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Tightrope Walking for Beginners: The Art of Balanced Living Online course starts May 15 and runs four weeks, $40 fee
In this course, you will gain a simple tool to look at your own life in terms of eight dimensions of balance. Then, after becoming more clear about your personal strengths and values, you will create at least one plan to move toward your vision of balanced living.
The facilitator for this course is the Rev. Dr. Maureen Killoran, a UU minister and professional life coach whose passion is helping people use their personal strengths to make positive life change.
You can sign up for this and other CLF courses by going to "Online Courses" under the Religious Education menu on the CLF web site.
Our Annual Meeting: Notice to all members of the Church of the Larger Fellowship, Unitarian Universalist Per Article VII, Sections 1 and 2, of the Church of the Larger Fellowship (CLF) Bylaws, the 25th Annual Meeting will be held on June 22, 2006 at the America's Center in St. Louis, immediately following the CLF worship service. The purpose of the meeting is to:
Tad Crawford, Clerk May 1, 2006
Did You Know... that online CLF Religious Education materials are all indexed? Look under "Curriculum Planning" in the RE section of our website.
BY JULIA WARD HOWE, 1870
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Arise then...women of this day! Arise, all women who have hearts! Whether your baptism be of water or of tears! Say firmly: "We will not have questions answered by irrelevant agencies. Our husbands will not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause. Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience. We, the women of one country, will be too tender of those of another country to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs."
From the voice of a devastated Earth a voice goes up with our own. It says: "Disarm! Disarm! The sword of murder is not the balance of justice." Blood does not wipe our dishonor, nor violence indicate possession. As men have often forsaken the plough and the anvil at the summons of war, Let women now leave all that may be left of home for a great and earnest day of counsel. Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead. Let them solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means whereby the great human family can live in peace... Each bearing after his own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar, but of God - In the name of womanhood and humanity, I earnestly ask that a general congress of women without limit of nationality, may be appointed and held at someplace deemed most convenient and the earliest period consistent with its objects, to promote the alliance of the different nationalities, the amicable settlement of international questions, the great and general interests of peace.
BY FORREST CHURCH, SENIOR MINISTER, UNITARIAN CHURCH OF ALL SOULS, NEW YORK, NEW YORK
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Julia Ward Howe and my mother had it right. Motherhood has nothing to do with pedestals, and everything to do with love, justice, non-violence and peace. Julia Ward Howe is best remembered today for writing "The Battle Hymn of the Republic"—somewhat ironically given her later peace work, but understandably given her abhorrence of slavery. She was a prominent Unitarian layperson, director of the Perkins School for the Blind in Boston , founder of the first American women ministers group, and a popular poet. As an abolitionist, she had strongly supported the Union cause. However, when, in 1870, five years after the cessation of hostilities between North and South in the United States , the Franco-Prussian War broke out in Europe, it galvanized a small but growing band of international peace activists who denounced the war as a senseless conflict. Julia Ward Howe figured prominently among the American crusaders for peace.
She wrote a manifesto against the Franco-Prussian War, had it translated into five languages (French, German, Italian, Spanish and Swedish), and then set out for Europe intending to deliver it at international peace conferences in London and Paris . But because she was a woman, the European organizers denied her a place on the program. Angry but undaunted, she hired her own hall and posted broadsides inviting the public to hear her. Few people came. So she returned to the United States , not broken, but inspired with a new idea. She called it Mother's Day.
In Howe's original conception, Mother's Day was designed to draw attention to several basic liberal values. Her object was not to put mothers on a pedestal. She wanted to draw mothers out of their kitchens and parlors into the public square, to unite as many women as she could in a common cause: the protection of children from war. Or as she put it, "to promote the alliance of the different nationalities, the amicable settlement of international questions, the great and general interests of peace." Significantly, she didn't call her annual festival International Peace Day; she called it Mother's Day, knowing no group that could more naturally or persuasively sponsor an annual festival of love and peace.
On June 2, 1870, Howe issued the first Mother's Day proclamation, which you can read on the front page.
Mother's Day would remind us that the whole world would be a better place if only everyone might rise to the challenge of motherhood: nurturing life, fostering peace, giving love. She went on to say, "Let women now leave all that may be left of home for a great and earnest day of counsel. Let them meet first, as women to bewail and commemorate the dead. Let them then solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means whereby the great human family can live in peace, each bearing after his own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar, but of God."
For several years, on June 2 in New York , Boston and Philadelphia —also in England , Scotland and Switzerland —Mother's Day was celebrated in this spirit. As with many festivals, more recently it has fallen on hard times. What began as a celebration of the second great commandment (to love thy neighbor as thyself) has developed into a commercial holiday. Rather than calling on mothers to unite, rally, march and proclaim to the world the values they so liberally bestow on their children, we have celebrated their domesticity with flowers and clichéd rhymes.
I have a modest proposal. With war-driven and domestic violence just as pervasive and far more deadly than it was a century and a half ago, perhaps we should consider reopening Julia Ward Howe's book and sending peace cards on Mother's Day, perhaps even finding ways to commit ourselves to the effort of working for a more peaceful world, which can only be accomplished one neighbor at a time. Mother's Day will then be celebrated in the spirit its founder intended. As Julia Ward Howe would have been the first to remind us, it's about time.
In this same spirit—the true spirit of Mother's Day—let me say a few words about my own mother.
Her name is Bethine—be thine—and that's the way she's lived her life, for others. But also for herself. As those women know who have given themselves away without return, to love your neighbor as yourself is a cruel adage if you don't love and respect yourself. As with many women, any superficial description of my mother makes her sound like someone else's property. The daughter of a governor, Chase Clark. The wife of a U.S. senator. This is misleading.
Actually, she's the best politician in the family, knowing better than any of us that "politics is people." She certainly would have understood and rallied to Julia Ward Howe's vision of Mother's Day.
Looking back on my boyhood, as a mother Bethine was a quintessential liberal. Even Dr. Spock proved insufficiently permissive. To my great delight, from first grade on we conspired to see how many creative excuses we could come up with to keep me home from school. My mother was what these days we call a codependent. I came home one year with three Cs and three Ds. She blamed my teacher.
She even saved me from the bomb. It was 1958. Fire drills in elementary school had been temporarily replaced by nuclear attack drills. The alarm would go off and all of us would dutifully tuck ourselves under our desks. From the moment of the first alert to the arrival of the missiles, we had ten minutes. Three times a year we practiced this. I can assure you (and some of you will remember), ten minutes pass very slowly when you are crouching under your desk waiting for an imaginary bomb to fall.
So I planned my escape, and practiced by running home after school every day. Despite an innate lack of athletic ability, I finally got it down under ten minutes. One day I arrived panting at the door, and my mother, fearing that once again I had attracted the attention of neighborhood bullies, asked me why I was so winded. I told her my plan. She understood completely. "If there ever were a nuclear attack, I'd want you here with me, not at school under your stupid desk."
So my mother went to the principal and requested that, in the event of nuclear attack, I might have permission to run home and die with her. The result was a new school policy. Should a nuclear attack take place, upon securing parental permission, those children who could get home within ten minutes would be excused from school.
We learn different things from our parents, but there are ways in which all nurturing parents are alike. Through the unconditional gift of their love and the security offered by sheltering arms and the comfort of home, we learn to trust others and life itself. More by example than instruction, our parents also teach us how to balance freedom and responsibility, individual wants and community needs. Both are first modeled in the family, with its one body and several members.
My mother taught me this. She taught me that all of us are related; we are kin to one another in a single human family. She learned this liberal principle—of neighborliness—from her grandmother, whom she called "the most ecumenical person I ever met." Speaking at the Martin Luther King, Jr. celebration recently in Boise , Idaho , my mother told a story about her grandmother to illustrate two things: Though we are each different, in essence we are one; and, because we are different, we have a hard time understanding one another sometimes.
"My grandmother Clark was very upright and moral," my mother began. "She told me that her favorite poem was ‘No Sex in Heaven.' Given how prim and proper she was—I can't remember her wearing anything that wasn't either black, white, or gray—the title of her favorite poem, "No Sex in Heaven" caused me some confusion.
"In this poem, everyone went down to the River Jordan, and on the trip to the other side, all their robes and vestments were washed away. This, too confused me—that she could approve and be so pleased about all these grown-ups walking out of the water in their birthday suits. Only later, when I could read, did I discover that the word "sex" in the title, "No Sex in Heaven" was spelled "S-E-C-T-S."
My mother spoke that day of Abraham Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation. She spoke of the bravery it took to march up to the schoolhouse door in Little Rock , to march for integration in the South, to defy the bans against free assembly in South Africa .
Julia Ward Howe would have been proud, proud to hear my mother give public expression to the maternal ethic of care and tenderness. She would also have understood her choice of holidays in which to proclaim these liberal values. In recent years the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday has become a far more appropriate occasion for their expression than is Mother's Day itself.
In 1913, when Congress moved Mother's Day's from June 2 to the second Sunday in May, it also changed the significance of the holiday. What had been a festival in which mothers might witness publicly to maternal values has been reduced to a private holiday on which their husbands and children send cards and roses—itself not a bad thing surely. In fact, in the cause of family peace, I strongly recommend any of you who may have forgotten to find some ready substitute immediately.
But still, I think that Julia Ward Howe and my mother had it right as to what motherhood is really about. As Bethine Church said in honor of Martin Luther King, Jr.: "Let us here today and in our daily lives all be prepared to love and care about each other, to let our differences strengthen rather than diminish us. Let us give up fear of each other and change it into belief in ourselves and our ability to add healing in this often injured world." Good words for Mother's Day, or any day in fact. Words to take to heart.
BY STEPHEN D. EDINGTON, MINISTER, UU CHURCH OF NASHUA, NEW HAMPSHIRE
There's a phone call I receive from time to time, and I know where it's going after just the first few words. It comes from a funeral director—more often than not it's my friend Norman Hall from up the street at Davis Funeral Home—and begins: "Steve, I have a family here whose mother/father/some other close relative, has died. They're really not strongly affiliated with any church, and the deceased did not consider himself or herself to be an especially religious person, but they would like a minister to officiate for a memorial service and burial. Could you be available at such-and-such a time and place?" Except for the occasions when I've had an unavoidable time conflict, I've never turned away such a request. It's usually for a family I don't know, and they are relying upon the wisdom of the funeral director to find a minister suitable for performing a memorial service for a "not church affiliated and not especially religious person."
It seems the local Unitarian Universalist minister is the one who, more often than not, gets the call when these situations arise. In fact, my UU ministerial colleagues and I have a name for such requests. We're the ones who get the call when a funeral director is asked to find the town's "LOM." LOM stands for "Least Offensive Minister" when it comes to funerals. Of course, it's never put to me quite that way––Norm Hall has considerably more class than that––but at this point in my life it's not an expression I'd take offense at anyway. Frankly, I suspect that few (if any) other ministers in town, representing any one of our local faith communities, would prove to be "offensive" under such circumstances. But, as I say, we UUs seem to be the ones to get the call when such circumstances arise.
I relate this not to make light of the plight of a family that has experienced the loss of a loved one. It is a privilege, in fact, to be invited to help a family, or circle of friends, to memorialize someone close to them, someone whose life has touched their own. I feel like I've been granted access to a very special, even sacred, part of their lives as I listen to them take the measure of someone to whom they are now having to say good-bye. While I'm the one who has been asked to be of service to those dealing with a loss, I've also gotten something back which, over the years, has come to be of great value to me. Even when the death has taken place under the most painful of circumstances, I still find myself touched by what is evoked in others when a life is recalled.
Not long ago I was asked to help conduct a memorial service for someone who had taken his own life. He'd been a resident of one of the mental health facilities in our community. He had been struggling with some issues for much of his life, and, tragically, they had become too overwhelming for him. It was important to those who knew him that his struggle be honored—even though the outcome was the last thing anyone who'd known him wanted. His life had made a positive difference in the lives of others in a way that was worthy of recalling. Indeed, such is the case when it comes to memorializing most lives.
While each of the lives I've been asked to assist in memorializing is unique to the persons involved, I've also come to recognize some common themes when it comes to how they are each remembered. While it may not surprise you to hear what some of them are, I'd like to share some of those insights with you in honor of Memorial Day.
Memorial Day originated to honor the soldiers who died in America 's Civil War. While it still retains the purpose of memorializing those who have died in America 's wars, it has also taken on a wider dimension. It has become a time to recall all those lives that have touched our own.
What is it I most often hear when remembrances of a person's life are offered? The thing most striking to me, actually, is how little I hear about how the person made a living. Striking because "making a living" is what many of us, of necessity, devote a substantial chunk of our lives to. The family may want an occupation mentioned, or the company for whom the deceased worked cited. Beyond that, what the family generally wants me to relate is what the person meant to the people in his or her life.
Practically every conversation I've had in preparing for a memorial service has borne out the truth of a statement made by Winston Churchill: "We make a living by what we get; we make a life by what we give." I hear very little about what a person acquired over the course of a lifetime; nearly everything I hear is about what they gave. The children want to talk about what kind of parent, or grandparent, the person was. They want me to point out what the person gave to the community. I recently did a service for someone who had been instrumental in starting and promoting softball league programs and tennis programs for boys and girls in Nashua during the 1950s and 60s. His sons and daughters barely mentioned his job (and I couldn't tell you what it was now myself) but they were eager to share his passions for softball and tennis. Whatever it is you feel the most passionate about—whether or not it has anything to do with your job—is going to show through, and that is what you'll be most remembered for.
Along with the ways in which you gave of yourself, and what your personal passions were, you will also—believe it or not—be well remembered for how well you made people laugh. I don't necessarily mean how good your jokes were (although sometimes that is the case), but rather the things you did to lighten people's spirits. Some of that, to be sure, is for the purpose of including some levity, but it runs deeper than that. We're remembered for the joy we brought into people's lives.
Another common theme has to do with how "at home" people were with themselves: how well they conveyed the sense of knowing who they were, where they stood, and how much self-respect and self-acceptance they had. "She let you know where you stood with her.... He was pretty clear with himself about who he was and what he wanted.... " If you are well-grounded in the life you are living, it will be noticed, and you will be remembered for it.
In addition to being remembered for what we give to others, we are also remembered for how "religious" we are. I find a certain irony in being the one who gets called on to lead the service when the deceased was, as it often gets put to me, "not a very religious person." In these cases the person was usually not a member of a particular religious community, and did not adhere to a particular set of religious beliefs and practices. At that level I can understand and accept the phrase "not very religious." But then I'll be told about how the person loved and revered life, savored living, respected the earth and its creatures, or cultivated a sense of awe and mystery and wonder at the Larger Life that surrounds us all. That sounds pretty religious to me!
More times than I can ever recount now I've heard the statement, "Well, Mom/Dad wasn't what you'd call a very religious person, but...." Then everything that comes on the other side of that "but" tells me just what a religious person he or she actually was.
As we remember those we have loved and the ways in which their giving and their loving have touched us, we are often called to consider not only their lives but our own as well. It can be a time of bringing to awareness how our own life has moved, or is moving, in ways we'd like to be remembered or in ways we might prefer to change. Memorial services can be tricky things at times; they can be precarious, thin-ice occasions as well as times of remembrance and affirmation. Memorializing one who has died also presents a challenge to the living—the challenge to confront ourselves and take stock of where we go from here.
So let this holiday be a time of remembering and a time of choosing. Give thanks for the lives that have touched and blessed your own, and keep on a course that will bring you fulfillment and touch and bless the lives of others.
BY GREG WARD, MINISTER, UU METRO NORTH CONGREGATION, ATLANTA, GEORGIA
I do not have a child, but if I did, I would teach that child wisdom. I would protect him and make sure he knew how to protect himself. I would nudge her toward high ideals and plenty of resilience. I would tell stories of my life—both happy and sad ones—and the things I learned. I would remind him things don't always work out perfectly—that mistakes happen. Success and joy are usually found by improving on our failures and then finding ways to let them go.
I do not have a child, but if I did, I would probably feel paralyzed at times with the magnitude of my responsibility. Know that the time we're together is short compared to the list of lessons to be learned. I would be overwhelmed knowing that there will never be a moment when my child is not learning something and that, in the long run, he will remember me, good or bad, as one of the most important teachers he ever had. I am sure I would live with uncertainty, wondering if I were doing the right thing or enough of what was needed. I would try to not push too hard, but hard enough to let her know how much I care. I would not want to be his therapist but I would want to be someone with whom he could share his problems. I would feel the anguish of knowing I could never completely cure her dis-ease with life's dilemmas and incongruities. I might not even understand her dis-ease, but I'd be resigned to suffer it alongside her for the time we're together, hoping my support would help her even after I am gone.
I do not have a child, but if I did, I imagine the hard part would be figuring out how to get the light into all the dark places she is apt to wander—not knowing how often, or how long, she will feel at home in the glow of my adoration. The hard part would be remembering the pain of my own past and hoping I have found ways to let healing—and not hurt—shine from those memories. The hard part would be the mixture of fear and hope. Fear that I will eventually fail to protect her from hurts and pain and that she would be miserable if I somehow succeeded. Hope that when the world does test her, she will stand up and shine.
And I guess, having a child would mean a good deal of prayer. Prayer that one day my child will come back to me beaming with joy, explaining how he has made the world a brighter place and how the world made him a brighter person.
I do not have a child, but I know that this is neither a reason nor an excuse for new generations to go without my experience, my vision, or my care. I do not have to have my own children to love what children bring to this world, to help them, hold them, inspire them, and make them capable of living on the level of their dreams.
I can teach. As long as I have beliefs infused with truth and love and a place to act out my beliefs, I can make a difference. And in so doing, I have many children. And I have a legacy. I can change the world.
From For All That Is Our Life, Helen and Eugene Pickett (editors), 2005, Skinner House Books. Available through the UUA bookstore (www.uua.org/bookstore) and the CLF library (www.clfuu.org/library).
BY JANE RZEPKA, SENIOR MINISTER, CHURCH OF THE LARGER FELLOWSHIP
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What a scandal it was! The season was spring, the year, 1627. The outrage involved eighty vertical feet of pine, so the story goes. The Pilgrims had erected a Maypole.
As Nathaniel Hawthorne imagined it in his story "The May-Pole of Merry Mount," a silken banner streamed from the top, colored like a rainbow, and a wild throng gathered ‘round with minstrels, wandering players, mummers, and rope-dancers. A real convention of mirth-makers. And they danced!
Well. The Puritans in the neighborhood—their tastes running more toward stocks and whipping-posts—did not approve. They assaulted the Maypole with their "keen swords," and in short order, down it fell.
There we have it. Myles Standish, the well-known non-dancer, non-singer, and non-celebrator, gathered America 's first vice squad and called a quick halt to what were later termed "the beastly practices of the mad Bacchanalians."
Hundreds of years later, the incident comes across to many as a battle between the fun-lovers and the prudes, though historically, complexities came into play involving theology, indentured servants, wilderness justice, free elections, guns, food distribution, and the beaver trade. For some, however, here in the twenty-first century, the interesting aspect of the Maypole discussion is ritual.
I recently had the humbling experience of stumbling upon a sermon I wrote in 1980 on the topic of ritual. In the seventies, ritual had been a hot topic in Unitarian Universalist circles, and I figured I'd wrap the topic up.
I carefully established that at their best, rituals celebrate and define life at every level—they surround birth, love, work, politics, social change. We construct rituals in and around sickness, sorrow, separation, and death. We anchor our realities. Of course I quickly distanced myself from the sanctimonious, and any hint of hocus-pocus. Me? I was all for ritual that points toward the great realities of life, symbolic actions that have dimensions of depth within the human soul, religious or not. I granted that the ritual might be happy or solemn, secular or sacred, personal or institutional, public or private, but whatever the case, it needed to be deeply touching, a signal of transcendence. I would soon turn thirty.
Deeply touching, a signal of transcendence? Apparently in my younger days my attitude toward ritual was pretty highfalutin. I have to admit that I came down a little hard at that time on rituals that didn't appeal to me personally—secret handshakes, the Miss American Pageant, Thanksgiving Day football games, paper hats, noise-makers, and, OK, forced frivolity around a Maypole, to name a few. But by now I have been around a few blocks and have watched people here and there in the world ground themselves through rituals of pouring water, offering fruit to statues, spinning around, blowing horns, floating little boats, arranging stones in great piles, and yes, putting on special hats. Chanting, dancing, sitting, kneeling, washing, burning, dunking, piercing, hallucinating, parading, fasting, prostrating, eating, circling—the list is long and the results often powerful. Determining whether a ritual is empty or sacred seems best left to the practitioner. I am much more open now.
On the other hand, some rituals seem either vaguely or explicitly destructive, and while Unitarian Universalists want to respect individuals and cultures that differ from each of our own, we don't want to make the case that anything goes.
How do we feel about the ritual exchange of mountains of expensive presents on Christmas morning? The crowning of a six-year-old at a beauty pageant? Communion—the body and blood? Ritual circumcision? Animal sacrifice? Maypoles? We each have a lot of choices to make.
Your spiritual inclinations may lead you to listening to church bells Sunday mornings if you have some nearby, Yoga, regular early morning walks, rocking the baby, calm reading time before sleep, lighting a chalice, a customary moment of gratitude, or conscious breathing during the morning commute. These days I'm not apt to list transcendence as an absolute requirement! Or you may be a perfectly deep, spiritual, kind and fun person whom ritual leaves cold. That's fine too. The freedom that Unitarian Universalists claim extends to ritual big-time. We're under no obligation; the choice is ours. We each have a cultural inheritance to acknowledge, a popular culture to react to, a family history to consider, and the great history and practice of Unitarians and Universalists to draw upon.
Begin, if you wish, with the Maypole.
BY LYNN UNGAR, MINISTER FOR LIFESPAN LEARNING, CHURCH OF THE LARGER FELLOWSHIP
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How would you feel if you became famous for something that you didn't even like? Pretty awkward, huh? That happened to Unitarian Julia Ward Howe, the woman who had the original idea for Mother's Day. You see, during the Civil War, when Julia was an avid supporter of the abolition of slavery and the Union cause, she wrote a song that became very popular. So popular that, nearly 150 years later, you've probably heard it. It's called "The Battle Hymn of the Republic", and the first verse goes:
Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord: He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored; He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword: His truth is marching on.
But what you might remember best is the rousing "Glory, glory, hallelujah" chorus. Anyway, the song has a lot a trampling and smiting and assurance that God is on our side of the war. But, while Julia always believed in putting an end to slavery, she came to feel that war was not the way to solve problems. So she ended up embarrassed by her fame for writing a song that glorified war.
But Julia did more than get embarrassed. She decided that if anyone knew how to work for peace, it would be mothers, because mothers understood how awful it was to have your son or husband killed or maimed in a war (in those days only men were in the military). Of course, men care about their sons too, but in those days when only men declared and fought in wars Julia felt that the women at home had a special role as peacemakers. So she created something called Mother's Day as a way to encourage women to work for peace. The Mother's Day we now celebrate owes at least as much of its history to a woman named Anna Jarvis who just wanted a holiday to celebrate moms, but the history of women making peace is an important part of what Mother's Day is, too.
Breakfast in bed and presents are a couple of ways that many people like to celebrate Mother's Day, but another way to please your mom and honor Julia Ward Howe might be to work for peace in your home or on the playground at school. You can be a peacemaker by figuring out how to solve arguments without having them turn into battles. After all, if we can't figure out how to solve conflicts peacefully with our family and friends, how can we expect whole countries to do it?
Here are some suggestions for settling conflicts peacefully:
Take a deep breath. Take another one. Have everybody take deep breaths until they are calm enough to talk and listen. Have each person say what they feel. You can't argue about feelings—they are what they are. Have each person say what they want. Have each person repeat what the other person feels and wants.
Have each person say what they need. This might be different from what they want. For instance, what Sidney wants might be to have the video game that Teri is playing with. But what Sidney needs might be something fun to do, or to feel included in what other people are doing. When you think about needs rather than wants then it can be possible to come up with solutions that might work better for everyone than what anyone originally had in mind.
Brainstorm solutions. Come up with as many ideas of what might meet people's needs as you can. Then choose a solution and try it out.
Of course, you can't force anyone to take these steps, and you always have to judge whether someone who's mad is going to be able to hear your suggestions at that moment. Ultimately, you can only make choices about how you act, not what anyone else does. The most important part of peacemaking, for kids, adults and countries, is listening. It's always tempting to listen to someone just enough to try to figure out how we can prove they are wrong. But when you really listen for what the other person wants and needs then it's possible to start working toward a solution rather than a battle. And, speaking as a mom, I would say there's nothing moms like better for Mothers' Day than more solutions and fewer battles. I think Julia Ward Howe would agree.
BY MARK BELLETINI, MINISTER, FIRST UNITARIAN UNIVERSALIST CHURCH OF COLUMBUS, OHIO
Let my body remember. Let my hands and feet remember. Let my breath remember those who have come before me, those who have come before us.
Let me be quiet for a time. Didn't Muhammad wait quietly in his cave? And didn't Jesus sigh silently by the blue lake? And Kwan Yin, didn't she sit in silence thinking about what to do before doing it? And what was Siddhartha the Buddha doing anyway under that tree if not just sitting quietly? And Susan B. Anthony, didn't she push back from her desk, and take a breath now and then? And Florence Nightingale, didn't she put down her nurse's hat and think silently about what to write about mysticism before she actually wrote it? And Sophia Fahs, didn't she stop telling stories sometimes and just sit there? And didn't Black Elk just notice the sunlight glancing off his chair sometimes? And Starhawk, does she talk always, or does she, too, keep silence?
Let us remember them with the silence they also knew. Let my body remember. Let my hands and feet remember. Let my breath remember those who have come before me, those who have come before us.
Last updated April 23, 2006
Church of the Larger Fellowship (CLF), 25 Beacon Street, Boston, MA 02108-2823 Phone: (617) 948-6166 · Fax: (617) 523-4123 · E-mail: clf@clfuu.org
