The Rev. Robert Lloyd Schaibly faithfully served the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Houston as its senior minister for twenty years. He is remembered by many who knew him as one of the congregation’s most influential ministers. He was the first openly gay minister to serve a congregation in the city that was not affiliated with the Metropolitan Community Church movement. This was not the only reason why the Rev. Schaibly’s ministry was historic. During his two decades in Houston, First Houston became the first sanctuary congregation in the state of Texas. It offered refuge for undocumented migrants fleeing the reigns of right-wing terror sponsored by the United States government in El Salvador and Guatemala. It also started the Houston Area Teen Coalition for Homosexuals, or HATCH, the state of Texas’s first program for GLBTQ youth. It expanded facilities–adding the three-story office and classroom building–and grew its membership to more than 500 members. Throughout this time, First Houston served as a major cultural and spiritual center, hosting numerous speakers and programs and, in the Rev. Schaibly’s words, an “uncountable” number of meetings “on the issue of war and peace and human rights.”

The visit of the anti-war activist and Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh to First Houston was of great significance to the Rev. Schaibly, the congregation, and the city. Nhat Hanh was then, as he is now, one of the world’s great spiritual leaders and primary proponents of Zen Buddhism, a religious tradition that inspired him to work tirelessly for, in his words, “peace in our hearts and on earth.”

The Unitarian Universalist minister and the Zen master developed an enduring relationship. The Rev. Schaibly visited Nhat Hanh’s Zen monastery Plum Village in the South of France several times. In 1988 Rev. Schaibly started the Zen meditation group at First Houston that eventually evolved into the Houston Zen Center.

In 1989, he preached a series of four sermons on his first visit to Plum Village and his developing connection to Zen practice and philosophy. His visit was transformative and he wanted to share what he had discovered with his beloved congregation. The Rev. Schaibly found himself opened to the practice of mindfulness, “waking up to the world,” more present to the basic realities of existence, an “appreciation of what I was eating and drinking.”

Over the course of a month he spoke with the congregation about meditation, impermanence, joy, and wishlessness. I want to focus on one of these for moment: joy. The late 1980s were a time, like today, when, as Rev. Schaibly put it, “you cannot watch the news, read the news, without becoming depressed.” Today we are also holding a memorial service, an event that is necessarily weighted with sadness. A man that many of us loved, a man who served as a religious teacher, an advocate for peace, and an inspiration, is dead.

And yet, and yet, in the face of necessary sadness of the hour, I suspect that if the Rev. Schaibly were with us here he would want us to focus on the joy and beauty of life. He believed that in our lives each of us makes a choice. Do we seek to “enliven… ourselves to all of life or deaden… ourselves to all of life[?]” He urged this congregation, which is to say many of you, to choose to wake up to the world and embrace the joy and beauty that is enmeshed with pain and suffering. Reflecting on the challenges of the late 1980s–which included the AIDS crisis, Iran Contra, CIA fueled civil wars in Central America, the so-called war on drugs, and the hole in the ozone layer–he suggested that Unitarian Universalists and all people of good heart needed to stay grounded. “And what would ground us?,” he asked rhetorically.

“The same sort of thing that grounds a lighting rod–a connection with earth. What would ground you is the reminder that the world is worth saving, that life has loveliness, that joy and beauty are also realities of the world, every bit as much as problems are, every bit as much!” It was only by staying so grounded in the joy and beauty of the world that each of us can, he believed, give to human society and our blue green ball of a planet what is required. “What your world needs from you is a calm joyous presence that is as marginal as possible to the madness of this world,” Rev. Schaibly told this congregation.

I did not know the Rev. Schaibly, or Bob as he would have wanted me to call him, well. We spoke on the phone only twice. Both times after he had lost much of his voice to the throat cancer that prompted his early retirement and ultimately took his life. In each instance, I was impressed by his thoughtfulness, his commitment to First Houston, and his calm joyous presence. After our conversations he sent me small care packages, containing material from his life with the congregation. In one of them he included this note:

Dear Colin:

It was nice meeting you by phone. Forgot to add I had few pieces of debris left from days before T-Storms were Hurricanes, and everyone was downsizing as an updated form of Transcendentalism.

I hope you enjoy First Church Houston…

Enclosed are sociology papers by two Rice students passed onto me “illegally.” What’s important is they present me in a pretty good light!”

Bob Schaibly

I cannot be sure but I suspect that Bob’s note to me captured some essential elements of his ministry with First Houston. Humor was clearly important to him, one of those sociology papers records that the sermon on the day the student visited was “dotted with laughter.” And, reading through many of his sermons I detect a repeated insistence that, as he often said, “Joy is always a possibility to each life and every moment we awaken to joy we set life right.”

Alongside a reminder of the persisting presence of joy, there are at least three other elements present in Bob’s words. First, there is his sense of himself as someone located in time. He mentions “days before” to indicate that he is thinking about the past. This may seem like a trivial observation but we ministers are ever present to the reality that human existence is fleeting and we each inhabit particular moments of time. The span that Bob was allotted has now elapsed and so we are here celebrating him. Just as one day, someplace and somewhere, each of the threads of our own lives will be cut and we will be remembered.

Second, Bob wanted to be well remembered. Like most clergy, he wanted to have an enduring impact on the world. And he wanted to be liked. He appreciated that the papers showed him “in a pretty good light.” He cared about this congregation and its mission and it was important to him that its members have a “good relationship” with its ministers. In all of his sermons he displays an enormous affection of First Houston. He was not afraid to tell members that he loved sharing his life with them. And from all the stories I have heard about Bob since I arrived here I know that those of you who knew him loved sharing your lives with him.

Third, he understood himself as located within the lineage of Unitarian Universalist ministers. The passing reference to Transcendentalism–the most famous variety of Unitarian theology–invokes this. Bob attended Harvard Divinity School, served four Unitarian Universalist congregations as their minister, worked at two others, and grounded himself in our theological tradition. In a sermon on the great nineteenth century Unitarian theologian William Ellery Channing, he offered you words that are similar to what both I and many other ministers have told you from this pulpit, “The purpose of religion is to promote virtuous lives.” And in the congregation’s centennial sermon he preached, “This church has been a place to deal with that conundrum of being human and wishing for humanity to do better.” A sentiment again shared by myself and almost any other Unitarian Universalist minister you might encounter.

Joy, his place in time, the importance of being well remembered, the lineage of Unitarian Universalist ministers, you will note that I have largely left out Bob’s biographical details from this eulogy. You can read his obituary in the Order of Service. But I would be remiss not to highlight or include a few additional elements before I close. Bob shared his life for many years with his beloved husband Steven Storla. Steven shared Bob’s ministry with First Houston in many ways–offering you a loving presence alongside Bob and even preaching on occasion. Steven will be offering some of his own words shortly.

Before he partnered with Steven, Bob was married to Elinor Burke. And while their marriage ended in divorce I think Bob wanted everyone to know that they remained friends throughout their lives.

Finally, as a young man, Bob marched from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. In Steven’s words, “It changed Bob’s life to see religious institutions witnessing for justice.” It also gifted him with the belief that, in his own words, “the future will find us increasingly liberated.” In his ministry and his time on Earth he sought to help bring about that liberation. A gay man, he thought of the movement for gay liberation as part of the larger effort for collective liberation. A Buddhist and a Unitarian Universalist, he sought to expand the amount of love and joy in the world. And as a human being he hoped that everyone would wake up to the glory of the world around us, a glory that is present with us today, despite the pain we feel in Bob’s death, despite the pain of mortality, despite the conflicts and crises of the hour. That’s why he often told the congregation, quoting Thomas Starr King:

“‘What a year to live in! Worth all the other times ever known in our history or any other!’

May we here feel that same love for life. These may not be the best of times but they are our times and we shall make the best of them.”

I will let Bob’s words provide my closing and say to you, as he did, Amen, Shalom, Blessed be!

as preached at the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Houston, Museum District, January 5, 2020

Happy New Year! I was not supposed to be in the pulpit with you this morning. But plans change, people get sick, and I find myself with you today on the first Sunday of a new year and a new decade. It is good to be with you. It is good to be with even though the news at the opening of this, what will perhaps be the most important decade in human history, is bitter and harsh. It is good to be with you precisely because it is when the news of the world is bitter and harsh that we need religious community the most.

The assassination of Iranian general Qasem Soleimani by a United States military drone strike on sovereign Iraqi soil has pushed the Middle East into crisis. Soleimani was killed alongside Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, an Iraqi military leader whose political party controls almost fifty seats in the Iraqi Parliament. These illegal acts of war violate both international law and the United States War Powers Act. They may lead to war between the United States and Iran. They have already led to further destabilization of the Middle East. Hundreds of people will almost certainly be killed because of the decision of the President of the United States to authorize Soleimani’s illegal political assassination. Thousands or tens of thousands or possibly even hundreds of thousands of people will die horrible violent deaths if this country goes to war with Iran.

I cannot help but wonder about the timing of the President’s decision to have Soleimani killed. He will soon be on trial in the Senate. The House has passed two articles of impeachment and he could, theoretically, be removed from office. Of course, there is every sign that his allies in the Senate will prevent witnesses from being called or from a serious trial taking place. The Senate Majority Leader even claims that he is coordinating the trial with the White House in order to facilitate a speedy acquittal. The position of the President’s Senatorial allies is clearly concerning. In his year-end report Chief Justice John Roberts, Jr., warned “we have come to take democracy for granted.” Roberts will oversee the trial in the Senate. It appears that the Senate Majority Leader’s position has him worried about his ability “to do our best to maintain the public’s trust that we are faithfully discharging our solemn obligation to equal justice under law.”

Drawing the United States military into a conflict abroad will almost certainly make it more difficult to have an honest debate and trial on the House’s articles of impeachment. There will be calls for national unity. For the many, the President will be transformed from a divisive figure to a unifying head of state. It will be harder to criticize him. War dissenters and pacifists will be castigated for being unpatriotic. There might even be calls to delay the President’s trial. This country’s liberal democracy may move closer to a defining crisis.

Over a hundred years ago, as the United States entered World War I, the writer Randolph Bourne warned that war is the health of the state. He wrote, “The moment war is declared… the mass of the people, through some spiritual alchemy… with the exception of a few malcontents, proceed to allow themselves to be regimented, coerced, deranged in all the environments of their lives, and turned into a solid manufactory of destruction toward whatever other people may have, in the appointed scheme of things, come within the range of the Government’s disapprobation. The citizen throws off his contempt and indifference to Government, identifies himself with its purposes, [and] revives all his military memories and symbols… Patriotism becomes the dominant feeling, and produces immediately that intense and hopeless confusion between the relations which the individual bears and should bear toward the society of which he is a part.” When war is the health of the state it is challenging to be a critic of either the President or the actions he directs the military to take. It is no wonder then that the current President is not the only one to authorize dramatic violent action during the impeachment process. President Clinton did the same thing in December of 1998 when he launched air strikes in Iraq as the House stood poised to impeach him.

Over a hundred years ago the Unitarian minister, pacifist, and first friend in the United States of Mahatma Gandhi, John Haynes Holmes stood before his congregation in New York City and told them, in the idiom of early twentieth-century Unitarianism: “War is an open and utter violation of Christianity. If war is right, then Christianity is wrong, false, a lie. If Christianity is right, then war is wrong, false, a lie…”

Today, I believe that the same thing can be said in twenty-first century words. Unitarian Universalism upholds the inherent worth and dignity of all people. Not some people. Not only citizens and residents of the United States. All people. Speaking only for myself, I can rephrase Holmes words: War with Iran is an open and violation of Unitarian Universalist values. If such a war is right, then Unitarian Universalism is wrong, false, a lie. If Unitarian Universalism is right, then such a war is wrong, false, a lie…”

You may have other views. We affirm the right of conscience and the search for truth as central to our tradition. These are mine and they mean that I will never pray nor preach for victory through arms or pretend that the people of Iran are any less human, any less worthy of my love or the love of the divine, than any of you.

And so, this morning, I find myself gravely concerned for the future of this country and this world. I find myself gravely concerned because not only do the President’s military actions represent a political crisis and a crisis in democracy, they are a distraction from what must be the central focus of the next decade: addressing the climate emergency.

The next ten years or so will determine whether or not humanity chooses to address the climate crisis. What we do now will impact the lives of not only our children and our grandchildren but the lives of those thousands of years from now–if there are humans thousands of years from now. At such a moment in humanity history, I find myself often reflecting upon the words of James Baldwin in the closing passage of his magnificent essay “The Fire Next Time.” Baldwin’s essay was written during the civil rights movement, that historic movement to overturn Jim Crow and defeat white supremacy. He saw that movement for racial justice as something that would determine the future of country–whether it would be a liberal democracy or a white supremacist apartheid state. Baldwin wrote: “And here we are, at the center of the arc, trapped in the gaudiest, most valuable, and most improbable water wheel the world has ever seen. Everything now, we must assume, is in our hands; we have no right to assume otherwise. If we–and now I mean the relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks who must, like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of the others–do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world. If we do not now dare everything, the fulfillment of that prophecy, re-created from the Bible in song by a slave, is upon: God gave Noah the rainbow sign, No more water, the fire next time!”

We are on the precipice of the fire next time. We are on the precipice because we, as a country, have been unable to overcome white supremacy. The current President is a white supremacist populist and many of his supporters have made it clear that their highest loyalty is to the maintenance of a white supremacist racial order and not liberal democracy.

We are on the precipice of the fire next time. Literally and figuratively, while the world is distracted by the threat of war Australia is literally burning. Figuratively, because the racial conflagration that has raged since Europeans arrived on the shores of this continent is threatening, once again, to consume the country.

The fire next time, in worship we have been focusing on the spiritual and religious tools that are necessary to live through such times of crisis. Today, and for the month of January, we will be focusing on what I believe is one of the most important of these tools: the cultivation of friendships. The philosopher Hannah Arendt observed that the cultivation of friendships was a crucial tool for those who survived the brutalities of totalitarianism. The creation and sustaining of friendship in such times is a sign that “a bit of humanness in a world become inhuman had been achieved.” And in such hours of crises as the ones we now face maintaining our own humanness and recognizing it in others is one of our crucial tasks. It is difficult to kill others whom we recognize as humans. Killing, especially on a mass scale, often requires the abstraction of human being into a categorical other: the human being who is a friend, a lover, a parent, a child, a sibling, or a neighbor becomes the Jew, the migrant, the black person, the indigenous person, the queer person, or the Iranian.

And so, now let us turn to friendship and consider the alchemical power it provides to make us human to each other.

The image of an elderly Emerson, perhaps resting in dusty sunlight on an overstuffed armchair, asking his wife, “What was the name of my best friend?” is moving. It suggests that Thoreau’s name faded long before the feelings his memory evoked. Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau are not exactly the type of people I usually think of when I think of friends. Thoreau, the archetypical non-conformist, sought to live in the woods by Walden Pond to prove his independence. His classic text opens, “I lived alone, in the woods, a mile from any neighbor, in a house which I had built myself… and earned my living by the labor of my hands only. I lived there two years and two months. At present I am a sojourner in civilized life again.” For Thoreau solitary life was permanent while life amongst his human fellows was but a sojourn, a temporary condition.

Emerson was equally skeptical about the social dimensions of human nature. In his essay “Self-Reliance” he claimed, “Society everywhere is a conspiracy against… every one of its members.” He believed that self-discovery, awakening knowledge of the self, was primarily a task for the individual, not the community. When he was invited to join the utopian experiment Brook Farm, Emerson responded that he was unwilling to give the community ‘the task of my emancipation which I ought to take on myself.’”

Yet both of these men sought out the company of others. Emerson gathered around him a circle of poets, preachers, writers, and intellectuals whose friendships have become legendary. And whose friendships sustained them through the struggle for the abolition of slavery and their work for the liberation of women. That circle contains many of our Unitarian Universalist saints. I speak of the Transcendentalists Emerson and Thoreau, of course, but also the pioneering feminists Margaret Fuller and Elizabeth Peabody, the fiery abolitionist Theodore Parker, and the utopian visionary George Ripely. What we see when look closely at Emerson and Thoreau is not two staunch individualists but rather two men caught in the tension between community and individuality, very conscious that one cannot exist without the other.

Emerson wrote on friendship and in an essay declared, “I do not wish to treat friendships daintily, but with the roughest courage. When they are real, they are not glass threads or frostwork, but the solidest thing we know.” Margaret Fuller drowned at sea at the age of forty. Her tragic death prompted Emerson to write, “I have lost my audience.” Emerson thought that Fuller was the one person who understood his philosophy most completely, even if they sometimes violently disagreed. Of her he wrote, “more variously gifted, wise, sportive, eloquent… magnificent, prophetic, reading my life at her will, and puzzling me with riddles…” Of him she wrote, “that from him I first learned what is meant by the inward life… That the mind is its own place was a dead phrase to me till he cast light upon my mind.” Perhaps Fuller’s early death is why Emerson recalled Thoreau, and not her, in the fading moments of his life. But, no matter, a close study of their circle reveals an essential truth: we require others to become ourselves.

The tension between the individual and the community apparent in the writings of our Transcendentalists leads to contradictory statements. Emerson himself placed little stock in consistency, penning words that I sometimes take as my own slogan, “…a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” Let us consider Emerson the friend, rather than Emerson the individualist, this morning. If for no reason than when Emerson was falling into his final solitude he tried to steady himself with the memory of his great friend Thoreau. Emerson himself wrote, “Friendship demands a religious treatment.”

Have you ever had a good friend? A great friend? Can you recall what it felt like to be in that person’s presence? Perhaps your friend is in this sanctuary with you this morning. Maybe you are sitting next to them, aware of the warmth of their body. Maybe they are distant: hacking corn stalks with a machete, sipping coffee in a Paris cafe, caking paint on fresh stretched canvas, or hustling through mazing, cold, Boston streets. I invite you to invoke the presence of your friend. Give yourself to the quiet joy you feel when you are together.

Friendship is an experience of connection. Friends remind us that we are not alone in the universe. We may be alone in the moment, seeking solitude or even isolated in pain, but we are always members of what William Ellery Channing called “the great family of all souls.” If we are wise we learn that lesson through our friends.

Again, Emerson, “We walk alone in the world. Friends such as we desire are dreams and fables.” Such dreams and fables can become real, they can become, “the solidest thing we know.” Seeking such relationships is one of the reasons why people join religious communities like this one.

When I started in the parish ministry it took me awhile to realize this. In my old congregation in Cleveland we had testimonials every Sunday. After the chalice was lit a member would get up and share why they had joined. Their stories were often similar and, for years, I was slightly disappointed with them. The service would start, the flame would rise up and someone would begin, “I come to this congregation because I love the community.”

“That’s it?,” my internal dialogue would run. “You come here because of the community? You don’t come seeking spiritual depth or because of all of the wonderful justice work we do in the world? Can’t you get community someplace else? If all you are looking for is community why don’t you join a book club or find a sewing circle? We are a church! People are supposed to come here for more than just community! Uh! I must be a failure a minister if all that these people get out of this congregation is a sense of community!”

Eventually, I realized that community is an essential part of the religious experience. The philosopher William James may have believed, “Religion… [is] the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude,” but he was wrong. Religion is found in the moments of connection when we discover that we are part of something larger than ourselves. Life together, life in community, is a reminder of that reality. People seek out that experience in a congregation because of the isolating nature of modern life. In this country we are more alone than ever before. A few years ago, Newsweek reported that in the previous twenty years the number of people who have no close friends had tripled. Today at least one out of every four people report having no one with whom they feel comfortable discussing an important matter.

Congregations like this one offer the possibility of overcoming such a sense of isolation. When there are crises in the world, or crises in our lives, a religious community like this one can be a place to discover that are not alone in our struggles. We offer a place for people to celebrate life’s passages and make meaning from those passages. Friendship requires a common center to blossom and meaning making, and breaking isolation, is are pretty powerful common centers.

Aristotle understood that friendship was rooted in mutual love. That love was not necessarily the love of the friends for each other. It was love for a common object. This understanding led him to describe three kinds of friendship: those of utility, those of pleasure and those of virtue, which he also called complete friendship. Friendships of utility were the lowest, least valuable kind and friendships of virtue were the highest kind. Erotic friendship fell somewhere in between. Friendships of utility were easily dissolved. As soon as one friend stopped being useful to the other then the friendship dissipated.

It took me until I was in my twenties to really understand the transitory nature of friendships of utility. I spent a handful of years between college and seminary working as a software engineer in Silicon Valley. I worked for about a year at on-line bookstore. When a recession hit there were a round of lay-offs and, as the junior member of my department, I lost my job.

Up until that point I spent a fair amount of social time with several of my colleagues. We would have lunch and go out for drinks after work. I enjoyed the company of one colleague in particular. I made the mistake of thinking that he was really my friend. He had a masters degree in classical literature. Our water cooler conversations sometimes revolved around favorite authors from antiquity, Homer and Sappho. “From his tongue flowed speech sweeter than honey,” said one. “Like a mountain whirlwind / punishing the oak trees, / love shattered my heart,” said the other. Alas, when I lost my job a common love of literature was not enough to sustain our relationship. My colleague was always busy whenever I suggested we get together. Have you ever had a similar experience? Such friends come and go throughout our working lives. Far rarer are what Aristotle calls friendships of virtue. These are the enduring friendships, they help us to become better people. Congregational life provides us with opportunities to build such friendships.

The virtues might be understood as those qualities that we cultivate which are praiseworthy. They are qualities that shape a good and whole life. A partial list of Aristotle’s virtues runs bravery, temperance, generosity, justice, prudence… Friendship offers us the opportunity to practice these virtues and, in doing so, helps us to become better, more religious, people. The virtues require a community in which to practice them. That is one reason why as we have been considering the spiritual and religious tools we need in this era of crisis we have speaking of the virtues in worship.

Let us think about bravery for a moment. The brave, Aristotle believed, stand firm in front of what is frightening not with a foolhardy arrogance but, instead, knowing full well the consequences of their decisions. They face their fears because they know that by doing so they may achieve some greater good.

Seeking a friend is an act of bravery. It always contains within it the possibility of rejection. Emerson observed, “The only reward of virtue is virtue; the only way to have a friend is to be one.” I have often found, when I hoped for friends, that I need to initiate the relationship. I need to start the friendship. I am not naturally the most extroverted and outgoing person. Many days I am most content alone with the company of my books or wandering unescorted along the urban edges–scanning river banks for blue herons and scouring wrinkled aged tree trunks for traces of mushrooms.

But other people contain within them possible universes that I cannot imagine. My human fellows pull me into a better self. And so, I find that I must be brave and initiate friendships, even when I find the act of reaching out uncomfortable or frightening. Rejection is always a possibility. I was rejected by my former colleague. Rejection often makes me question my own self-worth. When it comes I wonder perhaps if I am unworthy of friendship or of love. But by being brave, and trying again, I discover that I am.

Bravery is not the only virtue that we find in friendship. Generosity is there too, for friendship is a giving of the self to another. Through that giving of the self we come to know ourselves a little better. We say, “I value this part of myself enough to want to share it with someone else.”

We could create a list of virtues and then explore how friendship offers an opportunity to practice each of them. Such an exercise, I fear, would soon become tedious. So, instead, let me underscore that our friends provide us with the possibility of becoming better people. This can be true even on a trivial level. A friend visits. I take the opportunity to make a vanilla soufflé, something I have never done before but will certainly do again. We delight in its silky sweet eggy texture. It can also be true on a substantive level. A friend calls and inspires me in my commitment to work toward justice. He reminds me that we can only build the good society together. We can only do it by imaging the possibility of friendship between all the world’s peoples.

How have your friends changed your life? Emerson and Thoreau certainly changed each other’s lives. And I know that the two men, whatever their preferences for individualism, needed each other. I half suspect that Emerson’s tattered memory of his friend, “What was the name of my best friend?” was actually an urgent cry. As Emerson disappeared into the dimming hollows of his mind Thoreau’s light was a signal that could call him back into himself.

I detect a similar urgency in Elizabeth Bishop’s poem to Marianne Moore: “We can sit down and weep; we can go shopping, / or play at a game of constantly being wrong / with a priceless set of vocabularies, / or we can bravely deplore, but please / please come flying.” Whatever was going on in Bishop’s life when she wrote her friend the most pressing matter, the strongest tug of reality, was that she see her friend. Surely it is an act of bravery to admit to such a need. Truly it is an act of generosity to wish to give one’s self so fully.

Let us then, be brave, and seek out friends. Such bravery can be a simple as saying, “Hello, I would like to get to know you.” Let us be generous, then, and give ourselves to our friends, saying, “I have my greatest gift to give you, my self.” Doing so will help us to lead better, more virtuous, lives and may draw us to unexpected places and into unexpected heights. Doing so will help us to recognize the possibility of friendship, the community humanity among, inherent in all peoples. Doing so will equip us to thrive in an era of crisis and remember the promise of our faith tradition: someday, somehow, we will remember that we are all members of the great family of all souls and, so united, we shall overcome war and hatred to build the beloved community.

Let the congregation say Amen.

I would like to extend to you a personal invitation to join me and Rev. Scott today at 3:00 p.m. at a peace rally on Discovery Green. We will be joining with allies to raise our voices against War in Iran. We will demonstrate our solidarity with the people of the Middle East and against violence that would endanger millions of lives.

The Unitarian Universalist Association has issued a statement against a possible war with Iran in conjunction with several other faith organizations including the American Friends Service Committee, the Mennonite Central Committee, the Presbyterian Church (USA), the United Methodist Church, and several Catholic denominations. It reads in part:

As people of faith, we condemn the United States’ dangerous aggression towards Iran, including the assassination of Gen. Qassem Soleimani and the deployment of additional troops to the region. We urge the Administration to step back from the brink of war.

Our faith communities see the futility of war, and its power to dehumanize. We know that human flourishing entails breaking cycles of violence, being courageous peacemakers, and focusing on the root causes of conflict. Violent conflict is a path of mutual destruction…

As communities of faith, we renounce the escalation of violence, and call on the United States to work towards lasting peace with Iran.

I will be one of the speakers at this afternoon’s rally. I hope you will attend. If you do, and if you can, please wear one of your yellow “Side with Love” shirts. It is important today that all of those who are opposed to war and the use of assassination as a political tool make our voices known.

Happy New Year!

As I write this month’s column, I am in Michigan visiting my parents for the winter holidays. It is snowing outside – a soft blanket covers the ground and the roads alike. Winter weather brings a sense of peace and respite. There is a fire in the fireplace and I have spent the last few days enjoying my family and relaxing. Wherever you are spending the first days of the New Year, I hope you are finding a similar time to pause.

We are beginning a new decade and like many people, I find myself both taking stock of the last ten years of my life and looking ahead. Since 2010, my life has been filled with changes. My kids are bigger. One is a senior in college, the other is in Middle School. I live in a new city. It would actually take me several paragraphs to attempt to list all of the changes in my life.

The same would be true if I tried to list the changes in the world. It has been a mixed bag, filled with positives and negatives. Throughout the globe poverty has decreased, literacy has increased, and childhood mortality has declined. At the same time, the United States has gone through a severe recession and experienced a resurgence of white supremacist populism and white supremacist violence. The climate crisis has grown ever more urgent. And shifts in technology and the continuing rise of social media have accelerated the pace of societal change.

Ten years from now, the world and my own life will have changed again. Given the rate of change, it is hard to imagine exactly what society will be like. The climate crisis means that the next decade will be the most crucial in human history. It will determine whether or not we, as a human species, address the causes of global warming. Depending on the choices we make, ten years from now the world could either be in dire shape or on the path to a vibrant, sustainable future. Either way, it will be very different than it is now.

The fate of Unitarian Universalism over the next decade will be determined by whether or not we live up to our commitment to be a relevant religion. We will thrive if religious communities like First UU Church equip people to confront society’s challenges and adjust to its changes. We will fade into irrelevance if we do not.

While we answer the question of whether or not we are a relevant religion on a grand scale, we will also have to continue answering this question individually, on a personal scale. No matter what happens, in the midst of all the world’s changes, some things will remain constant. The cycle of life and death, birth and aging, will continue. The Earth will orbit the sun as it always has. The Moon will bring tides to the water. And people will need to find meaning in the rich mess of our lives. They will ask questions about the meaning of life and the power of love.

First UU Church’s challenge over the next decade will be this: Can we be a religious community that is relevant to the great crisis of the hour while at the same time providing a spiritual home for people throughout the days of their lives? I think First UU Church can. And because I believe this, I also think that the brightest days for both Unitarian Universalism and First UU Church are in the future. I look forward to seeing how the next ten years unfold.

love,

Colin

P.S. I would be remiss not to offer you a few final words of poetry. Here’s a mildly obtuse piece by Ravi Shankar that captures something of the feel of the New Year’s snow:

“Snowfall”

Particulate as ash, new year’s first snow falls
upon peaked roofs, car hoods, undulant hills,
in imitation of motion that moves the way

static cascades down screens when the cable
zaps out, persistent & granular with a flicker
of legibility that dissipates before it can be

interpolated into any succession of imagery.
One hour stretches sixty minutes into a field
of white flurry: hexagonal lattices of water

molecules that accumulate in drifts too soon
strewn with sand, hewn into browning
mounds by plow blade, left to turn to slush.

as preached on November 9, 2019 at the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Houston, Thoreau campus, Richmond, TX

The dedication of a new building for a Unitarian Universalist congregation is a momentous occasion. Every community is made better by having a place for Unitarian Universalism within it. Unitarian Universalists have long dedicated themselves to serving the wider community. Large and small our congregations have improved every city and town, village and suburb, in which they have been located.

In many cases our congregations have been the only places where people could freely gather to share their authentic selves and pursue their authentic truths. We have frequently offered the only religious oasis for the GLBTQ community. We have long been a place for political dissidents and critical thinkers who otherwise could not find a comfortable home. We are a non-creedal religious tradition. We welcome into our ranks atheists, humanists, and pagans alongside liberal, non-Trinitarian, Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, and Hindus. Historically, we have played a vital role in the struggle for justice.

In the nineteenth and early twentieth-centuries our forbearers opened their congregations to abolitionists and suffragists. During the Civil War, the first all black regiment from the North was funded by a Unitarian congregation in Massachussets. Some of the earliest women’s rights conventions were led by our co-religionists. In more recent decades, Unitarian Universalist congregations have played crucial roles in launching the public radio movement, sustaining the anti-war movement, confronting the AIDS crisis, fighting for civil rights, queer liberation, and women’s rights, and working for the environmental justice movement. Both the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People were started in our churches.

Our orientation to community improvement and building the just society comes from our theology. We are a this-worldly religion. We find this sentiment expressed by this campus’s namesake, Henry David Thoreau. The story is told that when he was on his deathbed a friend leaned near and speculated, “You seem so near the brink of the dark river that I almost wonder how the opposite shore may appear to you.” “One world at a time,” was Thoreau’s reply.

One world at a time; we Unitarian Universalists do not orient ourselves to some distant heaven. Instead, under the starry firmament of this cosmos and with our bodies placed upon the good soil of this planet we commit to journey through life together. Together we seek the truth, love each other and the human family as best can, and work for the just society.

This campus is named for Henry David Thoreau, a man who attempted to embody these principles. Thoreau was raised a Unitarian in Concord, Massachussets. Much debate has taken place over his connection to Unitarianism as an adult. The pertinent facts are these: he spent his entire adult life in the company of Unitarian ministers such as Theodore Parker, former ministers like Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Unitarian feminists, including Margaret Fuller and Elizabeth Peabody; his funeral service took place in the Unitarian First Parish Church in Concord, and was presided over by a Unitarian minister; and he resigned his membership from First Parish Concord as a protest against a minister’s unwillingness to speak out against slavery. He was, in other words, an archetypal Unitarian–an individual guided by his conscience and living in tension with a society that failed to meet his ethical standards.

Looking to Thoreau’s life we find four lodestones that we would be well advised to take as our own. These are naturalism, transcendentalism, community, and prophetic religion. Naturalism: Thoreau understood that we humans are part and parcel of the natural world. He counseled that the moral law was to be found by looking to the woods and the rivers. This is wise guidance for our contemporary age when we find ourselves ever more tied to the world of technology. His sense that human wisdom was found in the rushing waters and in the knotty forests led him to observe, “We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us.” The further we get from our connection to the natural world the further we drift from our own humanness. And so, it is good that this new campus we dedicate today is upon five acres of grass and brush–a space to play, a space to see the lights of the heavens, and a space to consider our connection to the great all of being.

Transcendentalism: Thoreau was part of the generation of Unitarian thinkers who came to be known as the Transcendentalists. They believed that religious truth is discovered through intuition. It was not inscribed forever in scripture. It was found by looking within and probing the mind’s infinite fathoms. They understood that the divine resides within each of us. “The highest revelation is that God is in every man,” Thoreau’s great friend Ralph Waldo Emerson taught in the gendered language of his day.

It is difficult to appreciate how radical Transcendentalism was in the nineteenth century United States. It was a religious philosophy that recognized that religious truth was not only found in the Christian New Testament or the Hebrew Bible. It did not point to Jesus as Lord and Savior. It was first major religious philosophy to arise in Europe or the United States that taught that the world’s religions all contained wisdom. It opened the way for people of European descent to turn to yoga, meditation, or the poetry of the Sufi teacher Rumi. It is why we Unitarian Universalists use the verses from many traditions in our worship services, such as these from the fifteenth-century Hindu mystic Mirabai: “What is this world? A patch of gooseberry bushes. It catches on the way to the one we love.”

There are echoes of Thoreau’s naturalism and transcendentalism in Mirabai’s words. This is not a coincidence. The Transcendentalists were the first major philosophers of European descent to look to Hinduism, Buddhism, and Taoism. They found beauty within these traditions and, through them, were inspired to connect more deeply with the divine. When we think of Thoreau and his fellow Transcendentalists we should remember that the moral law lies within but can be found in the wilds of the world, the wisdom of the great religious teachers, and among all those who attempt to live lives of conscience.

Community: Thoreau is often portrayed as the great American individualist. He went to Walden woods to experiment with self-reliance and find freedom. He built a cabin and tried to live by his own efforts. He believed in the sovereignty of the individual conscience. He felt that the slave holding war making society that he lived in was corrupting and wanted to see if he could live apart from it.

And yet, Thoreau’s individualism is only half of his story. He was always seeking truth through community. He and his friends constantly debated and sought to discover their higher callings together. Even in his retreat in Walden, in the cabin he built himself, he ensured that there was room for others. In his famous text he wrote, “We belong to the community.” Throughout his time at Walden he frequently visited his friend Emerson’s house for discussion and dinner.

Thinking about Thoreau we should remember that the success of the individual is rarely possible without the community. Yes, there is a tension between the community and the individual. But it was Thoreau’s relationship with his Unitarian community, that ultimately allowed him to blossom as an individual. Without the support of Emerson or others in his circle it is likely that he never would have succeeded as a writer or philosopher.

Prophetic Religion: Naming a campus after Henry David Thoreau must be read as an act of bravery. Thoreau is one of the most politically radical figures in European American history. It is possible to claim that he is the most important political philosopher that the country has yet produced. His essay “Resistance to Civil Government,” more commonly called, “Civil Disobedience,” is one of the foundational texts of the theory of non-violent resistance to government. Thoreau’s belief that the moral law lies within led him to believe that when there was a conflict between moral law and human law the only faithful, ethical, course of action was to choose the moral law. He wrote his famous essay after spending the night in jail for refusing to pay war taxes in support of the Mexican-American War, a war that, incidentally, ultimately brought the state of Texas into the Union and was fought primarily to expand slavery.

The influence of Thoreau’s essay can be traced through the great Christian anarchist Leo Tolstoy to Mohandas Gandhi to Martin Luther King, Jr. and to the mass movements of civil disobedience against injustice, tyranny, and ecocide today. Echoes of Thoreau’s call to the moral of conscience are found in Extinction Rebellion, Black Lives Matter, school striking for climate action, and on the streets in Chile, Lebanon, Iraq and elsewhere as people demand a better world.

Thoreau’s prophetic impulses made many of contemporaries uncomfortable. This is all the more true because in the years following his composition of “Civil Disobedience” he came to believe that slavery in South, including here in the state of Texas, could only be overcome with armed resistance. He was a vocal defender of John Brown. He called the man who led the armed raid on Harpers Ferry, the catalyst to the Civil War, “an angel of light” and compared the executed abolitionist to Jesus, saying, “Some eighteen hundred years ago Christ was crucified; this morning, perchance, Captain Brown was hung.”

Thoreau’s endorsement of Brown most likely makes many of us uncomfortable. I have certainly found it challenging to wrestle with. Just as I have found Thoreau’s statement, “The only government that I recognize,–and it matters not how few are at the head of it, or how small the army,–is that power that establishes justice in the land,” an inspiration in my own attempts to live by my conscience.

What Thoreau’s prophetic postions remind us is that the quest to live accordance with one’s conscience is never an easy one. The path less trod contains many a rock upon which we might stumble. It will often place us as an outlier to the wider society. And we may never know the impact our work for justice will have. Thoreau could not possibly have imagined the influence his essay on “Civil Disobedience” would enjoy across the globe.

Naturalism, transcendentalism, community, and prophetic religion, this campus has been named for Henry David Thoreau. The pillars of his life imply a charge for the gathered congregation as we dedicate this building. We are in era of profound crises: the resurgence of white supremacy, the climate emergency, and the assault on democracy. Let the namesake of this campus remind its members, all members of the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Houston, and people of good heart everywhere:

that we are part and parcel of the natural world;
that what happens to the green grasses, the rushing rivers, and the singing woods, will, ultimately, happen to our human species;
that there is a moral law within that we must follow in times of crisis if we are to lead lives of authenticity and spiritual honesty;
that there is but one human family and that there is wisdom spread across the planet;
that when we are confronted with injustice we are called to act;
that none of us, ever, is truly alone
and that every individual is stronger for being part of a community.

Oh spirit of love and justice,
that some of us call God,
and others know by many names,
we pray to you that
the Thoreau campus of the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Houston
will make the community of Fort Bend County
better by its presence,
it will provide a space for children to learn to make justice
and love the truth,
for adults to share and find their authentic selves,
and for all who cross its threshold
or hear its name
to know that here in Richmond, Texas,
there is a religious community
that embodies love beyond belief,
nurtures the good heart,
binds up the broken,
and engages in the difficult,
rocky,
work of building a better world.

Let the congregation say Amen.

as preached at the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Houston, Museum District campus, November 17, 2019

The Trappist monk, mystic, peace activist, and scholar Thomas Merton wrote about how he decided to pursue saintliness. One spring night he and a friend were walking along Sixth Avenue in New York City. The subway was being dug. The street was torn up–there were banks of dirt “marked out with red lanterns” lining sidewalks and piled up high in front of the shops. This was the 1940s. It was before Merton became a monk, when he was still a young man. Merton and his friend, someone who went on to become a noted poet, were arguing, passionately, about something.

Suddenly, Merton’s friend turned to him and asked, “What do you want to be, anyway?”

Merton recalls his answer, “I could not say, ‘I want to be Thomas Merton the well-known writer of all those book reviews in the back pages of the Times Book Review,’ or ‘Thomas Merton the assistant instructor of Freshman English…,’ so I put the thing on the spiritual plane, where I knew it belonged.”

Then Merton tried to formulate his response. He said, “I don’t know; I guess what I want to be is a good Catholic.”

Merton’s friend was not satisfied, “What do you mean, you want to be a good Catholic?”

Merton admitted that he was confused. And so, his friend continued to press him. “What you should say,” Merton’s friend informed him, “what you should say is that you want to be a saint.”

“A saint!… ‘How do you expect me to become a saint?’,” was Merton’s reply.

“By wanting to,” his friend said simply.

Merton was filled with self-doubt. “I can’t be a saint. I can’t be a saint,” he answered back. He recounts that in that moment, “my mind darkened with a confusion of realities and unrealities; the knowledge of my own sins, and the false humility which makes men say that they cannot do the things that they must do, cannot reach the level that the they must reach… cowardice.”

Merton’s friend would have none of it. He told him, “No. All that is necessary to be a saint is to want to be one. Don’t you believe that God will make you what He created you to be, if you will consent Him do it? All you have to do is desire it.”

Merton described this story in his spiritual classic the Seven Storey Mountain. It was the first major work that he published. For many people, especially of the Vietnam War generation, he went on to become exactly the person who his friend was prompting him to be, a saint.

Merton’s Catholic theistic theology may not resonate with most you but his narrative touches upon the theme of our sermon this morning. This is my second sermon for you on courage. We might define courage as the midpoint between fear and confidence. We exhibit courage when we acknowledge our fears, admit that there are ills which might befall us, and act anyway.

Last week I spoke with you about collective courage. Collective courage is the way that we can collectively face our fears and struggle to find new ways of being. It is the expressed in the seventeenth-century universalist phrase, “turn the world upside down.” It is the act of working together to confront social crises–great and small–and then attempting to reorder society.

This week I want to speak with you about individual courage. What I mean here is finding the courage to become the person you feel called to be. The theologian Paul Tillich wrote about finding “the courage to be.” We humans are born with the knowledge that we will die. We witness the mortality of others and realize that death will soon come for us. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but each breath draws us closer to our moment of expiration. This can make us anxious. No matter what we do–no matter how carefully we eat, how much we exercise, or how many doctors we see–the threat of death cannot be overcome. “The basic anxiety, the anxiety of a finite being about the threat of nonbeing, cannot be eliminated. It belongs to existence itself,” wrote Tillich.

In the face of our individual impending extinction it takes courage to continue along with life. And it takes even greater courage to be and to attempt to become, to recognize ourselves as poised on the existential void and still strive to live a life of authenticity. For Merton, it took an extraordinary amount of courage to pursue the vision of sainthood that he found with his friend that New York City night. It meant rejecting all of anxiety that told him he could not or would not or was unable to or that his life was too insignificant. Instead, it meant somehow moving past all of that and coming to recognize, in his words, “For me to be a saint means to be myself.”

The courage of becoming has long been prized by our religious tradition. In the nineteenth-century, the Unitarian theologian James Walker preached, “We are not born with character, good or bad, but only with a capacity to form one.” Our characters might be described as the total sum of our virtues and vices. Virtues are things about us which are praiseworthy. They are the accretions of our actions. Our actions become our habits and then eventually our habits turn to virtues–or vices–and these become our characters. And we Unitarian Universalists have long taught that we are not born with our character fixed in place–born wicked as many a conservative religious tradition teaches. But rather we are born with the capacity to become, the capacity to develop our virtues and vices.

Thomas Aquinas, the twelfth century theologian, identified four principle virtues. These are wisdom, temperance, justice, and courage. Over the next several months as we explore how to develop the spiritual and resources that will allow us to address the grave crises of the hour and of our lives we will be examining some of these virtues. We have started with courage because developing the courage to be is essential if we are to pursue the other virtues. Without courage it is difficult to gather the wherewithal to figure out how to be ourselves. William Ellery Channing, another nineteenth-century Unitarian theologian, wrote that the courage to become ourselves might even “be called the perfection of humanity, for it is the exercise, result, and expression of the highest attributes of our nature.” When we find it we open ourselves to the rich possibilities of life and confront the truth that we have a responsibility for forming our own characters.

Bob Schaibly used to frequently remind this congregation of this truth. During the two decades he served here he often told you some variety of, “life… [does] not have a meaning; we give life its meaning, or rather we give our lives their meanings.” Bob’s death this week prompted me to go read a number of his sermons. Reading them I found that he also often told you some variant of, “You already have within you what it is you need, and what it is that we who know you need, and what all the living things in the world need.” The recognition that life does not have an intrinsic meaning, the realization that we are born with what we need to pass our time on our muddy planet, it takes courage to face these truths starkly. It takes courage to admit to them and then open ourselves to becoming ourselves.

I spent a portion of this summer thinking about courage. As some of you know, Asa and I were in Europe for about five weeks with my parents. You might remember that everyone else in our family is in the arts. My father is an art historian and photographer. My mother was a ceramicist in her younger years and then, after she retired from teaching, served on a musem board. She, incidentally, makes all of my stolls. My brother is a figurative painter. His girlfriend is fashion designer. And Emma is pursuing a career in fashion photography.

Traveling with my parents meant immersing ourselves in the arts. We spent about a week in Arles, France at the giant international photography festival there. Rencontres d’Arles is even larger than Houston’s FotoFest. It brings close to a hundred thousand people to the ancient Roman city where Van Gough painted. It is a premier event in the arts world, a bit akin to the Cannes Film Festival.

My parents go most years. This year was very special. One of their closest friends, the Czech photographer Libuse Jarcovjakova was one of the featured artists. She was given the former Saint Anne’s church as an exhibition space. The building has been stripped of religious iconography. The stones have been washed white and a blonde wooden floor put in. The side chapels and the nave have been converted into a gallery that allowed Libuse to exhibit more than two hundred of her images.

Libuse is about the same age as my parents. This was her first major show. It would something of an understatement to say that it was a smash success. During the week that we spent together in Arles there were major articles about her work in the New York Times, Der Spiegel, Le Monde, and the Guardian. Walking around Arles with her was what I roughly imagine moving through Cannes with a well-known movie director. People stopped us in the street or came up to us and introduced themselves to Libuse while we ate in French cafes.

It would be fair to say that Libuse was in a bit of state of shock. In the space of a week she went from a complete unknown to an international art celebrity. And there are two things about Libuse and courage that I want to share with you. The first is about her art itself. And the second is about her life as an artist.

Libuse’s photography comes from straight from her life. It is her record of courageously becoming. Which is no small thing. She, as I mentioned earlier, is Czech. She came of age in Communist Czechoslovakia. She is also queer. To put it mildly, being a queer artist was not a form of authenticity that was largely tolerated by the Marxist-Leninist authorities. And yet, over the course of more than twenty years she took thousands of black and white photographs documenting her life, lives of those she loved and the lives of those she just happened to encounter. She used photography to attempt to make sense of her life. She told me, “Sometimes I was involved in very complicated situations. I used photography to get some distance for myself and to make some sense of the situation.”

The images that garnered the most attention were from the T-Club, which was one of only two gay clubs in Prague during the Communist-era. Never entirely legal, Libuse describes it as a place for: “Convulsive laughter and genuine tears. Insightful conversation and superficial coquetry. One-night stands and love for life. Beautiful young men and beautiful young women. Effeminate “B´s” and respectable-looking gentlemen, who rebounded from their families. Female footballers, waiters, taxi drivers and most probably the secret police too.” In this “place of eternal carnival,” as Libuse called it, people were able to find the courage to be themselves.

And Libuse took photographs of them as they lived that courage. This Transgender Awareness Week, one image in particular stands out. It is of a young postman from North Bohemia who traveled to Prague to visit the T-Club. He wanted to be a woman and gender transition was not possible for him in that repressive society. And yet, there is Libuse’s photograph. In it, the young postman appears as the woman he longs to be. She’s wearing a blonde wig, flirting with the camera, beaming in a long fur coat, courageously, fully, being herself.

Libuse empathy for her subject pops right out of the frame. I can only imagine the courage that was necessary to both take the photograph and be its subject. It is quite possible that either act could have cost the photographer or her subject their livelihoods. For Libuse, even the attempt to be an artist took courage. You see, she came from an artistic family. Both her parents were artists. But they were not the kind of artists approved by the Communist Party. They painted modern abstract canvases. The Party wanted socialist realism, which depicted working people living an idealized life under the Marxist-Leninist regime.

When Libuse graduated from high school the Party had its revenge upon her parents. They her made undergo what was called forced proletarization. In other words, they denied her a college education and tried to make her become a factory worker. She wanted to be an artist like her parents. She did not give up the courage to become. Instead, she told the factory officials that while she worked in the factory, she wanted to document the glorious life of working people had under the Party’s leadership. So, she took her camera and made photographs of people at work. But she did not do it in service of the regime. Instead of showing workers nobly toiling away, she took photographs of them engaging in their everyday acts of resistance–goofing, napping, ignoring supervisors, or doing whatever else they did when they showed up to the factory and did not work. I particularly like the images she made of the creative ways people found to sleep at work–under desks, in giant steel tubes, behind piles of wooden crates…

It took a lot of courage for Libuse to make such defiant photographs. Finding this courage was necessary for her to be herself–to become an artist when her society told her explicitly that she could not be one. It also helped her to develop a sense that courage and beauty are found in everyday life. In conversation with me, she explained a bit of her philosophy, “Doing photos of such normal ordinary things seems like it might be boring but photography changes things. Life is changing so fast that this ordinary thing will be very important. You don’t need to have some extraordinary adventure. You just need to be present to every day, normal, ordinary life. That is very special.”

It takes courage to recognize the specialness of ordinary life. We probably will not become famous religious teachers like Thomas Merton. And we probably will not become internationally known artists like Libuse. But we can find the courage to be ourselves. After all, this is what both Libuse and Merton recommend to us. It is also what the virtue of courage offers us. When we cultivate it we find within ourselves the ability to shape our character. We are born not good or bad but with the ability to choose and in order to do so we must be courageous.

I had initially thought to end our sermon there, but the events of the week require further observations about the courage of being. I speak, of course, of the week’s impeachment hearings. They have demonstrated extraordinary instances of the courage to be by civil servants. The women and men who have testified in front of the nation have offered case studies in how we can shape our own characters. They each have decided upon a profession and then performed its actions, cultivated its habits, and, ultimately, found them embodying its virtues.

It is clear that one of the virtues of their profession is courage. In the face of intimidation by the most powerful man on Earth, the President of the United States, Marie Yovanovitch, the former ambassador to the Ukraine, testified on national television. In a telephone call, the President of the United States had said to the President of the Ukraine that he was displeased with Yovanovitch and that she would “go through some things,” words that for me recall mafia movies. Yet there she was, in front of the world, offering information that may well lead to the impeachment of the President.

The philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre observed, to “be courageous is to be someone on whom reliance can be placed.” And in her testimony, Yovanovitch demonstrated that whomever the President might be she can be relied upon to perform her professional duties. It was a demonstration of how she had cultivated the virtue of courage. It was a demonstration of the courage of being–of embracing the role, the profession, she had chosen for herself.

Her testimony reminded me of words by the civil rights organizer, Ella Baker. Baker said, “I am here and so are you. And we matter. We can change things.” Baker’s words are an invocation of the courage of being. They remind us that we are here and that what we do matters. It takes courage to accept this, courage to admit, as Bob Schaibly taught, that we make the meaning we find in life. Yovanovitch was reminding the world that civil servants play a significant role in government. However much the President of the United States might slight her and her State Department colleagues, they remain actively involved in shaping the destiny of the federal government. And their professional virtues, of which courage is but one, are a significant reason as to why.

Not all of us are civil servants, just as not all of us are artists or great religious teachers. And yet, there is something about the courage to be that it is found in the lives of each person I have talked with you about this morning that recommends itself to each of us. It takes courage to recognize that we have within us the potential to be something and then courage to search for that something. It is the ordinary courage of life, not something extraordinary, and it is something we can find within us.

That is what Libuse tries to communicate with her photography. Her work is not of important religious leaders like Thomas Merton or successful government officials like Marie Yovanovitch. It is of regular working people like the woman from Bohemia dressed in her furs outside the T-Club, finding a space to courageously be the woman she knew she was despite having to live as a postman. It is of regular working people discovering the courage to be their human selves amid a brutal Marxist-Leninist regime–to goof off at work, to sleep on the job.

Can you find the courage to be and become? Such courage might mean admitting that you are uncertain of who you are supposed to be and living with that ambiguity. That is certainly something of what Bob Schaibly suggested in his sermons. Before we find the courage to be we must first discover the courage to recognize that it is we who make the meaning of our lives. In some times and places this is much easier to recognize that in others. Living in New York, the child of relative wealth and privilege, it was no doubt easier for Thomas Merton to accept that he could become who he wanted to be than it was for Libuse in 1970s Prague. Finding the courage to be a queer dissident artist under the Soviets and refusing to let the officials of a totalitarian regime be the people who made meaning from her life was extraordinarily difficult. It meant creating in secrecy, without recognition, for decades. And yet, she found the courage to be.

Can you find the courage to be and become? Have you found it? Can you accept that we make meaning in our lives? It is a significant responsibility. And it means accepting that our ordinary lives–yours and mine–can contain the meaning we give them. We might be hemmed in on many sides. We might not come from lives of privilege or have the advantages of a fine education or struggle with poverty. But we can find the courage to be and discover within ourselves the resources to make meaning in our lives. And to accept that such meaning will change over time. It is like Bob Schaibly said, “at different times the meaning of your life may have been to do God’s will, or to do justice, or to love mercy, or to enjoy the fruits of creation, to complete your education, to raise your children, to get these kids through college, and so forth.” Your meaning is your own if you can cultivate the courage to make it.

This belies the universe having cosmic meaning. And it takes courage to face that, as the poet Cristina Peri Rossi wrote:

“Se necesita mucho valor
para tanta muerte inútil.”

“One needs a lot of courage
for so much useless death.”

Death, like life, is only given the meaning we provide it. It takes courage to face that and to give our lives, and ultimately, our deaths meaning. And so, let me give the last words to Bob Schaibly who gave his life, and his death, meaning in part by serving this congregation, Unitarian Universalism, and our human world:

You already have within you what it is you need, and what it is that we who know you need, and what all the living things in the world need.

May we each, as members of this religious community and as members of the great family of all souls, cultivate within us the courage to find what we need within Bob Schaibly’s words.

Let the congregation say Amen.

as preached at the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Houston, Museum District campus, November 3, 2019

For about ten years I edited “Workers Power,” a monthly column that appeared in the labor newspaper the “Industrial Worker.” It was a forum for working people to share their experiences organizing a labor union. The people who wrote for it worked all kinds of jobs. Over the years I ran pieces by baristas and bartenders, bicycle messengers and truck drivers, grocery clerks, nurses, teachers, and a host of others. One of the wonderful things about the column was that it put me in touch with a huge range of people.

The prominent historian and labor lawyer Staughton Lynd even asked me, at one point, if he could submit something for the column. He wrote a beautiful piece remembering his friend Vicky Starr, one of the women who had organized Packinghouse Workers union in the Chicago stockyards in the 1940s.

Staughton’s profile of Vicky was a portrait of someone who had lived a courageous life. The Greek philosopher Aristotle defined courage as the midpoint between fear and confidence. He wrote, “whoever stands firm against the right things and fears the right things, for the right end, in the right way, at the right time, and is correspondingly confident” is the courageous person. When we are courageous we name our fears and then we act to address them. We act not with the certainty that we can overcome what we fear. Instead, we act holding onto the possibility that we can overcome. We find such a sentiment referenced in Abdellatif Laâbi’s poem “Life:”

I have seen what I have said
I have hidden nothing of the horror
I have done what I could
I have taken everything from love
given everything to love

Vicky had courage. She knew that the only way that her life and the lives of her co-workers was going to get better was if they acted together. And she knew that doing so carried significant risks. But that did not stop her from acting. When someone Vicky worked with lost a finger making hotdogs, she convinced everyone on the production line to put down their tools and walkout. The company quickly put in safety equipment. Unfortunately, Vicky was identified as a leader and lost her job.

A little while later Vicky was back at the plant. She used the name of a friend to get rehired. Over the next few years, she led short strikes when people died or were injured on the job. Vicky found the women easier to organize than the men. In order to recruit men for the union she discovered she had to go to where they hung out after work. Though it made her uncomfortable, she started visiting the bars they frequented. She learned to shoot pool and bowl.

Eventually, the union was established. Recalling the experience Vicky told Staughton, “You had this sense that people were ready to get together, to protect each other.”

The courage that people like Vicky exhibited was a common thread that united many of the columns. Workers sometimes wrote about getting fired and the difficulty they had in making ends meet as a result. Other times they wrote about standing up to a bully of a boss. Often the writers would reflect on how the courage they discovered while organizing on the job helped them to move from “low self-esteem” to exuding “confidence.” They would be courageous, confront their employer, win a modest victory and gain a bit of confidence in their ability to improve their lives. Some of these victories would be extremely modest–winning an extra bathroom break or new oven mitts for the kitchen staff–but each little victory would help them gain courage for their next action.

In their courageous acts, workers often exhibited a lot of creativity. In one the author described how he and his co-workers had forced their employer to pay them back wages that they were owed. They worked at a bar and hadn’t been paid in some weeks. They put up a picket outside and began handing out flyers with the headline “Free Drinks.” The text explained that since the workers were not getting paid the drinks at the bar should be free. Some customers went inside, presented the flyers to the bar owner, and demanded their free drinks. He was not amused. The workers soon got the money they were owed.

Courage often sparks creativity. It frequently comes when, in Martin King’s words, we find ourselves needing “to make a way out of no way.” It appears when, as Vicky said, “people… [are] ready to get together, to protect each other.” In such moments the ordinary rules cease to apply. People begin to imagine new ways of being and new forms of action.

Seventeenth-century English universalists used to call this the experience of “the world turned upside down.” It comes when, in times of crisis, people realize that the regular hierarchies of life–hierarchies such as class, race, and gender–are no longer serving them. And that in order to confront the crises they face they have to try to figure out a new way to live.

Have you ever had such an experience? Where you had to stop what you were doing and reimagine the way you and those around you related to each other? Where you began to find, if only briefly, a new way of being? Where you witnessed the world turned upside down?

Over the last few weeks, some of you will remember, I have been trying to draw your attention to the situation in Rojava. Rojava is the region of Northern Syria where the Kurds and their allies have been working with the United States military to destroy ISIS. The people of Rojava are the ones who were betrayed by the President’s decision to withdraw troops from Syria.

Rojava is important because the people there have been attempting to turn the world upside down. That region of the world is traditionally a very patriarchal culture. The people of Rojava have come to realize that movements like ISIS are based in patriarchy; and that the only way such movements can ultimately be defeated is by liberating women. They have inverted the social hierarchy and placed women at the top. They believe women’s “freedom and equality determines the freedom and equality of all sections of society.” And so, they have created a remarkable system of governance, which they call democratic confederalism, which says that every unit of society has to have both male and female representatives. They have an army led by men and an army led by women. Their town’s have two mayors–one male and one female. And, in order to fully turn the world upside down, the women have veto authority while the men do not. Now, obviously, this does not include all genders. But it is a radical reshaping of society–an incredible instance of collective courage–for a society where the alternative is a brutal system of patriarchal rule where women are treated as objects–even bought and sold as slaves–rather than human beings.

My own experiences of turning the world upside down mostly come from my work in the labor movement. When an employer refuses to address a health and safety concern and workers organize to deal with it anyway they are turning the world upside down. They are inverting the system where their employer gets to make decisions about their working conditions. Instead of management determining, for instance, if they are going to work with insufficient equipment they decide they won’t work until such equipment is provided. Sometimes, they might even provide it themselves–I know of more than one worksite where workers came together, bought equipment they needed, and then presented their boss with a bill.

Turning the world upside is a form of what we might call collective courage. This month we are talking about courage. This week we are talking about collective courage. Next week I will talk with you about individual courage. I start with the collective for two reasons. First, we are in a period of great social crises. This year in worship we are focusing on developing the spiritual and religious resources necessary to confront the grave crises of the hour: the climate crisis; the resurgence of white supremacy; and the global assault on democracy. We can only confront them by joining together. We can only address them by developing collective courage.

Second, if we are part of a community that practices collective courage then we are much more likely we practice it as individuals. The workers whose stories I edited for my column were not acting by themselves. They were part of a labor union. Their membership in such an organization gave them the confidence, gifted them the courage, to act and try to turn the world upside down. It would have been difficult, perhaps impossible, for them to do so, if they had been on their own.

The congregations that make up the Unitarian Universalist Association have been practicing collective courage and turning the world upside for hundreds of years. Our insistence that congregations should be run by their members was, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a profound act of turning the world upside down. The idea that all people had within the “likeness to God,” as William Ellery Channing taught, was a revolutionary one in a society that taught that people were born with original sin. The idea that congregation’s should select their own ministers was radical. It inverted the traditional hierarchy that placed the clergy in control of the church. Equally radical was the idea that ministers did not have a special relationship with the divine. We were understood to be people with special skills and a particular education that could guide the congregation in living its covenant and realizing its vision. Despite these skills, our congregants knew that they had the same relationship with the divine that we did.

At a time when kings still had divine rights, such a conception of a religious community was an act of collective courage. It was tied to our understanding of human nature. In the mid-nineteenth-century, the Unitarian theologian James Walker preached, “We are not born with a character, good or bad, but only with a capacity to form one.” People formed the congregations that became Unitarian Universalist as places to help each other cultivate good character. They believed that it was very difficult to develop good character on one’s own. It required participation in a larger collective.

Character, in the sense that our Unitarian forbearers used it, was not an idea unique to them. They were deeply influenced by ancient Greek philosophy, particularly Aristotle. Our character, Aristotle understood, was the sum total of our virtues and vices. Virtues are those habits of ours–those things we do over and over again until they become part of our very being–which are praiseworthy. Vices are, well vices, are the opposite.

We are a society more beset by vice than virtue. Voices of reason are telling us that if we are to survive as a human species we need to find collective courage and turn the world upside. This week the academic journal BioScience published an article signed by more than 11,000 scientists that declared “clearly and unequivocally that planet Earth is facing a climate emergency.” They warn that urgent action is needed if we wish to avoid “significant disruptions to ecosystems, society, and economies, [and] potentially makes large areas of Earth uninhabitable.”

At almost the same time, the President notified the United Nations that the United States would be withdrawing from the Paris Agreement on climate change. The Paris Agreement is the major international agreement suggesting how the human species might confront the grave emergency we face. And the President has decided that the United States should not be part of it. The impact of the decision of world’s largest economy to not–on a federal level–act and confront humanity’s existential crisis is likely to be significant.

In this era of existential crisis, we need communities that will help us nurture the necessary virtues to respond to what Martin King called “the fierce urgency of now.” The climate scientists are telling us that, in King’s words, “This is no time… to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism… It would be fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of the moment.” Chief among the virtues, the resources, that we need today, in this time of fierce urgency, is courage.

There are two practices of collective courage that we might nurture in this community and find helpful in our efforts to face the fierce urgency of the moment. Each of them was present in Vicky Star’s life. We can manifest each of them in our own. They are: fellowship and accompaniment.

The courage of fellowship is the courage of association. It means, building a community of people who might not otherwise come together. It is a core virtue of any congregation committed to the task of collective liberation. We find it described in the Christian New Testament as one of Jesus’s central activities.

For Jesus, it meant radical table fellowship. It was one of the most profound ways he challenged the powers and principalities of his day. He brought people together across social classes and across ethnic divisions.

The story is recounted in multiple gospels. Jesus had among his followers many tax-collectors and sinners. And they ate together. This might seem like a fairly innocuous activity. It was not. It was a great act of collective courage. In ancient Palestine, in the Jewish community, tax-collectors and sinners–by whom I suspect the text meant prostitutes–would have been some of the most despised people around.

In those days much of Jewish life was organized around ritual purity. Only the ritually pure could worship at the Temple. Only the ritually pure could find favor with the divine. Tax-collectors and prostitutes were not ritually pure. It was an act of social disruption to bring them together. It was an act of ritual impurity to eat together. It was a way in which Jesus turned the world upside down.

The Christian New Testament claims, Jesus, this great religious teacher, choose to eat amongst them and not amongst those who were already virtuous. I have suggested in the past that the key to understanding the Christian New Testament is found in Luke 17:20-21: “‘You cannot tell by observation when the kingdom of God will come. You cannot say, ‘Look, here it is,’ or ‘There it is!’ For the kingdom of God is among you!’”

The practice of fellowship is one way we bring the kingdom of God among us. In order to organize her meatpacking plant Vicky Star had to bring together, to engage in fellowship with, people who often hated each other. She brought people into the union who never would have talked to each other otherwise–black and white workers, Jewish and Catholic workers, Irish, Polish, Mexican, and Italian workers. It was by doing so that she and her co-workers were able to find the collective courage to address the challenges that they faced.

How might we apply the collective courage of fellowship to our lives and our religious community? After the service you will be having an opportunity to discuss my assessment report of First Church. We will be holding the first in a series of cottage meetings on the future of the congregation. Two of the things I have suggested you might wrestle with in the coming years as a religious community touch directly on the collective courage of fellowship. These are the questions, implied in my report: What is the vision of First Church? And who is First Church for?

That we will be having this conversation as a congregation is a legacy of our religious ancestors decision to, in their churches, turn the world upside down. For, it is ultimately you, the laity, who will develop your vision, your expression of collective courage, for this congregation.

This leads me to the collective courage of accompaniment. Staughton Lynd, and his wife Alice, have developed a theory of it. The Lynds names might be familiar to some of you. They are well known peace activists. Now in their nineties, they spent many years in late sixties and early seventies counseling draft dodgers. This experience led them to develop what they called the theory of “two experts.” They describe it this way: “The draft counselor was presumably an expert on Selective Service law and regulations, and on the practice of local draft boards. But the counselee was an expert on his own life experience, on the predictable responses of parents and significant others, and on how much risk the counselee was prepared to confront.”

The collective courage of accompaniment is one well suited for congregations like ours. Many of you are experts in particular fields–doctors, lawyers, social workers, human resource professionals, the list goes on. The theory of two experts is a way for those of us who have significant expertise in one subject to meet those we work with as equals. And in meeting as equals we practice the collective courage of turning the world upside down.

Staughton was able to write about Vicky because he and Alice had gotten to know her when they applied their theory of two experts to the field of labor history. Rather than presuming that they, Ivy League educated professionals, knew what the lives of working people were like they asked them. They gathered priceless oral histories of people coming together to collectively improve their lives and developed theories of organizing that have recently inspired Uber and Lyft drivers in their own efforts to create labor unions.

Members of First Church have practiced, without I suspect knowing it, aspects of the theory of two experts and accompaniment in your work with Neighbor-to-Neighbor. I have heard you tell me that when you work with partner organizations you follow their lead–offering the expertise and volunteer time that you have while letting them craft the agenda. This is an act of collective courage. For those of us who are used to being charge and making decisions, it means recognizing that people have an expertise that comes from their own experience.

I used my own understanding of the theory of two experts in my efforts to craft the assessment report that we will be discussing over the coming weeks. I met with more than forty of you to listen to your stories about First Church. And then, using my understanding of congregations and religious life, I attempted to use my expertise as a minister and a scholar to offer a portrait of yourselves. As the month proceeds and I listen to your responses to the report I will find out the accuracy of my portrait. And you will, as experts in your experience of First Church, get to decide how you want to cultivate character, craft collective courage, as a religious community in the coming years.

Fellowship and accompaniment can lead to the collective courage of action. That was certainly the case in Vicky Star’s life. By bringing people together and traveling with them on a journey she was able to help them act to improve their lives and to, perhaps only briefly, turn the world upside down.

In these days of existential crises, when the world can seem drear and dismal, collective courage comes to us well recommended. By practicing fellowship and accompaniment we might yet figure out how to make a way out of no way, and ultimately address the grave challenges of the hour. For, it is like the Unitarian Universalist minister Wayne Arnason has said:

Take courage friends.
The way is often hard, the path is never clear,
and the stakes are very high.
Take courage.
For deep down, there is another truth:
you are not alone.

In that spirit, I invite the congregation to say Amen.

A few people from the congregation I serve and from the broader Unitarian Universalist community have been asking me for more information on Rojava, the autonomous region in Northern Syria now under attack by the Turkish military and the reactionary Islamic militas that aligned with it. I have compiled this brief list to aid those who would like to learn more. I intend to update it as I find more useful materials. Here are some of the resources I have found useful:

Books

To Dare Imagining: Rojava Revolution, ed. Dilar Dirik, et al (New York: Autonomedia, 2016)
Thomas Schmidinger, The Battle for the Mountain of the Kurds: Self-Determination and Ethnic Cleansing in the Afrin Region of Rojava (Oakland: PM Press, 2019)

Web-sites and Periodicals Covering Rojava

Rojava Information Center, an organization devoted to providing journalists, politicians, and others with up to date information about what it is happening in Rojava
Emergency Committee for Rojava, an organization “to encourage and help facilitate coordinated action to end the occupation of Afrin and support autonomy for Rojava”

Organizations in Rojava

Kongra Star Diplomacy Rojava, a confederation of women’s organizations in Rojava
Syrian Democratic Council, Rojava’s political organization
Syria Democratic Forces (SDF), the umbrella organization for the aligned military forces of Rojava
People’s Defense Units, also known as the YPG, the main, primarily Kurdish, military organization in the SDF
Women‘s Protection Units, also known as the YPJ, the autonomous women’s military organization in the SDF

Organizations in Houston and Internationally

Kurdish American Foundation of Houston, a local organization celebrating Kurdish culture and community
Kurdish Red Crescent, a humanitarian organization with offices in Germany and Kobane providing medical aid to the people of Rojava. It is currently the only NGO remaining in the region

Twitter

Dilar Dirik, Political Sociologist and PhD student at the University of Cambridge, active in the Kurdish women’s movement
Kongra Star Diplomacy Rojava, official account of the women’s movement in Rojava
People’s Defense Units, also known as the YPG
Nuri Mahmoud, official spokesperson of the YPG
Rojava Information Center
Elif Sarican, Anthropologist based at the London School of Economics, active in the Kurdish women’s movement

as preached at the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Houston, Museum District campus, October 20, 2019

When I was twelve or thirteen one of my friends showed up to church in a suit. It was crisp and navy blue. It was paired with a lightly starched white shirt and a butter brown leather shoes polished to a glossy shine. With it, he wore a tie with a classic four in a hand knot that he done up himself.

This confused the rest of us. We were a group of perhaps half a dozen Unitarian Universalist kids. It was the late eighties. Typical Sunday morning garb consisted of the least sloppy tie-dyed shirt or punk rock pin festooned jacket that our parents could force us into. If we were going to be in the sanctuary for a special service–Christmas or Flower Communion–we might be strongly encouraged to wear jeans with no visible holes and some kind of shirt with buttons. But a suit? Who in our Middle School group ever wore a suit?

My friend, it turned out, had found religion. Or, more accurately, he found another religion besides Unitarian Universalism. He was at the beginning of his conversion process to some kind of fundamentalist Christianity. One Sunday it was his suit. Another Sunday found him enthusiastically talking about Jesus. A subsequent Sunday he told us that he had been “born again.” And a few Sundays after that we did not see him anymore.

He left and began attending a conservative Christian church with a grandparent. His parents and older sibling stayed in our congregation. Years later, I talked with them about why my friend had left Unitarian Universalism. They told me that he seemed to like the clear answers and structure that his new church provided him. It was organized around finding salvation through Jesus. The church leaders taught that the Bible had the answers to all life’s questions. Their preaching and teaching consisted of sharing these answers. And they claimed that the afterlife was more important than present life.

Our congregation was completely the opposite. In our religious education program we were never offered an explicit salvation narrative. We were never told that the Bible had all the answers. We were taught that our religious journeys consisted of asking questions and seeking answers. We were on a search for truth and meaning. We were not given clear definitions of either term. And we were told that our present life was more important than the afterlife. For, as Shakespeare wrote, death is “The undiscovered country from whose bourn / No traveler returns.” At best we can only speculate about what happens after we die. We are immersed in life.

Over the years, I have found myself thinking about my friend and the path he chose. In Unitarian Universalist circles it is far more common to find people who convert from some kind of fundamentalism to Unitarian Universalism than the other way around. Comedian George Carlin’s old joke, that he was Catholic “until I reached the Age of Reason” resonates for a lot of us. How many of you came to this congregation from a more rigid faith? And how many of you have a close friend or family member who left Unitarian Universalism for a variety of strict orthodoxy?

The nineteenth-century religious dissenter Francis W. Newman claimed, “God has two families of children on this earth, the once-born and the twice-born.” He went on to describe the once-born this way, “They see God, not as a strict Judge… but as the animating Spirit of a beautiful harmony.” Building off Newman’s dichotomy, the philosopher William James placed our tradition firmly within the category of the once born. He complained that we generally suffered from “an inability to feel evil.” And that we lacked an understanding of the religious experience of conversion.

Is that why my friend left Unitarian Universalism? Did he feel evil sharply and need assurance that it could be conquered? Did he think he could be born again and escape it? I do not know his answer. But I am unsympathetic to James’s claim that we do not feel evil. I do not think that most of you would accuse me of suffering from an inability to feel evil. If anything, I have been accused of being too “doom and gloom” and not optimistic enough to be a good Unitarian Universalist preacher.

It is certain that I am once born. I have never had a conversion experience. Nor have I left Unitarian Universalism for another faith tradition. I have found within our tradition resources sufficient to help me weather the crises of my life–of which there have been more than a few–and to help me come to terms with the tragic. I have found resources sufficient to help answer one of the key religious questions: What does it mean to lead a good life?

It is one of the oldest questions in religion and philosophy. My friend who left my youth group found a certain answer to it by looking into the metaphysical realm and discovering his connection with, and salvation through, Jesus. My own answers have been less certain. It was, in part, that ambiguity that made my friend uncomfortable. What truth I have discovered I have discovered precisely by embracing ambiguity and placing myself amid the rich mess that is a worldly life. This is why the words of humanistic poetry, like this snatch from Alejandra Pizarnik, resonate with me:

dice que el amor es muerte es miedo
dice que la muerte es miedo es amor
dice que no sabe

She says that love is death is fear
She says that death is fear is love
She says that she doesn’t know

I find a similar sentiment in these beloved words from the Chinese poet Tu Fu:

Every day on the way home from
My office I pawn another
Of my Spring clothes. Every day
I come home from the river bank
Drunk. Everywhere I go, I owe
Money for wine. History
Records few men who lived to be
Seventy. I watch the yellow
Butterflies drink deep of the
Flowers, and the dragonflies
Dipping the surface of the
Water again and again
I cry out to the Spring wind,
And the light and the passing hours.
We enjoy life such a little
While, why should men cross each other?

It is also present in my favorite verse from the Greek poet Glykon:

Nothing but laughter, nothing
But dust, nothing but nothing,
No reason why it happens

There are no certain answers to be found in these poems. There is no suggestion that we should be born again. There are just questions and a certain humility: “She says that she doesn’t know;” “We enjoy life such a little / While, why should men cross each other?” “No reason why it happens.”

The orientation of these poems is worldly. In their worldly orientation we find a hint of a Unitarian Universalist response to question: What does it mean to live a good life? Our tradition teaches that we are to root ourselves in the here and now. We are not to place our hopes in some unspecified future when we shall be dust.

But Unitarian Universalism teaches something more than that. That something lurks in the background of these poems. And it lurked in background of my friend’s departure from the congregation of my childhood. Unitarian Universalism teaches that we are shaped by the communities of which we are members. When my friend left our youth group he left one narrative about the good life for another. His new community made that narrative explicit. Our congregation was less clear, but the teaching was there.

It was not present in words. It was present in deeds. It was found not by looking to Jesus for salvation. It was found in the lessons we could discover in sharing our lives with each other. I do not remember anyone telling me that as a child. But as I have studied Unitarian Universalist theology over the years, I have come to realize that the teaching was present all along. Usually, it was offered implicitly rather than made explicit.

Early generations of Unitarian Universalist theologians used the phrase “salvation by character” to summarize their understanding of our tradition. This phrase signifies that we are to judge each other not by our creeds–what we say we believe–but by our deeds–what we do. Over time the choices we make, the things we do, eventually add up to who we are.

This conception of the good life, that we are what we do, was something that my home congregation gave us the opportunity to discover on many occasions. One Sunday morning from my youth group made a particular impression. By then I think I was fourteen or fifteen. We had a guest in our class that morning–someone who was a member of the church but who I knew only vaguely.

He was an out gay man. He was there to share with us his coming out story. This was Lansing, Michigan in the early nineties. At the time, the city only had one gay or lesbian bar. There was no pride parade. The local newspaper still occasionally “outed” local civic figures who were living in the closet in an effort to damage their careers.

Unfortunately, I only remember the outlines of the man’s story. He had attempted to live the “straight” life for years. He had come out after several years of being married to a woman. He told us that he had lived a lie. That he had pretended to be someone he was not. While he did, he suffered immensely. He was depressed. He considered self-harm. He engaged in dangerous behaviors. And then, finally, once he left the marriage, and he found himself. He was living a life where he was authentically himself. He had even found a man who loved him. And he and his partner had recently moved in together. And they were happy.

The story had an impact on us. We talked about it afterwards. A couple of the kids in my youth group identified as queer. The man’s story gave them permission to be themselves. And it gave all of us a role model, a resource, we could turn to if we were questioning our own orientation.

The religious path of salvation by character can be found in my vignette about my youth group. There are moral exemplars in the world. We can learn from them. We can model our lives after them. And maybe, just maybe, if we do, we might be able to become something like them.

The man whose story I recounted was undoubtedly far from perfect. I am sure he had struggles beyond his sexuality that he did not share with us. I imagine that, like most of us, he had his petty moments, that he sometimes spoke harshly to his children or his partner or that he held grudges. Salvation by character does not mean that we are perfect. It comes from an understanding that we can do things to make our lives and the lives of others better. We can make choices that lead us to live lives of authenticity.

We need a community to do so. My Unitarian Universalist community provided that man a place where he could share his story. And it provided us with the opportunity to listen to him. In those days, there were few other places in Lansing where we could collectively question the social norm that to be happy people had to be in heterosexual relationships. In those days, there were few places where that man could feel accepted and loved by his community, live his authentic life, and offer what he had learned to others.

Salvation by character, the life story he shared was not a clear path to salvation. It did not offer the neat narrative of the born-again Christian–which my friend had turned to. It did not tell us that there was a single solution, a single path that we all should follow. Yes, it did contain an element of transformation, the man left a life where he could not be authentically himself for one in which he could. However, his story was about embracing who he was in this world–not rejecting it. It was not a story about confessing his sins and seeking salvation through Jesus. It was a story about admitting to himself who he was and then having the courage to be himself.

Our lives are short and fleeting things. The words we had from Jimmy Santiago Baca are meant to remind us that we have only one life that we know and how we live it matters. Baca tells us:

Who we are and what we do
appears to us
like a man dressed in a long black coat

Lo que somos y lo que hacemos
se nos aparece
como un hombre de abrigo negro y largo

That man, presumably, is death. He warns us we must bring our lives to account, must constantly cash the promissory notes that are our actions until they become our very being. We each have only one life. Time is short and so, the man tells us,

“Sign it,”
he says,
“I have many others to see today.”

“Fírmalo,”
dice él,
“Tengo muchos otros qué ver hoy.”

Salvation by character, we are what we do. We learn how to live a good life in relation to a community. These are ideas are very old. They are much older than our tradition–something I hinted at in my invocation of seventh century Chinese and ancient Greek poetry. We might look back to Aristotle to find an early systematic treatment of them. He taught that the salvation we find in character is best expressed through the virtues. These are the elements of a good life, the things that we do which are praiseworthy–which we would hold up as examples to others.

The bravery of the man who visited my youth group was praiseworthy. He had been brave enough to leave an inauthentic life to discover one in which he was authentically himself. And that bravery was something he could help us discover in ourselves through his example.

Aristotle taught that these virtues were shaped by and informed by the community to which we belong. There was an element of what is called moral luck to this. Sometimes we are lucky enough to be born into a community or born with the circumstances to pursue a good life and sometimes we are not. Sometimes, as philosopher Martha Nussbaum has observed, things “just happen to” us. It is difficult to, in her words, “make the goodness of a good human life safe from luck.” Even as we seek to build a community where we might develop virtue–create a space where someone might share and live their authentic life–we find ourselves constantly buffeted by forces beyond control.

This, I suspect, is one reason my friend found comfort in his experience of becoming born again. It offered a permanent experience of salvation. Our once born humanistic path offers no such assurances. It, and the communities that sustain it, are vulnerable and can be lost. The good life of this world is not permanent, death, Baca’s man “in a long black coat” comes to all of us. Whatever salvation we achieve by character is at most secure for the span of our effervescent lives.

And here, as we near the close of the sermon, I am going to offer a final example of a community in which it is possible to pursue the humanistic virtues. What is happening with that community highlights the vulnerability of the good life. My transition is jagged; one of those moments when I like a jazz musician or house DJ, inelegantly switch between songs in the middle of a set. So, forgive me, as you might forgive the saxophonist who melody suddenly becomes discordant or turn tablelist whose record skips, as I jump from one thing to another.

I am going to talk about what is happening in Syria for a moment. Syria has been heavy upon my heart. In Northern Syria we find an example among the pluralistic community of Rojava of a place where it has been briefly possible to begin to pursue, to imagine, the good life. The people who live in Rojava are often called Kurds in the news. In truth, they are a multi-ethnic community of Arabs, Kurds, Yazidi, and others have spent the last several years imagining how they can create a space where they might be able to build a society where the good life is available to all people.

Following the withdrawal of the Syrian government from Northern Syria, the people of Rojava have attempted to build a community organized around three principles. These are direct democracy, ecology, and the liberation of women. Few accounts have made to the United States of exactly what this new society is starting to look like. The accounts that have emerged suggest that the good life imagined by those in Rojava is radically different than the one propagated by the oppressive, anti-ecological, patriarchal, regimes that normally reign in the region.

The people of Rojava have mandated that women must have a central role in society’s leadership. All leadership positions must be occupied by co-chairs–a man and a woman. There is also a man’s army and a woman’s army. Decisions are made at the local level, by those most impacted by them, and then coordinated across different communities. They attempt create ecological, democratic, and what we might call feminist consciousness in all that they do. This community is not perfect. Some reports suggest that while LGBT people are more welcome in Rojava than they are elsewhere in the Middle East they do not yet feel fully free to be themselves. But seven years is only a brief time to try to build a new society and invite people into a new way of being. I suspect that if Rojava survives it will, in time, become a society in which members of the LGBT community can be open about who they are and who they love. The openness to and encouragement for women’s leadership suggests that the people of Rojava are willing to make radical change.

Let me offer a brief pastiche of words from Rojava that hint at their new social vision. Here a few from Evren Kocabicak, a leader of Rojava’s women’s military wing. Three quotes: First, “nature is… a power that enables humans to achieve self-consciousness.” Second, “We have a system where every action, education or meeting is collectively evaluated; a system where such direct democracy is exercised.” Third, “Women may have a free personality and identity only so far as they have emancipated themselves from the hands of male and societal dominance and have gained power through their free initiatives.” Here are a few words from Dilar Dirik, a young Kurdish PhD student who left the region to study at the University of Cambridge. First, “All is sacred because it belongs to me, to you, to everyone.” Second, “Giving power to people who never had anything requires courage, requires trust, requires love.” Third, “Knowledge is everywhere, it needs to be valued and shared.”

I suspect that many of you hear resonances of Unitarian Universalist values within these words–of a conception of the good life that says that we must orientate ourselves to this world because we do not know what might happen in the next one. It is the society that has produced such beautiful visions that is now threatened with collapse. The United States withdrawal of troops from Northern Syria has given Turkey permission to invade. It has prepared the way for ethnic cleansing, a polite term for mass murder and dislocation. It has allowed ISIS cells to reactivate. And it has forced the people of Rojava to choose between an alliance with the repressive regime of Bashar al Assad and annihilation by the Turkish military. Their conception of the good life will almost certainly be replaced by something repressive and awful. In the words the Syrian scholar Hassan Hassan, the vision of Rojava is likely to be subplanted with a community ruled by “the worst of the worst.” Woman who have organized will be repressed and likely murdered. Democracy will be destroyed. And an ecological vision will be abandoned.

In the next week or two, we will be having an opportunity, as a religious community, to learn more about Rojava and the conception of the good life its members have. In partnership with the Kurdish American Foundation of Houston we are offering a forum featuring direct eye witness accounts of Rojava. It has not yet been scheduled. Once it is, I believe it will be the first such event in Houston. It will be a chance to learn about this new conception of the good life that after the current President’s betrayal is now under profound threat.

But for now, let us leave the subject of Rojava and attempt to bring our closing chord back into alignment with the rest of the sermon. What I have attempted to articulate, inelegantly perhaps, throughout this sermon is a simple message. We are what we do. We should orient our lives to the present world, which we know, rather the next one, from which we have, at best, scant reports. Whatever salvation there is to find we will find together. We will find it by lifting up what is best, virtuous amongst each other, and living authentically as we can: being brave, being honest, and nurturing the spark of brilliance, love, and hope that resides within each of us.

So that it might be so, I invite the congregation to say “Amen.”

Recently at the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Houston we’ve started doing a bilingual reading once a month. It is part of a larger project of using more Spanish in the service. We have a small community in the congregation who are native speakers and Houston has a very large population of who speaks primarily Spanish. Our small effort is an attempt to be a bit more welcoming and inclusive. For our October 20, 2019 we used “Dice Que No Sabe Del Miedo…” by Alejandra Pizarnik. There wasn’t an English version available so I did my own translation. Here it is (the orginal version is below for reference):

She Says That She Doesn’t Know Fear…
by Alejandra Pizarnik

She says that she doesn’t know the fear of the death of love
She says she does not have fear of the death of love
She says that love is death is fear
She says that death is fear is love
She says that she doesn’t know

Dice Que No Sabe Del Miedo…
por Alejandra Pizarnik

dice que no sabe del miedo de la muerte del amor
dice que no tiene miedo de la muerte del amor
dice que el amor es muerte es miedo
dice que la muerte es miedo es amor
dice que no sabe