Sermons

OPENING WORDS ~ 
Hi, Good morning, how are you?
It’s good to be with you, My name is Rev. Hillary, I serve as the minister at First Universalist Yarmouth – and I’m so happy to be here today.

Friends today I offer a service on love.
You see, over the past month and a half in Yarmouth we’ve been focusing on Love in all of our services and programs. This emphasis is the result of an experience we had in December where we were targeted by local white supremacists for our educational and anti-racist work, and welcoming and affirming spirit.
Rather than responding to that hate with more hate, we instead opted to share and enact more and more love.

So today, dear Castine, I welcome you to join us in this process of understanding, enacting, and living with this crazy little thing – or rather, this huge, moving, stretching, changing, predictable, spontaneous, comforting and unsettling, heart wrenching and joyful thing –
called love.

This morning let’s start small and consider simply what we mean when we use the word love – right now.

To prepare us for this project, our opening words are a teaching from this little book How to Love, by the Zen monk, peace activist, and being of great compassion, Thich Nhat Hanh.
Heart Like a River:

If you pour a handful of salt into a cup of water, the water becomes undrinkable. But if you pour the salt into a river, people continue to draw the water to cook, wash, and drink. The river is immense, and it has the capacity to receive, embrace, and transform. When our hearts are small, our understanding and compassion are limited, and we suffer. We can’t accept or tolerate others and their shortcomings, and we demand that they change. But when our hearts expand, these same things don’t make us suffer anymore. We have a lot of understanding and compassion and can embrace others. We accept others as they are, and then they have a chance to transform. So, the question then is, how do we help our hearts grow?
READING ~ 
A reading from A Hidden Wholeness by educator, author, and quaker activist, Parker Palmer.
If we want to support each other’s inner lives, we must remember a simple truth: the human soul does not want to be fixed, it wants simply to be seen and heard.
If we want to see and hear a person’s soul, there is another truth we must remember: the soul is like a wild animal — tough, resilient, and yet shy.
When we go crashing through the woods shouting for it to come out so we can help it, the soul will stay in hiding.
But if we are willing to sit quietly and wait for a while, the soul may show itself.
READING ~ 
Our second reading this morning is from the self described, “black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet,” Audre Lorde. It is an excerpt from her essay, “Poetry is Not a Luxury.”
There are no new ideas.
There are only new ways of making them felt,
of examining what our ideas really mean, what our ideas really feel like,
on Sunday morning at 7 AM,
after brunch,
during wild love,
making war,
giving birth;
while we suffer the old longings,
battle the old warnings and fears of being silent and impotent and alone,
while tasting our new possibilities and strengths.
SERMON
Friends, can I tell you a story about love? A love story, if you will?

On a Monday this past November, as is often the case on my day off – I went hiking.
It was a beautiful day – skies were clear, temps were pleasant –
and as I drove out to western Maine with my dog, Tizzy, I was content.
Doing a thing I loved, in a place I love, with a being I love.
What’s not to love?

Given the loveliness of the day, I chose a longer trail, about 7 miles round trip.
The hike was perfect, visibility was clear, the sun was warm, the breeze was mild but cool, and hardly anyone else was there.
In the midst of our ascent, I had no qualms about how I’d opted to spend my day.

When we made it to the summit, about 3.5 miles up, I found a comfy spot to sit and dropped Tizzy’s leash so she could lie down next to me without getting all tangled in it. As I took off my pack to pull out our snacks, I saw, out of the corner of my eye, something moving in the nearby brush – and Tizzy moving towards it.

“Nononononononononono! Tizzy Tizzy Tizzy no no!”
I lunged towards my dog but it was too late.
She’d already bitten down on the unsuspecting but well prepared porcupine.

I grabbed her harness and yanked her away – quills flying left and right – as the porcupine scurried off. I bent down to assess the damage and saw my beloved friend with a face full of bloody spikes.

And folks, I hate to break it to you, but your mindful minister here lost it. Expletives were flying out of my mouth like more porcupine quills – along with “Whys?!” and “are you kidding mes?!” and “we were having such a nice days.”

Millennial that I am, once I regained a semblance of a center, I pulled out my phone and googled “dog porcupine help.’
“Don’t pull the quills out yourself and get the dog to a vet” were my primary directives.

I proceeded to google local vets and call them one after another – no openings, so sorry we close early on mondays, go to the emergency vet – (2 hours away) – all this I remind you while holding onto my dog who was fiercely rearing next to me. Finally I managed to get a hold of a vet 30 minutes from the bottom of the mountain who could see us in 90 minutes.

Now…
We just had to get to the bottom of the mountain – 3.5 miles down – in an hour.

“Ok, Tizzy. We have to go.”

I released my grasp on her harness – held the end of her leash and began the descent, only to have my arm yanked taut behind me.

Tizzy had statued – frozen still. She looked at me defiantly.

I wondered what her narrative of this situation was – in her mind, was this my fault?

“Tizzy! Let’s Go! You need to come! Come here!”

Nothin’.
She turned her head – a calming signal sure, but with an attitude.

“Seriously?!? We have to go!”

Not budging. I took a deep breath. Grasped my face with my hand and did the only thing I could think to do. I scooped up my 60 pound dog in my arms – being careful to keep her prickly face away from mine – and began a wobbly but steady descent down the trail.

Yeah – sure, I’m not a big guy, but I’m kinda strong – to an extent.

I carried Tizzy for about 3 minutes before I had to put her down at which point she statued again.
I shouted firmly for her to come and started to run down the mountain thinking she’d follow – but nothing. I took a deep breath, walked over and picked her up again.
It continued this way for about a mile and a half before my legs became too wobbly and the broken ankle close calls became too frequent.

I set Tizzy down – my voice hoarse from shouting, my pulse pounding –
I looked at my poor friend – trembling, drooling, bleeding – I hated seeing her this way. And so, I did the only thing that made sense in the moment – I sat down and cried.

It had been well over an hour since we left the summit, the sun had sunk in the sky and the air was colder now, the shadows longer.
We’d missed our appointment at the vet. The task ahead felt impossible.

I looked at Tizzy. “Please, please, come with me. This is for you.”
I stood up – and she looked away.

“Tizzy – please, for the love of God -Let’s go!”

Nothing.

I took a deep breath. Relaxed my shoulders. Wiped my eyes.

“Hey good girl, you’re a good girl. Tizzy, you’re a good girl. I love you”

She looked at me.

“Oh – what a good girl! Such a good girl, let’s go, baby, let’s go.”

My friends – the dog started to walk.

‘Oh, such a good girl – let’s go, c’mon, let’s go!?

My friends – she started to run – we started to run.

We ran pretty much the rest of the way down the mountain – my knees throbbing and hamstrings burning.

She statued here and there – and at one point veered off the path to chase a squirrel –

But all it took to get us on track again were some gentle, kind, and calming words.

We made it to the bottom in record time and hopped into the car. I figured we might as well go to the vet anyway and see if they would help us.

Miraculously, when we arrived they’d had two cancellations and their schedule was wide open.

And as we are led to believe at the end of all love stories, everyone lived happily ever after.
The end.

Ha, yeah right –
Let’s instead say, everyone went on with their lives having learned a thing or two about love.
The end.

“If we want to see and hear a person’s soul, there is another truth we must remember: the soul is like a wild animal — tough, resilient, and yet shy. When we go crashing through the woods shouting for it to come out so we can help it, the soul will stay in hiding. But if we are willing to sit quietly and wait for a while, the soul may show itself.”

In the weeks that have passed since Tizzy’s mountaintop porcupine encounter – there have certainly been some other memorable days and events that have transpired.
But this experience has stuck with me.

In our Sunday service at Yarmouth that followed the hateful messages we received from white supremacists, I asked the congregation – and therefore also asked myself – “What does it mean to put love at the center of everything?”
“What does it mean to center all of our actions and thoughts in love?”

It was easy to fall into mindsets of fear, rage, and resentment at that time. Slipping into these ways of thinking, though, I quickly discovered that they really didn’t feel good after a while, nor were they particularly productive to the situation at hand. The only way I could quell these restrictive, anxious ways of being, was to locate love within and around me. To expand the river, as Thich Nhat Hanh teaches.

In that service, when I asked my congregation what it means to put love at the center of everything, I responded to the rhetorical question as best I could,
“I don’t know, but I want to find out.”

And since then, I have ventured to do just that.
I mean, I’m sure we have all ventured to do just that whether we were aware of it or not.
We’re always guided by love – in one way or another – be it in the form of desire or longing, joy or passion, grief or generosity, creation or destruction.

I’ve been curious though about what happens when we very consciously center love in our lives.
For doing so is not just the instinctual call of our hearts, minds and bodies –
To me it is also the call of our welcoming and affirming faith, which asks us to put love at the center. To live our values with love at our center.

But wait – let’s back up for a minute.
What are we talking about here? What’s love?

Granted – this is not the first time someone has asked this question.
Much time and consideration has been given to the meaning of love over the millenia –

The Greeks had their definitions of love – agape, philia, eros.
The Buddhists have their definitions of love – maitri, karuna, mudita,
There’s Paul’s letter to the Corinthians in the New Testament that states love is patient, love is kind; does not envy or boast; is not arrogant or rude.
We’ve even got the contemporary love languages – gift giving, service, words, time, touch.

But when we talk about living our values with love at the center – what are we – what are you, what am I – talking about?
Or perhaps more importantly, as bell hooks might ask –
she taught that love is never simply a feeling, love is an action –
When we talk about living our values with love at the center – what are we enacting?

You see the amazing, bewildering, challenging – and sometimes just nice thing about love is that it is totally subjective and relative.
It’s both within our control and out of it – how we love – how we receive love, give love, share love, define love is based on so many moving factors –
Factors that stretch back to our birth and the care, the touch, the attachment or detachment we received as infants, right up to the present moment at hand and how comfortable or uncomfortable, focused or distracted we are in this moment right now.
Our understanding of love is both constant and constantly in flux.

So, hey, Friends, pause with me for a moment and see if you can come up with a definition of love.

No wrong answers, just play with this question for a minute.
Perhaps let something or someone you love come into your mind and see if you can put words to that feeling.
How do you define love? What does love mean?
Find your center.
First thought best thought.

Anyone want to share?

My definition lately – and granted I had time to write this and mull it over for days –
To me –
Love means thinking and acting in such a way that I thrive and enjoy my life and the living beings I interact with thrive and enjoy life.

I mean — my definition of love essentially is maitri, metta – loving-kindness. A wish for all beings – myself included – to be happy, healthy, at peace and at ease.

I share the story of Tizzy, the porcupine, and the mountaintop with you today because it has been a fable of love for me through some challenging weeks.
Love is at the center of that day in every way.

Love brought me to the mountain, love brought Tizzy along.
Love compelled me to seek care for Tizzy, love caused me to flip out and try to force an outcome, love sat me down, made me feel my feelings, have a cry,
and love eventually pushed me beyond my needs and brought me into a relationship with this wordless suffering friend in my care.

How do I define love that day?
Love was appreciation and gratitude for nature, my body, the companionship of my dog. Love was compassion, a need to relieve her suffering – and my own.

What did I learn about love that day?
That it enhanced the beauty around me, enhanced my care for life.

I also learned that the more tightly I held love, the more forceful and self-serving I was with it – the less powerful it was.

I learned that releasing my own needs and loving in a way that met someone else’s needs required effort that didn’t come naturally at first, but once I made the effort – and it did take effort – it served us both.

Folks, this week, no matter how you feel about Valentine’s Day, I invite you to put love at your center.
Locate – feel, define, think about love when you wake up and as you move through your day. Where is it, how is it manifesting? Ask yourself regularly – what’s love got to do with this?
At the end of the day – tell yourself, or someone you share space with the story of your day as a love story.
Define the presence of love in your day, consider how it shaped the events and actions of your day, ask yourself what you learned about it and from it.

Love is not a new idea, but as the fierce and fiercely loving Audre Lorde teaches-
There are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt, of examining what our ideas really mean, what our ideas really feel like.

Keep love close today, my friends.
Keep it as your center. See what you notice, what changes, what grows and lessens, what feels restrictive and what creates an opening.

Oh – And for those who are feeling some love for that porcupine – I’m pretty sure he/she/they walked away from the scene of the attack with 50- something fewer quills but was otherwise totally fine.

Friends, May you be happy, healthy, at peace and at ease,
Love is in here and love is out there.
And may love guide you through your days.
Amen,
Let it be so – and let there be love.