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May 6, 2007 Sermon

Rev. Nancy D. Dean

May 6, 2007 – Association Sunday

Everybody Worships Something

Today our congregation celebrates Association Sunday. We are in fact a test congregation to determine if this will be a helpful biannual event in our effort to grow our wonderful Unitarian Universalist faith. To be reminded that our religion is a precious gem among religions. I am proud to say that a homily I preached at our Joseph Priestley district service in March was chosen as one for the packet that is distributed for the national Association Sunday in October. You each will have found an envelope on your chairs and are encouraged to give whatever you can to help strengthen our movement. If you have children, please give them the opportunity to support our faith, as well. One of the things I fondly remember from my childhood religion, is carrying my nickels and dimes to put in the children’s offering plate in Sunday school. It made me feel very responsible and special for that, and taught me from an early age that we each are part of sustaining our religious faith.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, by many recognized as the greatest American philosopher to date, was born into a Unitarian family; his father was the long-time minister of the First Parish Church in Concord, MA. Ralph Waldo Emerson also became a Unitarian minister, but eventually left the church because he felt it boxed religion and faith into still too small a place, for the Unitarian church of the 1800s was essentially a Protestant Christian church with Unitarian theology; meaning that while they did not believe Jesus was God, they still saw him as a special prophet, and the form or style of worship looked pretty much like all New England congregationalism. Emerson in the course of his seeking became the founder of a new movement that saw God as transcendent, hence the name Transcendentalists, which included many of the American intellectuals of the time. These Transcendentalists were reacting to the rapidly changing ideas that emerged from the liberal or progressive thinking of the Enlightenment, when the church no longer was dominating thought or able to restrict the discoveries of science or the ideas of philosophy being considered. These liberal thinkers wanted more room for religious thought, and believed that any understanding of God was greater than any single religion.

Since all the history of humankind is essentially an action-reaction model, the Transcendalists led by Emerson wanted to expand beyond the rationalists, beyond the Age of Reason, as the Enlightenment was called, to include more of the personal-spiritual that includes intuitive understanding. They believed science and reason were all well and good, but that there is something beyond these that should not be ignored either. So while the Transcendentalists did not reject science and reason, they did not want rationality to become yet another a box for people to say: This is all there is; this is truth.

As one writer put it:

      The Enlightenment had come to new rational conclusions about the natural world, mostly based on experimentation and logical thinking. The pendulum was swinging, and a more Romantic way of thinking -- less rational, more intuitive, more in touch with the senses -- was coming into vogue. Those new rational conclusions had raised important questions, but were no longer enough.

As a result of Emerson’s teachings our Unitarian movement changed over the next several decades to become the ever more open faith that accepts all ethical forms of spirituality as valid. We owe a great debt to Emerson for the courage of his convictions; for teaching what he believed despite the condemnation he received even from his Harvard peers who were also moving to greater liberality of religious thinking--but not as far as Emerson. But it is this courageous preaching the truth of his heart against the grain of the day that made Emerson’s Divinity School address so famous. We are the inheritors of that courageous belief.

Emerson taught that each sentient being is capable of knowing God, or what the great Lutheran theologian Paul Tillich called Ultimate Reality; the All of All. Further, Emerson taught that all you need to know of God was evident in the world around us as nature. Nature was not one truth; therefore God was not one truth, but Nature and God where/are many truths. Which is what the ancient Hindu story (from this morning’s reading) about the six blind men and the elephant also teaches. That even as each of the blind men first encountered this great beast from a different aspect, all they could know was what they experienced. So for one the elephant was a wall, another a fan, another a spear, another a tree, another snake, another a rope. (This story is also told as a Buddhist tale about three blind men discovering an elephant.) So this understanding of God was hardly a new thought, but it was new to the religious environment of the western world in the 19th Century.

In general, the Transcendentalists believed that we each are given special gifts of intuition, unique to each of us, that give us perceptions true for us, but not necessarily true for others.

Among the Transcendentalists were many artistic people who saw God and faith revealed in the arts. Literature, painting, music, all the arts were understood to be gifts of intuition and perception. From a purely rational view back over the history of Western Civilization, the arts are always the forerunners, the predictors, of the changes to come for a society. This was part of the Transcendentalists experience of religion; after all, have not all the great reformers been prophets not appreciated in their own day and forced to move outside the circles of accepted knowledge and truth of the day? We know this is the way of the world, even now.

For instance, those people who first spoke out against many of the issues of pollution thirty to fifty years ago, look like prophets now that we have global warming reaching a crisis stage. I know I first began reading about this issue in the early 1970s. Rachel Carson, even before, back in the early 50s, tolled the warning bell against pesticides that were killing birds, which eventually led to the DDT ban, something felt strongly in agricultural areas. Today we are losing vast numbers of song birds who migrate to the developing world where such pesticides continue to be used. I heard recently that up to 75% of honeybees in the western hemisphere are dying from some mysterious causes (I first heard about this from my fruit-grower father many years ago); a situation which is critical to our food crops since honeybees are the principle pollinators.

There are people who out of their study, experience, and their intuition first had the courage to challenge those who said they knew what was truth and dismissed these messengers, these prophets. So it has always been, and so it has been with religion. There is a oft quoted phrase in the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament that a prophet is never appreciated in his own land.

The Transcendentalists were keenly aware of what it meant to deviate from the norm; to step outside the circle of comfortable conformity. Though celebrated now, they were not in their own time celebrated outside of intellectual circles. Emerson, unlike most, did become famous in his own time for the breadth and depth of his philosophy. In part because, more than most, Emerson was able to take complex theological ideas and put them in simpler terms that most people could at least understand, if not entirely accept.

One of his most salient bits of wisdom was that everybody worships something; even the most ardent atheist worships his/her ideas of what is that ultimate reality, be it science, the mind, or the unknown mystery. Yet, in fact, most people do not worship quite at such an abstract level. Every person puts something at the center of his/her universe, and that is the thing s/he worships. Whatever you give your whole heart and mind to, was that which Emerson said we really worship.

If, as Jesus taught, blessed are the peacemakers, then how is it that so many in the religious right think we should be at war in Iraq? Emerson would say that what they worship is greater than the Christ they profess to worship. In other words, the measure of what we value, that which we truly hold most high, may not be what we say we value or worship.

Some UUs do not like the word worship, since they take it to mean the traditional religious practices, but the basic definition of worship is simply that idea or object which we adore or give reverence or venerate. Some religions worship idols, some worship founders like those of Islam and Christianity, and some worship the gods of commerce and finance, or beauty, or alcohol, or sex, or food, or children, or family. What we worship, that which is the center of our lives is sometimes God, but more often it is not quite that grand.

Instead of saying that everybody worships something, another way Emerson might have phrased this is that, what we won’t live without, what we won’t give up, what we would not change except under duress, what we will sacrifice other important things in our life for, is what we truly worship.

While most people might quell at this teaching, most of us also know there is an undeniable truth in it.

UUs of today do not worship our UU faith, which is why we do not tend to support the mission or the goals of our religion to the degree that some other religious groups do, like Christian fundamentalists or Mormons for example. I do not suggest we should make an icon of the faith itself; yet, we do need to appreciate that we cannot possibly hope to grow and be known if we do not support the faith in a rational, realistic way. Further, churches that encourage their members to give money when they don’t have enough to properly clothe and educate their children are not models I would want for UUs. But a reasoned approach does need that element of passion that tells us what a loss it would be not to have this faith of ethics and acceptance. That is a harder sell than the Give-or-go-to-Hell model.

I occasionally kid my colleagues in the interfaith ministers support group to which I belong, saying I sometimes envy them their Hell—like at the annual pledge canvass. Really, though, if the only way to get people to take care of this congregation and our larger faith is through fear, then I’m not much of a minister. I am deeply Unitarian; first and foremost believing in reason, the mind, but I am also Universalist, and wholly accept John Murray’s teaching (John Murray brought Universalism to this country from England), to give the people hope not Hell. In the two branches of our now united faith, I believe that we come together in understanding that religion is communal, but faith is a matter of personal responsibility; that ethics is the practice of the heart. And that is our vision and mission in brief: to be a faith that values the ethical community and the search for truth and meaning that is each person’s call of faith.

Perhaps the best question we can ask of ourselves is: What do I truly believe? The next best question is: What do I worship? We can know the answer to what we worship by considering the third question: Where do I invest my time, money, and love?

Jane Frelick called me yesterday morning to tell me someone had sent her the information that at 2am 3 minutes and four seconds, this morning, of this the sixth day of the fifth month of the seventh year, we had a 234567 sequence that will not occur again for a hundred years. I know some number people who get very excited about interesting numbers such as this; like when their car mileage turns over 1111, or 55555, etc--there are many such possibilities. I am not a number-oriented person, myself (except as they register on my bathroom scale or checking account), and find date sequences like this uninteresting. After all, the calendar as we know it a relatively recent invention; and time went on for many millennia prior to the Gregorian calendar we have used since the 16th Century. But numbers do have a spiritual meaning for many people; in fact numerical versions of astrological predictions have been around for centuries. Numerologists take your birth date, place (as in latitude and longitude) of birth, in fact any and all the numbers associated with the individual and from that make predictions.

My point is that anything human can become something a person might worship. Again, where one invests one’s heart is that point of worship. This may be a good thing or not, it all depends on what we do with it and whether it benefits not only ourselves but others, as well.

Emerson believed that all you needed to know of God could be found in nature. Nature is not a singularity; nature is diverse. Nature is benevolent in providing our sustenance, but also dangerous, unpredictable, violent; or, as Kipling put it so well, “red in tooth and claw.” The citizens of Greenberg, KS, which was leveled by a tornado this past week, could certainly attest to the violence and destruction in nature. Nature has many faces, and represents different things to different people.

If all I knew of nature was where I live now, then I would say nature is green rolling hills, verdant landscape, beautiful trees and flowers in the spring through fall, four seasons with not too much heat or cold or rain, not too dramatic by way of earthquakes, tornadoes, or other natural disasters. Tell an African Bushman of the Kalahari that my definition of Nature is the truth, the only Truth, and he will challenge such an idea and give his Kalahari Desert experience of nature. No one would be fool enough to say that there is only one Truth about Nature; yet millions of people have no compunction in saying there is only one Truth about God or Worship or Spiritual Experience. To Emerson this was ridiculous, and for most UUs of this current age such singular ideas about religion, the world, the universe make no sense, either; for we have learned, in the Emersonian Transcendalist tradition, the foolishness of trying to put God or Nature or much of anything in a sealed up box with the label TRUTH on it.

Emerson, it is also worth noting, certainly used the language of the religion he knew; the words God, Faith, Prayer, Worship, Sacred, Holy, were all meaningful to him, but in a manner that was not restrictive of personal intuition and interpretation.

For me the great gift of our UU faith is this open and accepting ethics-based religion that gives you and me both the help and the freedom to test our beliefs, to develop our intuition, to learn from each other the different ways we might experience God or Ultimate Reality, or any of the great gifts of life. I am always so pleased when I see how this plays out here in our congregation. When I look over the people come for the Christmas Eve service, or I see a member wearing his chalice with the Star of David on it, pairing Judaism with UUism; or the Nature-Based group holding a celebration as they will next week of the changing seasons; or speak to an atheist who is not interested in such traditional expressions of faith, yet devotes much of his or her time and money to great social justice issues. How bland a religion any other would seem to me now after experiencing the rich diversity of religious belief and practice such as we have here. It would be like being told I could only live at the seaside or in the desert or in Hockessin.

My friends, this is one of the first Association Sundays, and I for one hope it will be the first of many. We have a precious gem in this UU faith of ours, and like any other precious gem we might possess we need to take good care of it, protect, support it, and display it with pride.

May it be that each of you, and many more to come, will be as enriched by this faith as those of us who have become Unitarians in the transcendental wake of the great religious rebel Ralph Waldo Emerson. May our Unitarian Universalist Association thrive to that end.

 

May 20, 2007 Sermon

Rev. Nancy D. Dean

May 20, 2007

Mental Health is Physical Health

The great Unitarian minister A. Powell Davis of the All Souls Church in Washington, D.C., said that there are four principles or rules that are important in dealing with personal or cultural anxiety:

      The first is: ‘Face the realities.’ Nothing is so terrible when you face it as when you run away from it.

      . . . We live all our physical lives within our own precarious bodies, subject to all the perils of disease, all the dangers of accident. We live our mental lives subject to all the changes of error, all the possibilities that reason itself my be unseated.

      The second principle is: Be energetic about the possibilities: and ONLY about the possibilities. Altogether too much energy and effort is expended upon impossibilities.

      . . . Concentrate upon what is possible . . . cultivate the possible . . . Do not succumb to the anxiety—the preventable anxiety—that disables us unnecessarily and paralyses useful effort.

      The third principle is: Accept the inevitabilities. What nothing can be cone about should be accepted promptly and freely. We must not wait until it thrusts itself upon us as a crushing blow. Not many inevitabilities are intolerable.

      There is a fourth. To master anxiety, or anything else whatever a [person] must live for something bigger than him[her-]self. [rather than] I-me-mine. We must get father away from self-centered living.

       

The Rev. Davies, like all clergy, saw his fair share of both healthy and unhealthy people within the scope of his ministry. Counseled with healthy and unhealthy people, and like all people of his time and ours as well, he distinguished between healthy and unhealthy people as the two basic categories, but, as an additional layer or category, he distinguished between physical and mental health. From my reading of his work, though, he was at the beginning of a move to begin to understand that the illness, disease, or health of the mind or brain, is not a separate realm from that of the body.

My contention in this sermon is that one of the reasons we do such a poor job in this country of helping those with mental illness stems from this propensity to think about and talk about mental illness as if it were a totally separate range of human health problem. For it seems clear to me that mental illness is physical illness, and the ways in which we separate the two by-and-large hurt those with mental health challenges to a degree we would never tolerate if the given problem were an obvious physical ailment.

Albert Schweitzer, who declared himself Unitarian in theology, was recognized world-wide as a man of great genius and even greater compassion. He spent his life establishing health care for the indigenous peoples of Africa who at the time were being exploited by colonial powers. His fame grew because of his writings about the need for civilization to be ethically motivated rather than purely capitalistically oriented. So when he wrote and spoke about the goals of civilization as goals where the ethics are responsibility without limits toward all that lives, he was not purely philosophizing but living the values he promoted. I believe that one sign of our innate goodness is that people seem to universally admire such people as Schweitzer who live out of the ethics they proclaim. For at root we know that we can never claim to be truly civilized as long as we treat any person or people in any way that denies their basic worth and dignity.

Sadly, as in our religious, spiritual, ethical, or medical stances we are at this point in our human history sadly deficient in our ethical or compassionate approach to mental health.

Let us consider part of the problem, part of the reason we want to separate the mental from the physical. The main reason is that we often cannot see the source of the disease or injury or malformation, which makes it difficult for people to sympathize with the problem. Modern medicine is beginning to change that, but for most of human history we could not see the problems of internal origin in the way we could see a broken leg or rotting teeth, or weeping sores, or the wasting away of the body. What we can see is that with which we can be sympathetic or empathetic. As modern medicine evolved, much of what once was mysterious—like a ruptured appendix or tuberculosis or polio—could be known and what could be known could be treated. Or at least worked toward finding a treatment.

In biblical times diseases such as leprosy were considered a punishment from God, or proof of demon possession, because people did not understand its causes. As science progressed, as microbiology developed, leprosy, now known as Hanson’s Disease for its discoverer, was found to be caused by infection by the bacillus Mycobacterium Leprae. An easily treatable condition with antibiotics. Even today we have about 150 cases of leprosy diagnosed each year in this country. Armadillos are on of the principle carriers of the bacteria, and often it is the people who hunt and handle them that become infected. No punishment from God, no evil from below, a simple, yet terrible infection—like many others.

So the physical that can be seen or discovered more readily has over the course of our modern history come to be considered with greater logic and reason for the physical ailments they are, however difficult they may be to treat or cure(if either is possible). A person diagnosed with cancer immediately elicits our greatest compassion; yet, we know that while treatment has advanced greatly, modern medicine is still unable to guarantee cures. The months and years of toll that this disease alone takes on the lives of people we know is profound; yet rarely do people fear cancer in the way they did even seventy-five years ago when many people thought you could “catch” cancer from someone with the disease.

We know that there are many sources or causes for the physical ailments and diseases that afflict humanity, and much of the resources dedicated to human health is to help find the causes and treatment for heart disease, cancer, diabetes, obesity, and all the range of rarer disease that afflicts the human community.

The brain, while it is being studied, while the search for causes of mental illness is ongoing, is still the area of greatest ignorance for the medical community and for the rest of us. Yet, the brain is the engine of the body. It is the physically necessary organ for the operation of the body. We can lose arms, legs, gall bladders, even large sections of our internal organs and still live. But not one lives without a brain. And, few people live well with serious damage to the brain. The brain, ergo the mind, is just as much, if not more, physical than any other part. The mark of or proof of death, is not heart death, but brain death.

Yet, when we think about or speak about mental illness, in general, people continue to feel some level of mistrust, superstition, discomfort. Few people will hesitate to say, for instance, “My father had a heart attack.” But far, far few people will say, “My father is a paranoid schizophrenic.” Why is this? For one reason, to say my father had a heart attack will almost always elicit compassion, while the other tends to elicit discomfort or anxiety.

One of the great advantages of our modern communication age is that people are discovering that things once considered rare are to be found everywhere. In this way the internet is truly life saving for many who once would have felt isolated. So little by little people are becoming less reluctant to talk about things that even in my childhood were taboo subjects, like cancer or mental illness. Yet, I can safely say that virtually every family will be touched by one or the other, if not both; which shows the degree of common occurrence for both.

Mental health professionals are justly frustrated and angry because most health insurance covers very little treatment for mental illness, in comparison to treatment for other illnesses. Our wider medical community, and especially our politicians, would scream loud and strong if health insurance said they would only pay for ten doctor visits for a cancer patient, but we hear little when they say that about mental health treatment.

Herein lies the core of my message this morning, for it is to my mind a failure of ethics to continue to separate mental illness from physical illness, when in fact mental illness is physical illness. Albeit an area where the medical scientific community has a lot yet to learn.

Further, I believe it is tantamount to criminal, and certainly morally objectionable, to fail to treat all of our citizens equally when it comes to the amount of our state and federal dollars given to health care.

Almost every year or two we will hear of a case somewhere in the nation where a court has intervened to get medical care for a child whose parents are either of the Christian Science or Jehovah’s Witness churches. These two sects have strong beliefs about human medical intervention; for the Jehovah’s Witness religion, the issue usually is about blood transfusions, for they take from the Bible the admonition not to drink blood as equivalent with blood transfusions. In Christian Science, the tenets of the faith hold that through prayer alone God will heal if it is meant to happen. Regardless of the religious beliefs, or if it is simply a matter of blatant neglect, rarely do the public object to this clear interference between church and state when it comes to saving the life of a child. We believe the state has a responsibility to save lives; at least on one level. (Though we as a government or nation discount the lives of military men and women; at least, up to a point.)

Yet, at this very moment, in every city in this country, in most of the towns and villages, there are people with severe mental illness on the streets. The vast majority of so-called “homeless” people are homeless because of mental illness.

The great frustration for many families, and for mental health professionals, is that we do not have the same attitude towards helping the mentally ill as we do to forcing treatment on Jehovah’s Witnesses; for often the mentally ill person is not capable or willing to submit to the treatment they need. Often families are driven to cutting themselves off from their mentally ill parents or children, because they have no way of getting them committed for the treatment they so clearly need.

This, my friends, is clearly failing in our understanding of the ethics of community. That we as a people or a nation can stand by and allow hundreds of mentally ill men, women, and children to languish for want of treatment; or become such a burden on families that the families collapse under the strain. It happens all the time. Clergy see it all too often. It is the most painful of all the aspects of pastoral work, to see the sad effects of mental illness and to see the families able to do little to help change the situation.

Fifty years ago there certainly existed abuses of the mental health system, but at least we had one; now there is precious little for families who must face these long-term mental health crises. This all-or-nothing approach seem to characterize much of our national medical behavior. For now, it is nearly impossible to commit someone, like that young man who slaughtered all those people at Virginia Tech, unless they are seen beforehand to be danger to themselves or others. In his case, that happened and he was still released because he could not be committed for further treatment.

Schweitzer taught that ethics is about a relationship that arises from a reverence for life; not just some lives, but for life. To love one another means to care about the suffering of our human family. Not just the people for whom it is easy to empathize, but also for those whose illness give us discomfort, or anxiety, or fear.

A. Powell Davies approach is, I believe, the place to begin as we individually try to understand mental illness and to advocate for change. To face the realities is where we begin; to understand the electrical-chemical organ of the brain is subject to flaws, damage, and disease just like any other part of the body. Nothing is so terrible when you face it as when you run away from it. To look to what is possible and not just focus on what may seem impossible. To not succumb to the anxiety—the preventable anxiety—that disables us unnecessarily and paralyses useful effort. To accept that sometimes, just like with cancer, that there are inevitabilities we must accept. But most important, to overcome our anxiety about addressing the reality of mental illness. For ignoring the problem will not make it go away.

I have spent quite a bit of time with families challenged by mental illness. It can be extremely painful to watch as family members try to find ways to help people who can no longer manage their own lives, or who in fact damage the lives of others. It is sad and more than frustrating to watch someone try to deal with severe depression or other forms of mind disease or disorder because people do not have access to the treatment they need.

For me it is no less than a modern failure of ethics that we are not doing more to demand that our mentally ill members of society get the treatment they need. What is needed is, as Schweitzer said, ethics as devotion to life inspired by reverence for life.

May it be that we continue to learn more about the problems of mental illness, to see it as nothing more or less than physical illness, so that we may learn to respond with the same love and compassion to the betterment of all.

 

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