausted, feeling like we’re trapped in Wolf Blitzer’s Situation Room and can’t get out…

And then there is this: the endless inhale of choices in our American marketplace. For me this is so well illustrated by something I once encountered at a restaurant called Macaroni Grill. “Create your own primo pasta,” the menu said. “Choose from everyday indulgences that take your pasta creation to new heights.” At this point, I’m rolling my eyeballs. The subtext, I know, is that as a consumer in a postmodern hyper-individualist society, the act of purchasing becomes nothing less than the art of declaring who I am, the art of constructing my personal identity. I am what I buy. But must this be the case when I’m hungry and I just want to eat some good Italian food? My eye scans the rest of the menu. I see five categories, each with multiple options: sauces, toppings, yummies, the actual type of pasta, and the type of side salad to accompany the dish. In all, there are 38 options to choose from, to take my pasta creation to new heights. I order a cheeseburger.

The inhale is constant and exhausting. So many things to know, so much need in the world to meet, so many things to do, so many things to choose. And so, like writer Elizabeth Gilbert, we multitask like Swiss Army knives. We text while driving. To-do lists paper our walls. “I am so busy,” we say along with everyone else. It is the age of overwhelming.

But how did things get this way? What happened to throw the natural inhale-exhale rhythm of creation out of whack?

Perhaps it is the Law of Unintended Consequences in action. For surely we did not intend to fashion a world in which we must inhale without end. The original intentions were hopeful, and inspiring. Capitalism, with its intention of rewarding people for their initiative and hard work and creativity. Technology, with its intention of making life easier and raising our standard of living. But then there is that sober saying from Ralph Waldo Emerson: “Things are in the saddle and ride mankind.” Capitalism ends up in the saddle, and we see what has happened. The development of a system in which the driving goal is a never-ending MORE; in which the modus operandi is to create in people artificial needs; in which the people, bred to be needy, bred to be credit-card consumers of the MORE, find themselves on the wheel of work, working like mad, in debt like mad, running just to stand still if not to make the money to buy the things which they will have no time to enjoy because they are too busy working. This is what happens when Capitalism ends up in the saddle. And as for technology? Our “labor-saving” devices paradoxically cause us to work even harder than before, even as it arguably lowers the quality of our lives. Somehow, our technologies begin to alter our expectations for each other, so that, just as email is constantly available and instantaneous, people (we think) should be constantly available, and when we send an email, we should receive a reply immediately. The expectation is of course unreasonable, but it creeps within us nevertheless. Unfeeling, non-human technology setting the standard for flesh-and-blood. Don’t even get me started on how this is true where it comes to the work of democracy. How the nature of the television medium has shrink-wrapped political discourse into image and sound bite. Now, if a politician can’t explain his or her policies for a complex economy like ours in three sentences or less, he or she is dismissed as incompetent.

Things in the saddle, riding humankind. Culminating, I would argue, in a myth that is diametrically opposed to the inhale-exhale creation myth of the Hebrew Bible. I’m talking about the myth of being a limitless self in a limitless world. The myth of the infinite MORE. The myth that we can keep on living unsustainably without consequences. This secular myth, so different from the ancient one, taking up a central place in our lives and shaping our conscience within. And so, even as we say to one another, “I am so busy,” we say it with pride, as if it is a desirable thing, as if we deserve a medal, as if we are demonstrating the goodness of our character. And then, when it all finally gets to us, and we can no longer bear the pain, and we’re burned out, at home in our pajamas, eating cereal straight out of the box and staring at the TV in a mild coma—we feel shame. We feel wrong, and we feel conscience-stricken. We have let the myth down.

Perhaps these are some of the causes of the natural inhale-exhale rhythm of creation going askew. The Law of Unintended Consequences in action. The emergence of a new myth within culture and within conscience that worships the unlimited MORE. Whatever the cause, it hurts. It hurts to never stop inhaling.

In his tremendous book called Sabbath: Finding Rest, Renewal, and Delight in Our Busy Lives, Wayne Muller makes this clear. How busyness and overwork become a kind of violence in which we simply cannot be our best selves. No time for rest and a renewal of perspective. No time to savor and to feel gratitude. Just living at warp speed, living in anxious survival mode. “I have sat on dozens of boards and commissions,” says Wayne Muller, “with many fine, compassionate, and generous people who are so tired, overwhelmed, and overworked that they have neither the time nor the capacity to listen to the deeper voices that speak to the essence of the problems before them. Presented with the intricate and delicate issues of poverty, public health, community well-being, and crime, our impulse, born of weariness, is to rush headlong toward doing anything that will make the problems go away. Maybe then we can finally go home and get some rest. But,” Muller continues, “without the essential nutrients of rest, wisdom, and delight embedded in the problem-solving process itself, the solution we patch together is likely to be an obstacle to genuine relief. Born of desperation, it often contains enough fundamental inaccuracy to guarantee an equally perplexing problem will emerge as soon as it is put into place. In the soil of a quick fix is the seed of a new problem, because our quiet wisdom is unavailable.” That’s what Wayne Muller says, and it leads me to think of the enormous problems facing this country and facing the next President, and I hold John McCain and I hold Barack Obama equally in the circle of my compassion. In the circle of my compassion, I hold the fine, compassionate, and generous people in this congregation and beyond. There is so much to do, so many needs to meet. And yet the more needs we try to satisfy all at one time, the faster we try to go, the more we breathe in, and in, and in: the more frantic we get, the more desperate, the more reactive, the more sloppy—and our work for justice and peace is neutralized, seeds of future problems are sown. The Tao Te Ching asks us, “Can you remain unmoving till the right action arises by itself?” How would we answer? How would this congregation answer? Each of us as families, as individuals?

Perhaps this is why, in Judaism, regularly observing the Sabbath is no less than one of the famous 10 Commandments. It’s right up there, with “thou shalts” and “thou shalt nots” like don’t murder, don’t steal, honor your parents, and don’t bear false witness against your neighbor. It’s just as momentous, just as far-reaching, even if, on the surface, the command to take spiritual delight in our days and to indulge ourselves in the beauty of doing nothing seems … frivolous. And here, I have to confess that, in the past, this is exactly how this commandment had seemed to me, in comparison with the others. In the past, there would always be this voice from Sesame Street coming up to sing, “One of these things is not like the other….” Why, I always thought, had the author of the Ten Commandments put “Thou shalt not murder” on the same footing as “Thou shalt remember the Sabbath and keep it holy”? Until I realized that people who lack an intentional practice for rest and spiritual reflection commit a kind of murder themselves. A murder of the life force within and without. Diminishment, depletion, erosion, exhaustion—in our bodies and in the body of our earth. There is a reason why the Chinese pictograph for the word “busy” brings together two characters: one for heart, and another for killing.

The message is clear: like God in the ancient creation myth, we do well to embody the rhythm of inhale and exhale in our lives even as it commits us to doing something that is countercultural and flies in the face of our secular world. Judaism teaches this, and so do other major religions around the world. Muslims are about to enter into their holy season of Ramadan, with its fasting, prayer, and reflection to achieve goals of spiritual and physical cleansing, and this definitely resonates with the Jewish Sabbath. 

Inhale, exhale. Take a deep breath now, fill up your lungs—and release. Relax into the exhale. Be a good steward of the present moment.

So now we turn to practicing the Sabbath—what’s involved. And to this end, once again we go back to the Hebrew scriptures, where we read that “On the seventh day God finished God’s work,” and we also read, over and over again, the refrain: “And God saw that it was good.”

A close reading of that line about the seventh day—God finishing God’s work—suggests that, actually, the Sabbath is not simply a day off, a day when nothing is done. God is finishing God’s work—and this is something. Something is happening, something is being done, even into the seventh day; but the character of what is being done is special, has finality to it, has uniqueness. So what might this be? According to the ancient rabbis, God’s work of finishing has to do with menuha, which means tranquility, serenity, peace, repose. Rest, in the deepest possible sense. Renewal. This is what God creates on the seventh day, without which the Creation is incomplete and lacking. God creates the exhale, to balance out the inhale.

It means that we enter into Sabbath space and time not simply by ceasing from doing any job-related activities, or pressing pause on whatever makes us feel busy. We cease doing all such things so that we might shift our focus to the creation of something higher and something deeper, something which puts all the labor of the previous six days into perspective and completes it. Wayne Muller describes it well when he says, “It is the presence of something that arises when we consecrate a period of time to listen to what is most deeply beautiful, nourishing, or true. It is a time consecrated with our attention, our mindfulness, honoring those quiet forces of grace or spirit that sustain and heal us.” That’s what Wayne Muller says. The Creation culminates in a direct sense of beauty, and nourishment, and grace, and healing, and the ultimate goodness of life. And what takes us to this is doing what God does in the creation myth: we consecrate the work of our lives, meaning that we step back and just look upon it, we attend to it, we listen, we honor, we give thanks, we appreciate.

This is the proper work of the Sabbath. For observant Jews, the practice is to set aside the time from Friday sundown to Saturday sundown for this. To spark the imagination by lighting the Sabbath candles, to eat the Sabbath meal, to remember God and reflect on the Torah, to enter into an experience, ideally, of spaciousness. It’s not supposed to be heavy and legalistic. It’s supposed to be a time of sacred spirituality, sensuality, prayer, rest, song, delight. One of the more popular Sabbath activities, in fact, is making love. Apparently there is a tradition among some observant Jews that couples are to make love four times during the Sabbath. Once, Wayne Muller respectfully inquired about this with a friend, and the response was, “No, we make love only once. But, for the other three, we hold a deep intention.”

The proper work of the Sabbath: whatever invites the Spirit into our lives. Gardening can do that. Creative writing, or dancing. We are doing it right now, seated as we are here, in the round—not busy with our jobs, not busy with housework, not busy with committee work, but focused on work of a higher order, which is singing together, reflecting together, mourning together, rejoicing together, praying together, committing and recommitting our lives to that which deserves the loyalty of our hearts and spirits, dwelling in gratitude together. This work finishes our week, just as God’s work of creating tranquility and peace on the seventh day put the finishing touch on all that God accomplished in the previous six—and without which Creation would NOT be good, would NOT be worth living in, would NOT be enough, so that, presumably, God would be in the same spot so many of us today are in, trapped in the myth of the infinite MORE, and compelled to keep on laboring away: an eighth day, a ninth day, a tenth, an eleventh, and on and on….

But what God created on the seventh day makes the other six ENOUGH, makes them GOOD. So let it be for us. Every week, but also every day, let there be a Sabbath time where we turn away from our regular labor and pause, find a place of spiritual rest and repose, breathe in and breathe out the rhythm of creation. Be like the God of the myth, on the seventh day, and look upon the life you are creating with love, with compassion. Allow gratitude to well up within you. Let gratitude flow in your heart. God may see that it is good, but even more important is that you do.

• • •

© 2008 Rev. Anthony David anthonyuu (at) gmail (dot) com