1 Everything is Holy Now September 27, 2015 Florence Caplow, Minister Susan Cashel, Worship Associate Call to Worship Florence Caplow We gather this day to honor each other and our world We are of the stars We are of the earth We are part of the great circle of humanity May we recall in reverence All that has given us birth and all that sustains us. Reading: Miracles by Walt Whitman Susan Cashel Why, who makes much of a miracle? As to me I know of nothing else but miracles, Whether I walk the streets of Manhattan, Or dart my sight over the roofs of houses toward the sky, Or wade with naked feet along the beach just in the edge of the water, Or stand under trees in the woods, Or talk by day with any one I love, or sleep in the bed at night with any one I love, Or sit at table at dinner with the rest, Or look at strangers opposite me riding in the car, Or watch honey-bees busy around the hive of a summer forenoon, Or animals feeding in the fields, Or birds, or the wonderfulness of insects in the air, Or the wonderfulness of the sundown, or of stars shining so quiet and bright, Or the exquisite delicate thin curve of the new moon in spring; These with the rest, one and all, are to me miracles, The whole referring, yet each distinct and in its place. To me every hour of the light and dark is a miracle, Every cubic inch of space is a miracle, Every square yard of the surface of the earth is spread with the same, Every foot of the interior swarms with the same. To me the sea is a continual miracle, The fishes that swim--the rocks--the motion of the waves--the ships with men in them, What stranger miracles are there?
2 Sermon Everything is Holy Now Florence Caplow Here we are, gathered in this room on a brilliantly sunny Sunday September morning. What a concept, this many people choosing to take time from your lives to come here for a little breathing space, taking time to be reminded of the things of the heart that we don t tend to talk about or maybe remember so much during the week, as we run around trying to keep our heads above water, trying to get our errands done, trying to survive. I felt this last week too in our Touchstones service on reverence, when people shared the most personal and astonishing stories and thoughts about reverence, from an appreciation of cell phones to awe about a butterfly s life. For us, though, Sunday morning is not actually something special and set apart from our ordinary lives, but a reminder of how we aspire to live all week, a life of awareness, appreciation, kindness, love and justice, As Jimmy sang at the beginning of our service, When I was a boy, each week On Sunday, we would go to church And pay attention to the priest He would read the holy word And consecrate the holy bread And everyone would kneel and bow Today the only difference is Everything is holy now The first time I heard this song, Holy Now by Peter Mayer, a UU singer- songwriter from Minnesota, I cried as we sang along with the refrain, everything is holy now. It was such a relief, like a coming home, a recognition, a healing balm, someone singing what I believed but somehow, deep down, didn t think I had a right to believe. And at first glance that s a little odd. I was raised Unitarian Universalist, a humanist, with great appreciation for the human spirit and for the beauties of this world. Why did it mean so much to me to sing Everything is Holy Now that first time, and every time I ve sung it since? Peter Mayer, the songwriter, was raised a Catholic, and even went to Catholic seminary, contemplating the possibility of Catholic priesthood before finding out he was really a UU. Some of you were raised Catholic too, I know, or within other very traditional religious understandings, and maybe you feel a special resonance with this song for that reason, since you have walked a path like his. But I think all of us, not just those of us raised Catholic, are heirs to a Western understanding that splits up the world in many painful ways, between what is Sacred, like Sunday morning, and what is not, like Monday morning. Between saints who are impossibly good, and sinners, like the rest of us. Between the spirit and the body. Between humanity and nature. We have been splitting up the world like this for centuries,
3 and even when science began to replace religion as a dominant understanding, we have continued to live in this split, I think feeling sometimes separate and fallen and anything but holy, living in a holy world. I think many of us, maybe even as children, or especially as children, have glimpses of another way of seeing, a unity that utterly belies the dualities that we are taught in school and in church, that we take in as unconsciously as the food we eat and the milk we drink. When I was in Sunday school We would learn about the time Moses split the sea in two Jesus made the water wine And I remember feeling sad That miracles don't happen still But now I can't keep track 'Cause everything's a miracle. When I was twelve years old, and completely and unrequitedly horse crazy, a miracle happened for me. My mother, who didn t have a lot of money, finally gave in to my years of desperate pleas and told me that if I could find a riding camp, I could go. I did a lot of research and I found a camp in Wyoming, between Laramie and Cheyenne out on the high range, only twelve girls at a time on a thousand acre ranch, very seriously studying and practicing everything about horsemanship. That was nearly 40 years ago, and as I was writing this I searched online for the camp, called Sodergreen, and discovered that, astonishingly, it still exists. It was the first time I had been in the West. From horseback you could see for miles in all directions, to the distant snowcapped mountains all around. There were tiny flowers everywhere in the low grass. There were astonishing thunderstorms every afternoon, that frightened and thrilled me. The couple who ran the ranch taught horsemanship at the university of wyoming and raised Arabians. There were stallions and mares and yearlings, as well as the school horses. Their relationship with their horses was unusual for the time: she could ride her Arab stallions on the open range, bareback with a halter, at a time when whips and spurs were more the rule. Something in me started to blossom there, in that wide landscape and with the horses, as a kid who had struggled with being different than other kids, sometimes shunned, often frightened of the world and other people. One morning I got up very early, a little before dawn, left the bunkhouse, and took my pocket camera out to take photographs. I photographed the gray Arab stallion as his dark eyes gazed at me through the fence in first light. And then I walked up the hill behind the ranch house and stood there shivering, alone with the grazing horses, watching the dawn.
4 One moment everything was as it had been, and then my heart just opened, everything opened and was perfect, the whole world crystalline and whole. There was no problem, no division, no fear just vast, light-filled openness, and I was inseparable from it. I remember tears, as my heart stretched and stretched with joy. Everything, everything, everything is holy now. I think this experience of wholeness, so significant to me, is not so rare, actually. A recent study of young adults reported that more than a third of them had had intense spiritual experiences, regardless of religious backgrond. And sometimes it is not so intense, just a glimpse, an intuition that the world is more than it seems, more than we are told that it is. When holy water was rare at best It barely wet my fingertips But now I have to hold my breath Like I'm swimming in a sea of it It used to be a world half there Heaven's second rate hand-me-down But I walk it with a reverent air 'Cause everything is holy now Here s the strange thing, even though many people have these experiences or intuitions, even though it may seem like an obvious and wonderful thing to us, to open our spirit to an appreciation of this world, it still threatens some people with traditional religious views. As I was reading about the song, I came across a post about it on a website called, I kid you not, What s Wrong With the World: Dispatches from the 10th crusade. Now, I don t want to get you all riled up, and I don t for a moment believe that this is the way very many Christians would view this song, but it is an interesting mirror from a very conservative religious view, and it is important to understand, I think. The writer had this to say, Why do otherwise sensible and orthodox Christian people occasionally fall for this kind of "everything is a miracle, everything is holy, nothing is any more special than anything else" universalist shtick? What is it about a kind of spiritual egalitarianism that is so attractive that pantheism and anti-christianity goes unnoticed? The writer takes issue with the song precisely because it does NOT separate holiness and the world: She writes, Furthermore, if there is not God who is absolutely holy, and who is strongly separate from His Creation, then nothing can be holy at all. A radical anti-egalitarianism, a radical separation between Creator and creature, is a necessary condition for the possibility of meaningful holiness. She is right that this song is universalist and pantheist, that in some ways it is heretical in relation to traditional understandings. As I like to say, Unitarian Universalism is the marriage of two great heresies, and people died for both those heresies in our history. We don t tend to talk much about universalism in Unitararian Universalist congregations, and that s too bad. My experience on that hill in Wyoming was an experience of
5 universalism, of wholeness, and of my own wholeness, my rightness in the world as part of the miracle, no matter how I was treated by other children. A universalist view recognizes our oneness and our holiness, and our first UU principle of the inherent worth and dignity of every person. And in case the word pantheist is not familiar to you, a pantheist feels that there is sacredness in everything, rather than everything over here, and divinity over there, separate. I have sometimes called myself an ecological pantheist, because for me, the interdependence and interconnectedness that is part of the ecological nature of things, that I first learned walking in the woods and in my ecology classes in college, is all by itself, without needing to add anything separate or other, a living, breathing booming buzzing miracle, something to revere, to feel awe about and wonder. Wine from water is not so small But an even better magic trick Is that anything is here at all So the challenging thing becomes Not to look for miracles But finding where there isn't one In Buddhism too, there is a recognition of this other way of seeing, beneath our usual ways of dividing up and complaining about the world. One of my favorite mythological Buddhist stories is about the Buddha and one of his students, Subhuti. Subhuti asked a question of the Buddha after one of his public talks, maybe a talk a little like this one. Basically he asked a very reasonable question, one you might be wondering yourself: Revered teacher, if, as you say, everything is perfect, why does the world seem to be so difficult? And the Buddha put out his big toe and said to Subhuti and everyone else there listening, When I touch my big toe on the ground, you will see things as I see them and when his big toe touched the ground, everyone saw the world around them as a jeweled palace: jeweled trees with jeweled flowers, beauty everywhere. When the Buddha picked up his big toe, everything went back to normal. Except that afterward things are not quite the same, just as I was not quite the same after my experience on that Wyoming hill. In fact, that I am here in front of you today is probably very much related to that experience on that Wyoming Hill, and other like it. Is it naive to see the world as the Buddha showed his students? Is it wrong, as our friend the conservative Christian suggested online? What about all the suffering we can see on the news every night? Surely that s not perfect or holy. I can tell you how I see it. I think, in that story I just told of the Buddha, both ways of viewing the world are true. This world IS difficult, and cruel, and painful. It would be foolish and naive to deny that. But if we live with only that view of what is wrong with the world, we miss so much of reality. We live in a tight little hell of fear, disappointment, and anger.
6 The world is also holy and interconnected, and it s a miracle that anything is here at all. That view is also true, verifiably true, and with that view supporting us, we can, as the universalists sometimes say with a smile, love the hell out of this world, respond to what is wrong with the world with a deep understanding of what is also and at the same time right and holy and astonishing, about this very same world. Benediction Florence Caplow May the love that gives to life its beauty, the reverence that gives to life its sacredness, and the purposes that give to life its deep significance be strong within each of us and lead us into ever deepening relationships with all of life.