Let us rise in body or spirit and join in our opening song

Song: Find a Stillness

Chalice Lighting:

O light of life, be kindled again in our hearts
As we meet together at this time,
To celebrate the joy of human community,
Seeking a wholeness that extends beyond ourselves.
– Samuel A. Trumbore

Let’s sing a response to the lighting of the chalice

Rise Up O Flame

Principles of Unitarian Universalism

Unitarian Universalist congregations affirm and promote seven Principles:
The inherent worth and dignity of every person;
Justice, equity and compassion in human relations;
Acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth in our congregations;
A free and responsible search for truth and meaning;
The right of conscience and the use of the democratic process within our congregations and in society at large;
The goal of world community with peace, liberty, and justice for all;
Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.

Let us join in a responsive reading

Responsive Reading

Out of a community of diverse heritage and belief,
we come together to share our hope, and to create good in the world.
The teachers of all traditions and times have taught that we are
called to mercy, generosity, and mutual care
and that to be good is to serve.
We know that there can be no enduring happiness for humanity
so long as suffering and want go unrelieved;
until all may be sheltered, none of us is truly at home.
May the power of our various faiths sustain us in this work, that
we may be the hands of holy creativity and justice;
and together build a better world.

-Kendyl Gibbons, adapted

Story – Charles Hartshorne

Charles Hartshorne grew up in Kittanning and Phoenixville, in northeastern Pennsylvania. His father’s mother was Episcopalian, his father a Quaker, and his father was an Episcopal minister and also had a law degree. His mother’s father was also an Episcopal minister. Hartshorne said “How philosophers think about religion may well depend largely on how they have encountered it in childhood and youth. A genuine religion of love has its appeal. This is especially true if the love includes an aspect of what Spinoza called intellectual love and the poet Shelley called love for intellectual beauty.”

Of his father “My father did not merely proclaim his piety, he lived by it. Moreover, it was an attractive form of piety. He saw Christianity as a religion of love and took seriously the two sayings that God is love and that love for God and fellow creatures sums up Christian (and Judaic) ethics. He was essentially affectionate, gentle, and fair in his treatment of others. He had compassion for poor and underprivileged persons. Himself the son of a rich man, he disagreed strongly with the richest man in his church, who expected employees in his iron mill to work a twelve-hour day.“

Of his mother “In the broad sense of rationality, Mother was perhaps slightly superior to Father. Her view of things could be counted on for sanity, especially her view of personal relations. Three examples. Once, when I was fussing about a girl whom I knew I did not love and did not want to marry, but who had charm and who had somehow offended my pride, Mother heard my story and simply said, “Charles, life is big.” No more needed to be said. I had been making a mountain out of a molehill. Once when a parishioner undertook to explain to Mother that she should refer to her black laundress not as Mrs. Smith but simply as Lizzy, Mother said, “I am accustomed to calling her Mrs. Smith. I think I will continue to call her Mrs. Smith.” Subject closed. Third example. My youngest brother, Alfred, brought home for us all to look over the first girl who had interested him. We all thought she was hopeless. She seemed extremely frail, for one thing, as though starved from infancy, and not especially well educated. Mother did not argue with Alfred. As she told me later, she simply said, “Alfred, marriage is a very serious matter. It is not enough to love a girl, you must know that you can continue to love her for years after you are married to her. It is not fair to the girl otherwise.”

Hartshorne went to an Episcopal boarding school in Lancaster County. He read Emerson’s essays and Matthew Arnold’s Literature and Dogma. After reading Emerson, he decided to “trust reason to the end.” He said Arnold’s book was “almost like an explosion in my mind” and “After Arnold, my only options were to drop all theological beliefs — except perhaps Arnold’s desiccated formula: “The enduring power not ourselves that makes for Righteousness” — or else to become a philosopher.” He also found a book on birds, which started a life-long interest in ornithology – 50 years later hew wrote a book, Born to Sing, which combined philosophy and ornithology.

Hartshorne went on to Haverford, a Quaker college, where philosophy professor Jones had his class read Royce’s Problem of Christianity, which Hartshorne says was “a very singular book, even for Royce. The chapter on community was another writing that changed my life. Never, after reading that, would self-interest theories of motivation have much appeal for me.”

In 1917 he left college to volunteer in the Army Medical Corps, and served for two years in France, until the end of the war. When he returned to college, it was at Harvard, where he went on to a doctorate in philosophy, with a dissertation titled “The Unity of Being”. Adter two years in Europe, mostly Germany, on a post-doctoral fellowship, he returned to Harvard as junior faculty, assisting the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, and editing Charles Pierce’s papers. In 1928, he became a professor at the University of Chicago, and married Dorothy Cooper, a Wellesley student he had met at Harvard, who was a Universalist. His family attended First Unitarian, on the University of Chicago campus. Reportedly when their daughter asked why he didn’t attend, her mother told her “he has more important things to do.” But he had a joint professorship at Meadville-Lombard, the Unitarian seminary in Chicago, from 1848 until 1955, when he went to Emory University in Atlanta. In 1962, he moved to the University of Texas at Austin.

He and his wife were members of First UU in Austin, and I remember him as a tiny old man with wild white hair under a colorful pillbox cap of maybe Guatamalan fabric, holding hands with an even tinier wife as they came into church. They were vegetarian, and never owned a car. They had one daughter, Emily Schwartz. Dorothy was his lifelong editor, proofreader, correspondent, bibliographer and travel agent as well as loving companion. She died in 1995, after years in a nursing home, and Hartshorne died in 2002, at the age of 103.

Let us now take our offering for the support of this congregation

Epitaph of Seikilos Petros Tabouris Ensemble

Offering and Response (Unison)

For the gifts which we have received—and the gifts which we, ourselves, are—may we be truly grateful. Yet more than that, may we be committed to using these gifts to make a difference in the world: to increase love and justice; to decrease hatred and oppression; to expand beloved community; to share, and to keep sharing, as long as ever we can.

Reading: from A New World and New World View – by Charles Hartshorne

What follows is an item of Unitarian history that will be unfamiliar to many readers. Nearly four centuries ago, the Italian theologian Faustus Socinus criticized the traditional deification of Jesus of Nazareth; in addition, though scarcely any encyclopedia or history will say so, he rejected the traditional idea of God as an unmoved mover, an immutable and all-determining power. Believing that human beings have genuine freedom, Socinus denied that God either determines or eternally knows our free acts. Rather, we determine the acts, and God knows them only after the fact or as they occur.

This view implies real novelty in the divine consciousness, it means that we cause changes in God. In this bold break with tradition, Socinus anticipated our current process theology. What he chiefly lacked was the insight that the idea of creaturely freedom, which creates novelty even in God, should be generalized to apply to all creatures, even the humblest—for instance, atoms. Human creativity is then no sheer exception in an otherwise divinely determined world but is only an extremely special, high-level case of creaturely freedom. Before the physics of the late nineteenth century, this generalization could scarcely be entertained, but about a hundred years ago a number of thinkers, more or less independently, did entertain and defend it. Among them were Peirce, Boutroux and later Bergson, both in France, Varisco in Italy, and Whitehead.
…
I appreciate the difficulties many have with theism. As a college sophomore, I roomed with an atheistic senior, and I have associated much with nontheists ever since. Concerning difficulties with the idea of God, I ask, “Which idea? Is it the classical notion of an immutable being that decides the details of cosmic history in eternity?” Then I am an atheist. “Or is it the conception of God as supreme freedom and love responding to creatures, the least of which has some freedom of its own and at least some primitive form of what in a generalized sense could be called love—at a minimum, some spark of sympathy for others, some feeling of their feelings?” Whatever the difficulties presented by this idea, they are not the same as the problems with the more usual conception. Only this usual conception figures in the works of the great nontheistic writers from Carneades in ancient Greece to Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzsche, Russell, Dewey, Santayana, and Freud.

….

Why should one aim at future good for anyone, even for oneself? In the long-term future, we are dead. Is it for the good of corpses that we are striving? Taking the whole future into account, the self is a wasting asset. To make it the ultimate good is to turn life into Macbeth’s “tale/Told by an idiot/full of sound and fury/Signifying nothing.” An elder citizen like myself sees this fact more readily than the young are likely to; yet I was twenty years old when I first saw it.

Present experience, as I then began to understand, is a contribution, a gift, to future experience; otherwise, in ultimate perspective, it is indistinguishable from nothing. The present becomes the past for an ever new present, and in this perpetually renewed contribution to the future is our only permanent reality. To make a huge fuss about whether the new present that later inherits from this one will always be a state of self—rather than of descendants, pupils, friends, strangers, or even life in nonhuman for— is to show a failure to understand our mortal existence. The final question is what we can contribute to the future of life, any life that can be supposed able to receive and adequately appropriate our contribution.

Of course, we are all more or less selfish. Any vertebrate animal sees and feels itself as the center of the world, “Here I am; there you are, background for my career.” As Reinhold Niebuhr saw so well, this feeling translates itself readily in a thinking animal into an egocentric attitude that carried to the limit, amounts to self-deification. Only a divine ego could be the real center of the world. Thus, our animal experience puts us at the center of the world, while our reason tells us that every other human person is as central as we are, so that neither is central. The other is, in principle, as permanent or impermanent as we are. As Shakespeare said, “We are such stuff/As dreams are made on, and our little life/Is rounded with a sleep.” Unfortunately, much Western philosophy and, to some extent, nearly all philosophy and still more nearly all religion have cheated us here. They have flattered our individual or collective conceit with theories of personal immortality and have tried in every way to explain away death, instead of helping us to accept it for what it is. The ancient Jews were the great exception, honor to them. Even when individual death has been accepted, however, the human species has often been regarded as though it were immortal. Species do last longer than individuals, but they, too, are mortal, and basically for the same reason, that they are contingent creatures of the creative process, dependent for continued existence upon circumstances.
…..
Life is a gift from past life to future life. This simple truth goes deeper than we normally realize. The great singer Paul Robeson sang a moving song about four rivers all finding their way to the sea. To the question of questions, “Into what sea does all life pour its treasures?” I have found no nontheistic answer. Emerson’s Oversoul or Plato’s world soul is the only answer I know; but this soul, this divine life, is not to be conceived as immutable, for then our lives could not contribute to it, or as all-determining, for then all suffering and wickedness is its doing and our sense of freedom an illusion.

Lesson: We Are One

As I said, my memory of Charles Hartshorne was as the husband of a charming old couple, obviously still devoted to each other. I knew he had created something known as process theology, but even though he was still lecturing into his 90s, and apparently speaking at UU services in Texas and elsewhere, I don’t remember that he did at ours after we were there. It wasn’t until this winter that I read any of his work. Once I did, I found that he was influenced by and influenced others I had been reading – and that what he had to say made clearer some things I had been thinking for a long time, some of it decades.

I had been digging into the background of the idea Beloved Community this winter, and, before that, the ideas of identity politics. The phrase Beloved Community originated with Josiah Royce, who more often called it the “Great Community”. He explicitly maintained that it included the entire world, but was built of very local communities that were differentiated and homogeneous, and larger communities, including nations, that were also different from each other, but also all focused on the good of the whole — that loyalty to the group took precedence over the individual, and that the aim was the good of the community, ultimately the global community.

Some years ago I had read The Fear of Barbarians: Beyond the Clash of Civilizations, by the philosopher Tzvetan Todorov, a Bulgarian who immigrated to France. It is useful because he is writing from the point of view of an other in France, which gives a perspective that shows our troubles in the US, which we tend to think of as unique, as a manifestation of a global phenomenon. His explanation of civilized versus barbarian is

A civilized person is one who is able, at all times and in all places, to recognize the humanity of others fully. So two stages have to be crossed before anyone can become civilized: in the first stage, you discover that others live in a way different from you; in the second, you agree to see them as bearers of the same humanity as yourself. The moral demand comes with an intellectual dimension: getting those with whom you live to understand a foreign identity, whether individual or collective, is an act of civilization, since in this way you are enlarging the circle of humanity.

And finally, from Ichiro Kishimi, a philosopher and explainer of Alfred Adler’s psychology, the idea that our two goals are self-reliance and living in harmony with community – which he equates with believing and behaving as if people are our comrades rather than our competitors.

As it turns out, Charles Hartshorne was taken with Royce’s idea of the great community at a young age, just before World War I, when Royce was at the end of his life and career and his ideas were new. Now, beloved community has been embraced by UUism, but the idea of a universal great community has been lost, and the idea is that our local religious communities must be deliberately diversified and that we should focus on individual identities, with emphasis on particular identities. I think our local communities, and the larger organization, should be focusing on helping people be self-reliant and to be “civilized” – to understand life in terms of comradeship and the light of the divine within others and ourselves – not of rights and privileges, or of making other people and the society at large behave according to our beliefs.

Hartshorne’s main ideas were that

first, God, the universe, and everything are not things in themselves, but a process – that the universe is continually changing and being reinvented;

second, that God is not omnipotent and omniscient, but is dependent on the process – that God doesn’t know anything that hasn’t yet happened, and doesn’t direct what is happening, but is dependent on what everything in the universe does, people included

and third, that the universe, and God, are all one thing

Hartshorne identified himself as a Buddhisto-Christian, and his core idea – sometimes expressed as that the universe is the body of God – is like the Catholic metaphor of the Church as the body of Christ. But also like the Buddhist idea of no-self – that the idea that we are separate selves – is an illusion. Our seventh principle talks about the interdependent web of life, but to me, that is not as vivid, and keeps alive an idea that we are separate beings caught in a web with everything else.

Philosophy can be very dry – and as the Tao Te Ching says – the way that can be spoken is not the way. It is something that we must learn to see without words.

Think about your body – your feet, your hands, your lungs, liver, kidneys, pancreas, gall bladder, and more. Take a minute to start at the top of your head and walk though your body, all of its parts, down to your feet.
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Now – did you remember all the of microbes in your gut and on your skin? There are slightly more microbes living in and on your body, and most of them are doing work like helping to digest your food. Stop for a minute and think of them, what we think of as alein to us, living within us and doinf their work, too.

None of those cells can exist, or not for long, on their own. The body cannot exist long as a living entity without all of the cells doing their job. The microbes cannot live without us, and we cannot live without our microbes.

Now, imagine if your liver cells began arguing among themselves, or thought, well, I don’t really care about those heart cells up there – they aren’t a bit like me – and I don’t really want to work today.” Or the brain said “I’m the one who coordinates everything – those feet are down at the bottom, and dumb – who needs them?”

And – each of those cells is made up of proteins – the image is of a protein called EBD88 – one of thousands of proteins in our bodies – and each protein is made of molecules, which are made of atoms, which are made up of protons, neutrons, and electrons – as is everything in the universe – from rocks to stars and everything in between. All the same, but arranged in an infinite number of ways, coming together in one way, transforming and falling apart every moment.

I think the heart of Hartshorne’s philosophy, which is Buddhist and Christian – to love one another as oneself – not as as in like oneself – but as an identity – that the other is oneself — to recognize that others as just other parts of the same body. Which leads back to the same great community, which for Hartshorne includes not just the people, but the whole great blooming buzzing confusion of the universe, from electrons to God.

The prelude this morning, Paul Robeson’s Song of Four Rivers, came from his work on a movie The Six Rivers – the Volga, Mississippi, Ganges, Nile, Amazon and the Yangtze. The music was by Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich, the lyrics by German playwright Bertolt Brecht, and sung and narrated by Paul Robeson, who said “Day by day with our hands — yellow, white, or black — we change the face of the earth and the future of mankind.” – celebrating international trade unionism and solidarity after World War II, just as Royce’s idea of the great or beloved community was born in the turmoil of World War I. The idea, as in Adler and Hartshorne, is that we are all comrades, not separate selves in competition – no more than our livers are separate entities that must compete with our hearts and lungs.

Not only would the world be a better place if we realized this, but our individual experiences, since we would not be living in a stressful world we see as full of competitors or enemies from whom we must defend ourselves.

Song: Litany

Sing unto the earth, and all the rocks and trees
All that lives and breathes, far beneath the sky
For they are God
You are God
I am God
We are God
We are One:
The bed through which the river flows
We are Alpha:
Which was in the beginning
We are Omega:
Which shall be in the end
We are One
Forever

The cloud rains on the mountain
The creeks fall to the river
The river flows to the sea
The sun that shines in heaven
Lifts up the drops of water
And the cloud
Rains on the mountain

We are the water
In the river
In the clouds
In the creeks
In the sea
Which is purer?
Which is better?
We are One
Forever

We are the bed through which the river flows
We are the water of the river
And we are One
Forever
We are and were and shall be
Forever

Let’s recite our mission and covenant together

Mission and Covenant

Mission

Be a beacon and a refuge for all
Worship joyfully
Grow in spirit
Touch our community

Covenant

Love is the doctrine of this church, The quest of truth is our sacrament, and service is our prayer. To dwell together in peace, To seek knowledge in freedom, To serve others in community, To the end that all souls shall grow Into harmony with creation, Thus we do covenant with one another.

Hymn

Earth is Enough (Here on the Paths of Every Day)

Joys and Sorrows (Please save announcements and comments until the end of the service)

If you woke this morning with a sorrow so heavy that you need the help of this community to carry it; or if you woke with a joy so great that it simply must be shared, now is the time for you to speak.
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For the joys and sorrows that haven’t been spoken, but which remain in the silent sanctuaries of our hearts.
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These joys and griefs, spoken and unspoken, weave us together in the fabric of community.

Silent Meditation

Benediction

From the murmur and subtlety of suspicion with which we vex one another, give us rest.
Make a new beginning, and mingle again the kindred of the nations in the alchemy of love;
And with some finer essence of forbearance temper our minds.
– Aristophanes

The chalice flame is extinguished until once again ignited by the strength of our communion. Go now in peace.

Song: Go Now In Peace (3 times)

Closing: The Work Continues by Martha Kirby Capo

Our time together is finished, but our work is not yet done:

May our spirits be renewed and our purpose resolved

As we meet the challenges of the week to come.

The chalice flame is extinguished Until once again ignited by the strength of our communion.

Go now in peace.

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