What is the story of your life?

Linda McCullough Moore begins her story, Four Kinds Of People, in her book of short stories, This Road Will Take Us Closer To The Moon with these sentences: 

"I'm sitting in the late afternoon of my existence at Logan Airport reading the fine print on the backside of my boarding pass when my life walks in. Well, one of my lives, my former life. Carlton."

"The wife - I'll call her Mary Ann - asks him how long the layover in Charlotte is. He asks her how the hell would he know. Still the charmer."

"Are those your boys?" I say to Mary Ann.
No, we rented them for the trip. I make the only interesting reply.

"Are you married?" she asks me.
"Not at the moment, but I have high hopes for the thousand priests at Myrtle Beach."
"Oh," she says as though she has some clue what that might mean. I start to explain, but then think better of it. There are about four people in the world who are interested in the difference between Catholic and Episcopalian priests and their matrimonial proclivities.
"And you're not a nun, you say."
"Nope, still not a nun." I can see why she has a little trouble with the weather channel.

One might wonder how one should respond when stories of your past life encounter you unexpectedly and are filtered through the dark veil of ignorance begging for clarification which only the deeply initiated could possibly understand. In such instances the inherent worth and dignity of every person is hard to remember and, if remembered, hard to apply when people are clueless and naive. What does it take in moments like this to live the first principle? Patience, patience, and more patience.

Patience leads to forgiveness which leads to compassion which just might lead to gratitude. The narrator of the story is patient and has a good sense of humor, the kind that can laugh at the incongruity and absurdity of life. It is important to laugh with people and not at people, and experience the mysterious alchemy which transforms pain into peace, darkness into light, banal nonsense into grace.

The older we get the more former lives we have, the more stories that can haunt us, the more experiences we can cherish and enjoy in the sharing with others. We remember the children who were only with us a short time on the trip, the partner(s) we tried to love and hoped would love us, the goals we pursued some with triumph, some with defeat, some just abandoned for various reasons that we can't name or if we can, we don't tell others or want to talk about. Because we believe in the inherent worth and dignity of every person our faith inspires us to be grateful for tomorrow if it comes, because God only knows how the story will continue to be created and unfold, and we are filled with enthusiastic hope for the actualization of the divine potential that we and all our brothers and sisters possess.

Rising ocean levels - new NASA data

I have mentioned on UU A Way Of Life in previous articles as we have read Flight Behavior in July, and The Green Boat in August, that the sea levels on the Eastern seabord are rising rapidly. His is a segment from Thom Hartman published on 07/31/14.



How will this affect our UU churches in New York City, Boston, Philadelphia, Washington, DC, Florida, etc.?

Searching for truth and meaning in social justice projects or looking within?

When we consider the fourth principle of Unitarian Universalism "a free and responsible search for truth and meaning" we might first wonder what the words "truth" and "meaning" mean. Right? What are we talking about here? Is it Truth with a capital T or truth with a small t? And what is the meaning of meaning? Does it mean anything that means anything to me or is it psychobabble, or philosophical nonsense which is best left to the scholars and experts?

I am assuming that what the fourth principle is referring to is the existential question of "does life have meaning?" The Dali Lama has stated that the meaning of life is finding happiness. Slick answer isn't it? Everyone that I know wants to be happy. As a psychotherapist I have had clients who liked their suffering, their pain, their depression because it got them sympathy and attention, what we therapists call, "secondary gain", and playing the victim is great fun for the perpetrator of the game as it creates high drama and makes them the center of attention, the center of the drama and that, of course, you see where I'm going here don't you, makes them happy, as perverted as that may seem to some of the naive and innocent who don't get the game being played.

So the big question instead of what is the meaning of life is, perhaps, what will make me happy? Unitarian Universalism implies, in asking people to covenant together to affirm and promote the seven principles, that applying the seven principles will make them happy. And if this is the product which Unitarian Universalism is selling not many people are buying it at this point in human evolution. You might wonder if the product isn't any good or maybe Unitarian Universalism is just ahead of its time, offering something which most people are not at a place to appreciate and to know deep down that it is something they want and would make them happy.

Most people in American society are hedonists. They revel in the material world where consuming is the answer to our problems. After 9/11 President Bush encouraged Americans to keep shopping, to go shopping, to not let the terrorists win by showing them that capitalism is alive and well.

Osho makes a distinction between pleasure, happiness, joy, and bliss. To share my understanding of his four part model pleasure is sensory satisfaction, scratching the itch, drinking when you're thirsty, eating when you're hungry, sleeping when you're tired, having sex when you're horney. Happiness is an emotional state when engaging in an activity which is aesthetically pleasing, going to the art gallery, listening to good music, enjoying the company of someone you like, engaging in activities that are satisfying and fulfilling. Joy is not situationally related but an over all sense of well being and peace. Bliss is the flow state of becoming one with the all, transcending the ego plane of projected experience.

And so when we say that the meaning of life is pursuing a path of that which we think will make us happy are we pursuing truth with a small t or a capital T, and is the meaning of the pursuit idiosyncratic or something more universal?

Other religions help people distinguish the path to happiness and sometimes are dictatorial about it saying this will take you to heaven and that will take you to hell but Unitarian Universalism is more laid back, it has no one way, but is purposefully eclectic. This is both its genius and its downfall. For while Unitarian Universalism encourages and promotes and affirms a free and responsible search for truth and meaning it leaves the adherent, aside from acknowledging the six sources, entirely on his/her own aside from cultural preferences of every particular UU congregation some of which are humanistically oriented, or christian oriented, or buddhist oriented, or Earth-centered oriented or a potpourri which is of very little help to anyone because if you accept everything, you'll fall for anything.

The UU search for truth and meaning then becomes extremely difficult because the UU adherent is left pretty much on his or her own. The question of what will make me happy is left amorphous, ambiguous, open ended, up in the air, and so with no supplied guideposts, the UU adherent is left to engage in social justice projects in search for meaning or looking within. Of course these alternatives are not mutually exclusive and might include both or even a third or fourth way. How do you find truth and meaning in your life? How does your faith  help you?

Official life and real life - discrepancy - that's a fact

In Linda McCullough Moore's story "That's A Fact" in her collection of short stories, This Road Will Take You Closer To The Moon, the narrator of the story, a young girl of 10 or 11 in 1955 says:

"People in a family need to be so careful. My family are. Everything - our whole life up till now - has been possible because we're careful. We keep it all inside our house. Whenever we go outside in the street, we take our different selves, and leave real life at home. Until tonight." p. 5

The first principle of Unitarian Universalism is to covenant to affirm and promote the inherent dignity and worth of every person, and in reading this passage with which I can strongly identify I am reminded of what us psychotherapists call "boundary issues" and wonder who are the "persons" who have inherent worth and dignity? Is it the "different selves" that they take to the street, or the "real life" they leave at home?

The narrator's working class family is visiting a German immigrant middle class professional family at Christmas time and the narrator describes her frustrated, discouraged, severely financially stressed father who finally let's the cat out of the bag about how difficult things are within the family.

"But still I know this is no sudden thing: my father spilling his guts to these German strangers. He has dragged himself, inches at a time, over to the cliff's edge and, head heavy, tumbled over. That's how it's done. A person doesn't run a mile to reach the edge and hurl himself into the void that ends in jagged rock below, for the simple reason that by the time you've reached the edge, you're winded, and you stop just shy to catch your breath and reconsider. The ones who take the plunge make camp just crawling distance form the edge and every day inch closer, living in a place where tumbling over - be it suicide or saying all - is not a great departure from routine." pp.5-6

Dad breaks the boundary. He let's it rip. Has he had too much to drink or is the discrepancy between a working class guy without even a high school degree and a German immigrant engineer rocket scientist just too great to make the game of pretend and keep up with the Joneses overwhelmingly impossible? There are times when the facade crumbles. It is no longer worth keeping up the pretense. The counterfeit dignity isn't working any more. And such a moment is either an excursion to hell or a crack in the shell where the light can come in leading to transcendence. Which will it be?

The narrator tells us:

     "The husband reaches out and pulls the water bucket closer to the chair. The wife points to the cake. In accusation? Some desperate hostess offer of distraction?
     But no, oh no, we will not be diverted, not from our lives. We'll take them home with us and sleep with them tonight. We children will grow up and carry them away and keep them with us everywhere we go." p.6

Oh yes we are like turtles. We take the shells of our lives wherever we go. We not only tell ourselves these stories of our lives constantly, often unconsciously, but they become the lens, the filter through which we perceive the world. If we were told we were good as children and the world was a good place, we wake up in the morning and expect good things to happen to us. But if we were told we were bad as children, and the world is a bad and dangerous and hurtful place we wake up and expect bad things to happen to us. And depending on our stories about our lives we either live relatively happy or on the edge of the abyss.

Religion, of course, is itself a story, a meta -story within which we understand our lived experience and come to believe what to expect. In this story, the 10 year old girl's religion is the Weekly Reader which she gets in school which reports "the facts". It is the Weekly Reader, the secular version of the world to which she compares her personal life, her lived experience, and she, as only a 10 year old, has picked up on the irony, the incongruity, the absurdities of our lives, the idea that there is an official version of how life should be lived which often is quite discrepant from one's actual experience.

It's shame that the Weekly Reader has become the purveyor of the official story of what life is like in the American dream. Too often in our media dominated culture the religious stories of uplift, inspiration, guidance on the living of the Good Life have been drowned out. Mammon has taken the place of the holy, the sacred. And so the narrator's family lives a life of quiet desperation as compared to the immigrant German professional family. They live in the same neighborhood, apparently, otherwise they would not be sharing a Christmas party together because they have little else in common. The narrator, a child, does the comparison through the eyes of her father and comes up short handed maybe not because of a lack of real needs being met, but because in comparison, based on material values, the working class family comes up deficient.

What is screwed up here is not the discrepancy in class but the values which determine desirability. In the 50s in the United States the whole culture was overtaken by a materialistic ethic which was called "progress" which has taken us down a path of degradation of our planetary environment which is contributing to the death of many species and possibly in a century a drastic threat to our own. While the Weekly Reader was held up as the repository of the societal facts, the 10 year old narrator senses that there is something not quite right, not authentic, pernicious driving people to the brink of suicide or a crisis in meaning contributing to a "letting it all out."

Perhaps it is not the facts that are as important as the meanings we make from them. Keeping up with the Joneses in the American competitive spirit is not the way to the Good Life and our failure to recognize this has contributed to our despair. And that's not a fact, but an opinion which are two different things.

Two Family House - a movie depicting the living of the fourth principle: a free and responsible search for truth and meaning.

Buddy Visalo (Michael Rispoli) is a guy with a dream as big as his heart. Defying everything and everyone, including his wife (Katherine Narducci), Buddy decides to follow his dream. When he meets a woman who truly believes in him (Kelly Macdonald), he must choose between the only life he's ever known and his desire for happiness. A tender, romantic comedy in which two people discover that happily ever after can come from the most unlikely place. "This rich romantic comedy, with its message of love and tolerance and hope and its great old tunes, won the Audience Award at this year's Sundance Film Festival and seems destined to capture many more fans..."(THE NEW YORK TIMES).

As we reflect on the fourth principle this month on UU A Way Of Life on line magazine no movie could be more appropriate than Two Family House, a movie in which Buddy Visalo defies his family, his ethnic group, the conventions of society to follow his heart in his search for truth and meaning. I highly recommend this movie which is available streaming on Netflix.

Story of the day - Haiku: Aren't getting the answers to life's important questions?

Wrong answer if wrong question.

The right question makes all the difference.

Question the question if stuck.

A free and responsible search for truth and meaning is not a job for sissies and cowards

The fourth principle of Unitarian Universalism, "we covenant to affirm and promote a free and responsible search for truth and meaning" is perhaps what true spirituality is all about. Osho said that the first step on a spiritual path is rebellion by which I think he meant questioning. The "why" question.

Rev. Galen Guengerich wrote in his book, God Revised, that when he left his Mennonite community of his family to go to Princeton Seminary, "his" people were afraid he would lose his faith. Rev. Guengerich wrote that he didn't lose "his" faith, he lost someone else's. He was just beginning to search for a faith of his own.

Unitarian Universalism may be one of the few religions which not only accepts but encourages a free and responsible search for truth and meaning requiring no allegiance to a creed or dogma for membership in its congregations and denominational body.

While there are seven principles, I like to think of them as values, that Unitarian Universalists are asked to covenant together to affirm and promote, there is no required set of beliefs. UUs are "freethinkers" as they have been called which include people from all former religious groups or none supporting each others search for truth and meaning. James Fowler in his model of faith development describes this search as step four in his six stage model of faith development. Here is how Fowler's fourth stage is described on Wikipedia: "Individuative-Reflective" faith (usually mid-twenties to late thirties) a stage of angst and struggle. The individual takes personal responsibility for his or her beliefs and feelings. As one is able to reflect on one's own beliefs, there is an openness to a new complexity of faith, but this also increases the awareness of conflicts in one's belief."

Unitarian Universalism is not a faith for concrete thinkers, literalists, people needing the security of authority figures telling them what they should believe and think.

Unitarian Universalists are not so much looking for answers as they are willing and open to, as Rilke said, living the question. Here is what Rainer Maria Rilke wrote: “Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

To live the question of the forth principle takes, according to Rev. Fredric Muir in his essay on the fourth principle in the book With Principle and Purpose: Essays About The Seven Principles of Unitarian Universalism, humility, awareness, non judgment, balance, learning, engagement, and focusing. I would add curiosity, courage and bravery. Living the fourth principle takes curiosity, courage and bravery. It is not for the insecure, the unsure, the submissive, the weak, or the lazy. And further, beyond Muir's six virtues, and mine of courage and bravery, I also would add patience and perseverance, what I call the "2 Ps".

Unitarian Universalism is not a faith for children but a faith for responsible adults grown-up enough to ask grown-up questions about their existential experience. They are ready to engage in an interior search of their own meaning making and for their own truth as they can best discern it. This is not a job for sissies or cowards, but for the courageous, the brave, and the curious.