Metaphors of Love

Now and again I so enjoy putting a sermon together, I can hardly stand it. This is one of those sermons. It’s theme is LOVE, not only one of the centering concerns of all religions, but also a preoccupation of civilization from time immemorial.

I’ve written plenty of sermons about love through the years exploring a variety of perspectives. Early on in my career I offered a predictable sermon or two drawing from various categories of love using the traditional Christian categories learned in seminary, such as erotic love--eros, or brotherly love—philia, or self-sacrificing love—agape. I’ve mined our Universalist tradition’s liberal and freeing theological assertion that “God is Love.” I’ve spun sermons on Unconditional Love for Mother’s Day. I’ve returned time and again to the great analysis of Love by the 20th century psychologist Erich Fromm, whose book the Art of Loving is a classic, in my estimation a definitive narrative of the social and psychological dimensions of Love in the modern era. In more recent years I’ve turned to the insights of neuroscience in mapping the brain in Love, asserting that Love derives from mammalian bonding instincts and resides in the limbic (mammalian) brain.

I’ve collected hundreds of poems that touch on various aspects of Love, sacred but mostly profane offerings. Some of those selections I included in a recent (2006) quote collection on Love and Marriage titled We Pledge our Hearts.

I’ve officiated over hundreds of wedding ceremonies, in the process listening to the testimonies of couples in Love and in turn counseling them about the vicissitudes of Love. I have sagely intoned to smittened couples Anne Morrow Lindberg’s cautionary advice: “When you love someone you do not love them all the time, in exactly the same way, from moment to moment. It is impossibility. It is even a lie to pretend to. And yet this is exactly what most of us demand. We have so little faith in the ebb and flow of life, of love, of relationships. We leap at the flow of the tide and resist in terror its ebb. We are afraid it will never return. We insist on permanency, on duration, on continuity; when the only continuity possible, in life as in love, is in growth, in fluidity - in freedom, in the sense that the dancers are free, barely touching as they pass, but partners in the same pattern.”

I’ve written meditations on Love, my favorite inspired by the lost generation British poet Rupert Brooke, “The Great Lover:”

“Love is a flame: —we have beaconed the world’s night.
A city:—and we built it, these and I.
An emperor: —we have taught the world to die.”

This meditation of mine speaks to an ongoing aspiration:

A quarter of a century ago I first aspired to make Brooke’s words, “say,’ He loved,’” my epitaph.

No other poem has had such an enduring effect. I had an intuition that to love, more and more, would save me and satisfy me as no other attribute might.

To love more things, more often heightens perceptions, broadens appreciations, deepens connections, set frees empathy.

Loving — seized by and yielding to the quality of a person or thing that is beautiful, good, or true — is a signature of humanity. The more we love, the more we encounter that part of the human condition that is divine: Eternal!

To the extent I actively love I am free from the limitations of ego self.

Let me be remembered not so much for what I have loved, rather let me be remembered for my growing capacity to love freely and purely.

Say of me someday, “He loved, too!”

So for more than thirty years, now and again, I’ve looked at Love and spoke about it from a variety of perspectives as a religious phenomenon relative to the meaning and purpose of the human condition. You might think I’d have tired about Love as a sermon theme.

What excites me now is a whole new way of getting at Love, not from poetry and theology, but from science that leads me to a thoroughly natural understanding of Love.

The Science of Love

It’s appropriate during this week of the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth to take a scientific look at Love. More and more we realize that we live in a post-Darwinian world. Darwin’s theory of evolution, particularly the notion of natural selection, is embedded in our bodies through our genes, revealing patterns of behavior that cluster in what we now call social biology. Our biology and our social biology are now revealing Love’s origins.

A leading researcher/writer on the Science of Love is Helen Fisher. An evolutionary anthropologist by training, Dr. Fisher has spent her career writing on the biology of Love. A recent book, Why We Love: the Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love (2004) is a handy resource, not only on up to date findings about science’s take on Love, but it’s also spiced with helpful advice.

Dr. Fisher presents three levels of Love that she and her colleagues have mapped that function in certain areas of the brain through the agency of brain chemicals. The first is sexual desire or lust, the second is romantic love, and the third is attachment or bonding. Taken together these three progressing levels make sense: Lust causes one to search the population for a mate. Romantic Love causes one to connect physically and emotionally with one other person. And Attachment keeps the couple in relationship for the length of time necessary to raise a child. In the simplest sense this is the network of Reproduction.

Dr. Fisher’s research for this book involved brain imaging of college students who claimed to be in the first few weeks of being in love. The subjects of the study where shown a photograph of their beloved while an MRI machine scanned their brains. Then their brains were “cleared” by having the subjects count backwards by seven from an arbitrary number. Next the subjects were shown a photograph of a neutral acquaintance. The images that resulted detected blood flow in the brain, a symptom of neural activity.

Dr. Fisher and her team found activity in certain areas of the brain, hot spots that are part of a circuit that is dense in cells that produce or receive the brain chemical dopamine. (This circuit relates to wanting or anticipating a reward.) Another area, shaped something like a medium sized shrimp and residing on one side of the brain, releases the brain chemical norepinephrine to incite passionate love. Yet another similarly shaped and sized area, on the opposite side of the brain from the passion zone, registers physical attractiveness, as well as related longing, desire, and that compulsive neural itch to be physically an emotionally connected with another. All of this is occurring in the so-called mammalian brain. A surge of dopamine and norepinephrine with a reduction of serotonin are the primary ingredients of a cocktail the produce a Romantic Love state of mind: elated, infatuated, craving, obsessive, focused, passionate, ruptured…. New love can seem almost like a mental illness—mania, dementia, and obsession rolled into one state.

In love-making and orgasm other chemicals are triggered including oxytocin in women and vasopressin in men that promote bonding or attachment. (Oxytocin is the biochemical that bonds Mother to Infant.) Curiously seminal fluid has dopamine and norepinephrine in it as well as serotonin, testosterone, and estrogen--a mixture of chemicals that stimulates bonding and also has an antidepressant effect.

It is clear, and it will become clearer as research advances, Romantic Love as a literal state of mind, is being reduced to a biochemical chain of events triggered in the brain.

Transcendent Love

Yet, I recommend that this reductionist vision of Love is not an end place, rather it is a starting place for those who seek to explore transcendent aspects of the human condition.
Regarding the transcendent nature of Love, David Buss, a psychologist from the University of Texas and author of the book The Evolution of Desire, said:

“I've spent two decades of my professional life studying human mating. In that time, I've documented phenomena ranging from what men and women desire in a mate to the most diabolical forms of sexual treachery. I've discovered the astonishingly creative ways in which men and women deceive and manipulate each other. I've studied mate poachers, obsessed stalkers, sexual predators, and spouse murderers. But throughout this exploration of the dark dimensions of human mating, I've remained unwavering in my belief in true love.”While love is common, true love is rare, and I believe that few people are fortunate enough to experience it. The roads of regular love are well traveled and their markers are well understood by many—the mesmerizing attraction, the ideational obsession, the sexual afterglow, profound self-sacrifice, and the desire to combine DNA. But true love takes its own course through uncharted territory. It knows no fences, has no barriers or boundaries. It's difficult to define, eludes modern measurement, and seems scientifically wooly. But I know true love exists. I just can't prove it.”
True love is a good phrase to begin to explore the transcendent dimension of the complex of brain chemistry that I’ve been sketching. Through imagination, intuition, and empathy love seeps into our seeing and knowing. Time and again, across the ages, we experience love in multiple dimensions; and it is a primary source of meaning in our lives/world. We speak of it in terms of a golden rule: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” We intone Love’s primacy in religion: “Faith, hope, love abide; these three. But the greatest of these is love.” And there any number of ancient and modern meditations on love,--poems, essays, books,--such as the following by Anne Morrow Lindberg: “Love is a force in you that enables you to give other things. It is the motivating power. It enables you to give strength and freedom and peace to another person. It is not a result; it is a cause. It is not a product; it produces. It is a power, like steam or electricity. It is valueless unless you can give something else by means of it.”

I want to sketch, just a little, the transcendent nature of Love as I imagine it.

The seat of Love is the brain, an evolutionary marvel that can be effectively conceptualized in three aspects: First the ancient reptilian brain with its autonomic activities; then the mammalian (limbic) brain; and third the neocortex where thinking and other so-called higher function emanate. Together these areas work together, through the alchemy of brain chemicals and electrical circuits (neural pathways) to create consciousness and self-consciousness. In the process of instinct and experience we invariably transform “mere” physical/emotional Love of brain chemistry into the metaphors of “transcendent or true love” that give our lives and world layers of meaning: heaped upon meaning, heaped upon meaning, heaped upon meaning….
It is clearly our nature to first, biologically Love and then to make metaphors of Love that give meaning to our lives and world. I believe the religious dimension of the human condition is also the meaning making dimension. It’s totally understandable why Love marks so many of the world religions.

I suspect that the when we know any sort of Transcendent Love our thoughts are flowing along familiar and pleasurable neural pathways while inciting centers associated with biological Love. There is a direct correspondence between biochemical Love of brain chemistry and transcendent Love of the brains’s consciousness. Nature has implanted Love in us and the miracle of our mind (conscious/self-conscious) projects Love onto our world, thereby creating many nuanced forms of Love.

This is a natural miracle, a natural miracle that happens for each of us.

My colleague Dick Gilbert wrote a brief meditation that is a fitting end for these remarks intimating how a “merely” biochemical Love in the brain transforms into the ideals of Transcendent Love that give our lives and our world meaning:

We are, therefore, we love.
Cosmic bits of energy
Come to life together.
We love, therefore, we are.
May we be humbled before the wonder
Of what we dare to create.

What to Do on Your Summer Hiatus

Summer Hiatus

We’ve come to the end of a Church Year. Beginning next Sunday we enter our Summer hiatus, when regular activities will be suspended through Labor Day. Four Summer services are on the calendar. I’ll be doing two—one in July and one in August. And there will also be two lay led services in each Summer month. All will be held at 10:30, the time we will observe, after Labor Day, for our one consolidated Sunday service.

In the rhythm of our Unitarian Universalist ways, a summer hiatus is a long standing tradition. The popular story says that in the nineteenth century Boston Brahmins who summered away from the city took along their ministers, too. So the Boston churches were left without clergy. And without clergy the churches were closed. That’s most likely apocryphal.

I’ve concluded that we’ve long taken a holiday, a summer hiatus, because we can, and also because we’re the better for it. We all return glad to see familiar faces. But most of all we’re refreshed, eager to start anew, rich with experiences and reflection during our time away.

And surely in the background is our sense of religion and the place of Sunday services in an overarching scheme of personal exploration and self-culture. So, while we won’t be meeting regularly for a dozen weeks, nearly a fourth of a year, I usually give you a recommendation on how to use this time well, for the sake of your personal enrichment.

Summer Story

And this time is special interlude, a season of particular value that is captured in a special literary genre known as a Summer Story or a Summer Tale. I have two favorite, relatively contemporary Summer Stories that you’ll recognize. One is the children’s classic by E. B. White, the wonderful Charlotte’s Web, with Fern the farm girl, Wilbur the pig, and Charlotte the spider, whose death at the story’s end is compensated for by the host of tiny spiders who hatch from her eggs—a poignant conclusion but true to life’s cyclical nature. A second Summer Story is the novella by Stephen King, The Body which became the popular movie Stand by Me, that chronicles the in-between, eventful summer of four boys and their transition from youth to the first realizations and responsibilities of adulthood.

Summer is a momentous span of time.

Keeping a Journal

Here’s my recommendation, then, for you to use your time away from UCH to the advantage of your spirit/psyche/soul. Keep a journal. Discover your own Summer Story.

Every day set aside time to record and process the conjunction of the day and of your life.

Some of you may remember that I’ve created a structured journal, format based on the psychology of Carol Jung. You can purchase it through lulu.com or via amazon.com. It’s called All the Elements and each book has enough pages for one season. It would serve you well, particularly if you were of a more serious mind and interested in exploring archetypes and the process of individuation as described by Jungian psychology.

However, what I have in mind for most of you is a free form sort of journaling that you might naturally discover in the process of journaling.

Keeping a journal is significantly more than writing a diary or a mere recording of events. It is a matter of you responding to, by processing, the day, relative to your inner life, in an ongoing way. Keeping a journal has many good results. Here are proven benefits of keeping a journal.

Benefits of Keeping a Journal

A record of your days. Each day comes as a precious gift. Yet those days are so ordinary that we too easily lose them in the retreat and onrush of time. Contemporary life is an ever accelerating tumult. Your journal entries are like souvenirs—beloved reminders—that you pause to gather and keep so you will not neglect or forget the preciousness of your days. And each day is a precious gift.

Embedding you in the moment. When you keep a journal you are generally more aware, because you've charged yourself to keep a record. Be aware: of weather, health and mood, events and relationships, dreams and memories. Details and texture pop into clearer focus. Context becomes apparent. Journal keeping encourages the active form of meditation known as mindfulness.

Centering. A journal gives you a sense of order and at least a semblance of control of your life. You focus on yourself, but you also see yourself in context, particularly through your many relationships. Such a vision allows you more easily to repose in your world with understanding and even serenity, though the demands of the world press upon you and time rushes you into the future. It is good to be centered in this fashion, especially in our demanding, hectic contemporary world.

More memories and more accurate memories. We unconsciously forget much more than we ever consciously remember. What we do choose to remember is sometimes so processed as to be fabrications rather than facsimiles. (Psychologists speak of “the graceful degradation, as we make our memories fit our current circumstances.) A journal's record is a memory aid and a memory corrective.

Relationships. Be encouraged to register the connection or lack of connection you may experience. You have a relationship with yourself, with other persons, with your work and otheraspects of your life, with nature, with the Divine. Relationships also have a transcendent quality that reveals the spirit that marbles Life; and they can take you toward the depth of existence.

Accumulation of rhythms and patterns. When you review your daily journal entries, certain aspects of your life and world will seem to repeat or progress: a dream recurs; winter weather melts into spring's warmth; a particular relationship languishes; you continue to resolve to lose weight but fail to do so. Rhythms and patterns alert you to the seasons of nature, your world, as well as seasons of your self.

Change and Growth. An accurate record of your days and ways inevitably reveals the changes that are always working around you and in you. When you recognize the constancy of change, it is natural to not only accept the changes but to direct them toward your aspirations and goals. Personal growth hinges on an acceptance of the reality of change in all aspects of existence. A daily record also alerts you to the harbingers of change.

Commitment and Accountability. The seductions of our world are many, and we are culturally conditioned to be perpetually entertained. Many of us fear commitment. It is also said that we tend to deny responsibility for our actions, especially by casting ourselves as victims of this or that influence. This journal insists that the "buck stops here": with you, the person who keeps the journal. If you are not honest, your journal silently mocks and admonishes you.

Confession. Keeping a journal works only if you're honest. The one person you can never deceive is yourself. A journal's intimacy makes it easy to tell the truth, because truth telling is therapeutic. There are two sorts of confession. We generally see confession as coming clean—admitting to something negative. However, there is a more positive confession—baring the depths of your soul. Both are good for the spirit. Your
journal is your conscience on paper.

Discipline. Journal keeping requires commitment and steadfastness. There are days when you for one reason or another you will want to shirk from doing it. These are occasions that make or break the journal's many benefits. Journal keeping is a form of exercise to keep you mentally, emotionally, and spiritually fit. To maintain a healthful tone you do
it especially when you don't feel like doing it. It is an end in itself, too—a dedication to Life and your life, that you sacrifice daily. (Sacrifice literally means to make sacred.) Through dedicated journal keeping you realize the inherent sacredness of Life and your life.

Creativity. You are a work in progress. A journal encourages engagement and participation in becoming your true Self. This is the surface creativity of keeping this structured journal. There is another level of creativity that relates to the art of writing. Reflections, where you can process your day through your marvelous imagination. With daily practice you will discover that writing unlocks creativity. Your life as written down in a journal is a kind of art.

Spirituality. Spirituality animates religion. Spirituality—the emotion, the realization, and the imagination that merge into a unique consciousness—marbles every life. Intention and awareness brings such qualities to our consciousness. The attitude of mindfulness swells our grateful, reverent participation in Life. Many find that keeping a journal illuminates a religious truth: the journey is, at least, as important as the journey's destination.

Journal Mechanics

You have a week to think about how you might keep a Summer Journal. What would work best for you, giving you the satisfaction of the task itself?

Do you want to work at the computer or with paper and pen? A handy way to keep a computer journal is to use an unpublished blog, such as Google’s blogspot. (Only you as the blogger have access to the blog.) In this regard every entry will not only be chronicle and separate, but it will be automatically marked with time and day. Such a blog is also thoroughly searchable.

There are those, who in keeping a journal, prefer a special blank bound book and the feel of pen on paper as a tactile art and continuing reward. A hand written journal is obviously handier in most instances, relative to a computer, and can be taken with you throughout a day or on a journey. It is always at hand.

For the materials of your journal choose what best suits you.

And don’t be intimated by the writing. Approach the writing process through the alchemy of putting pen on paper and letting the words flow. In flow writing you enter the realm of imagination through stream of consciousness. You may be surprised that rather than having little to articulate you have almost too much to articulate.

In this regard journaling is an antidote to the deleterious effects, the skimming across the surface and dwelling on the insignificant, that is part and parcel of the likes of text messaging and twittering. (There seems little room for reflection or depth of expression in the limits of 140 characters that Twitter imposes. And even a cascade of twitter messages—so many tweets--doesn’t seem to offer much compensation, merely piling triviality on triviality.)

I thoroughly maintain that journaling, for the discipline it imposes, as well as for the insights it offers, is one of the best tools of self-understanding. Give it a try, if you haven’t done it before. And if you’ve done it before, take in up with new enthusiasm and resolve to stick to it. Discover your own Summer Story.

Writing Your Spiritual Biography

This morning I recommend a process by which you might begin to explore your "spiritual biography."

I have two goals in mind. 1) I want to urge you to "examine your life," in keeping with the aphorism that "the examined life is the one life worth living." 2) And I also want you to become aware of your "spiritual trajectory"—not just the flow of your life, but also the direction your life is taking relative to values and meaning. The latter, I hope will apprise and surprise you—that you have a spiritual trajectory and your life has more than an unfolding, it has a destination that can be conceived in religious terms (In theology/philosophy this is known as teleology.)

A child's development is amazing, isn't it: from the pure, potential of the zygote at conception; to the birthed personality nine months later; to the walking, talking, reasoning individual, say of two years; to the morally sophisticated youth often or twelve years old? [In fact, our church school program is grounded in a clear vision of the child and youth's psychological development. Our Unitarian tradition was the first to fit developmental psychology into religious education and moral nurture as early as the 1940s. And so our children's religious education is guided through an unfolding, age appropriate scheme.]

As I age, coming to better self-understanding and also gathering information from others I encounter, I am more and more appreciative—sometimes in awe—of the significance of the earliest years—how we are formed; how the first quarter of our life is more than a frame of reference, it is an inescapable presence casting long shadows through all our years; how our innate personality plays its part.

Early Elements and Influences

So, in writing a spiritual biography, special consideration must be given to the earliest years. You know, "as the twig is bent, so the tree grows." This is what I want to reflect on today.

The obvious starting place is Family. Parenting figures are monumental influences on a child. They represent a convergence: two distinct genetic and cultural heritages, perhaps quite different from one another. (Our church is haven for what used to be called "mixed marriages"—mixed in the sense of being of quite different faiths; for example Jewish and Gentile.)

Each parent brings something unique to the tender child. It might be something as fundamental as a basic understanding of love: unconditional love associated with Mother, and conditional love associated with Father. Or what a parent brings might be exceedingly complex or conflicted. In my counseling experiences the influence of a parent, which might include absence, as in a death or divorce, because it is foundational, has an ongoing effect.

In my own Family I can clearly identify how my parents shaped me. My mother by action and word articulated a very real and enduring experience of love. One of my great life lesson's occurred when I saw her introduce my infant daughter to her first spring, carrying Katie in the crook of her arm, and moving from plant to plant in her garden, repeating a refrain: "Look! What's that? It's beautiful!" Perhaps I became a freethinker at our Sunday dinner table, where and when, from my father I learned how to be constructively critical of the priest's homily and the scriptural illustration that went in it. Each of my parents had a strong work ethic; and their way of spending leisure time was to tend their fruit vegetable and flower gardens and finish the house that my father literally built himself—a long work in progress. Though my work ethic is somewhat different, it is similarly strong.

It's worth considering what beliefs and values your parents instilled in you with their words and especially their deeds.

Home is a subset of Family. You might try drawing a house from your childhood, something as basic floor plan perhaps. Fill it up with things and people from then. When you have it complete, write a narrative to accompany what you've drawn, being particularly sensitive to the feelings and strong memories evoked. One of our enduring children's curriculua here at UCH is Haunting House, with its conviction that the places we inhabit fill us up, even as we fill them up.

Closely related to Home is Place. A decade ago, the poet Kathleen Norris wrote a fine book called Dakota: A Spiritual Geography, in which she explored the spirituality of a remote town, Lemmon, South Dakota, where she had family roots and where she retreated as an adult from New York City. I recommend it as a guide to exploring Place.

Place gets into us on a deep levels—that middle brain place where sensations and memories reside. Ellie, my wife, grew up in Upstate New York where Lake Champlain runs between the Green Mountains of Vermont and the Adirondacks Mountains of New York. Her spirit, I ascertain, was shaped by contrasts—the melancholy of isolation, deep winters, and long nights and crisp, invigorating summer days of scintillating sunshine; white/gray winter snow and vibrant autumn leaves; the moan and cracking of the lake making ice and the harmonious stitching of crickets in deep summer. Place is more than the ministrations of Nature. It is also people and habitations. Ellie's experiences of growing up in a village of 800 or so inhabitants were markedly different from those of you who grew up in a city neighborhood—Chicago perhaps.

Whenever I read memoirs of childhood, such as Jean Shephard's stories of growing up in Hammond/Gary, Indiana—I'm impressed by the poignant influences of Place—how they relate to the alchemy of becoming, that the world, no matter how contained or vast, shabby or magnificent is an influential milieu.

An indispensable to Family, Home, and Place is Time—the age in which one is young. Each era and even decade is different, in some ways, startlingly so. It matters whether one came of age in the Depression Era, the War Years, the Conformist 1950s, the Psychedelic '60s, the Excessive 70s, the Greed Is Good 80s, or the Clinton-dominated 90s. The influence of Time includes generational influences. Generational cohorts share general outlooks and dispositions, seemingly in reaction to their parent's general ways.

Begin a spiritual biography by exploring the basics of Family, Home, Time, and Place.

Next take into account your Basic Personality, the consequence of that heterogeneous genetic mix that you are—your uniqueness. This is a good opportunity to search out old friends, as well as family, all those who knew you best. Peer into old photograph, seeking recognition. Remember as best as your able your youthful ways— patterns and passions. What you see may be so poignant as to give you astonishing.insight into who you became. This is the center of a spiritual biography—an exploration of the Inherent Self.

Another helpful area to explore from your childhood and youth are your significant Teachers, Mentors, and Role Models. Consider the quality they possessed that allowed you to learn from them, in addition to what you actually learned. What was their stake in the teaching-learning relationship? Were they even intentional? My earliest Hero was the great baseball player Willie Mays who was not only an athlete virtually without peer, he played the game with style and joie de vivre. (He is also African American, but I never much thought about that one way or the other.)

Don't forget your Friends. Who were they? What were their qualities that met your qualities in the almost mystical bonds of friendship? In what ways did they give you the freedom to be your true self, or at least explore the possibility of true self? Are they friends still?

What about other Influences', books, music, movies, and other aspects from popular culture that stirred you, which perhaps when you think about them now are exceedingly vivid. (I amaze myself with lyrics from old 1950/60 rock-n- roll songs that pop up like aphorisms to suit a specific situation in 2003. I realize they're in my unconscious, I've retained those lyrics, because they affirmed a truth I realized.) The first book that made an impact on me was Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer. Twain, I recognized knew me or at least we were kindred spirits. And that relationship matured so that Mark Twain continued to be a spirit guide regarding human nature in almost everything he wrote, especially his darker later works.

Also consider the highly charged or curiously memorable Moments of your childhood and youth—those occasions that seemed like they happened only yesterday, because you can recall them in vivid detail. They are special windows into not only the influences that shaped you but who you would become. (Here consider significance of the conclusion to Orson Wells, Citizen Cane—a remembrance of the dying Kane of a moment from his childhood: a snowy day and a sled with the enigmatic name "Rosebud.")

When you have considered such things and perhaps more, try to imagine how you gathered up all this and more into your emerging Self; and as the process carried you toward adulthood, you began to feel the increasing urges of independence, to literally break away and assume more and more self-responsibility. That curious creature was you—an almost mature human being perched on the brink of adulthood—a marked beginning for a differently maturing Self, facing all the predictable crises and passages through the next forty years that I described in my pervious sermon. Sometime in your late teens or so you were a formed adult—formed by the influences of the first quarter of your life, influences that you exerted your will upon in your becoming.

Threads of Continuity

I maintain that if you want to know the spiritual qualities of your life, you must begin with your early years, and in those years, look for what I call threads of continuity. Threads of continuity are those attributes, outlooks, patterns that trace—often circuitously—to childhood and youth. Those threads will likely reveal a trajectory—the arc of your years reaching toward a goal.

For example, I can look back forty some years, remembering how I entered into the Sunday dinner conversation about the homily—from my father's common sense perspective trying to make sense of it. As a breakaway young adult, when I became a Unitarian that dinner table model easily translated into the basic Unitarian prescription: "prove all things, hold fast to that which is good." I shall never stop from proving and holding, as I seek truth."

A Season of Reflection

We've entered a season, with longer nights and a hunkering in, that lends itself, quite naturally, to the sort of "spiritual biography^ I'm recommending. My approach to such a "spiritual biography" suits the counsel of the T.S. Eliot, who poeticized in the Four Quartets: "We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive at the place we started, and know it for the first time."

I would hope that your exploration of your formative years might take you to a loving appreciation of the child/youth you were: precious and malleable then and with the bud of a destiny that would take you through your years.

[November, 2008]

For the Love of It

Today, in the Alice Warren Room, thirtysome person are displaying a variety of homegrown art. The artists are writers of novels and poetry; painters and other visual artists; ceramicists and potters; flower arrangers; photographers; quilters, weavers, and embroiders; jewelry makers; and more. None are professionals in the sense that the art they do is their vocation, a source of significant income. Rather it is their avocation—in many instances their passion. Though practiced over many years, in many instances, these artists are continually honing their skills with the humility of a student seeking a deeper relationship with their subject.

They are, in the best sense, amateurs. The word amateur is generally something of a pejorative in popular use. But for me amateur is a word of reformed cachet thanks to a book by Wayne Booth published in 1999 by University of Chicago Press titled For the Love of It: Amateuring and Its Rivals. Booth, now deceased, was a distinguished U of C professor who specialized in the field of rhetoric. In the book For the Love of It he chronicled his love for the cello, an instrument he began playing in his 30s.

Amateur, in its origin, literally means for the love of. Booth turned amateur into the verb and gerund amateuring.

To be an amateur is to do something, often in the broad spectrum of the arts, simply/primarily for fufilment and pleasure. In my estimation amateuring has a certain purity, free from the inevitable corruptions/corrosions of the marketplace. An amateur can be more freely responsive to a foundational love—being smitten and enthralled by an art aand motivated by the pleasure it gives when engaged in it.

Amatuering is a high calling and can result in a mythic journey.

I could use any of our thirtysome homegrown artists as an illustration of the amateuring way: Anita Jenks in Ikebana, the refined art of Japanese flower arrangement, Nancy Weill in weaving, Judy Jeske in collage, Al Fischer in photography, Carolyn Sibr in poetry, and on and on.

I’ve settled on Tim Burke and his long and dedicated passion for a small plot of remnant prairie at the nearby corner of 31st Street and Wolf Road in Westchester. Tim is a long time member of UCH. Over the span of the 26 years I’ve known him he’s kept me informed of his work and vision of prairie restoration and maintenance. He’s shown me poetry he wrote and photographs he’s taken at the Wolf Road Prairie, as he shared his conviction that prairie restoration is best accomplished by continually cutting back invasive plants. In this regard, prairie restoration is an art.

Tim is, in the best sense of the word, an amateur naturalist and photographer.

I asked Tim to write a narrative of his work as a prairie restorer. (In my estimation his story is mythic both in his dealings with nature and in his dealings with the politics/personalities of Save the Prairie Society.) And I’ve selected some of his stunning photographs of Wolf Road Prairie plants to display.

[This Introduction was followed by Tim Burke's narrative of a 26 year affair with Wolf Road Prairie.]

A New Era of Responsibility?

A Call to Responsibility

Responsibility is one of the words of the day, in large part, thanks to President Barack Obama. He offered a compelling statement of responsibility in his January inaugural: “What is required of us now is a new era of responsibility - a recognition, on the part of every American, that we have duties to ourselves, our nation, and the world, duties that we do not grudgingly accept but rather seize gladly, firm in the knowledge that there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character, than giving our all to a difficult task.

“This is the price and the promise of citizenship.

“This is the source of our confidence - the knowledge that God calls on us to shape an uncertain destiny.”

His call to responsibility was not a one time event, but a recurring theme. While campaigning for the Democratic nomination in June, 2008 at a Chicago Black church, he admonished young black men that “responsibility does not end at conception.” And when, earlier this year his administration issued its national budget, it was titled “A New Era of Responsibility,” setting a standard for economic recovery.

Responsibility is a theme dear to our liberal religious way, long yoked to our Unitarian organizing principle of freedom—freedom of belief and conscience. We have long suffered under an outside judgment that freedom is a license for licentiousness. So, in response, we have argued that freedom and responsibility are, in essence, a dialectic. Each presumes the other. Freedom and responsibility are pavers on the pat of our liberal religious journey.

This morning I will reflect on responsibility and challenge you to do so, too..

The Responsibility Covenant

I begin by looking at one of the founding documents of Western Civilization and the Jewish-Christian tradition, the first book of the Bible and the Old Testament, Genesis. I’ll read its first two chapters through the lens of responsibility.

First, toward the end of the seven days of Creation , God creates the first man, Adam. God then creates woman from Adam’s rib. (An older account later in this book says that man and woman were co-created at the same moment.) Whatever account you follow, the result is the same. God establishes a covenant with Adam and Eve. A covenant is an honored contract that establishes right relationships between the parties. God blesses the first couple with an existence in Paradise, with only one restriction or responsibility: not to eat of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

A serpent beguiles Eve and Eve beguiles Adam to eat the forbidden fruit. When they do, they gain moral knowledge. The signature of that knowledge is their startling awareness of nakedness, which they cover with leaves. This gives them away to God, who first holds the serpent responsible and metes out consequences. It shall crawl on its belly and be despised by humankind henceforth. Adam and Eve are held responsible, too. They are expelled from Eden. As a consequence the man will have to labor by the sweat of his brow for sustenance. As a consequence the woman will experience great pain in childbirth, yet still desire her husband.

The story jumps forward in time to the first siblings, Cain and Abel. Cain is a farmer. Abel is a shepherd. Abel’s burnt flesh offerings prove more savory to God. Cain is jealous and kills his brother. God questions Cain regarding his brother’s whereabouts. Cain responds with one of the most haunting responses that echo down the corridor of human history: “Am I my brother’s keeper?”

God’s response is an indictment of Cain’s question, implying that yes, he is his brother’s keeper. In consequence, Cain is expelled to a land East of Eden and he (and his progeny) shall ever be wanderers, all to Cain’s supreme distress.

These seminal stories lead us to the double meaning of the notion of responsibility: 1) There’s responsibility in response to right relationships in the nature of things. Adam and Eve are responsible to God’s will through a covenant. And it is also true that God is responsible to them. Cain, despite his question, is in fact responsible for his brother Abel. 2) There’s responsibility as being accountable for one’s acts, usually expressed as punishment for irresponsibility, such as eating the forbidden fruit or harming one’s kindred.

So, think of responsibility in those two dimensions: 1) the moral obligation inherent in right relationships and 2) moral culpability or accountability for one’s actions.

In the swirl of the continuing economic crisis, a deep recession or possible depression. these two dimensions of responsibility loom large.

Culpability and the Economic Crisis

Regarding moral culpability for the mess that engulfs us all. There’s plenty of blame to go around: Hold responsible the imprudent seekers of the so-called sub-prime mortgages who ordinarily wouldn’t have qualified by virtue of down payment or income—the mostly underclass who were so easily duped. Hold responsible the lenders who sought out the imprudent, under-qualified. Hold responsible the bundlers who gathered together such mortgages and sold them to larger institutions, who in turn bundled more mortgages together and passed them on in ever larger circles throughout the economic marketplace. Hold responsible the large financial institutions, the banks, brokerage houses, and insurance companies who traded in such shaky packages. Hold responsible the supposed government regulators who should have been keeping tabs on this financial house of cards that imperiled so many financial institutions. Hold responsible the politicians who cozied up with titans of the marketplace, sometimes for their political/financial gain. Hold responsible the greed of Wall Street, where officers and upper management profited from obscene bonuses for their actions later proven derelict. Hold responsible the greed of Main Street in a era of easy money, when soaring housing values were turned into lines of credit and spent to afford what has been called “affluenza.” Blame a glut of credit cards that also fueled a consumer shopping spree, while paying interest rates that were once considered to be nothing but usury. Blame the auto-companies, two of the Big Three at least, for failing to divine a future of tight credit, more fuel-efficient and alternative fuel using automobiles, and labor contracts hobbling their future. Blame unions, too, for demanding benefits and wages that cause the cost of cars to soar in the face of international competition. Blame George W. Bush and blame Bill Clinton whose respective policies, Republican and Democrat, turned aside from tough and prudent choices

Taking an Old Testament point of view and invoking the universal moral principle of fairness, should those who caused the crisis be punished, if not in fact, at least in rhetoric?

For example, who’s responsible for and what are the consequences for allowing billions of dollars of Recovery Money to be used for huge bonuses for executives at AIG. And is it fair to retroactively declare that they must either return the bonuses contracted for months ago, or be taxed on them at an unheard of rate of 90%?

The fairness concept in the midst of this financial meltdown/crisis is perplexing. On one side is a large percentage of Americans. Those who did not take out subprime loans, who did not spend the equity of their property beyond a shrinking market value, who budgeted within their means. On the other side are the imprudent home owners and the financial institutions that exploited them. It’s not that we suffer in their wake of irresponsibility.

We are told that it is important for the sake of our national and even the international community that we incur a staggering debt of trillions of dollars, a debt that will likely burden future generations. The money borrowed and distributed in the financial marketplace, it is argued, will prevent genuine catastrophe. But, is it fair for the prudent folk of Main Street, to bear the burden? Much has been said of populist anger, of the prudent, carrying figurative pitchforks and torches, because of the unfairness and for a desire to punish the culpable?.

Dimensions of Responsibility

So. in this parsing of the moral notion of responsibility, we recognize that responsibility has several dimensions. 1) There is self-responsibility implying both prudence and bearing of consequences for bad choices. (This moral notion of self-responsibility is one a keystone of our UU way.) 2) There is the responsibility that we have beyond our self, family, and chosen communities to our society. This includes the obligations of citizenship to our nation—staying informed, voting, advocacy—and the obligations of being a citizen of the world. 3) There is responsibility to future generations, our progeny, that they be born into a world not burdened by our generation’s irresponsibilities. President called this responsibility to future generations “our most enduring responsibility.” He went on to say, “We have to change this country for them… We have to leave them a planet that’s cleaner, a nations that’s safe, a world that’s more equal and more just.” These are attributes that he cites in the ongoing task of creating a more perfect union.

I want you to reflect on responsibility and to share your thought as we reason together in a talk back session. Keep in mind our religious and ethical perspectives. What does it mean, the call of our President to “A New Era of Responsibility.”

April 19, 2009