The Thousandth Generation
Ana Levy-Lyons
November 19, 2023
First Unitarian, Brooklyn

I was having some back pain a while ago and I was trying to figure out what might have
caused it. Was it when I went for a run the day before? When I carried heavy groceries
home a week ago? Something earlier? I asked my chiropractor how long ago an injury could
have happened to cause a pain I’m feeling today. He replied, “…birth?”

There’s a passage in the Hebrew Bible that sources pain back even further than birth. It
says: “For I, your God, am an impassioned God, visiting the crimes of the parents upon the
children, upon the third and upon the fourth generation of those who hate me.” This is one
of the parts of the Bible that makes some of us a little queasy. It seems to say that God will
punish children for the sins of their parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents. It
seems so unfair.

But if we set aside the notion of God as the agent of punishment for a minute, then this
becomes a teaching about the ripple effect of the things we do and the things that happen
to us; how they ripple out to our children and beyond. Nothing stays contained to one
moment or even one lifetime. When seen in this light we recognize it; we know that
referred suffering is real. When someone commits violence, when someone uses force,
dishonesty, tears the fabric of trust, whether the ancestor was perpetrator or victim… the
effects of it reverberate to the third and fourth generations.

I want to share two stories of this tragic truth. They are stories that are hard to hear but
devastatingly familiar these days. The first was shared by a friend of mine, Zvika Krieger,
who used to work for the US State Department supporting efforts on Israeli-Palestinian
peace negotiations. He writes, “Shachar and Shlomi lived in Kibbutz Holit near Israel’s
southern border with Gaza. They met in music school, got married, and had three
children… They founded a bilingual school that taught children in Hebrew and Arabic,
under the slogan: ‘Jewish Arab Education for Equality.’ On October 7 th , Hamas gunmen broke into Shachar and Shlomi’s house. The parents ran into their safe room with their 16-year-old son, Rotem. Shachar directed Rotem to get under a pile of blankets, and she laid on top of them. Moments later, Rotem heard a grenade explode and the sound of gunshots. He heard his parents scream… Rotem laid
under those blankets for over eight hours, soaked in his own blood …as well as his
mother’s blood seeping through the blankets.

Shachar’s brother shared that in 1919, in what is now Ukraine, their great-grandmother
also used her body to shield her child during a pogrom, pushing her under a bed to hide
her while she, the mother, was murdered. That child lived and became Shachar’s
grandmother.”

…to the third and fourth generation.

And then there’s a story shared in the publication Jewschool by Ilana Sumka, a peace
activist working to build understanding between Jews and Palestinians. She writes that
she remembers meeting young Palestinian children who lost their parents,
grandparents, sisters, and their homes when Israel bombed Gaza in 2008. They lived to
see more bombings in 2012, 2014, and 2021. A recurring nightmare. Ilana wondered
what would become of these children. Who would they grow up to be? She writes,
“Tragically, we now have a partial answer as to who some of those kids grew up to be.”
Some of those children she met fifteen years ago were among the Hamas attackers on
October 7.

…to the third and fourth generation.

Sometimes the aggressors become the victims in the next generation, sometimes the
victims become the aggressors. Sometimes the roles stay the same and the actors change.
The actors change, but the pain gets transmitted birth to birth. How far back did it start?
Was it birth? Before birth? October 7? The Nakba? The Holocaust? The pogroms? The
Crusades?

This chain of violence and suffering is playing out so tragically right now in the Middle East,
but we see smaller versions of it all the time, even in our own lives. Many of us still
experience pain that came about through our parents’ actions. Or pain from things that
happened to our parents. Some of us can trace the underlying dynamics back to our
grandparents or even great-grandparents. It gets passed down like dominoes. When it’s
profound, originating in abuse, or a loss that came too early in life, dire poverty, hunger,
forced displacement, or a violation of the body, when such a pain is passed down, this is
what’s known as intergenerational trauma. It reverberates and we, the descendants, can
feel like it happened to us.

And in some sense, it did. The field of epigenetics teaches us that our genes are actually
changed by trauma – they encode a kind of embodied memory that can be passed down to
our children. The fears of the parents are visited upon the children, quite literally in our
DNA. And so those who are wealthy can feel like they are always on the edge of poverty;
those who are safe can feel constantly threatened; those who have plenty to eat can feel like they could go hungry tomorrow. The facts don’t matter so much; the received experience is embedded in our hearts. And then we humans sometimes act out of that place of fear, sometimes blindly, sometimes without even knowing we’re doing it.

Intergenerational trauma touches so many of our lineages. It certainly describes what’s
going on in Israel and Palestine. It describes an aspect of the Black experience in this
country. It describes the experience of so many victims of sexual violence and all kinds of
violence who, tragically, constitute a huge percentage of the American people. And poverty
can be another form of trauma, slower and more hidden, but devastating nonetheless. The
list goes on.

So, when this wave of horrific violence exploded in Israel and Gaza last month it hit a raw
nerve. It activated some of those deep fears, not only there, but here. Many of us see the
suffering and injustice and we’re triggered by it. The battles here have mostly been of
words, but they have at times broken into physical violence, most notably when six-year-
old Wadea Al-Fayoume, was murdered because he was Muslim. The rise of antisemitism
and Islamophobia have been terrifying, especially for people who are visibly Jewish or
Muslim. But even others have told me that they feel uncomfortable and wary in New York
City now.

It’s far away but it’s so close. I feel sickened by what’s happening in our world right now.
Some of us are angry. Some of us are scared. All of us are heartbroken. We all want a happy
ending to this story, and we all know it’s way too late for that.

But what we can hope for, what we can work for, is the possibility of transformation – in
the Middle East, in the U.S., and in the circles that we touch. Because just like we can ask
where do you start the story? How far back do you look? We can also ask where do you stop
the story? Since how it ends up, as they say, depends on where you stop the story. And this
story is not over yet.

The Hebrew Bible passage I read to you doesn’t end where I ended it. Here’s the full
passage: “I, your God am an impassioned God, visiting the crimes of the parents upon the
children, upon the third and upon the fourth generations of those who hate me, but
showing loving-kindness to the thousandth generation of those who love me.” What saves
the day here, literally the saving news of faith, is that goodness and love also ripple out. Yes,
hate and fear proliferate, but love proliferates exponentially more. Loving-kindness to the
thousandth generation.

This too rings true in our world. When you act out of love, justice, truthfulness, and respect,
that goodness reverberates outward into the world touching everyone and everything. And the corollary to this is that we are the beneficiaries of goodness from long, long ago. We all know people who are very sane, loving people, good partners, or good parents who, themselves, came from an abusive family or just a family that didn’t know how to really see them. And you ask yourself, “How did he turn out to be such a good partner?” “How did she turn out to be such a good mother?” “Where did they get such strength?” And you don’t find the answer when you look at their parents or the community they were raised in. The
thousandth generation principle teaches that they could have been lifted by a powerful love
a hundred years ago that formed a substrate of compassion, kindness, strength, and pride –
recessive genes that transmitted silently through the generations. Love can never really be
contained.

How can we break the cycles of intergenerational trauma that are so much bigger than us?
Only by plugging into a love that is also bigger than us. A love that stretches way back – that
finds compassion in the midst of hardship, and understanding in the midst of grief. And a
love that pays it way forward. Call it intergenerational loving-kindness. There are people all
over the world, including many in this room, doing this work right now.

I was especially moved to learn of an organization called Parents’ Circle – Family Forum
jointly run by Palestinians and Israelis. They bring together parents of children who were
killed in the conflict. They meet and talk and cry together. They tell each other their stories
and they listen. One program called Parallel Narratives helps each community listen to the
narratives of the other. Together they visit the village of Lifta whose residents were driven
out in 1948. And they visit the Holocaust museum Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. Here is what
Haled Juma, a Palestinian participant, had to say:
 
“During the encounters I met a group of Israelis and formed ties that last to this day. I
discovered people who have true empathy and who support our right to live free in an
independent state, not under occupation. The visits we group members made together
made me very hopeful that there is a true opportunity for co-existence if only people would
get together, face to face, and speak from the heart.”

I know it’s tempting at times like this to be cynical about these kinds of efforts. We can look
at what’s happening right now and say, well, obviously it doesn’t work. But the participants
themselves, who have experienced the grief and the devastation firsthand, believe that in
fact it is violence that doesn’t work. They believe in the peace process and believe that it is
the only way forward.

Meytal Ofer, whose father was killed by Hamas says: “I think there is no other choice. This
is my home. I don’t want to give up my home. I don’t want to go, and Palestinians will not go anywhere either. So, we have to do something. You cannot stop violence with violence. We tried it for 100 years, and it’s not working.” Bassam Aramin, whose daughter was killed by an Israeli soldier, said, “The arc of history is long. Germany once tried to wipe out Jews and now exchanges ambassadors with Israel.

Someday Israel and Palestine will coexist as states, and the question is simply how many
corpses will pile up before that happens. We must share this land as one state or two states
or five states. Otherwise, we will share this same piece of land as the graveyards of our
kids.”

This is the work. It’s the work of beginning to heal intergenerational trauma with
intergenerational loving-kindness.

We can’t possibly know the effects of our actions or exactly how they will reverberate
through time and space. But what we can do is ask ourselves: what kind of seed do we have
in our hand? What is the nature of the thing we are planting and putting out into the world?
What are we participating in? What about the words we’re about to speak? What about the
words we’re about to withhold? What about the quality of the attention we pay to someone
who needs to express themselves? Are we really listening? What about the way we touch
someone? How do we use our power? How do we behave with those who have no power –
children or non-human animals? How do we behave with those who can’t hold us
accountable – strangers on the subway, strangers online? What are we passing on to the
next generation?
  
The striking thing about the “thousandth generation” teaching is that from the viewpoint of
the Bible, there haven’t even been a thousand generations yet. So, it’s not only about
receiving love from our ancestors, but that love is our natural inheritance from before the
world was formed. The genealogy of evil stems back only three or four generations, but
love was born in the dawn of time. This is our true inheritance. When we transmit that love,
when we express and manifest that love, it will live and breathe and ripple outward for a
thousand generations into a future world that we can not even begin to fathom.

Jan 29, 2023

First Unitarian, Brooklyn

Part 1

In the basement of my building, next to the laundry room, there’s a bookcase where people can leave books they no longer want and take books that look interesting. I’ve started calling this bookcase “God’s Dropbox” because it seems like God curates a personalized reading list for me and deposits the books there. Several times, a book I found there has been exactly the thing I needed at that moment.

And so it was that over the summer I was talking with a friend about writing and writer’s block. He suggested that I might want to try this practice that he had read about years ago where you start each day by writing, free association, long hand, for ten minutes. He said it was from the book, The Artist’s Way. I had never read that book, but I thought the writing exercise was worth a try. So I tried a version of it – not first thing in the morning, but just before I would work on a writing project. Free associate for ten minutes. I noticed how much it helped my writing flow more easily, more freely, more creatively. I came up with ideas and connections in those ten minutes that might not have occurred to me otherwise. And I also noticed how I was still so resistant to doing it every day because there was a voice in my head that said, this is a waste of time.

I was noticing all this about myself and after about a week, there it was in God’s Dropbox: The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. I took it off the shelf and leafed through it. It was all cut up inside because, I realized later, it’s a workbook that you write in and cut things out and stick them up above your desk or on your fridge. But I took this copy of The Artist’s Way up to my apartment and started reading it.

It was a strange entry into the world of this book because it was always the important parts that were cut out. It was like one of those espionage documents where all the most explosive, compromising information is redacted with black bars. It would say, for example, “The following spiritual principles are the bedrock on which creative recovery and discovery can be built [colon].” And then there would be a big square cut out of the page.

But by reading what was there, I started to piece it together in my mind and heart. Its premise was simple: that we are all creative beings. Creativity is not something that only successful artists possess; it’s part of our nature; part of our inner child, part of the factory settings of each human being, installed by the greatest Creator of all. Julia Cameron, the author, uses the word “God,” but she’s quick to say that it doesn’t matter what you call it; there is a creative force at the foundation of the universe and part of the evolution of the world as we know it has been the transmission of that creative capacity itself to us. The feminist theologian Mary Daly put it this way: “It is the creative potential itself in human beings that is in the image of God.”

This natural creativity that we have is abundant in our childhood. We pretend, make believe, dream vividly, conjure imaginary friends. We love color, we love sparkle, we love twirling and running. We identify with strange looking animals like komodo dragons. We ask fresh questions and make astute observations about our world. We’re funny when we’re kids, and humor is always a little creative twinkle.

But at some point in our childhoods, many of us find that the adults in our lives are trying to dampen that expansive dream-filled way of being. They want to steer us toward more serious matters of getting dressed and brushing our teeth and going to school, getting there on time, and then doing our homework. All mediated by grownups. When we bring home a crayon drawing from school, the grownups may chortle about how cute it is and may put it up on the fridge. But they don’t take us seriously as artists.

And as we get older, grownups sometimes will subtly or not so subtly steer us away from serious study or careers in the arts. That stuff is just for fun; just a hobby. Worst of all, some of us get told that we’re no good at it. Creativity is for other people, for the professionals, for people with real gifts. Not you. Sometimes well-meaning friends will pile on and critique an idea or rough draft too early – and you get shamed for not being good enough right out of the gate. And so your tender creative venture withdraws.

Reading around the edges of The Artist’s Way, literally, I could tell that Cameron believes what I have always felt: that there is a kind of spiritual/ creative injury that we suffer in that process. The creative part of ourselves, the divine gift that is so essential to who we are, gets suppressed. And along with it, the channels of spiritual flow get stopped up. We live smaller, less expansively. Our childhood dreams grow dim. We put our heads down and do our jobs, sometimes living vicariously through other creative people around us.

But creative flow is part of who we are. Each of us. And I have come to believe that it is un-killable. We have the ability to nurture that part of us and let it flourish again. Cameron calls it creative recovery. And it is clearly also spiritual recovery. When we unclog our spiritual plumbing and allow the natural current of creativity to flow through us, we become more fully ourselves. And when that happens, watch out, world. It’s so powerful. Amazing things begin to happen. For one thing, synchronicity. I’ve experienced it myself, that when I start to tune in to my creativity, all kinds of “coincidences” and unexpected opportunities crop up. I believe that’s the great Creator happily, busily making connections for us.

Now to be clear, this is not just for people who want to be writers or musicians or painters. We can bring creativity to our whole lives, whatever we do. For lawyers, for scientists, for retail workers, for accountants (they don’t call it creative bookkeeping for nothing)! Definitely for teachers, definitely for parents. The way we run a PTA meeting or play a pickup game of basketball or arrange the furniture in our apartment. There is creative potential everywhere. When it’s flowing, our whole life can be a work of art. And when it’s flowing, we realize: this is how it’s meant to be. This is who we are meant to be. At that point, how can we keep from singing?

Hymn: My Life Flows On in Endless Song (#108)

Part 2

What’s in God’s Dropbox for me is going to be different from what’s in your God’s Dropbox. It may not be books for you; it may be some other vehicle by which you are offered the next step in your journey. The important thing is to keep your eyes and ears open to receiving whatever signal might be coming your way. Who knows? Maybe First U is your Dropbox.

So I want to offer you some key teachings from this particular path of The Artist’s Way and you can try it on for size if you like.

To move toward creative recovery, Julia Cameron lays out a 12-week program with two foundational practices: Morning Pages and the Artist’s Date. Morning Pages is basically what my friend told me: Just write every morning, three pages longhand, without stopping or thinking about it. Just spew onto the page whatever is running through your head. By getting it all out, most of it banal, some of it profound. It becomes a kind of prayer or meditation, simply watching your thoughts as they spill onto the page. No judging, no editing. And you don’t show it to anybody. Not anybody. You don’t even go back and reread it yourself for the first few weeks. You just do it.

The other practice, the Artist’s Date, is where you take yourself, alone, on an outing every week. It doesn’t need to be something highbrow. It should be something fun. Playful. Interesting. Different. Go to a part of town you’ve never been to before and wander around. Go to a beach in the winter. Go look at dinosaur bones in a museum. Ride the subway to the end of the line. Talk to strangers. Buy some weird ingredients that you don’t know what they are and try to cook something with them. Do something that your adult self would think is a waste of time, but that your inner child would think is awesome. In letting yourself play like this you are nurturing that inner child. You’re filling the well of your creativity with new experiences. And you’re starting to open up a long-dormant part of yourself.

There are many more exercises that Julia Cameron offers, all designed to help us recover our capacity to dream and trust ourselves and create. Many of them also help us come to terms with the source of our old creative and spiritual injuries. And so just in case First U is your God’s Dropbox, Ana Egge – who sang her song, Dreamer, for us earlier – and I are going to be offering a workshop based on these exercises. Anyone and everyone is invited to join us, read the book, do the exercises, and see what happens. The info will be in the e-news this week.

Here’s what Ana had to say about doing this work: “I’ve always seen songwriting and music making as fun. Not that I haven’t experienced writer’s block, I have. But over the years I’ve learned to give myself permission to play. One of the exercises from The Artist’s Way that has helped me to do that is the morning pages exercise, which I’ve done on and off for many years now. It really helps me to clear out the mental chatter and make room for something new. I’m really looking forward to showing up with the group for the Artist’s Way meetings at First U to see what happens as we allow ourselves to recover our own creativity and give ourselves and each other permission to play.”

I eventually went out and bought myself a complete copy of The Artist’s Way without all the cut up pages. But reading it initially with the key spiritual lessons clipped out taught me something invaluable: I already knew the key spiritual lessons. We all already know these lessons in our hearts. We know that “Creativity is the natural order of life.” We know that “When we open ourselves to our creativity, we open ourselves to the Creator’s creativity within us and our lives.” We know that there is a source of spiritual energy far beyond us and deep within us. It’s sometimes buried; it’s sometimes scared. But when we start to let it flow, we reclaim our true nature and we begin to become who we are meant to be.

Prayer

Let’s pray together. Great Creator within us and beyond us, guide us in our journeys. Help us to become the artists of our lives, living with creativity, joy and playfulness. Help us quiet the voices that tell us we can’t or we shouldn’t dare. May the child within us be nourished and protected. And may that child can be a conduit for our dreams. Help us open ourselves to your holy flow every day and bring creative spirit to everything we do.

Faxes to God

Ana Levy-Lyons

October 23, 2022

First Unitarian, Brooklyn

Part 1:

In the year 70, the temple in Jerusalem was destroyed. The Romans pillaged it and burned it and by the end, all that was left was the western facing wall, standing by itself. This wall, called the Western Wall or the Wailing Wall has become known as a holy site – a special place where God especially receives prayers. And so every year thousands of Christians, Muslims, Jews, and curious tourists visit the Wailing Wall and pour out their hearts. Sometimes they speak their prayers out loud, sometimes they wail, and sometimes they write their prayer on a little scrap of paper, fold it up, and stick it between the stones of the wall.

But what if you want to deposit a prayer in the wall but you live on the other side of the planet and can’t get to Jerusalem? Well, in the 1980’s the Israeli telephone company came up with a solution: they created a dedicated fax line where you could fax your prayer from anywhere in the world and an employee would deliver it to the Wall. The New York Times reported, “God has a fax number in Jerusalem.” The wonderful little book Faxes and Email to God is a compilation of some of these prayers faxed by people ranging in age from 3 to 93:

• From Rebecca, age 8: “Dear God, My grandpa has been gone since I was 3. How’s he doing?”

• From Serena, age 4: “Dear God, When are you coming down?”

• From Johnny: “Dear God, Please give me the strength to take care of my wife.”

• From Estelle: “Dear God, Many years ago I placed a note in the Wailing Wall asking that my daughter not marry before she gained the judgment to find the right man. Decades have gone by and my daughter is still single. So what I want to ask is whether I could please take back my original request?”

• From Rita: “Dear God, My mother recently admitted to placing a message in the Wailing Wall twenty years ago asking that I not marry until I achieved the wisdom to find the right man. I wish she had never made this wish. But if it is not too late, please find me the right man, and give me the good judgment to spend the rest of my life with him.”

What’s our reaction when we hear these? It’s cute when it’s kids but kind of naïve and simplistic when it’s adults? The prayers I just read from the Wailing Wall reflect a very straightforward belief in a personal God – a God who is in heaven with our loved ones, a God who may “come down” at some point, a God who can directly answer us and make things happen here on earth.

Some Unitarian Universalists feel a connection to a personal God like this and might pray as a conversation with that God. But others believe this is something we should grow out of. We bristle at “magical thinking.” Many think of God more abstractly – or not at all. After all, Unitarians are the people who believe in one God at most.

But we do pray here at First U, or at least we use the word “prayer,” and we have a few opportunities to pray during the service – a prayer after the sermon, a silent prayer, a pastoral prayer, lighting candles, and certainly singing and listening to music. I actually think of the whole service as a form of prayer. But what is prayer? Why do we do it? How do we do it? If we’re gonna pray, don’t we have to know to what or to whom we’re praying? And if we don’t know who’s on the other end of the fax line, should we even bother? I mean, it might just be the guy who works the late shift at the phone company and that’s as far as it goes.

It probably won’t surprise you to hear that I think, yes, we should bother. Because the truth is, nobody knows what’s on the other end of the line. We’re talking about the greatest mystery there is – the source of the big bang, the foundation of our own consciousness, the origin of love. We’re talking about something ineffable that is the light in a baby’s eyes, the warmth of a held hand. We’re talking about an early part of ourselves that we don’t fully understand but that makes our heart race when we glimpse it from time to time. None of it makes rational sense.

But it doesn’t have to make rational sense. As much as some of us may hate this, we live in a world that is primarily non-rational. Once your basic needs for food and safety are met, life is actually about all the other stuff — the dimensions of the inexplicable, energetic, creative, emotional, intuitive. These are the things which actually, I believe, make up the majority of our experience of this world, for good and for bad.

We sense with a different sense that we exist in the light of something much greater than ourselves. Whether we nickname it “God,” whether we think of it as our deeper Self or Higher Power, whether we imagine it as the natural world or the whole that is greater than the sum of all the parts, whether it’s the ocean of which we are a drop, whether it’s the power of love, whether it’s within or beyond, we yearn to commune with it. That communion is prayer.

At least, that’s what I’m doing when I pray. I know that I live in the presence of a source of unlimited energy, creativity, and love. The more I intentionally open myself to that source, the more I invoke it and tend to my relationship with it, the more it flows through me and out into my life. I call it God, as well as other names for God, but naming is just a way to focus attention. You don’t have to name it at all.

But to cry out to it in some form is, I believe, a fundamentally human need and the most natural thing in the world. We embodied creatures have an instinct to, at times, set aside the rational, step out of the mundane, and cry out in a different register. No one knows for sure who’s on the other end of the line, but we cry out anyway. And sometimes the primordial prayer, the deepest prayer, is simply the yearning to know that we’re not alone in an empty universe.

• From Jonathan, age 9 ½: “Dear God, I have been wondering if you are real or not. Please tell me. Love, Jonathan.”

Like that.

Hymn: Come, My Way, My Truth, My Life

Part 2:

We modern humans have trouble making space and time for the spiritual dimension of our lives. We’re so conditioned in this culture to only do things where we know that there’s going to be a payoff and where we know what that payoff is going to be. We run a cost-benefit analysis and only if it looks like we’ll end up in the black, do we do it. Prayer isn’t like that. It isn’t efficient. It doesn’t follow the rules of adulthood. We can’t know in advance where it’s going to take us. We can’t know what we’ll “get out of it.”

When we’re in what I’ll call our small mind – our day-to-day ego and ordinary, practical self, we assume that everything is a zero-sum game. If we spend a half hour praying in the morning, we lose a half hour for something else. Whether it’s time, energy, or even love, we think that it’s all finite and if you “use up” some of it over here, you’ll have less to spend over there. But through prayer we evoke the deepest, most elemental parts of ourselves. We step into our great mind. We step into the holy waters of the larger reality where it’s not a zero-sum game. Quite the opposite: love is unlimited, time is nonlinear, and energy is infinite. It gives the lie to how we all normally operate. And when we bring some of that great mind into our small mind life, when we scoop some of that water and carry it back with us, watch out world!

This is why Abraham Joshua Heschel, the rabbi who marched in Selma with Dr. King famously said, “Prayer is meaningless unless it is subversive, unless it seeks to overthrow and to ruin the pyramids of callousness, hatred, opportunism, falsehoods. The liturgical movement must become a revolutionary movement seeking to overthrow the forces that continue to destroy the promise, the hope, the vision.”

In other words, when prayer is doing its job, it’s infusing us with a visionary power – the great mind that does not accept the normal rules of society. This can revolutionize our families and it can revolutionize our communities. It can shift our lives in those non-rational ways that we could never prove or anticipate.

But if you want to invite in that kind of transformation, you have to intentionally open up the channel. Don’t get hung up on intellectual questions of – is there a personal God or it is just the life force of the universe? (The answer is yes, by the way.) In my experience, if you want God or Source or whatever you call it to change your life – if you want it to relate to you as a conscious being, try relating to it as a conscious being. Dismiss the voice that says it’s too childish. Send a damn fax if you have to. Some amazing things start to happen when we let ourselves cry out.

Do not think that you have to be polite in prayer or do it any particular way. Nothing is too big; nothing is too mundane. You don’t have to be respectful or grateful. You just have to be yourself. Prayer can be the place of greatest authenticity where we learn our own truth even as we speak it. The Source of Life can take our anger and our disappointment and our grief. From the time of the psalms and even earlier, humans have been pouring out our rage over how unjust life can be. Lamentation is a real and holy expression. Sometimes we all need a good cry and it helps to have a direction to cry in.

• From Vivien: “Dear God: I’m really confused. Why isn’t life getting any better? Why does everyone I know seem to be depressed and tired all the time? Why couldn’t you have made things a little bit easier on all of us down here? Why disease? Why hate? Why rape and murder and lying and mosquitoes and rotten fruit and floods and famine and DO YOU REALLY LOVE US? Why is your concept of love so different from ours? Why did you create us? And if you can’t answer these questions, if I can never know the answers, then why did you make me capable of asking them?”

Imagine if a thousand years from now, this sanctuary is no longer standing, except for one wall – the western wall here. And our descendants come on pilgrimage and they write their prayers on little papers or send them by whatever technology they have in a thousand years – directly through their brain teleportal systems. And they place them or zap them in the cracks of the stone, yearning to connect with something ancient. I image their prayers might not be so different from ours.

I imagine they will still be yearning for love and still searching for meaning, just like us. They will still be in awe of how beautiful this world can be sometimes and still heartbroken over how cruel it can be, just like us. They will call out from their brokenness and grief and rage against God, just like us. And, sometimes they will send tears of gratitude for the gifts of new life, new love, and senseless joy, just like us.

Prayer:

We’re going to try a little prayer experiment now. Instead of me articulating a prayer on behalf of the community, I’m going to give us a series of prompts to start us off and invite everyone to fill in the prayers that are real for you. Simultaneously. Just say the first thing or things that pop into your head. So I might say, “I’m grateful for…” and you might repeat the starter and say, “I’m grateful for my health as I’ve just recovered from Covid, I’m grateful for my loving dog, and I’m grateful for this beautiful fall.” You can whisper it in your own heart, but I think it would be really beautiful if everyone prayed out loud and we had a whole cacophony of prayers rising, and filling our sanctuary. Let’s try it:

I’m grateful for…

Why does it have to be that…

I love…

It hurts so much that…

Help me trust myself so that I can…

Give me strength so that I can…

Let love flow through me so that I can…

Fairytales: The Emperor’s New Clothes

Ana Levy-Lyons

October 16, 2022

First Unitarian, Brooklyn

Sermon Part 1

This week a number of you received text messages supposedly from me, asking you to buy gift cards for some good cause. This was a scam. Just for the record, I will never text you out of the blue and ask you to do me a favor by buying gift cards. (God help me if I ever actually do need a gift card or if a Nigerian prince ever really does contact me…)

The art of the scam goes back probably as long as humans have been around. And it is a scam that is the starting point of our story today – that of the Emperor’s New Clothes by Hans Christian Andersen. A pair of swindlers come into town and they prey on the human weaknesses of the people – of the king, of his court officials, and of the ordinary townspeople. Why do they do it? Like any scammer, they do it to make a buck. They keep billing the king for fine yarn, which they never buy and never use, and just like the scammer will keep asking for more gift cards after you buy one, they reel the king in and keep asking for more money for more imaginary yarn. It’s possible that they also take great delight in exploiting the hypocrisy and emptiness of the pomp and circumstance of royal power.

This year in our worship series we’re exploring classic European fairytales. Like the biblical stories from last year, fairytales are mythic stories that are deeply embedded in our cultural substrata because they evoke archetypes. They tell deep truths about ourselves. They often have many versions and many sources. In this case, Hans Christian Andersen may have adapted this story from a medieval Spanish story of swindlers who claim to make clothing that’s only visible to certain people. And that may have come from an even older Indian version of the story. But these stories didn’t include the child who blows the whistle on the whole thing.

So where did the character of the child come from? The child may come from Andersen’s own life. Apparently when he was a kid, he was once standing in a crowd with his mother eagerly waiting to catch a glimpse of the king – Frederick VI. When they finally saw the king, Andersen said, loudly, “Oh, he’s nothing more than a human being!” His mother angrily shushed him, saying, “Have you gone mad, child?” Because madness, culturally speaking, is about not seeing what everyone else sees – or seeing something that no one else sees. The fool on the hill sees the world spinning round.

The mother in The Emperor’s New Clothes does the same thing. She shushes her child. She calls her foolish. She desperately tries to retain social control. Why? Because she is scared. What would happen if society’s lens were shattered and everyone admitted what was really there? Would it be madness? Indeed, when the little girl cries out that the emperor is naked, it spreads like wildfire and everyone starts yelling, “yeah, he’s naked! He’s not wearing anything at all!” Anarchy! Suddenly everyone has the courage to admit the truth. Except for the emperor himself who just continues strutting his stuff. Doubling down instead of admitting you’re wrong is a common tactic of the powerful. It must have been great to watch…

Former Child monologue 1:

It wasn’t so easy, you know!

[Ana: “What? Excuse me, I’m trying to preach a sermon here. Who are you?”]

I happen to be the only person in this room who knows the truth about what happened that day. Because I was there, all those years ago.

[Ana: “You were there?”]

Not only was I there, I was the little girl who cried out, “the emperor is naked!” That part you got right. But then you make it sound like everybody instantly saw the light, and then lifted me up on their shoulders and sang, “For she’s a jolly good fellow.” And we all lived happily ever after. I’ll have you know; it wasn’t like that at all! They hated me. They hissed at me. My mother, may she rest in peace, was absolutely mortified. I don’t think she ever forgave me for making such a spectacle of our family. And for months afterwards people would avert their eyes or even cross to the other side of the street when they saw me coming. I was a pariah. It was only later, in secret, in people’s homes and in shady taverns, that they started to murmur about it – “remember that little girl at the emperor’s parade…?” And one after another they started admitting to each other that they couldn’t see the clothes either. And by the time it was all out in public, everyone was pretending that they had said the emperor was naked all along.

Sermon part 1 continued…

Point well taken. Thank you. If I may recap: you were a prophet. And it’s sometimes no fun to be a prophet when people are not ready to hear your words.

With the addition of the character of the child-prophet, the Emperor’s New Clothes becomes a story of political and social satire. It pokes fun at all of the socially polite fictions we tell ourselves to this day – the fictions about democracy that keep illegitimate rulers in power; the fictions about nature that keep suicidal ecological practices legal; the fictions about business that keep cruel economic systems humming along. It’s acceptable in our culture to advocate for technocratic solutions to particular problems – the change of a law or policy or mechanism. But start to prophecy about the fairytale that is whole system? The figures of corporate and political power get very nervous.

Because to keep a massive fiction afloat requires a great deal of collective consent and energy. Everyone has to agree to uphold the basic framework on which it hangs. And sometimes, with enough support, the fiction can become real. Like money itself, whose value is completely dependent on the faith of basically everyone. Money these days is nothing but digital numbers drifting like ghosts in computer hard drives and yet it has such meaning that people starve for the lack of it.

Hymn: Now I Recall My Childhood

Sermon Part 2

So in The Emperor’s New Clothes, the court officials and the emperor and the townspeople all pretend to be able to see the fine garments. Or maybe they will themselves to actually see them, so great is their desire to be normal. But either way, their sense of self and their social status depends on perpetuating the fiction. Everyone not only claims that they can see the royal garments, they gush about how beautiful they are. They collaborate with the swindlers; they give the scam color and life – they commit to it. And anyone who threatens their precarious worldview – who gives voice to their doubts and pushes them out of their comfort zone, gets punished. And woe be to that person. Just ask Greta Thunberg. The child at the parade, I imagine, learned her lesson the hard way and never again tried to pull anything like that.

Former Child monologue 2

Wrong again!

[Ana: Excuse me?]

You said I never tried anything like that again, but that’s wrong – I did. In fact, as hard as it was in the short run to be the only one who said what was obviously true, that moment changed my life. I look back on it as a kind of rebirth. It was like something inside me burst out – something real and true. And I suddenly I could see in a different way – not through the eyes of the adults in my life, but through my eyes. This is going to sound weird, but it was like I gained my own eyes. The eyes in my head. I had always been told that I should trust the vision of others; but now I saw that I could trust my own vision too. And that sometimes I could understand things that even the most powerful people in the land – even the emperor – couldn’t understand. I could see the world spinning round. And so for the rest of my life, whenever I had that burst of clarity, I would speak out. And when people called me a fool, I didn’t mind. I kind of felt bad for them actually. Because I knew that they were desperately trying to hang on to their fairytales.

Sermon part 2 continued…

It sounds like it was really a kind of spiritual awakening. Like the world shifted on its axis. You realized that the invisible clothes were just a social fabric – a fabrication that everyone was weaving together. And that if that was the case, then maybe other aspects of reality might be a fabrication as well.

In this sense, there’s a mystical dimension to the story of the Emperor’s New Clothes. When a child’s vision cuts through the agreed upon reality, it destabilizes that reality. And it gives a kind of freedom, a kind of permission to everyone else, to all of us. To step outside of what we think we know; to step outside of the systems of our relationships and money and power and look at them all afresh.

Now to be clear, not every lone opinion is in the right. Pushing back against the status quo doesn’t always mean we’re doing God’s work. It may not be wise; it may not be moral. Sometimes the consensus view is the consensus view because it is true. And to try to tear it down, as so many leaders of a certain political party are doing these days, can be dangerous. And so a process of discernment must always be standing guard. We make a mistake when we embrace extreme individualism, scorning the wisdom of those who came before us and others in our community. This is where the spiritual work of humility comes in – to know that sometimes our own vision is incomplete and we need each other.

But we also make a mistake when we are too passive, too eager to fit in with the crowd, and too accepting of the social fabrications of this world. There will always be scammers out there, ready to take advantage of what we want to believe to be true. Hans Christian Andersen gave us the figures of both the scammer and the child who is a part of each of us. This is where the spiritual work of honesty comes in. To seek the honesty of a child who, in their own innocence and literal thinking, can often perceive things more clearly. As the Unitarian apostate fool-on-the-hill Henry David Thoreau said, “It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.”

Prayer

Let’s pray together. God of insight and power of inner wisdom, give us the understanding of a child. Help us to cut through the social fabrications of our lives to reveal the naked truth of things as they are. May we have the humility to learn from others and lean on our community for a reality check. May we have the honesty to question accepted norms. May we learn to trust our own vision – the eyes in our own head as the world is spinning round. And may we have the boldness to speak our truth when we know it’s time.

Talking to Strangers

Ana Levy-Lyons

September 18, 2022

First Unitarian, Brooklyn

Part One

Two scenes. Scene one, set in the North Island of New Zealand: a visitor from out of town comes to a Maori neighborhood and greets a shopkeeper. The two of them make eye contact and then lean their faces close, until their foreheads and noses are touching. They take a moment to breathe each other’s air before stepping back. And then they chat. This is the traditional indigenous practice of hongi – a greeting that means roughly “the sharing of breath.”

The Maori creation myth, like the Biblical creation myth, features the divine breathing life into an earth creature. The earthling becomes animated and conscious when it receives that breath of life. So in the practice of hongi, it’s understood that the two people are literally sharing the breath of life, allowing it to pass between them. They are breathing life into each other. For a visitor, hongi is also a kind of initiation – they are being brought into the circle of the community, which includes all the creatures of the island. They are taking part in the oneness of everything.

Scene two, set on the R train in New York City: a visitor from out of town gets onto the subway. He looks around and, seeing that every single person is on their phone, he gets out his phone too. He spends his ride in silence, transported through that little rectangular portal to a world that is not New York City but the world of Pokemon GO or Instagram or maybe a news story about Trump and the Justice Department and their game of chicken. No one on the train acknowledges our visitor and no one certainly has any interest in breathing his air. In fact, we have spent the last few years going to great lengths to avoid breathing each other’s air.

In the age of Covid, hongi sounds terrifying. And in fact, during the height of the pandemic, Maori tribes were trying to ban it or at least discourage it. But I want to suggest that in our culture hongi might have sounded terrifying even before Covid. We’ve been drifting away from each other for decades at least and now it’s to the point that we speak of an epidemic of loneliness. Isn’t it interesting that just as our culture was pushing us away from each other, increasingly mediating our interactions through screens, a disease came along that made it, for a time, positively reckless to be in the presence of another human being? What does that mean? I don’t have an answer, but it feels significant. Like maybe the tide of loneliness that we had set in motion had to reach its extreme form, its high water mark, before it could hopefully, maybe, recede, and we could find each other again.

In this country, we have long embraced an ideal of extreme individualism, more euphemistically called “healthy boundaries,” less euphemistically called “isolation” and “alienation.” Our interconnectedness with other humans, never mind other creatures of the earth, was a pleasant idea, but not something urgent and real or religious. It was not something that guided our lives in any real way.

Our lives have been much more guided by the need to safeguard our own interests and those of our family. Others would be let into that circle cautiously on a case-by-case basis. You can’t really blame us for this. We have a pretty paltry safety net, so in some sense it really is everyone for themself. And in this country we have the historical anomaly of single family homes and single driver cars. More than a quarter of us live alone. And if you want to know how much we trust each other, almost half of us live in homes with a gun.

And then of course, there’s the centrifugal force of technology. As much as it connects us, it also pushes us away from each other. Any spare moment when we might have chatted with strangers – in line at the grocery store, in an elevator, in a waiting room – we’re on our phones instead. Food delivery apps and online shopping make it less likely that we’re going to out in public to begin with. And when we do have to share air with someone, like in an Uber, the app now gives us the option of warning the driver in advance to not talk to us.

So we were heading this way before the pandemic, the pandemic made it worse, and now we find that sometimes, even if we want to, we don’t quite know how to do this thing called relating to each other. Our social skills are rusty and we’ve become a little bit timid. Not all of us, of course. I’m sure some of us in this room are thinking, “Well I’m not timid. This doesn’t apply to me.” But as a culture as a whole, we’re reticent about talking to each other.

How do we make new friends, interact with someone who’s different from us, or form relationships with our neighbors? How can we even begin to bridge our political divides? How can we build community – real community where people are there for each other, take care of each other’s kids, and help each other live our lives better? How can we feel our interdependence, not just fling the word around as a theoretical? I want to suggest that one small way to start is by talking to strangers.

Hymn: What Wondrous Love

Part Two

I read about some research on loneliness and why lonely people were not making more connections. If everyone’s lonely, can’t all those lonely people just get together and not be lonely any more? Apparently it’s not that simple. After so much Zoom and texting, face-to-face can feel like going out on a high wire. The connection is raw and immediate, less controllable. You can’t shape your image the way you can online. You’re right there and the other person is right there and you have to deal with each other. It’s what’s great and it’s what can be hard.

The research also showed that one of the reasons it’s not so easy to just meet people is that we believe that to talk to a stranger is going to be much more awkward and unpleasant than it actually is. We overestimate the difficulty of socializing and we underestimate how happy it will make us. Apparently even deep, meaningful conversations with strangers are less difficult and more fulfilling than we expect! When research subjects were randomly assigned to either make conversation with strangers on the subway or just get on their phones as usual, those who made conversation, even introverts, reported feeling happier at the end of the ride than they had before. It gave a little lift to their day. Those who just stayed on their phones reported no difference in mood by the end of the ride.

That’s a small example, but it’s not a small matter. We humans are social creatures. We need each other. NY Times columnist David Sax puts it in terms of our larger political context: “Engagement with strangers is at the core of our social contract.”

So with all this in mind, I decided last week to use myself as a guinea pig and try the talking to strangers experiment. My self-assigned task was to talk to one stranger every day for a week. And it couldn’t just be a thank you to a checkout person at the grocery store, I had to try to actually initiate a conversation. This was a pretty uncomfortable prospect for me – I’m not the most gregarious person and I identify as bad at small talk. But I did it.

I talked with a woman in the lobby of my building whose phone ring was “The Greatest Love of All” by Whitney Houston. I talked with a guy who was unlocking a Citibike about how exactly he was going to ride a bike while holding a full cup of coffee. He said it was one of his few talents. I talked with an elderly woman sitting next to me crocheting at a film screening who I learned was making yarmulkes for the guests at her grandson’s upcoming bar mitvah. She had already made 22. I talked to a guy on the subway who was the only person not on a cellphone. I asked him about this and he said he prefers to just people-watch. “I grew up in the 60’s,” he said, “I know how to live without a phone.”

And then, on Friday, at the very end of the week I had set for myself, a stranger talked to me. I was standing in line at Trader Joe’s with my son Micah. I had not been to Trader Joe’s in many years, but for some reason that day I had the impulse to go. The guy standing behind us in line asked if Micah was a dancer. He is a dancer and we were both shocked that this guy had somehow been able to tell. We started chatting and it came out that the guy is an opera singer and knows the worlds of dance and music. He’s 74 years old, still performing, and has no interest in retiring. He said, “Why would I retire? I love my job.” We talked the whole time we were in line, and Micah and I were both touched by the sweetness of the exchange. It felt like a little surprise blessing.

I had spent a week initiating these conversations and then one came free to me and my son in this lovely way. In reflecting on it later, it seemed to me that this was not a coincidence. When we reach out to the world with the intention of connecting there’s a kind of instant karma and it boomerangs back to us. We create a relational cycle and the world gets smaller in a good way. We start to feel the threads of the web that bind us to everyone else.

Could we all do this? Could we let more people into our bubble more often? Could we take the risk of inviting others into our world and becoming curious about theirs? I’m not suggesting that we all practice hongi. But I am suggesting that we aim to live something of the principle of hongi, which is also the principle of Unitarianism. We are all one. We can all be guinea pigs in the spiritual research on our oneness. Try a week of talking to strangers and see what happens. Try a month.  Who knows? If the studies are right, you may like it more than you expect.

Because the deeper truth is that we all breathe each other’s air. Inevitably and always. In the larger sense we all practice hongi all the time. We need each other and we breathe life into each other. In physics, in ecology, and in spiritual life, our interconnectedness is no joke. It’s not theoretical. It’s real. I believe we are called to live in the light of that truth.

Prayer            [music begins]

Let’s pray together. Spirit of life we open ourselves to the mystery of the oneness of the universe. All voices one vibration; all souls one presence. Help us feel our connection to all the creatures of the earth. Help us to trust one another as different faces of ourselves. Open our hearts to the joys and the suffering of others. May we see an end to the epidemic of loneliness in our time. May we take the risk of vulnerability, the risk of being called naïve, the risk of rejection. We will stake it all on the possibility of connection. We will build community together, and share with our neighbors, until the strangers among us are strangers no more.

Forgiveness is Divine

Ana Levy-Lyons

October 2, 2022

First Unitarian, Brooklyn

Part 1:

NASA did an amazing thing this week, something straight out of an 8-year-old’s fantasy: they intentionally crashed a spaceship into an asteroid. The spacecraft was called DART – Double Asteroid Redirection Test – and the asteroid was named Dimorphous. “Dimorphous” means having two forms. Dimorphous was not threatening Earth, but NASA wanted to experiment with trying to knock an asteroid off its course in case one ever was heading our way. (A big enough asteroid can be quite problematic as any dinosaur will tell you.) So they built this thing and sent it up into the sky, got it going at 15,000 miles an hour, aimed it at Dimorphous, and watched to see what would happen. And of course livestreamed the whole thing.

So my family and I got to watch this sci-fi drama online from the comfort of our living room – one of the ridiculous miracles of the modern world. We were treated to a split screen – on one side the NASA engineers in the control room whooping and hollering like it was the Super Bowl; on the other side an image of Dimorphous, the asteroid, getting bigger and bigger in the screen. The adults in my family are not too bright so we kept asking each other, “where’s the DART spacecraft they keep talking about? Why are they only showing the asteroid?” It took my 12-year-old daughter to explain, “No, we’re on the DART spacecraft. We’re looking through the camera that’s on DART!” Sometimes we are so identified with our own perspective, we can’t even see it.

Now we understood why Dimorphous was beginning to fill up the screen; how we could see greater and greater detail, eventually even the boulders strewn across its surface. Now we understood why they said, “Signal loss will confirm impact.” When contact was made, DART and its camera that we were looking through would be blown to smithereens. They said, “We will look for the signal loss and then celebrate.” And sure enough, after showing the most detailed image of the asteroid, the screen went blank, and the NASA people went crazy.

It’s fitting, I believe, that this took place on Rosh Hashanah, the beginning of the High Holidays when Jews and anyone else who wants to are invited into ten days of awe – ten days to look with wonder at this universe. Ten days to reflect on our lives, our own galactic trajectory, where we’ve been, where we’re going, what camera we are looking through, how we have shown up in the world as the best versions of ourselves and how we have not. It’s a time for course correction. It’s a time to make apologies when we’ve missed the mark. It’s a time to reflect on our relationships and, where others have failed us or hurt us, to practice that most challenging of spiritual arts, forgiveness.

Forgiveness is often talked about in platitudes. You can find hundreds of them online. “To forgive is to set a prisoner free and discover that the prisoner was you.” Or, “Forgive others, not because they deserve forgiveness, but because you deserve peace.” And as cliché as these quotes are, they do get at something that’s true. Forgiveness is a process that is primarily about the person doing the forgiving.

Because sometimes when you’re that person – the person who was wronged – you suffer doubly: first because of the thing that happened to you and then also because of the dart of anger and resentment that you carry. You hold on to that dart, you ride with it, and see only through its camera lens. When someone hurts you and you don’t deserve it, they’ve violated the rules of reciprocity, they’ve done physical or emotional violence, they’ve manipulated, they’ve failed to see you when you really needed to be seen, they’ve failed to support you when you needed the help (even when you were always there for them) – the injustice of it rankles. They can’t just get away with it. The past must be set right; the world must be set right.

If you’re like me, you’re going over and over it in your head about why they’re wrong and you’re right and here’s another reason, here’s another way that they did this thing to you. The dart sends a continuous signal – a strobe light of anger and resentment. Its perspective of the other person fills the screen and traps you in an endless loop. It’s not a good place to be, hence all the internet quotes about freeing the prisoner that is you.

But how to do it? They say that forgiveness is divine. And indeed, the central spiritual teaching of Universalism is that God will forgive all of us. God will forgive all our wrongdoing, no matter what, and draw us back into a loving cosmic embrace. No celestial grudge; no one goes to hell; no one is punished forever. Forgiveness is a divine capacity. Is it also a human capacity? Is there a way we can free ourselves from the narrow camera angle of anger and resentment?  What would it take to see a wider, galactic view, find compassion, and get free?

Forgiveness, in my experience, is a process. It’s never like flipping a switch. It takes time and it has stages. It takes place in the realm of the heart, the realm of spirit, emotion, and energy. Nothing in this realm is clean and hard-edged and definite.

While I believe that forgiveness has great power to effect change in the physical world – what we often call “the real world” – it often doesn’t involve the other person at all in a direct verbal way. Sometimes it makes no sense to say, “I forgive you” to someone who has hurt you, especially when, as is so often aggravatingly the case, they don’t think they did anything that requires forgiveness. In fact, a misplaced “I forgive you” can feel somewhat pointed: “I forgive you for not calling me once for the last two months.” A verbal expression of forgiveness is probably best reserved for times when the one who wronged you has actually asked for it.

No, forgiveness is something that takes place internally or, you might think of it, between one another on the spirit level – a different level of consciousness. It’s a drama taking place between celestial bodies. There are at least three players in this drama: You have DART, the spacecraft of anger and resentment with its single-pointed camera view. You have Dimorphous, the multifaceted asteroid that is the other deeply flawed human being. And you have the celestial container, your higher self, some call it the divine self – the one who forgives over and over, no matter what… in the words of the Rumi poem, “even if you’ve broken your vows a thousand times.”

[Song: Come, Come, Whoever You Are]

Part 2:

Here’s how I see it: You start to do the work of forgiving someone – which can be as simple as picturing the person and saying the words in your own heart, even if you don’t feel it, “I forgive you for …” whatever it is. And just the act of doing that with as open a heart as you can muster begins to humanize the other person. It begins to expand the view of the DART camera feed.

And then you start to think about why the other person is the way they are. What must have happened to them that they think the way they treated you is normal? What kind of fear drives their cruelty or callousness? What kind of pain are they carrying forward? Or if it’s not pain but entitlement, what has that entitlement cost them? Their actions towards you are often an echo of others’ actions toward them.

As you travel down this road of contemplation, you approach them – their spirit self – and as you get closer, you start to see them more clearly. The details on the face of the asteroid may start to resolve, until you can see the boulders and the shadows. And you may feel a little hint of compassion start to emerge. It doesn’t mean that what they did was okay, but pay attention to that compassion.

Because from here, sometimes, it can start to get really interesting. I have found that when you start to work on forgiving someone, they get humanized, and sometimes the realization may hit you that that’s not the person you really need to forgive. There’s a different person whom you really need to forgive. Maybe it’s a parent, a sibling, a teacher – someone who loomed large in your life and you got wounded in a way that made this current situation so extra painful. It’s referred pain. When you set about trying to forgive that person, that’s a much bigger deal. And when you keep going and dig deeper, you may find that the one you most need to forgive is God. Or maybe it’s yourself.

Meanwhile, the first person – the one who wronged you today – is just the poor schlub who got caught in the crossfire of their baggage and your baggage. They are indeed dimorphous – more than one form, more than one truth. They can never be fully explained by one terrible act or even a pattern of terrible acts. There is always more to the story. They are both: the monster that hurt you and the poor schlub underneath, just toiling away the best they can in a messed up world. And now the two of you, rather than being only adversaries, can be strangely bonded, suffering the pain of the world together. This picture is the big, wide-angle picture, the divine picture. This forgiveness is divine forgiveness.

How will we know that our forgiveness mission has worked? How will we know that it has had impact? Signal loss. The signal from the DART; the anger, the resentment, will burn up and disappear. Or – not to take the metaphor too literally – it will at least diminish. Signal loss will confirm impact. We do this work, and that endless loop of arguments in our head goes quiet. We notice that we feel lighter, freer, happier. Like the NASA scientists, look for the loss of signal, and then celebrate.

And then there’s one more thing that can happen; an inexplicable thing. (This may be way too woo-woo for some of us in this room and if that’s the case, you can just cover your ears for this last little bit.) The purpose of the NASA mission was to see if a giant asteroid can be moved – if it can be nudged off course even a little bit. We engage a forgiveness mission to change ourselves, but of course we always hope in the back of our minds that the other person can also change – that the situation can change.

And I’ve seen it happen. Even when the forgiveness is never articulated in words to the other person, even when the process seems completely internal, it can have an effect that reverberates in the galaxy. When we fly deeper and deeper into the heart of the matter, see the other and ourselves more clearly, and grow our compassion until we attain signal loss, there is an impact in the world. And sometimes the force of that impact can lovingly nudge others into a slightly different course.

As for Dimorphous, the actual asteroid, we don’t know yet whether its orbit has changed. Small changes grow and become visible only over time. We’ll know in a few months when the dust settles. These things take time to unfold. But I, for one, am keeping my fingers crossed.

Go with the Holy Flow

Ana Levy-Lyons

September 11, 2022

First Unitarian, Brooklyn

Part 1

You don’t really know a river until you swim in it. And you haven’t really swum in a river until you’ve done it without boom boxes playing nearby and jet skis and motorboats whizzing past you; until you’ve done it by yourself, under the open sky, in the shadow of the swaying trees. You don’t really know a river until you have been there alone with God or, as some might say, alone with yourself.

This summer I was gifted with such a moment. My husband Jeff and I had stayed overnight near the Hudson River about an hour north of here the night before we picked our kids up from camp. I went for a run first thing in the morning heading to a spot along the river that I had visited many years before. It’s known as an area with a nice beach where you can swim. Very known. The last times I had been there, it had been crowded with what felt a bit like a frat party.

But on this particular morning when I came out of the woods onto the sandy beach it was pristine, quiet, empty of people. But full, so full. Lush and shady. The beach strewn with gnarled driftwood and sun bleached logs. The steep rolling green hills and cliffs on the other side of the river. And the water – sparkling, deep and layered with colors. This water was known to the indigenous people here as Muhheakunnuk – the river that flows two ways. Because, well, it flows two ways. Freshwater flows from Lake Tear of the Clouds high in the mountains down toward the ocean. Saltwater tides flow from the ocean up, way up into the heart of the land.

As I swam I could taste the two-ness of it. The water was slightly salty and sweet, flowing both north and south, somehow warm and cool at the same time, ancient and continually renewed, constant motion and deep stillness. I floated, and with my ears underwater I could hear the voice of the river. A deep, swirling, echo-y sizzle, almost frightening in its feeling of presence.

And what was I called to do in that moment? What was my job in Muhheakunnuk’s presence? It was clear to me that my job was to surrender to it. To surrender to something so, so much greater than myself. To let it hold me, support me, and guide me just as the banks lovingly hold and guide the river itself. It was easy to do in that setting – the joy and awe and gratitude came easily. Humility was natural. Prayer was natural. Try to control or own this river? Unimaginable.

In other settings, in everyday modern life, humility doesn’t come so easily. Not for me and not for most of us. We encounter the world and we try to shape it. We ask ourselves, “What can I do with it? What can I use it for? How can I change it? How much can I change it?” For hundreds of years now we have built along the shoulders of the world’s rivers. We have bottled their waters; we have changed their courses; we have filled their bellies. We have become skilled in control and assertion; efficiencies and practicalities. And to be sure, these ingenious human capacities have their place.

But in the course of it, we have forgotten the meaning of surrender. In going our own way, we’ve forgotten how to let ourselves be supported; how to go with the flow. And with each step, the voice of the river has grown harder to hear. The great presence has gotten harder to feel.

And so, despite all our genius, the last few years many of us have felt like we’ve been struggling to keep our heads above water; the pandemic, our democracy, our ecological crisis, along with whatever personal losses we’ve been through. We feel like we have to do it all ourselves, with our own brains and our own power. We have to forge ahead, climb every mountain, ford every stream. When obstacles pile up one on top of another, we fight harder.

There’s something noble and uniquely human about swimming upstream (although, to be fair, salmon do it too). But it’s also lonely and exhausting to always be trying to be masters of our own destiny; always pushing the river. And my goodness, we spend a lot of energy fighting what is.

Song: Wade in the Water (#210)

Part 2

What does it mean to surrender to the river of our lives… to wade into the water not knowing where it will take us? Does it mean we have to accept whatever comes our way? Does it mean we have to be a doormat? A shrinking violet? A wallflower? That we can’t strive to achieve something hard? Speak truth to power? Heavens, no!

This is how I think about it: As we move through life we encounter many different currents. Some are internal – our drives and desires and fears. This week for some of us it might have been some nervousness about the first day of school. That current was tugging us back a little as we started to walk out the door of our homes. Or maybe it was excitement about seeing friends again and the current was pushing us out the door. Those are currents within us.

Some of the currents are external – the pressure of what others are doing or what our job requires of us. Maybe a loved one needs us and we feel the pull of responsibility. Or we’re moving in one direction and then the door slams shut. Some are physical – our bodies as they change; our limitations and abilities. There are currents formed by experiences – the things that happen to us. Wow, I’ve been fired from three jobs in a row! That becomes a current. And then there are all the social currents swirling around us all the time – we are advertised to, barraged with news good and bad, seduced by our smartphones, regaled with new information …

We are pushed and pulled in a hundred directions. In a world like this, going with the flow, surrendering to the current, isn’t so simple, even if you want to do it, because… which one? Wade in which water?

This is one of life’s big questions. And I believe that it goes far beyond the limits of what our brains can handle. Rational calculations will not help with these existential questions. Our own strength will not get us there. This is where we need to invite in a deeper wisdom.

Whatever we may call it – our higher power, our innermost self – I believe there is a wisdom available to us if learn to trust it. But we have to go a place with no boom boxes or motor boats; no cellphones; a place where we can feel small in the presence of something greater. Maybe it’s a beach, maybe it’s here at this worship service, maybe it’s a bedroom with the door closed and a candle lit. Go to that place, let go of the need to control, and listen for guidance. The voice of the river, that low echo-y sizzle, will speak to those who listen.

I believe that each of us can find, not just any flow, but the holy flow that is just for us. The right current for who we are called to be. It might not be the smoothest ride. It might be one that will carry us over rapids or drop us over a waterfall. It happens. But when we find the flow with which we are meant to go, it can be transformative; life-giving for us and others.

And when we find our holy flow, I want to suggest that we don’t just passively float along. We align ourselves with it; we ally ourselves with it. We take a deep breath, face downstream, and swim. Because the beautiful thing is, in this life, whether it’s in our families, in our work, in our schools, or in our congregation, we’re not just along for the ride. We collectively make the current what it is. We form part of our own holy flow. Because a river doesn’t have just one source – it is fed, it is created by every raindrop, every surge of the ocean tides, every little stream and tributary. The rivers of our world are created by all of us together.

When we have our Water Ceremony in a little while we’ll be enacting this mystery together. Each of us is going to pour some of our water into one of the two basins in the side aisle chapels or into this beautiful baptismal font from 1853. This will be a current, flowing from each of us. We will be carried by the flow as we create the flow. The water that results, part salt-water, part fresh water, some chlorine, tap water, hospital water, vacation water, sink water, trillions of microorganisms, … this water we will call holy.

Let’s pray together.

Prayer

God, Muhheakunnuk, Earth Mother, higher power, deepest self, source of wisdom, we open ourselves to your guidance. We stand before you in humble gratitude for the many streams and currents of this world. Fill us with awe; help us to let go, just for this moment, of the need in us to try to grasp and own and control; release the tightness in our shoulders, our brow, our chest. For this moment let us trust in something greater than ourselves. Let us melt into what is – the warm and the cool, the north and the south, the ancient and the new, the deep and the wide, the salty and the sweet. Carry us through. Carry us when we need to find the right words. Carry us when we greet a new day. Carry us when we are lost and scared. Carry us when we make choices, big and small. We open our ears to your voice. Help us find our holy flow and we will enter it with all our heart, with all our soul, and with all our strength.

Act 1

River: Everyone heard the decree. The Pharaoh has spoken and every male Israelite newborn is to be drowned in the Nile – drowned in me. You ask how I feel about being the agent of death for innocent babies? I neither like it nor dislike it. I am simply an agent of inevitability. The Pharaoh’s power is inexorable; my flow is inexorable. It carries people to their fate. I am destiny.

Yocheved [holding Moses, to Miriam]: He’s three months old now. His presence is growing – he almost glows – and his cries are getting louder. Pharaoh’s men will soon find out that he’s alive. I don’t think I can hide him any longer. But drown him? Never. I would die first. I’ve made a decision. See? I’ve made this basket – a soft cradle out of bulrushes and sealed it with pitch so it will float. I’m sending him down the river to meet his destiny. I’m offering my child to God.

Miriam: No. No. This is not going to happen to my baby brother. He’ll die out there by himself. I’m going with him. I’ll walk along the shore, mother, but I’m going with him. I can protect him!

Yocheved: Foolish girl. We can’t resist destiny. We don’t have that kind of power. You can go watch him for a while if you want to, but stay safe. Don’t do anything reckless. He’s in God’s hands now. If he perishes, he perishes.

[Hands Moses to the River, who slowly carries him downstream to Basya and maidservants. Miriam follows along.]

Basya [to maidservants]: Look at that, floating among the reeds. What is that?  It looks like an ark. Bring it over here to me.

[Maidservant #1 brings the basket over to Basya. Basya opens it and all three look into it with wonder.]

This is one of the Hebrew’s babies.

[Maidservants’ expressions change to disapproval/ disgust.]

Homily part 1

The river of inevitability brings the oppressor face to face with the oppressed. Karma forces the wealthy to confront the poor. It’s an old story and it happens to this day. It happens every time a homeless mother asks for money in a subway crowded with professionals on their way to work. It happens at a Louisiana town hall meeting where a Black community is fighting a new facility that generates hazardous waste in their town. It’s happening right now on the border of Poland where Afghan refugees are arriving hungry and cold, and being shut out. The voices of suffering travel to the ears of the powerful, like it or not.

But it’s rare that the confrontation is so stark, so vivid as it is in the story of Basya and the baby Moses. A child of power, in this case the daughter of Pharaoh, is confronted with the bottomless vulnerability of a baby from the underclass. She’s forced to see the effects right in front of her of her own father’s actions. She has to see the cruelty embedded in the Egyptian power structures – in the face of a baby where a baby should never be, alone and adrift with no one to care for him.

How did it get so bad that Pharaoh had sentenced infants to death? The same way it gets so bad in our country and many other countries when the immigrant population is deemed to be a threat. The Israelites were refugees from a famine long ago. Joseph (of the technicolor dreamcoat) had died and Pharaoh who respected him had died. This was a new Pharaoh who didn’t know Joseph, didn’t care about Joseph, and didn’t trust these immigrants with their foreign ways. They weren’t assimilating into Egyptian society. And what’s worse, they were growing. There were more and more of them all the time. If they didn’t do something, pretty soon Egypt would be a majority minority nation – and then where would they be? And so Pharaoh had forced them into labor and degraded them, but it didn’t work. They kept thriving. He tried to get the midwives to dispense with the babies as soon as they were born, but the midwives wouldn’t do it. His methods got more and more draconian.

How history repeats itself. And this story isn’t even history – it’s a sacred myth. In its specifics, it may not be true and yet it is truth. These archetypes repeat. The refugee is first welcomed and then is seen as a threat; the other is a source of fear and disgust for the dominant culture. Those in power do what they can to keep the stranger out, to keep them poor and desperate. And the oppressed and the poor are forced to do desperate things. Like Yocheved in the story, today’s would-be immigrants will sometimes send their children alone across the border praying that that they will somehow be able to survive.

Act 2

Basya: This is one of the Hebrew’s babies. I don’t know what to do. This child my father wants killed? This child my father feared? How could he? It’s so cruel. Surely if my father saw this baby he wouldn’t be afraid. Poor thing, floating out here by himself in the river. He’s crying. He needs a mother. He needs a mother. And maybe what I need is a son. Did the gods send him to me on this river?

[Basya lifts him out of the basket and holds him. The maidservants gasp in horror.]

Miriam [moves in quickly while Basya is still making up her mind]: Shall I go and call a nursing woman from the Hebrews for you, and she’ll nurse the child for you?

Basya [stares at Miriam, long pause]: Go!

[Miriam runs and gets Yocheved, pantomiming what happened; Yocheved comes to Basya]

Basya [to Yocheved]: Take this child and nurse him for me, and I’ll give your pay.”

[Yocheved takes Moses with wonder. Walks back with him and Miriam. River reverses course at this moment to flow with Yocheved, toward the Israelite camp.]

Basya: When he was weaned, he became my son, and I raised him in my father’s palace. I called him “Moshe” because I drew him from the water.

Arts and Inspiration

[Spotlight: with Adam Podd, Dawn Elane Reed, and Liz Komar]

Structure makes art possible. Artists of all stripes know this. Whether writers or musicians or (I imagine) stained glass window makers, it is a common experience that structure and even limitations fuel creativity. If there’s too little structure, the wide ocean of possibilities can be paralyzing. Strange as it may seem, artists finding themselves in such an ocean will sometimes even make up rules for themselves in order to have something to work within and push against. If you want an extreme example of this, the author Earnest Vincent Wright decided to write a 50,000 word novel without using the most common letter in the English language, the letter “e.” It’s quite a challenge to write even a single sentence without the letter e. I’ll try that sentence again, without “e:” It’s most difficult to spin a string of words without using that taboo you-know-what.

For the theists among us, I like to imagine that this is kind of what God did when God created the world (and bear with me for a moment if this is not your thing – it’ll be over soon). God said, “Hey, just for fun, let’s build an entire universe without using most of reality. Let’s try to squeeze the kaleidoscopic thousand-dimensional, trillion-eyed, timeless, spaceless, divine into a time-bound, 3D physical world. Let’s try playing the symphony of the cosmos through a kazoo and see how it sounds.” That, I believe, is God’s project, and that, I believe, is the artist’s project as well.

And so a house of worship is a perfect garden for these mystical arts. Our mission provides a target for artistic expression. And our sanctuary provides the physical structure within which music and shape and color and light and stories can flourish. The healthy limitations of the space – the shape of the windows, the organ with its particular sound, the configuration of the pews and balconies, the high pulpit and the high ceiling, they all create a playground slash obstacle course where creativity is coaxed and the spirit can play.

The fruits of that creativity fill the worship life of this community. We roll into this space and we are immersed in beauty. The arts give us a little taste of the world of spirit, emotion, and ideas – all the intangible wonders that we come here longing for. They elevate the mundane and focus our hearts. We feel joy; we process pain; our cups are filled.

With your generosity, our sacred space here at First Unitarian will continue to serve as a home for the arts, for inspiration, and as a conduit for the holy for generations to come.

Social Justice

[Spotlight: Nancy Wolf, Natalie Thielen Helper, Vania Abrew Rodriguez, Sean Sellers, and Jan Thompson]

During this pandemic we have learned that many things, including worship services and classes can happen online. But there are some things that can only happen in a physical space. All the work for justice that we’ve just heard about happens in a building – in this particular building. The Buddhist monk protesting the Vietnam war was here. The Ramadan dinners happen here. Our safe space for Black Lives Matter protestors was here. The sanctuary for refugees and asylum-seekers is here. The weddings for all couples regardless of gender identity or sexual orientation happen here. And the greening of our buildings, by definition, has to be here. This is the physical body of First Unitarian, in which our values are, well, embodied. Our faith in inscribed in the walls.

In that sense this entire building is not a container so much as a bridge. It’s a bridge between spirit and matter; the world of ideas and the world of action. We have our ideals that we speak about in our sermons and readings; that we drink in through the music –  and then, when we’re at our best, we waste no time and allow no daylight between those ideals and trying them out in real life. It’s a kind of farm to table system. We cultivate our aspirations on our spiritual farm here, we tend the crops of idealism, and then we harvest them and serve them up to real people, right in the same place. Farm to table in one fell swoop. And that transformation happens right here in these buildings.

A house of worship is the only kind of institution that I know of that does this. At a university, the ideas are cultivated but they’re mostly enacted elsewhere. At a homeless shelter, the work of serving people’s needs is done, but the concept – the why – is generated elsewhere. But here at First U, we have this unique energetic confluence where our moral imagination can come to life. This is something special and powerful. With your generosity, our sacred spaces will continue to be a bridge to our justice work. They will continue to shelter those who need shelter, provide gathering for those working for change, and become models of earth reverence and sustainability for generations to come.

Community and Inclusion

[Spotlight: Tyrone Davis, Becky Huffman, and RE children]

It is said that we should “be the change we wish to see in the world.” It is how we live our values that, I believe, determines how effective we are at spreading those values. When we build a wheelchair lift, as we have, to bring people from outside into the Sanctuary for prayer and another one to bring people from the Chapel to the Undercroft for fellowship, that’s being the change. When we carve out a space for those wheelchairs, that’s being the change. When we provide a place here in the Chapel of All Faiths for people to bring pastoral concerns and have loving conversations after every service, that’s being the change. When we host fellowship hours, lunches, dinners, and joyful events to build community in this isolating world, that’s being the change.

And when we make space for our young people – classrooms and playrooms – when we make those spaces warm and safe and comfortable; and when the children feel like those spaces are a second home where they can be themselves, that is building a future. We’re living in a time when children are growing up without a sense of place. This is partly by necessity because of the pandemic and partly because of the allure and convenience of virtual space long predating the pandemic. What we provide here in our physical spaces is unique and truly irreplaceable. Children get comfort and groundedness and hopefully soon, hugs in this place. In this place they can be embraced just as they are.

For people of all ages, the embrace of First U can be an antidote to loneliness. It’s a special spot on earth that is not home and not work (and not Starbucks, the supposed third place). We know we need this because some of us don’t fit in neatly at home or at work. Maybe it’s because of our gender identity or beliefs or who we’re partnered with or just social awkwardness but we don’t fit in. To have a place where we can go and be protected from the rains and warmed from the social cold, that is a blessing. And for us to provide such a place, to hold such a community, is being the change.

When a canvasser approaches you in the coming weeks, please join your fellow congregants in responding as generously as your circumstances allow.  Every gift moves us toward a future where our spaces can serve our faith with continued stability, inclusiveness, safety, beauty, and grace. Every gift matters and every gift is appreciated.

In the Babylonian Talmud, it says this about the Jewish High Holidays: “Three books are opened on Rosh Hashanah. One for the completely evil, one for the completely righteous, and one for everyone in between. The completely righteous are written and sealed in the Book of Life immediately. The completely evil are written and sealed in the Book of Death immediately. Those in between stand suspended from Rosh Hashanah until Yom Kippur.” It’s like some get a green light, some get a red light, and some get a yellow light. Let’s take a quick poll and see how this breaks down here: Raise your hand if you are in the completely evil category. Raise your hand if you are in the completely righteous category. Anybody in between, in the yellow light zone?

I think we all know that everyone in the world is somewhere in between and they also undoubtedly knew this back in the 6th century when the Talmud was written. But they used this concept as a teaching tool to help people seize the opportunity of the High Holidays to deal with their stuff, return to their core, and open their hearts toward the Book of Life. Ten days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur to get right with God, with our neighbor, with our conscience, with the earth. Ten days to say what we need to say to our loved ones because you never know when it might be too late. Could we do this inner work on a different ten days, later in the year? Sure. But would we? Probably not. And so we do a mini version of this every year here at First U around the time of the High Holidays.

On the afternoon of Rosh Hashanah, if you venture down to the waterfront in New York there’s a good chance that you’ll find dozens of Jews praying and throwing stuff into the water. This is a tradition called Tashlich where you bring a few pieces of bread or twigs or acorns to a river, and throw them into the water, casting your sins away with each piece. It’s part of the spiritual journey of those ten days. It’s different from what we’re going to do this afternoon with our holy water – and I hope you’ll all join me as we give some of our holy water back to the river. But in the case of Tashlich, it’s asking the river to hold your pain, to absorb your regrets, and to help release you from your negative patterns. And you watch the objects representing your mistakes float away downstream.

So this year a friend of mine went with her daughter and her dog (named Nancy Wheeler) down to the river for Tashlich. Her daughter asked what the dog’s sins were. From what mistakes did Nancy Wheeler need to be released? And so her mother composed an Al Chet prayer – a confession like the one we did together earlier – for the dog. It goes like this:

-For the sin of barking too much.

-For the sin of eating chocolate and having to be rushed to the hospital.

-For the sin of turning the garbage over and eating everything in it.

-For the sin of ruining the couch.

-For the sin of being annoyingly needy.

-For the sin of being aggressive with her family even though we are the people who love her most in the world, and take care of her and give her everything.

-For the sin of lying down in mud puddles.

Setting aside the question of whether it’s even possible for a dog to sin, you’ll notice that these sins are all about ways that Nancy Wheeler has made trouble for my friend and her family. They are sins from the perspective of the wronged, not from the perspective of the wrongdoer. And this raises an important question: who gets to decide if someone has sinned? When, if ever, do you get to say that someone else has sinned? Do you have to be personally harmed by it or can you just witness an act that harms others? Who gets to name it and say, “this is wrong?” Who gets to pass judgment on whom?

This is a crackling, fiery, live issue in our political and social worlds today. Because, on one hand, “judging thy neighbor” is itself a cardinal sin for liberals. Some of us have had painful experiences being judged for who we are or what we do or whom we love. We yearn to live in a judgement-free zone. On the other hand, wrongdoing by its very nature usually affects someone else. We have a stake in what others do. If the pandemic has taught us anything, it is how desperately interconnected we are. We’ve experienced it. We’ve learned that we have a stake in whether other people wear masks or get vaccinated. What other people do matters to our lives. It matters to the lives of those we’ll never meet and those who don’t have the power to protect themselves. And that matters spiritually and ethically. And so the arguments about personal freedom versus collective responsibility rage on and on.

The abomination that is the new anti-abortion law in Texas is a fascinating case study on this topic. And let me be perfectly clear: Let nothing that I am about to say suggest that I find this law anything but an abomination. But. And. It is a powerful concept that any random hair dresser can sue a Lyft driver for transporting someone to get an abortion. In traditional legal terms, that hairdresser would have no “standing” to sue because she’s not personally harmed by the Lyft driver’s act. But with this new concept, she can sue because she witnesses the Lyft driver participating in what she sees as a sin against an unborn child.

Again, I think this is a terrible idea when it comes to abortion, but let’s play it out for a minute. What if this concept were expanded to other areas of life? What if we assumed that we all have standing when we see injustice in our world regardless of whether we are personally harmed? What if New York State criminalized the burning of fossil fuels? And the hair dresser could sue the Lyft driver, not for where he was taking his passenger, but just for driving the Lyft!? If we treated the climate emergency with the urgency that it deserves, this wouldn’t seem so crazy. We all have standing when it comes to protecting the web of life on this earth. We all have standing. And talk about saving unborn children!

Now, this is not going to happen in New York State, nor should it. Among other reasons, I mean, poor Lyft driver! But I do think that we need to engage in this kind of thinking, imagine boldly, and not be so careful and polite about it all. We have to do whatever it takes, however dramatic, to change course. We have the cosmic equivalent of ten days right now to grapple with our massive collective wrongs and unskillful living. Ten days to do the work of transformation. For now, our fate hangs in the balance between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. These days will determine whether our species and many other species will be written into the Book of Life. Could it be a different ten days, sometime later? No. It has to be now.

In the 1984 movie “Starman” an alien comes down to earth and learns how to drive by watching humans. When he almost gets into a car accident by speeding through a yellow light, his human friend yells at him. “I thought you said you had watched me! You said you knew what you were doing!” He said, “I did watch you. Green light, go. Red light, stop. Yellow light, go very, very fast.” We’re in the yellow light zone – not all evil, not all righteous, but in-between and needing to go really, really fast. In reality, we need to go really, really fast in our public work and really slow in our spiritual and communal work.

Publicly we can go fast by advocating for policies and laws that will nourish the health of our communities. And, yes, we have standing to call out the sins of others, especially corporations and those in power. On Friday Extinction Rebellion produced a series of actions across the city, blocking the big banks that fund fossil fuels. They had huge signs that essentially recited the Al Cheit prayer on behalf of the corporation like my friend did on behalf of her dog. “For the sin of intentionally obscuring the science on climate change. For the sin of continuing to invest in oil and gas even after you knew…” They rolled a giant boat into the intersection in front of JP Morgan-Chase corporate headquarters and 14 people handcuffed themselves to the boat. Some of the people were elderly and sat in lawn chairs. One said, “I have a two-year-old grandson. How could I not be here?”

There’s also another dimension of the work we need to do during these proverbial ten days of the yellow light. It is the more private process; the more communal process. It’s a process of slowing down. Because of course, in most cases, that’s exactly what’s needed when you see a yellow light. Slow down and even stop. And in this process there just happens to be a wonderful resource at our disposal right now. On the Jewish calendar, the new year that just started on Rosh Hashanah happens to be the Shmita year. I preached about this in the spring. Shmita is the year every seven years when we release everything. Let the earth rest. Do not plant anything, work the land, or harvest anything to sell it for money. Eat the volunteer crops that grow, but allow everyone else to as well – the poor and even wild animals. You don’t own the land. Could we really not plant or harvest anything for a whole year? Maybe not. But could we rotate crops so that each field gets to rest instead of pouring more fertilizers into depleted soil? Probably. If we lived and ate differently. If we slowed down.

In the Shmita year all debts are forgiven. The literal meaning here is about forgiving monetary debts. But I wonder if it could also mean emotional debts. Could we seek to really forgive this year? Could we make that a special practice, after the people in our lives have been pushed to their limits in the last eighteen months? We have all been under stress, some even trauma, and many of us have not been at our best. We may have lashed out; we may have said things we didn’t mean. Our loved ones may have as well. And so maybe the accounting never has to happen after all. Maybe we can erase the ledger book where we’ve kept track of debts and start to forgive instead. Maybe we can start to forgive ourselves.

Shmita is about slowing down at the yellow light; cutting the earth some slack, cutting each other some slack and cutting ourselves some slack. What would it feel like to release our claim on the land and our claims on one another? To just let go. Release. Shmita means release. If you want to explore this together, we’ll be starting a Shmita project for the year – part support group, part spiritual laboratory, part think tank. How can we make best use of these cosmic ten days when our fate hangs in the balance? I hope you’ll join us. We’ll have details in the next e-news.

When I did Tashlich this year, and I threw my twigs into the Hudson, I was slightly dismayed to notice that they kind of didn’t go anywhere. Because the Hudson River is not a river but a tidal estuary, salt water from the ocean flows upstream way into upstate New York. So my sins just floated there disturbingly ambivalent about which way to go. But then, this is perfect. It’s not realistic that I or anybody else will instantly change – instantly be a whole new person. It’s not realistic to think that our stuck places and negative patterns will be whisked away just like that. But I have faith that if we set our intention prayerfully as people, as a community, and as a world, if we set our intention and work to release all the constriction, all that’s holding us back, in time the river will win and it will all wash out to the sea. And we and our future generations will be written and sealed in the Book of Life.