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You have to grow from the inside out. None can teach you, none can make you spiritual. There is no other teacher but your own soul.
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BY JANNE AND ROB ELLER-ISAACS CO-MINISTERS, UNITY CHURCH—UNITARIAN, ST. PAUL, MINNESOTA
Janne: Rain or shine, dark or light, all mornings begin the same. I get out of bed, get dressed in my exercise clothes, go downstairs, make a glass of lemon water, read the weather section in its entirety, and, depending on the season, put on necessary outdoor wear and go out into the morning. I welcome the morning each day with a walk with our dog Maggie. She sniffs and smells the remarkable changes since the night before and I watch and listen. I see dark turning into light, I see birds courting in the trees, I see bunnies running away from the potential menace of a dog. I greet other walkers and joggers. I throw a Frisbee or stick. As I walk and notice, I often repeat lines of poetry I am trying to commit to memory—to learn by heart.
Each morning I spend time reconnecting myself to the sacred. Our colleague Bill Houff calls it his “still point,..that small clearing deep inside myself, which is self tending and where, if I am paying attention, I can find peace and joy and a sense of connection to something which is greater than myself.”
I walk out and reconnect to the ground of being—that place within us where we may be reminded of what Houff calls “the nourishing mystery, in which we live and move and have our being.” Ellie Weisel calls it, “the place where primal memory resides, where hope grows, where lives touch.” Whatever we call it, we can agree that we human beings are destined to live surrounded by mystery: we possess just enough awareness to know that life is a great and frightening gift. It is our nature to be aware, to feel every day the failings and foolishness, the wonders and joys of being alive and being connected to one another.
The religious impulse is the human attempt to give expression to this challenging awareness. Every morning I am humbled by all that is, by all that can be and has been. After my morning walk, I come into the house and write. When I am done with writing, I take some Buddhist prayer beads and let my consciousness move over the collective reality that is our church community. I think about what I know of our parishioners’ lives: their struggles, their challenges, their joys and triumphs. Then I select six people to bring into my prayers each morning. I hold each person, thinking of all that they face in their lives. I can feel their spirits next to me and then I release them. This practice has transformed my life. From the practice of praying for those I care about, I find I forgive more easily, get obsessed with issues less frequently, and love more deeply.
I came to this daily practice out of a sense of longing for deeper connection with the mystery of life, for deeper connection to the sacred in all aspects of life, including my own. I longed to get to the depths of my life; to scrub the surface until it shone, or gave me images with which to move. I came to this practice out of longing. I came to it out of a sense that my life wasn’t answering the question that is my life.
Rob: While Janne found her way to daily practice out of longing, I was driven to it by a desperate need to deal with anxiety and rage. Though I had dabbled in yoga as a teenager, I was in my early 20s before I was actually able to commit myself to the work. My girlfriend at the time and I had been together for three tumultuous years when she left me. She was right. We needed to end it. But did she really need to get involved with my best friend? I felt completely betrayed. Day after day I walked around fuming, so angry I could scarcely breathe. After a few weeks of this, a dear friend took me by the scruff of the neck and dragged me to a class in martial arts.
It took almost immediately. Each class began with a series of stretches intended to insure we wouldn’t hurt ourselves during the more active portion of the class. It was just demanding enough that when I skipped a day my aching muscles would remind me. I was in pain until I took the time to do my set again. It wasn’t long before I was completely addicted. Whenever I stretched out, did my martial arts, took time to breathe deeply, I was able to move through anxiety and rage, to let go of that immature sense of betrayal and live in the moment. Whenever I didn’t, I wasn’t. You wouldn’t want to be with me on days I didn’t do my set.
Then I began to revel in it. I noticed that I was at my best immediately after completing my practice. So I began to time my practice according to my daily priorities. Each evening I’d look at my calendar, decide when I needed to be at full strength the next day and plan to do my set just before that time arrived. For example, early in my ministry on board meeting days I would wait until five o’clock. Then I would move through my set with unusual intensity, shower and dress and arrive at the board meeting as if shot from a gun.
Considerable strength can be gained through regular practice. However, how one makes use of that strength needs to be aligned with the purposes of love, or significant damage can be done. Choygam Trungpa, the great Tibetan Buddhist master who founded Naropa University in Colorado wrote extensively about the dangers of spiritual materialism. It was some years before another friend noticed that the way I used the power that rose from my practice in the interest of my work robbed my family of the best I had to give. It was then I realized how much it matters how we greet the day.
Each of us begins as best we can. I have many friends who cannot fathom why anyone would want to get up early. If the best you can do is grab five minutes in the car for self-reflection or count your blessings just before you go to bed, then do it and give yourself credit. And a word to the wise…you may well be at a stage of life when carving out time for formal spiritual practice is simply not possible. The good news is that you can redefine work you’re already doing as practice. For instance, if you have young children at home you may well find it impossible to take time away for practice. But you can bring the intention of spiritual practice into your parenting. Spiritual practice helps us to develop a particular quality of attention, a way of being which ultimately one wants to bring to bear in every relationship. To the degree that we can bring that quality of attention to our parenting or to caring for family members who are ill, the relationships themselves become spiritual practice.
I’m here to testify to what has happened in my life since I decided to begin each day with spiritual practice. I wake up groggy. What the Tibetan’s call “the monkey mind” is chattering away. Some days I’m mad. My back hurts. Other days I’m worried about some obligation for which I’m ill-prepared. None of it matters. My job is to lie down and stretch out, to read a while, to write in my journal, to do my yoga and my martial arts routine and then to sit and breathe and recite a prayer I know by heart. And every day that work restores my sense of balance, opens my heart and aligns my life with those I love. It matters how one greets the day.
Janne: Our colleague Harry Scholefield saw the deep need for a serious devotional practice during a sabbatical when he realized that he was completely depleted. At that time in his ministry, he devoted a lot of his time and energy to civic issues like public housing and civil rights. He realized that he needed to find a devotional practice that fed his spirit, kept him connected to a source larger than himself and to the people he loved most deeply. He focused his practice on welcoming: welcoming the dawn, welcoming the words of wisdom that shape our experience, welcoming the sacred relations that surround us, welcoming the grief, gladness and gratitude that inhabit our days.
Rob: Those of us who do demanding work, those of us who want to bring our best selves to those we love most, those of us who wish to find and keep our balance even in the weathers of deep struggle may need to develop a disciplined spiritual practice. If we don’t, to quote Harry, “we will just dry up and blow away.”
My own practice was initially inspired by the need to quiet my anxiety and help control my rage. It served that purpose. It still does. But what began out of neurotic need has now become a way to stay awake, to welcome, to notice, to remember and then to move into the day with far more appreciation and far greater joy than I ever imagined would be possible. Living by Heart, the spiritual discipline developed by Harry Scholefield and the Rev. Laurel Hallman, invites us into five disciplines, which taken together provide an effective framework for spiritual practice in a Unitarian Universalist context. They are:
The Practice of Waiting: The quiet of anticipation, settling in to this time and place in living by heart. It’s the waiting for dawn.
The Practice of Welcome: All the ways we open ourselves to the moment. When we live by heart we greet the rising sun in recognition of the fact that we are full partners in creation.
Noticing Sacred Relationships All Around You: We hold those we love in our hearts, in sacred memory. We express our gratitude. We state our best intentions. When we live by heart we call the faces of our loved ones to our minds and wish the best for them.
Words of Wisdom: We share the scriptures of the ages, old and new. We invite the poets to attend and trust the conversation to encourage all our voices. When we live by heart those words of wisdom come to dwell within us. We hear them sounding deep inside us guiding us in all we do.
Moving From Centered Strength Into the World: We bow and say goodbye as we carry love’s message out into the world, to our families and friends, to the places we work and all the neighbors we have yet to know. When we live by heart we become instruments of the larger love, the love which is our birthright and our obligation.
May it be so in your life and in mine.
BY MARK BELLETINI MINISTER, FIRST UNITARIAN UNIVERSALIST CHURCH OF COLUMBUS, OHIO
When I was a child, I attended a Catholic parish school in Detroit, on the East Side. I had a good education, for the most part. I learned my times tables so well I can still remember them. I was taught that evolution was a fact, and that religion and cosmology were not in conflict, since it was a Belgian Catholic priest, Abbé Lemaitre, who first came up with the whole “Big Bang theory” of the origin of the universe in the first place. And, I know some people have a hard time believing this, but it’s true: I was taught that the Bible was full of cultural assumptions and exaggerations and even out-and-out fairytales which we were not to be so foolish as to take literally. Our faith was not at all to be like those Baptists and Lutherans down the street.
But as you can tell, prejudice can be taught in school as well as the times tables. I was raised to feel a prejudice against Protestants. The nuns made this clear in everything they said. Those of us in parochial school often felt pity for our Protestant friends, who, through no fault of their own, belonged to churches which were somehow neither valid nor valued by God.
Of course, Detroit was largely a Catholic city, in both the immigrant and African American populations, so actually, Baptists and Lutherans were rare birds. I had met only one or two of each in my whole life by the time I went to college. And, despite the prejudice inculcated in me at school, they seemed like good enough people, so my pity didn’t survive long. Still, the teaching was very clear during my education: the Roman Catholic Church was the One True Church, and those outside its embrace would have trouble coming into the presence of God.
I didn’t know, at that time, that many Protestants were being taught the same nonsense about Catholics. And that both of them were pretty ignorant and prejudicial about Jews. And that almost no one in my neighborhood knew anything about Muslims or Buddhists, who were simply lumped together as “those pagans.”
Now this prejudicial part of my education put me in a terrible spiritual bind. Why? Because my grandfather on my mother’s side, Umberto, was an atheist. Plain and simple. Had no use for religion, Catholic, Protestant or new-fangled. No use for God. No use for Christ. And that worried me. If God was not too pleased with those Protestants down the street, pure atheists surely deepened the divine frown.
And believe me, my grandfather was very clear about his atheism. When I was very young, my grandfather underwent a dangerous operation in the great Ann Arbor clinic. The surgeons worked all day, then told my poor grandmother that my grandfather might not survive the night. So my very Catholic grandmother sent in a priest to give her husband the “last rites.” When he caught a whiff of the sacred oil and heard the Latin prayers, he sat bolt upright in bed along the crease of his cut and pointed a bony finger toward the door. Then he said, with deep red and shaking rage, “You get that faker out of here, right now. You need a priest. I don’t.” You can probably tell that this story really impressed me.
Grandpa Umberto’s atheism wasn’t just cool and philosophical. His atheism was passionate and based, he would probably have told you, on his life story. His parents had died when he was a child. He had been raised by his older sister, who wasn’t much more than a child herself. He earned his keep as the town oven-boy, rushing between the homes to bring the still-hot bread from the town oven which was in his sister’s house. The God he heard about in church, “qui laetificat iuventutem eam…” who brought joy to his youth, was simply a lie, he felt. There was no care-taking God keeping his parents alive, keeping his life normal. There was no divine joy in all the sorrow and working and fretting and rushing.
But he married my grandmother, Anna. A widow. And she was acquainted with sorrow no less than he. When she was a girl, most of the male population of her town was lost in the greatest mine disaster in United States history. Her father, the neighbors…all gone up in smoke. Later, her husband Eduardo died of spinal meningitis. After a couple of years, she married my atheist grandfather, who then adopted my mother as his own. Umberto and Anna then had a daughter, Anita, my mother’s half sister. She died in an auto accident when she was only four months old. However, all of these sorrows did not make my grandmother an atheist like her husband. Instead, it brought her closer to God. Her prayer life sustained her, and she went to mass and communion with frequency, for it grounded her in the love of God.
And the thing is—they were married for 40 years before my grandfather Umberto finally died. They had a good marriage all those years. And their lives are part of my life, my story, told over and over again in snippets all of my days.
So it was that my theology developed differently from the theology presented in the church school I attended. The nuns taught us prejudice against Protestants first. But, being American nuns in neo-McCarthyite days, they also taught us prejudice against atheists, since it was all of those “godless communists” over in Russia who were planning the death of America.
However, the nuns didn’t understand that when they lambasted nonbelievers, they were also talking about my beloved grandfather, who lived not in Moscow, but just down the street in East Detroit. They were condemning my grandfather whom I loved. Who loved me. Who sat down and patiently taught me the metric system. Who had that reliable faint scent of whisky on his breath as we listened to opera arias on the record player. Who made his garden blaze with asparagus and tomatoes and rosemary, his backyard orchard overflow with peaches and pears. And who never went to God’s own church. Because of these stories, and my love for my grandpa, I knew deeply, in my heart, two things:
The nuns were simply wrong. My grandfather was a good man, kind and gracious. Thus I knew that everything said about people who were not Catholic must have a good chance of being wrong. Maybe even those people in Russia were not the devils everyone made them out to be. Maybe, I concluded, adults weren’t as smart as they pretended to be, and didn’t know how to tell the truth.
I also knew that my grandmother and grandfather had a good and loving marriage, which meant that differences—serious differences between people—were not really a necessary cause for them not to get along. Maybe it was possible for even enemies to get along. Maybe it was possible for everyone to get along, if they gave up wanting to convert others as the chief proof that they were right.
Because of this life-learning, I have tried to live a different life from the one I imagined I might live. Throughout all of my adult life, through seminary and through my ministerial career, I have decided to try to fight against the prejudices I was raised with. I have tried to get people who are at odds to talk with each other: I’ve tried to get atheists to talk with theists, Catholics with Protestants, Christians with Jews, Democrats with Communists with Republicans, the old with the young, the ex-con with the law-abiding. I have tried to get colors and cultures to meet. I have struggled to come out of my little parochial world—a world where I was part of “a true church,” while most were not. I have tried to come out of that narrow place, and migrate into a world of wide truths, a world of a million, million human hearts, each of whose lives are just as important to them as my life is to me. I have tried to see myself as part, not all; incomplete, not final; human, not God; a story, not The Story. I have, in short, made a theology.
The dictionary will tell you that theology comes from two Greek words, theos and logos, the first of which means God, and the second of which means reason or word. Which is to say, theology is a word or reasoning about God. But theos itself has a root in Greek. The Greek word for God is the noun form of a verb which means “to come out of.” Thus, theology has to do with the words that express what we come out of, where we come from, or even, where we wish we could have come from. This is why theological language can be so diverse: some speaking of a loving father God, others of a mother goddess, others of many gods, others of no God, still others of a spirit within, or of the whole world as God. We know what we value most highly through our own stories, and the stories of those we love and admire, whether they be grandparents or more distant heroes. We are all in this together, in relationship, doing theology together, trying to express the wisdom of our lives in the wisdom of words. That’s theology.
In her November Quest column, Rev. Jane Rzepka wrote about time capsules. In response to her column, a CLF member wrote to us about a different sort of time capsule…
I just read Jane R’s article in November’s Quest and I know what a living time capsule is—it’s me and others like me who are in prisons (some in mental prisons as well). What I mean is, I’ve been locked up ten years; however, time stands still for me in the areas I used to live in and by. I remember the farmer’s field at the end of our street and the lake on the golf course behind my house. I can tell you the size of every tree and the color of the house. I can also tell you who lives in the surrounding houses. That is as it was ten years ago.
My mom wrote that the farmer’s field now has a housing development on it and “traffic has sure increased.” Or so I’m told.
The lake on the golf course has been split in two and re-landscaped. I was sent a photo to show me the changes. My mind simply doesn’t realize the change because when I look out over the golf course in my mind’s eye—it’s the same single lake as always.
I got sad when I read the article on the time capsule as I know that my memories are just reflections of a time before and they are not now. But to me the farmer’s field is still there and the lake is whole and the trees and neighbors are all in their right spots. It’s me who lives there ten years ago, not wanting to face the brutal truth that I will never see home again—except in my time capsule.
Peace and love, Andrew H.
Raising Ethical Children This course is designed both to help parents apply their own sense of ethics to their childrearing practices, and also to help parents find ways to develop a sense of ethics and responsibility in their children.
Taught by the Rev. Ken Reeves, a UU minister and clinical psychologist, this course begins February 18th and runs four weeks.
Spirit of Life This course was originally created by the Rev. Barbara Hamilton-Holway as a way to foster spiritual and ethical development in Unitarian Universalists while deepening our sense of UU religious identity. It is highly participatory and calls upon our spirituality and creativity in exploring how our day-to-day lives reflect and refract the holy and ourselves.
Taught by CLF ministerial intern Dan Kane, this course begins February 18th and runs nine weeks.
An Introduction to Ralph Waldo Emerson: What Emerson Might Teach Us Now Ralph Waldo Emerson was, for a very brief tenure, a Unitarian minister. Then he became a Unitarian contrarian, challenging the stiff and staid ways of traditional Unitarianism. We’ll look at the life of Emerson, read some primary texts, and ask together what we might still have to learn from Emerson’s critique.
Taught by the Rev. Jay Leach, UU minister and Emerson scholar, this course begins March 10th and runs six weeks.
Click here to find out about upcoming classes, class logistics, and registration. Classes carry a $40 registration fee.
Shared Interest Groups Looking for online community? The CLF offers a variety of email-based groups for people with different theologies, life experiences or interests. Want to share with others who are retired, or who identify as UU Buddhists? Would you like to discuss science and religion with UU humanists or find community support with others who are dealing with chronic or terminal illness? We offer Shared Interest Groups on these and many other topics. You can find out more, or subscribe, by clicking on Shared Interest Groups under the Online Community menu at www.clfuu.org. If you don’t see the topic you were looking for, and you’d like to head up a group on a new shared interest, please contact our minister for lifespan learning, Lynn Ungar.
Quest Podcast Ever wish your Quest experience were more like listening to sermons in church? You can hear Quest sermons and readings, most often in the authors’ voices, on your computer, iPod, or other portable player. Once you subscribe to Quest on iTunes, the new audio version of Quest will be downloaded to your computer automatically each month. Subscribe here, or visit Quest to download individual audio segments from the current issue. You’ll be surprised at how easy it is!
BY JANE RZEPKA, SENIOR MINISTER, CHURCH OF THE LARGER FELLOWSHIP
It weighed in at thirty tons, stood two stories high and covered fifteen thousand square feet. A boxcar could fit inside it. In the 1940s, the first computer was born. I would not have thought that this was a religious event.
A thousand years ago, when a Spaniard named Magnus devised a brass counting machine resembling a human head sporting numbers instead of teeth, priests destroyed it with clubs. The looks of it alone seemed literally too diabolical.
I would not have thought that Magnus’s counting machine was a religious event.
When Blaise Pascal came along in the 17th century, he didn’t fare much better. His calculating machine, the Pascaline, was beautiful—a hand-crafted brass box about fourteen inches by five by three—that could do the work of six accountants. He was 18 years old. But people were afraid that accountants would be put out of work, and ultimately, Pascal renounced his interest in science and math and devoted the rest of his life to religion.
I would not have thought that the Pascaline’s failure was a religious event.
I preached about computers in the early 1980’s, dazzled as I was by the computer our family owned that played “The Yellow Rose of Texas,” beat us at hangman, taught typing, catalogued imaginary antiques, and very quickly wrote our names 500 times. It could justify margins. You could type in a mailing list. Until then, we’d been impressed by the technologies of toasters and bicycle pumps. Truth be told, at that stage I agreed with Rutherford B. Hayes when he first saw a telephone, a “harmonic telegraph,” in 1928: “That’s an amazing invention, but who would ever want to use one?”
I did not think the household computer was a religious event.
How wrong I was.
We all know that religion has a lot of components. Justice work. Religious education. Spirituality. Community. Inspiration. Compassion. Innovation. Beauty. Religion manifests internally and externally. Alone and in community. In action and in stillness. By now, in 2008, I can’t think of any aspect of religion that cannot be fostered online.
In alcoves in nursing homes I see residents logging on to shared computers to light virtual candles of consolation and hope. Down at the library I watch the kids comparing ancient texts for homework, sometimes with earphones to hear what the original language sounds like. There’s the social networking crowd, who find niche networking Web sites where they can meet, say, Muslims in Montana or pagan young adults. Hankering to watch and listen to a sermon? Want to type in some of your beliefs to determine what religion you are? Go online. Or maybe you’d like to know what social justice project you can join right now? Head for your computer. Time for an influx of the latest liberal religious thought? Gazillions of blogs await you. Need help with your yoga practice, or with teaching the Unitarian Universalist purposes and principles to third graders, or you’d like to join a structured online class on Transcendentalism or raising ethical children? Do you miss after-church talk-backs and crave a rousing and irreverent discussion on the use of the word “god” in congregational life? Go over to your kitchen table, or your desk, grab the laptop or the iPhone you tossed on your bed, and get started.
This spot on the page is where I’m oh so tempted to try to list all of the resources that your Church of the Larger Fellowship offers you, both in print and online. But by now the volume of our online offerings ensures that trying to list them all would be madness. I hope that if you are a computer person, you will visit the Church of the Larger Fellowship and explore. If you run into any particular difficulty or need a little guidance, just call the CLF office at 617-948-6166 or send us an email.
An older colleague in California, Ric Masten, was quoted in the Monterey County Weekly: “Some of my dearest friends I’ve never met. I don’t know why some people knock the Internet. It is all minds and spirits here, no age or race getting in the way. This is the world for me.”
Does your computer further your religion? We’d love to hear how. Some responses may be published in Quest. Please email us at clf@clfuu.org or send a note to the CLF office.
BY LYNN UNGAR, MINISTER FOR LIFESPAN LEARNING, CHURCH OF THE LARGER FELLOWSHIP
In the sermon on the front page of this issue of Quest, Unitarian Universalist ministers Janne and Rob Eller-Isaacs talk about the importance in their lives of having a spiritual practice. Somehow, a “spiritual practice” doesn’t necessarily sound as if it might be that much fun. Practicing an instrument or a sport can be fun—but it isn’t always, and practicing, say, multiplication, is pretty boring for almost everyone. And what is a spiritual practice, anyway? Can you really practice being spiritual, or is it something that just happens, like when you look at the stars at night, and all of a sudden you get an overwhelming feeling of how tiny you are in the huge universe?
Well, as a matter of fact, religions all over the world have encouraged people to participate in spiritual practices. It turns out that, just like stretching and strengthening exercises help you to be a better athlete, spiritual practices can help you to feel more centered, more aware of your connection to other people and the universe, more present in the moment you are living rather than worrying about what has happened before or what might happen next. The Hindu religion uses yoga, a combination of body poses and breathing designed to stretch your spiritual muscles as much as your physical ones. The Buddhist religion uses Zen meditation, a way of sitting still, letting go of thoughts and opening the heart and spirit to what is present. Judaism and Islam both have times set aside during the day when people of those religions are expected to pray, to give thanks for the gifts of the world and to remember that all we have and all we are comes from something larger than ourselves. Some religions use fasting, or dancing or singing or even twirling around in circles as spiritual practices, ways that help the people who use them to be in touch with the “still, small voice” inside them.
But with so many different spiritual practices, how can people know which might be the right one for them personally, the one that fits? Well, let me tell you, it isn’t necessarily easy. Maybe for as long as you can remember your family has said prayers together at bedtime, or watched the birds at the feeder as you eat your cereal in the morning, or shared what you each are grateful for, or gone for a daily family run, and your spiritual practice is just something you were born into. Maybe you decided a long time ago to keep a journal, and you’ve really had to push yourself to take the time to write something down each day, but your spiritual practice has grown more meaningful the longer you’ve done it. Maybe a friend invited you to a yoga class, and you just stumbled onto something that felt right to you, that you want to do again and again. Maybe you have a favorite spot beneath—or up in the branches of—a tree where you go to just sit and be still. Or maybe you feel like you wish you had a spiritual practice, but nothing you’ve tried feels right to you.
Just remember, your spiritual practice doesn’t have to be the same as anyone else’s. Take me, for instance. I’ve tried a lot of spiritual practices over the years, and I know that my soul is fed by singing and poetry and prayer. But where my spiritual practice is really at these days is tap dancing. Yep, tap dancing.
You see, what I discovered when I decided to learn to tap dance a few years ago, is that you can’t tap dance and think of anything else. It just doesn’t work. People spend years in Zen meditation learning to let go of the “monkey mind” that chatters all day—that voice telling you what you need to do and how you need to be and filling your brain with random bits of irrelevant stuff. They learn to breathe in and count “one,” to breathe out and count “two,” over and over again until the mind is still. That’s great. But me, I like to count “and-a-one and-a-two and-three and four and-a-five and-a-six and-seven and-eight,” in rhythm to the movement of my feet on the floor. I like to hear the rhythms inside the beats, to feel the way the dance moves inside the music. I like leaving the dance floor sweaty and tired and focused, and I like the way I’ve learned to find music in everyday rhythms like the swish of windshield wipers and the click of a turn signal indicator. I like how I can be waiting in line at the grocery store and instead of being bored or frustrated my feet start to move: “and-a-one and-a-two and-three and four and-a-five and-a-six and-seven and-eight,” bringing me back to who I really am—not just a random person stuck doing tedious errands, but someone who finds a way to dance to the complex rhythms of life.
Now, I know that tap dancing isn’t for everyone, but I do suspect that all people of any age could find something worth doing, if only for a few minutes each day, that might quiet their minds, open their hearts and spirits and help them to “tap” into something deeper than the “monkey mind” of daily life.
I was seven years old when I had my first encounter with theology. My mother made a batch of fudge, placed it in the refrigerator, and decreed it could not be sampled until after supper. I was not pleased. I contrived every scheme I could imagine to sneak some, but someone always seemed to be lurking around the kitchen.
At about four o’clock I got what seemed like an unbelievable break. My mother and sister had to go to the store, leaving me alone for a little while. Mother must have been reading my mind, because she gave me a warning on her way out. “Just because I’m not here,” she said, “doesn’t mean you’re alone with the fudge. God is watching you.”
The word “theology” means God-study. As they drove off I was studying hard. It did not take long to conclude I was a seven year old atheist. Boy, did that fudge taste good. Unfortunately for me, mother had counted the pieces, and the recount on her return showed a deficit of three. When asked how I could have brazenly taken the fudge in front of God, I said, “I don’t believe in God.” My ever practical mother responded: “It would be in your best interests to act as if God were there.”
by the Rev. Terry Sweetser, UUA vice president for stewardship and development, from his book As if God Were There, published by Rising Press in 1986 and available from the CLF library or phone 617-948-6150.
Last updated January 18, 2008
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
