February 2003

So Far What I Know

---

One of the joys of the suburban life is the time you spend in cars. This may not sound like much of a joy, but its primary benefit is the time it gives me to talk with my kids, especially my six year old, Allen. We constantly discuss all manner of issues, most typically while I'm driving him and his little brother to and from school, day care, or play dates. Allen is relentless in his questioning of me, because I have become a source of fascination to him. Boys love their mothers fiercely, I've discovered. But these questions he's asking me are not just about love. They are about comprehension. He is just wrapping his mind around the idea that I had a life before he was born. This is frankly amazing to him, and sometimes it's amazing to me.
So Allen asks me all kinds of things-did I have Pokéman when I grew up, or computers, or television, or cars or telephones? (How old does this child think I am, anyway?) And he wants to know if I had homework, and was it hard, and what kinds of things did I have to know, anyway, because, as he put it one night, “You're really smart, Mommy.”
Oh, baby, I wanted to say, if you only knew. I am not half as smart as I wish I were, I don’t know half of what I want to know, and don’t do half of what I long to do. I just do the best I can, with what I know so far.
What do I know so far, after 44 years, a couple of careers, two kids and 16 years of marriage? For starters, I know the importance of doing the unexpected, of breaking the rules. I am one of four siblings, and when we were younger, it was fairly easy to get us to be obedient, to follow the rules without question. But questioning, it seemed, always came more easily to me than it did to my brothers and sister. As I grew older I realized that rules were just as likely to be used against you as for you. When I figured out that rules were often designed, not to make life easier for everyone, but to make life easier for certain folks at the expense of other folks, I became less attached to obedience, and more attached to questioning.
This notion of breaking the rules is a life theme for me. I was watching a talk show a while back, and its guests included the author of a very popular book called “The Rules,” designed to help anxious single women who are searching for husbands. I stopped my channel-surfing long enough to note some of the author’s directives on how to catch a man, and I must say that listening did my heart good. It felt wonderful to know that, in meeting and marrying my husband, I had broken absolutely every one of the rules.
Subverting rules and expectations has always appealed to me. But here's what else I know so far: you can't live your whole life in reaction to events, or rules, for that matter. Sooner or later, I think, everyone needs a way of life that depends not just on what they oppose, but what they believe in. Some time ago, I knew I wanted a life that meant something. Typically, that is the desire that brings people back to church.
My favorite brother is a politically right-wing, born-again Christian. We love each other dearly, and long ago agreed to disagree. We both left church when we were kids, and we both returned to it as adults. My brother got back to church first, but to a wildly different experience than that of Unitarian Universalism, which he believes is a vague feel-good religion designed not to demand too much from any of its adherents. He tells me all the time, with only a slight trace of mockery, that being a UU suits me. And he's right about that, but for the wrong reasons. It suits me to be part of a non-creedal faith, with no arbitrary pledges to believe the unbelievable at the risk of my membership in a faithful community. But he’s wrong when he says being a UU isn't a very demanding task. What I know so far is that my journey to Unitarian Universalism, and my faithfulness to it, is a lot more difficult than my brother gives me credit for. Being faithful, after all, takes a lot of energy and thoughtfulness.
I can hear Brother now asking me, “What exactly is it that you’re being faithful to?”
Good question. Certainly, I’m being faithful to the purposes and principles that our congregations covenant to promote and affirm. I'm being faithful, as well, to a vision of the beloved community, a vision that has sustained us for generations, a vision which is known by many names. I’m being faithful to myself, and to my understanding of how to live in such a way that the things I say and the things I do and-dare I say it-the witness I attempt to make, are all part of a coherent whole.
What does that look like? Another thing I know so far is that most times, this task looks uninspiring and dull. It's a far cry from the stories of the great Christian martyrs of the early Church, for example, who rejoiced as they faced the lions within the Coliseum’s walls. I guess that's why they’re saints and I'm not. In my first year of seminary study, I was astounded by one of the primary texts, which recorded the words of one of the early Christian martyrs. Writing to his colleagues in struggle, he begs them to allow him to die, pleading with them not to undertake any heroic activity that might spare his life. He cautions them, “If I say no, don’t listen to me,” so anxious is he to prove a credible witness for the way of Jesus to the citizens of Rome. Not only credible, in fact, but also imitative. To be most completely like Christ, in the early Christian church, you had to die.
Some of my non-UU classmates evinced a certain amount of sympathy and admiration for the martyrs’ declarations. But I was unimpressed. When I was challenged by a colleague about why, I asked what was so admirable about dying for Jesus? Wouldn’t living for Jesus, witnessing to his life, performing similar works, have been a better choice?
Dying for faith, for principle, is a noble thing. But what I know so far is that living faithfully is the larger challenge we face. There are no grand gestures inherent in the day-to-day tedium of doing what you think is right. If you try to spend a day doing justice, loving mercy, walking humbly with God, the heavens are not likely to open. More than likely, you will be sick and tired of the attempt. So why bother?
When my car comes through the Lincoln Tunnel and I am met on the other side by a man who wants my spare change, I roll down my windows and say good morning and give him my change and smile. I didn’t always do that. But I hated the way I felt about myself when I drove by. I hated the way I felt about myself when I sat at the light, trying to figure out all my possible options, hoping to second-guess the man on the other side of my window, wondering what he was planning to do with the money. I decided I’d never know the answer to that question. I decided to act in a way that made me feel closer to the woman I wanted to be. I decided the woman I wanted to be was a woman who would wish a drunken man good morning and chide him gently about being sure to have something to eat sometime today, and tell him to have a nice day.
I know that when I do that, I am trying to live faithfully. I am trying to affirm the inherent worth and dignity of every person. I am trying to adhere to the Buddhist principle of right conduct. I am trying to recall the Biblical admonition to feed the hungry and the directive of Jesus to love your neighbor as yourself; I am trying to be my mother's daughter.
It was my mother, after all, who was my first example of faithful living. Undereducated, locked in an abusive marriage with four young children, she nonetheless made a life for us. Her steadfast love and attention made my life possible. I used to ask her, as an angry teenager, why she put up with my father, why she didn’t leave. She didn't leave, she told me, because she couldn’t care for us all alone. And because her own mother died when she was only a toddler, she wouldn’t leave us motherless just to save herself.
The truth is that I often cannot be like most of the people whose faithful lives I most admire. I am too cranky, too demanding, too willful. I do not even live in circumstances that demand the incredible sacrifices they made, so that theirs are the tests of faith I will never know. I know that I keep searching for the models of faithfulness, even when
I know I cannot live up to their examples.
I was in college the first time I read the story of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German Lutheran pastor who began his career as a theologian and ended his life as a martyr in the waning days of the Nazi horrors. But it was the kind of story to which I paid scant attention until I grew older and began to understand what can be at stake when we seek to live faithful lives. Bonhoeffer was a scholar, a man who lived much of life in his head. When he came to the United States to study at Union Theological Seminary he was quite critical of what he viewed as the sloppy scholarship of the American church. But it was in America, in conversation with classmates and followers of the Social Gospel movement, that Dietrich Bonhoeffer came to a clearer understanding of the call to a faithful life.
One of his classmates, Frank Fisher, one of the few black students at Union, took him to the Abyssinian Baptist Church on 138th Street in Harlem. Bonhoeffer taught Sunday School there for several years, and learned the African-American spirituals he would later teach at his clandestine seminary in Finkenwalde, Germany and at the University of Berlin. In America, Bonhoeffer was exposed to a faith community totally unlike the one in which he was born. He encountered a faith and a deep spirituality forged in the fires of struggle and pain and loss. He learned a different language of witness, a language that would serve him as he returned to Germany on the eve of Adolph Hitler's rise, a language that would inspire him to lead a movement against the pre-Nazi state churches.
His was a faith ultimately rooted in his vision of the church community as the visible presence of Christ in the world. But even if we find ourselves at odds with Bonhoeffer theologically, how can we argue with his deep sense of faithfulness to the country and the people and the God that he loved so much? His friends at Union, sensing the onset of the Nazi terror, arranged a fellowship for him and got him out of Germany. He was safely in New York City, preparing to teach and lecture throughout the U.S. when, during a tortuous few days, he decided to return to his country, against the advice of everyone he knew and loved. He wrote a letter to the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr in July of 1939 that included these words:
I have come to the conclusion that I have made a mistake in coming to America. I must live through this difficult period of our national history with the Christian people of Germany. I will have no right to participate in the reconstruction of Christian life in Germany after the war if I do not share the trials of this time with my people. My brethren in the Confessing Synod wanted me to go. They may have been right in urging me to do so; but I was wrong in going. . . .Christians in Germany will face the terrible alternative of either willing the defeat of their nation in order that Christian civilization may survive, or willing the victory of their nation and thereby destroying our civilization. I know which of these alternatives I must choose; but I cannot make that choice in security.
By 1940, he had become a part of the Resistance movement in Germany; by 1943, he was arrested and imprisoned; by 1945, in the waning days of the war, he was hanged at the Flossenburg death camp.
I know Bonhoeffer speaks to me more deeply than the martyrs of the early Christian church. I think that's because he was more determined to live faithfully until he died. And in his death-a death he prayed to avoid, yet knew he would not-he became an avenue of grace for those who knew him and for those he left behind.
What do I know? I know that in every community of faith there are those with troubled minds and burdened spirits. Each of us has sorrows and regrets of which we have not spoken, perhaps not to anyone at all.
I also know that even with our burdens, we can bear our difficulties with grace and create paths of change in our lives. I know that there is blessing to be found when we put aside our own pain for a time, and move to ease the pain of another.
We may never be called upon to make the great, heroic gesture of giving up our lives. It may or may not be our destiny to change the world. But witnessing to the possibilities of goodness in what appears to be a hopelessly broken world-that we can do. These are the things I know so far. These are things I hope my sons will one day know. These are the things I pray they will keep, and ponder in their hearts.

---

Most days are ordinary days, and I go about my business. I run into a former intern, and he tells me about a deeply moving lecture he attended. I get a phone call, and the person on the other end of the line talks about lunch at a Japanese noodle shop, and how her conversation at the table had been transformational. A colleague feels fully and profoundly changed by the fact of an enterprising squirrel in a busy section of the city.
I begin to feel jaded, as though brushing my teeth is supposed to be deeply moving, and crossing the street transformational. I begin to wonder what ever happened to capital “T” Transformation, where lives are changed and spirits are truly renewed for the long haul.
But then again, I know that nobody preaches the message of the wonder of small things more than I do: to see majesty in the ordinary; to find meaning in the every day. In the words of William Blake, “To see a World in a Grain of Sand/ And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,/ Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand/ And Eternity in an hour.” That’s what I preach: everyday transformation.
So I got to thinking about how maybe I talk too much about the importance of day-to-day perspective, at the expense of deeper transformation. Sometimes we change our lives not only by noticing the grains of sand and the wild flowers, but also by taking charge of our lives in big, huge ways. We decide we want to try to give birth or adopt children, or we make the decision to move into an assisted living complex, or we pack our bags and join the Peace Corps, or in the midst of an errand, we simply stop by the desert’s edge until clarity appears about giving up the driver’s license, training as a Web designer, or abandoning professional tennis and giving belly-dancing a serious try. We decide, we choose, we act. We jump-start the process of life’s transformation.
Sometimes, of course, we are just living our lives, and an unpredictable circumstance arises-serious illness, for example-and we decide to make the best use we can of that circumstance. We hadn’t been out there looking for deeply meaningful experiences or transformation, but the occasion arose, and we could either knuckle under or adopt a positive perspective. Somehow we had the spunk to transform our outlook and gain from the experience.
So it was with the columnist and author Anna Quindlen, who wrote, “It was very cold the night my mother died. She was a little older than I am today, a young woman with five young children who had been eaten alive by disease, had wasted away to a wisp, had turned into a handful of bones wound round with pale silk . . . It was not until the aftermath of my mother’s death that I began to realize that I would have to fashion a life for myself-and that is what I have been trying to do, in a workmanlike way, ever since. This seems rather ordinary to me now, but at the beginning it was odd and frightening. Up until that point life had fashioned me. There had been almost no decisions for me to make, in part because I was not permitted to make them, and in part because I saw no path other than the one I was on . . . . And then a kind of earthquake in the center of my life shook everything up, and left me to rearrange the pieces.”
Part of what we do as religious people is rearrange the pieces after an earthquake shakes everything up. And part of what we do is ask ourselves during ordinary times if it’s time to initiate a transformational experience. In her poem, “Now I Become Myself,” May Sarton says,
Now I become myself. It’s taken
Time, many years and places;
I have been dissolved and shaken,
Worn other people’s faces,
Run madly, as if Time were there,
Terribly old, crying a warning,
"Hurry, you will be dead before-”
(What? Before you reach the morning?
Or the end of the poem is clear?
Or love safe in the walled city?)
Now to stand still, to be here,
Feel my own weight and density!
. . . .
All fuses now, falls into place
From wish to action, word to
silence,
My work, my love, my time, my face
Gathered into one intense
Gesture of growing like a plant. . .
That’s what we do as Unitarian
Universalists, we fuse and fall into place. We face the big transformational issues, take a hand in fashioning our lives, and, with luck, we come out ahead. May our spirits be strong for the task, and may we feel grateful for the chance.

Have you transformed your life? Made decisions that changed everything? Will you tell us about it? Please send your story to clf@uua.org, fax it to (617) 523-4123 or mail it to Jane Rzepka, Church of the Larger Fellowship, 25 Beacon Street, Boston, MA 02108. We hope to be able to print some of them in an up-coming issue of Quest.

---

REsources for Living
by Dan Harper, interim director of religious education, Church of the Larger Fellowship

"The Bible is like Santa Claus and sex. Children hear about it on the playground or on the street, whether or not their parents discuss it with them. And as an adult, if you don't enjoy it and wish to abstain, you can successfully avoid it only by taking extreme measures such as total social deprivation or profound isolation."
The Rev. David McFarland (from the pamphlet "UU Views on God")

When it comes to the Bible, it's a truism that Unitarian Universalists can't come to any agreement. There are Christian Unitarian Universalists for whom the Bible is central to their faith. There are other Unitarian Universalists who have a strong negative reaction to the Bible, and want to have nothing to do with it. Most of the rest of us are probably somewhere in the middle.
I believe it's important for UU families to include something about the Bible in a well-rounded religious education program. The Bible lies at the roots of our Unitarian Universalist tradition and is the source of several of the UU principles. And as David McFarland points out in the passage above, mostly we don't have a choice about whether to present the Bible to kids. In most of the Western Hemisphere, the surrounding culture begins to introduce the Bible, God, and Jesus to our children at a very young age. (I know I've had 3 year olds ask me who God and Jesus are!) That makes it important for us to present our own liberal views on the Bible.
This doesn't mean, however, that you have to cover the whole Bible. The Rev. Barbara Marshman, a long time UU religious educator, once said that the Bible is like a huge banquet, with many different dishes. You don't have to eat all the dishes, and it's OK to choose the ones that most appeal to you. (For example, there are stories of rape and incest in the Bible that we may not want to share with children.)
For younger children (aged 5 to 7), try using the book Hide and Seek with God by UU religious educator Mary Ann Moore. With chapters like "People Have Different Ideas about God," it's perfect for UU families, who may or may not relate to conventional conceptions of God. For older children (aged 8 through 12), try From Long Ago and Many Lands, compiled by UU religious educator Sophia Fahs, with five stories from the Hebrew Bible and four from the Christian Scriptures, along with many other tales from around the world. These two books, available through the UUA bookstore or from the CLF Loan Library, include many of the Bible stories that UU children should be introduced to. To use these stories in religious education, you might want to use the sample lesson plan in the CLF booklet Religious Education at Home: A Handbook for Parents. CLF's "Between Sundays" web site-www.clfuu.org/betweensundays/-has sample stories from both of these books.
Adults and highschoolers may want to read the Bible directly. Start by reading the pamphlet "UU Views of the Bible," available online at: http://dev.uua.org/pamphlet/3042.html (or call the CLF office for a paper copy), to get a sense of how other UUs respond to the Bible. But the Bible is a huge collection-which books of the Bible should you start off with? Because it's so much a part of our cultural inheritance, every UU should read the book of Genesis, with its stories of Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Noah, Abraham, and Joseph. The book of Exodus, with its story of liberation from slavery and religious freedom, is also on the must-read list from the Hebrew Bible. As for the Christian scriptures, the stories of Jesus contained in the books of Matthew, Mark and Luke are central.
These five books-Genesis, Exodus, Matthew, Mark, and Luke-form a solid introduction to the Bible for UU teens and adults. The Harper Collins Study Bible uses a good translation and has short introductions and extensive footnotes for each book of the Bible. Another great resource for teen and adult UUs studying the Bible is The Women's Bible Commentary, edited by Carol Newsom and Sharon Ringe (Westminster John Knox Press, about $24 at major online booksellers). There's a short introduction and commentary for each book of the Bible that can help give you a fresh perspective on the Bible (including a chapter on the book of Proverbs by CLF member Dr. Carole Fontaine). I promise this book is a great discussion starter.
Always, though, the key element of a Unitarian Universalist approach to the Bible is to think critically and rationally as well as metaphorically and intuitively. Unitarian Universalists do not take the Bible literally. At the same time, we do not claim to have the final answer about the Bible. We approach the Bible with open minds and open eyes, ready to accept what is good and true, and ready to be skeptical when skepticism is appropriate. More than anything else, it is this that we adults need to teach our children, and to constantly relearn for ourselves.

Quest February 2003 Contents

---

Make Love, Not War: The Story of Saint Valentine

by Eliza Blanchard, ministerial intern, Church of the Larger Fellowship

Even UUs can agree that we could use more love in the world. During times of global upset, this need is especially acute. In recognition of this need, we offer this look at the pagan and Christian roots of the celebration we call St. Valentine’s Day.
It began as the Roman feast of Lupercalia, in honor of the god Lupercus, who protected the city from wolves and other enemies. The holiday evolved into an early spring festival honoring Juno, the goddess of marriage. Young men chose their female partners for the duration of the feast by lottery.
Confusingly, there were two Valentines, both Christians in a time of persecution and both put to death on the same day, February 14, 270 C.E.. The holiday we know probably arose from tales about the Roman priest, Valentinus, who was imprisoned for aiding Christian martyrs. Other legends say that he was imprisoned for marrying Roman soldiers when such marriages were forbidden.
As the story goes, he appeared before the emperor Claudius II, and attempted to convert him. In response to Claudius’s question “Why not worship idols?” Valentinus is said to have responded that idols were manmade and therefore rotten. Not the tactful answer! Claudius sentenced him to be clubbed, stoned and then beheaded.
Another legend has it that Valentinus befriended and tutored his jailer’s daughter, a blind girl, who miraculously regained her sight. She sent him a note to thank him and his response was signed, “Your Valentine.” Here begins the Hallmark story.
By 496 C.E., Christianity was the dominant religion, and Pope Gelasius no longer approved of the holiday of Lupercalia, even though Christian priests had been substituting names of Christian saints for the names of young women in the lottery. He declared the day sacred to the memory of St. Valentine, and by 1400 all of Europe celebrated this holiday of love with cards, hearts and tokens of affection.
We offer the prayers that follow as a valentine to the world in times so in need of love.

Quest February 2003 Contents

 

---

We All Need A Skyhook

by Dr. George Richardson, long-time CLF member, and author of “Chickadees”

Responding to the curiosity of the Quest staff, Dr. Richardson was kind enough to send along the following information about his faith, his life and his creativity.

I became affiliated with UUism before I knew it, from my birth in 1921. Both my grandfathers were Unitarians. Our family practice consisted of going to the local church for Easter Sunday and to funerals, but not otherwise. I can’t think why Easter seemed so important to family UUs, who never discussed religion in the intervals. My surgeon-father’s answer to our metaphysical questions as children was: “You’ll have to decide about that for yourselves.’”
The three of us had challenging childhoods. Our mother died a few days after I was born. Ten years later my father, then 50 years old, a professor of surgery at Harvard Medical School and chief of the teaching service at Massachusetts General Hospital, had a major paralytic stroke. He survived, enjoying a remarkably full life in the midst of disability, for almost fifteen years. We children also survived, and thrived, in our various ways. My older brothers, now deceased, were Edward Peirson Richardson, ultimately Bullard Professor of Neuropathology (the study of operative and post mortem specimens of brain and spinal cord) at Harvard Medical School, and Elliot Lee Richardson, who held many cabinet positions in the Nixon and Ford administrations. Eliot was best known for his resignation when Nixon tried to duck investigation of the Watergate affair.
I graduated from Harvard Medical School in 1946 and trained in surgery at Massachusetts General Hospital. I stayed on, became involved in laboratory work on hormones, and moved from surgery to gynecology. I was an Associate Professor of Surgery at Harvard Medical School. For several years, until 1987, I was Acting Chief of the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Massachusetts General Hospital.
Like my brother Elliot, who majored in philosophy at Harvard, I have had a lifelong interest in philosophy and religion, and, specifically, in Unitarianism and its history. I began going to the First (now First and Second) Church in Boston in the 1950s, enjoying in the first half hour the beautiful music and spiritual quiet, and in the second the rigorous, questioning sermons of Duncan Howlett. I have remained, happily, basking in the long ministry of Rhys Williams, and now enjoying the warmth and welcome of Stephen Kendrick.
Now in retirement, I write poetry, aided and supported by participating in workshops where we all share and discuss our work. I read more news and science than poetry, however. In my poems I try to think hard, to focus, and to eliminate what is not true to life. I believe that we all need a skyhook, we all need an anchor, we all need to live by faith. That’s all we need to believe, and we should believe it deeply. To go wide of that mark courts disagreement about things that are beyond “rational discussion.”
In response to a question about the image of the skyhook, Dr. Richardson added: “One thought is that the skyhook is suspended from the point at which all that is best in us humans converges. Of course, there’s more to ourselves than our consciousness, let alone our intelligence. When I was a child I could not conceive of adult love as I came to know it later. It came to me as a new world. But it was always there, in me, even though I didn’t know it. Faith is there, in the same sense. Faith is life believing in itself.”

Chickadees
In winter snow and cold
Venetian blinds
cross-slat the window,

a musical staff,
where, on a jungle gym of twigs
the notes are a melody

of shadows
of bouncing chickadees.
Lighter than half an ounce,

a tablespoon of water,
they needle the bark
for invisible food.

Their bodies are warmer
than ours, though the wind
is so close to their hearts.

Their cheerful bounce
is work-to make fat,
to make heat -to stay alive,

and yet they give:
they give us joy,
and their belief
in life!

By George S. Richardson, M.D.,
CLF member

Quest February 2003 Contents

---

On-line course offered
CLF will offer a four session on-line course on Unitarian Universalism beginning on Monday, March 3rd and ending on the week of March 24th. Together we will explore our own spiritual journeys, the background of Unitarian and Universalism, its more recent history and social action roles, and end with a bit about CLF, past and present. We will be live on-line once a week to share our ideas. To register, please e-mail Eliza Blanchard, student minister, at eblanchard@uua.org . Space is limited, so don’t delay!

General Assembly
is the yearly meeting of the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations. The myriad programs, business events, and exhibits provide a rich experience to the thousands of UUs who attend each year. Not only can GA offer a unique way to interact with other Unitarian Universalists, it is CLF’s once-a-year opportunity to meet and greet each other. The CLF board and staff look forward to seeing as many of you as possible in Boston, June 26-30, 2003.
www.uua.org/ga or call 617-948-4209

New announcements list:
A low volume email list has been created for CLF members, for announcements, links to special features, and other news. To join, go to: uua.org/mailman/listinfo/clf-announce or send email to clf-announce-request@uua.org containing: subscribe your-real-name (as known to CLF). We hope you will join this list, as it will be a central way for us to keep in touch.

Come with us to GA!
(At Least in Spirit)
Calling all CLFers! You are cordially invited to attend the 2003 General Assembly in Boston, even if you can’t travel. Send along a photograph of yourself or a picture postcard of your hometown (or both) and we will take you with us to Boston. We will once again have a CLF Members’ Wall in our booth at the GA exhibit hall where visitors and CLFers at GA can get to know a bit about our members. This is also a great way for the CLF staff to get to know you all, too. So, please send your photos/postcards along right away-before you forget. See you in Boston (even if you won’t see us)!

A “Delegate Issue”
If you would like to represent the Church of the Larger Fellowship at General Assembly this year, it’s not too soon to start planning. The CLF is entitled to have 22 delegates at the General Assembly in Boston from June 26 to 30, 2003. If you are interested in serving as a delegate, please contact the CLF office to apply. As a delegate you will be able to vote on Statements of Conscience, UUA bylaw changes, resolutions, and Actions of Immediate Witness. And of course you'll be able to attend workshops, concerts, programs, and worship services galore, while meeting Unitarian Universalists from near and far.
Our delegates are asked to attend the CLF Annual Meeting and the CLF Worship Service and to work a minimum of three hours in the CLF booth. You can meet our minister, the Rev. Jane Rzepka, and the CLF staff, too.
If you’d like to participate in GA 2003 by representing the CLF as a delegate, your costs, in addition to your travel, include adult full-time registrations ($240 per adult), hotel rooms at about $130 a night (this figure may increase), and meals. Call the CLF at 617-958-6166 and speak to Lorraine or e-mail us at clf@uua.org before March 31 to indicate your interest. Visit the UUA's GA Web site at www.uua.org/ga/ga03.html for 2003 details.

Quest February 2003 Content

---

From the Jewish tradition:

O God, who makes peace and harmony
In the heavenly spheres,
Help your bewildered humanity understand
The futility of war
And hatred and violence.
How long, O loving God,
Will we continue to kill in Your name?
How long will we refuse to register
The unalterable fact that
All human creatures on this earth
Are brothers and sisters?
Help us to understand
That the search for peace
And well-being is not weakness
Nor lack of conviction, but rather the only way to insure continued life
On this planet upon which
You have placed us.
Help us prove ourselves worthy
Of Your creation,
God of all space
And time and worlds.

From the Christian Tradition:

Eternal God,
Shepherd of every hope,
Refuge of every bewildered heart,
Hear our prayer for peace in the Middle East.
Save us from weak resignation to violence.
Teach us that restraint is the
highest expression of power,
That thoughtfulness and tenderness are marks of the strong.
May we never for a moment forget that all are fed by the same food,
Hurt by the same weapons,
Have children for whom they have the same high hope as do we.
May we not weary in our efforts to fashion out of our failures today
Some great good for all thy people tomorrow.

From the Muslim tradition:

God, Lord of the universe,
Be merciful and compassionate.
Have mercy upon us and illumine our way, our hearts and our minds in this hour.
God, Lord of all dominion,
Whose hand is all good,
Give our leaders humility, wisdom and good judgment. Help us all to diffuse this crisis peacefully
Before it plunges us into a whirlpool of senseless suffering, bloodshed and war.
Heal us, our compassionate Lord,
Heal our folly by your wisdom,
Heal our arrogance by your forgiving love,
Heal our greed by your infinite bounty
Heal our insecurity by Your healing power.
God, guide us to Your ways,
Ways of righteousness and peace.
Bring us peace, O Lord of peace.

The above three prayers are adapted from those put out by the U.S. Interreligious Committee for Peace in the Middle East

From the Unitarian Universalist tradition

Great Mystery incarnate in every person, transcending personal beings, and dwelling among us in the midst of our relationships, we need your help.
In a world torn by violence and fear, do not let our hearts be hardened. Let us embrace those who are in need of our support.
Help us to move beyond seeking justice to seek a world governed by grace. Help us to know what needs to be done and do it.
Where we find suffering, may we bring compassion.
Where we find fear, may we bring courage.
Where we find hate, may we bring love.

by Duane Fickeisen, co-minister, UUs of the Cumberland Valley, Bolling Springs, PA.

Quest February 2003 Contents

Last updated June 12, 2005