First Parish Sermon

Thank you all for coming out and especially for making it on time, what with this time yesterday being an hour from now. I love daylight savings time. It is the miracle of civilization that together, millions and millions of people agree to shift time forward and backward twice a year.

Daylight savings time connect us. I came here this morning to speak of connection. I came to speak about oneness, about kindness.

And yesterday I realized why. Yesterday we celebrated and remembered the life and the powerful love of Nancy Paul, my godmother. She was the mother of my closest childhood friend. She had been fighting a cancer which had torn through her body, and just this past week her mortal life came to an end. 

Yesterday we packed into a standing room church to pay our respects and honor her exceptional love. Every single person who spoke mentioned her kindness. Never so much as a word of gossip, never a negative or condemning word about an other person -- and the result was a vast network of friends. Almost every person in that church yesterday had been touched by the simple and beautiful kindness which flowed through Nancy with ease.

And so I have come this morning to sing the praises of one of my second mothers -- to hold her kind of kindness up and to use it as a goal -- to explore the possibilities and potential of a life based on lovingkindness. 

Just a few weeks ago, I was part of a sixteen-person team of massage therapists who were working for the Boston to New York Aids Ride. Two Thousand One Hundred riders and six hundred some odd volunteers whose efforts raised millions of dollars for Aids research: sixteen sets of hands and almost three thousand bodies of tension. I had volunteered to drive the truck which carried the massage and chiropractic teams’ gear. It was a twenty-five footer, the single largest vehicle I have ever captained.

By seven in the morning, we needed gas and so we pulled over to a rest stop. We all knew there was a possibility that a truck this size would need Diesel fuel. But NO WHERE! I MEAN NO WHERE was it marked! So we collectively decided that since it was not specified, this truck was thirsty for unleaded. 

Now this was a rental truck, so it was somewhat difficult at first to discern that there was actually a problem. It had never really had great pick up and had always been a bit slow on the hills. 

I knew something was wrong when I heard my first backfire.

I don’t know if you’ve ever heard one, but on a twenty-five foot truck they sound like someone firing a shotgun directly beneath your seat cushion. Soon enough the frequency had escalated to near machinegun fire and in the mirror I could see that the truck was streaming A THICK BLACK trail of smoke.

Just a few hours earlier I was listening a truly remarkable man, Dan Palotta, the president and founder of Palotta Teamworks, the company which puts on the Aids Rides. He gave a rousing speech in Boston to the riders and crew as we began the first day’s ride. He spoke about the challenges which lay ahead, the moments which would test us.

He spoke of  kindness. Pure and simple. Palotta repeated time and again that this was foremost an experiment in love and kindness. That the Aids Ride is a chance to imagine a world based on, and ruled by love. One in which your first thought isn’t just of yourself, but rather of another. On the ride we could practice, we could create a temporary mobile community of kindhearted people, looking out for one another. 

Now that was all well and good, but we were stranded -- and it looked bad. Until the angels came. Another Aids Ride truck, clearly healthy and filled with the proper fuel. Three young women stepped out to offer help. I explained the situation, thinking in the depths of my mind, "HOW DID THEY KNOW ABOUT THE DIESEL!" Here are three young women none of whom seem outwardly truck savvy, and yet their rig was going strong, and mine was dead on the roadside. 

Soon another truck pulled up and then another. Volunteers poured out of their respective trucks to talk about what had happened. Soon out of the mixture of conversation, a plan was born. We had a number of trucks, mostly half or three-quarters full. We decided we would repack the two least filled trucks and empty out our truck of all the medical supplies. 

And so we set to it. Everyone from the trucks that stopped by joined in and before we knew what was happening they pulled away with our gear. 

Almost simultaneously a sixty something tow truck driver pulled up and asked if we could use any help. He set to work in the rain and got the truck hoisted up onto his rig and we were off.

 It was over! I breathed a sigh of relief. It wasn’t even noon yet of the first day.

The amazing thing was that not one person I dealt with from my own team all the way up through the chain of command, not one person blamed me. Not once did anyone attempt to make me feel at all less than or inferior. Everyone showed me nothing but lovingkindness. In times of crisis, there is no choice but to act and react authentically. We break through to a whole different way of being. There is no time for the luxury of judgement. 

All too often we get stuck on details. Some nagging flaw in a friend. Some transgression, trust broken. Ancient feuds; racial divides. All these attachments drive wedges between people, and squelch love and prevent kindness. They distance us from each other. 

How many times have we unintentionally hurt someone’s feelings. Indulging in the easy humor of the negative. How often have we unwittingly belittled a friend, a neighbor, a stranger, focusing the lens of our attention on faults, on imperfections.  
Imagine looking in the mirror and seeing first our beauty and singularity and miraculousness. Looking on one another and seeing ourselves first and foremost as unified rather than separate. 

I believe it the goal, the full expression of our Universalist faith to strive to cultivate love for even those who we judge as ignorant, unenlightened or cruel -- those we see as enemy. Now this is a lofty and high goal, so we start with the bite-sized morsel of lovingkindndess.

I think we’ve all felt moments, however brief or fleeting, moments where we feel love, when all seems right with the world, when we feel connected, at one, at peace. 
The key is giving ourselves to those moments. Putting ourselves on the line. This is rapture; not for any extraordinary thing, not for any flashy or shining or distant thing. 
This is simple appreciation: savoring the truth that this life is an absolute miracle. 
 Ralph Waldo Emerson writes, "The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common. What is a day?  What is summer? What is child? What is sleep? To our blindness these things seem unaffecting. But to the wise a fact is true poetry, and the most beautiful of fables."

True poetry, and the most beautiful of fables. 

The wise see with eyes open, present and focused. They see into this life reading it like a song of praise. This is the vision and the wisdom of the masters. 

Elsewhere he writes, "Jesus spoke of miracles for he felt that our life was a miracle, that and all that we do; he knew that this daily miracle shines as we divine it; he knew that it is one with the blowing clover and falling rain."

Emerson shouts that the miracle isn’t some distant mystery. It is all around us -- in us and through us. We are its arms and hands. We are the body through which the miracle of this life expresses itself.  

What is your life expressing? 

What are you making of this precious time?

What will people say when they remember you? Some, like Nancy are just naturally kind. It was the foundation of her being. Now you don’t need to be born with it. We can take steps now to cultivate our lovingkindness. People all around the world have been practicing such cultivation for years, and they have created some reliable technologies.

There is a practice known in Buddhism as Metta or lovingkindness meditation. It is a practice for expanding heartspace, blessing a wider and wider circle with our love. 
Think of one person in the room; use the first person you think of. Whether you know them or not, it can be anyone. Thinking of this person, someone here in this room, repeat after me this simple prayer.  I’ll say one line and you can repeat it silently focusing on your person:

May You be free from danger
May you have mental Happiness
May you have physical happiness
May you have ease of well-being
 (and once more)
 May you be free from danger
May you have mental happiness
May you have physical happiness
May you have ease of well-being

Imagine how fundamentally different, how revolutionary it would be to have the first and clearest thought in your head be one of genuine beneficence and well-wishing. To feel oneness, the connectedness we spoke of earlier. 

Stripped of mental judgements, attachments and identifications. Underneath it all at the most basic level we each have come out of this world; we are reflections of its beauty; we are made up of recycled molecules, bits and pieces from history.
At our very core we are all more the same than different. Think of how much blood has been shed in the name of difference, of division. Think of the devastating violence in the Middle East. For so long Israelis and Palestinians so very different, even defining themselves in contrast,  in opposition. And now the violence escalating in a frenzy. 

All for difference, for identity.

Imagine the alternative. Imagine seeking among the vast similarities between people to establish some common ground. In a global perspective, Israelis ands Palestinians have much more in common with each other than they have different. Imagine these points of commonality as seeds of connection. Two soldiers standing face to face thinking of themselves as connected. What if we could dare to imagine a Middle East United? a world united?

It begins in the heart. This kind of mammoth goal, these high ideas must start at the simplest scale. 

Dear Friends, may we open our eyes wide and behold a world which inspires lovingkindness. May we be kind; may we emulate the exceptional love we have known through masters of Kindness like Nancy Paul. May we live up to their example, continue their legacy. 

Amen