Sermons

READING ~ Poem:  The Afterlife of Billy Fingers, by Annie Kagan

The same intelligence that grows trees from seeds,
that lets birds fly,
that waves the ocean
and gives birth to new stars – that same Intelligence
also breathes your breath, beats your heart,
and heals your wounds.

READING ~ Poem: It’s Not So Much That I Want to Know God, by Chelan Harkin

It’s not so much that I want to know God
As to be close to the spiral in the seashell,
To feel the wind as my own breath,
to let birdsong all the way in to my being,
let my bones be the ledger lines for its song.

It’s not so much the that I want to know God
as to be reacquainted with the intimacies of the stars
through remembering
they’ve always shone from within
the expansiveness of my own chest.

It’s not so much that I want to please any Cosmic Authority
as to be strong enough for the little girl inside of me
to feel held and finally able to weep old tears.

It’s not so much that I need a particular place of worship -
I want to abide in the majesty of each moment
that the humble door of my ancient heart
be more willing to open to the wide beauty of the world.
My only prayer is to be excommunicated from ideology
and feel the divine guidance coursing through me.

It’s not so much that I want to worship God
as to remember to say thank you
with deep recognition
for every small act of love that finds me.

I care not to serve an abstract God.
My only desire is to serve
the One Great Heart
that lives within us all.

SERMON

Good morning. I hope you had a wonderful Solstice and are now settling into the long and heavenly days of a Maine summer.

I can’t say that all of the monthly themes the UUA suggests work for me, but when I first saw the word Renewal, I got really excited. Then I realized that my mind read this word as Re-New-ALL. And that set off an exploration into what relationship personal renewal has to do with Re NEWing ALL. How is it possible to Re NEW ALL?

But first: a story. Or I should say, 1/2 of a story.

Once, many many years ago, I had a session with one of those people who has access to realms other than this one. She didn’t call herself a psychic, but she definitely was tuned in in ways that I’m not. During our time together I was shown how my mother’s mother, Alice Barry Larkin, and I had been with each other in many past lifetimes, as sisters… parent/child…cousins… friends. I was given a vivid image of the two of us playing together… running through the emerald fields of Ireland. At the end of the session, my grandmother’s Spirit - or whatever it was - gave me a mandate. I heard: Learn the Old Religion.

It felt like a command, but I didn’t know where to start. Because of who I was at that time, I looked for books to learn about the Old Religion and was surprised that I didn’t find much. Had people not studied this? What few books there were read like dry, academic studies of something long dead and forgotten except by a few. Eventually, the voice in my head faded and so did the search for learning about the Old Religion. Which, you may notice, was not the original charge… to learn about it… but to learn it.

What I’ve learned about it is the celebration of the turning of the seasons, the Solstices, Equinoxes and Quarterdays of Samain, Imbolc, Beltaine, and Lughnasa. But also that the Old Religion was profoundly connected with place as well as time. Practitioners  viewed and related to nature not as a collection of things to know or possess but as a world of conjoined lives, holy and complete. At its base was a sacred natural order of which humans were a part but certainly not the main characters.

Reflecting on what I know about both Eastern and Western religion,  they don’t talk a lot about the sacredness of nature. Religion for a long time was mostly about this idea of transcendence, the ascending path to Source, God however you name it. Life here on earth was “nasty, brutal and short” to quote Hobbes, and we would get our just reward in heaven… or by being reincarnated as a more evolved life form. Although North American indigenous and some African tribes have a deep personal relationship with nature, I’m not discounting that. But the ascending path, in many ways, still dominates much of the world’s spiritual culture.

And I get it. Life is complicated and messy. Transcendence feels wonderful. It just  - by itself - can’t be the whole picture.

Martin Heidegger wrote: “The oldest of the old follows behind us in our thinking, and yet it comes to meet us.” It’s difficult to imagine that only about 50 years ago “modern” Western civilization began the renewal of a deeper relationship with the more than human world. That’s almost two millennia of philosophy and theos-centered religion giving credence to the supremacy of the divine over the worldly and to the humans over everything thing else on earth…. a belief that still has tenacious roots today. Early philosopher/scientists like Rachel Carson and Annie Dillard reawakened our long denied but latent felt-sense of connection with trees and stars, rocks and beavers. But as late as 1979, Gregory Bateson could still write in his book Mind and Nature, A Necessary Unity: “The major problems in the world are the result of the difference between how nature works and the way people think.”

Why does it take so long to change the way we think? To change the way we act based on the information we already have? To give more than lip service to our UU Principle of Respect for the Interdependent Web of All Existence? Because if all we needed was information, we already have it in spades.

Research in biology, systems and quantum theory, genetics, and other sciences have been telling us for decades that we are all inter-related and that there is inherent intelligence in cells, organs, organisms, animal and human groups, eco-systems, even the earth and universe as a whole.

• From the world of science, Albert Einstein called the idea of a separate self an “optical illusion of consciousness.”
• From the spiritual perspective, Thich Nhat Hanh wrote (in No Death, No Fear) that “the truth is that everything contains everything else. We cannot just be, we can only inter-be.
• And a trained psychologist, Francis Weller (in The Wild Edge of Sorrow) talks about how awareness of our “intervulnerability” as he calls it and mutuality “impels us to search for ways to heal the whole, rather than encase ourselves in a bubble of impossible individualism.

Our cells know it, our Souls know it, our psyches long for it. So why does it take so long?

I believe one intriguing answer to this question comes from Merlin Sheldrake, who wrote the popular book on fungi called Entangled Life. Did Anyone read this book yet? I recommend it highly. In it Sheldrake writes:

Many scientific concepts—from time to chemical bonds to genes to species—lack stable definitions. (Stable scientific definitions, he means; something we can pin down and say this is it.) And then he goes on to say that “the idea of an “individual” is no different: just another category to guide human thought and behavior. Yet so much of daily life and experience—not to mention our philosophical, political, and economic systems—depends on individuals that it can be hard to stand by and watch the concept dissolve. Where does this leave “us”? What about “them”? “Me”? “Mine”? “Everyone”? “Anyone”?

I love this quote. It feels like humanity’s current cutting edge of understanding. If we truly took in the information we have been given, our concept of me and mine become… fungible. Why does it take so long to change? Because even if we’ve had these glimpses or shimmers of unity, we can only offer to the world what we have fully digested and integrated. The rest is Mystery.

But the mystery is not “out there” somewhere. It’s right here. Mystics of all times and traditions and geography tell us that the truth of our inter-being, our place in the web of life, IS fundamentally discoverable and knowable… but only through the inner journey. Our true place in the world can be known but only by going within. Knowing about the unified field of existence is not the same as knowing, and not the same as the practice of our unity. The project we are called to undertake, the necessary  practice, is a daily, Living inter-being, not a theoretical one.

It’s not like we have to find the answer; we know we’re all an interwoven tapestry. It’s a returning to and renewing - over and over and over again - our relationship with that living, scintillating, dynamic ONEness. It means including everything, nothing left out. It means we Re - New ALL.

What’s so difficult, why this takes so long, is because we are steeped in the paradigm of separation and duality: me and you; us and  them. Whatever short tastes of wholeness, those shimmers, I have felt leave me longing for more. Longing to put down the burden of individuality and feel a part of the ocean of all that is.

I believe the most pressing challenge of our planet today is taking all we have learned about science, spirituality, psychology - and trying to figure out how to live into the alchemy of spirit and matter, seeing past the duality of divine and human. I use the word alchemy deliberately, because I believe it’s necessary for life on this planet that we Re - NEW - ALL in an alchemical process that dissolves our limited sense of self into the caldron of unity. Because honestly, it’s so much harder and unfulfilling to serve life, or even deal with our personal lives in relationship, with a sense of duality, a separate sense of self. The self will always get hurt, will always be afraid.

In Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer asks us:

What happens when you learn about your local ecology not just as an observer, but also as a participant? What happens when you crack open your isolated sense of self and plant within your heart this symbol of our ever-branching inter-being? What happens when you consider your actions in terms of your ecological and cultural legacy?

 We have to start from where we are. And right now, we can nurture the understanding, wisdom and felt-sense of our appropriate space in this one ecosystem that has a deep taproot we can explore our entire lives. Learning about our place and responsibility in this one ecosystem called the universe is I believe the essence of the Old Religion.

So back to the second half of my story, and my grandmother Alice’s charge to me to learn the Old Religion. I spoke recently about the retreat I went to in Ireland last month. There was a Druid elder at the retreat, and we had several conversations. She spoke of the Old Religion not in terms of ceremony; she definitely didn’t talk about the Old Religion in terms of spells and magic. She mostly talked about the relationship to the land, a consensual and sensual conversation that is happening all the time and that we can join with deep listening, and nonhierarchical thinking.

I told her about my love of Maine and how the rocks and ocean and fields and trees had been a primary relationship for me in my youth. And how, like dating an old flame after you’ve been married and divorced, I was once again coming into deeper love for and trust of the other than human relatives that surround us here on the coast.

“Ah,” she said, “sounds like you are learning the Old Religion.”

What? Did I hear her right? I had forgotten completely about that session long ago where my grandmother had shown up. Could it be that I’ve been on this path all along? That I’m finding myself being Re-Newed by perhaps the oldest of all forms of Spirit?

I’ve been quoting a lot of different people today. I do this to remind myself that I am not alone; that others are grappling with the same conditioning and finding new and important ways to cleanse our system of the illusion of individuality. I find friends and teachers who are also longing to swim in the ocean of inter-being.

And to remind myself that this way of being is not new. In fact it is very, very old. We only think it’s new because we’ve just begun to RENEW our understanding. We are remembering, on a cellular level, how profoundly intimate and ecstatic it is to live in relationship not only with other humans but with the vast enlivening network we are indistinguishable from. We need renewal, and we need to RE NEW ALL, bringing everything into our perception of reality, not just what we believe about what we can see, taste, touch, and hear. Or, as Gregory Bateson said, “It Takes Two to Know One.”

Everything is in relationship with everything else. Everything is communicating with, taking part in everything else all the time. To be renewed is to pay attention, to listen, and then to join the conversation.

So it is. And May it be so. Amen.