“LESSONS FROM DARKNESS” A Winter Solstice Sermon

Lessons From the Holidays Sermon Series, Part 5 of 10
by the Rev. Melanie Morel-Ensminger
First Unitarian Uniiversalist Church in New Orleans
Sunday, December 23, 2007

This is now the 5th in a series of 10 linked services for the holiday season, entitled “Lessons From the Holidays.” So far, we have journeyed through Advent and learned about waiting, celebrated the wonderful story of the Christmas menorahs, been lectured to by Charles Dickens in the person of the Rev. Roger Brewin, and coped with the holiday blues. Today we take lessons from Yule, or the Winter Solstice. Tomorrow, we will celebrate Christmas Eve in grand style, with 2 special worship services: a 5 pm Peace Communion in the UU tradition (if you don’t know what that might mean, we invite you to come find out!), and then at 7 pm our familiar and beloved Family Christmas Tableau service, re-enacting the old story of Christmas. Before and after those services, there will be a Holiday Open House, with wassail and goodies to share. Please bring a plate of something delicious and sweet and join us for this holy, and fun, night. Next Sunday, we continue the series with a New Orleans Jazz Funeral for the Year 2007. We’ll bury 2007 in a casket from the Charbonnet-Labat Funeral Home, have the TCB Brass Band to lead us in the traditional first-line tunes, and we’ll end with a joyous secondline around the room. Don’t miss it! On January 6th and 7th, we’ll host Connie Barlow and Michael Dowd, who will lead us into a spiritual appreciation of evolution in a worship and workshop. Our series will end on January 13th with a look at the Magi for Epiphany, and there will be kingcake at Coffeehour to celebrate the opening of Carnival season. Please come to these special services, and see how UUs celebrate the holidays!

Despite our recent warm temperatures, it is the time of the winter solstice. That is, it is the time in the Northern Hemisphere when the earth is tilted on its axis furthest from the sun and the effects of its rays. It is the time for the shortest day and the longest night of the year – which this year, occurred exactly at 8 minutes after midnight Central Time yesterday morning. From here on, the days will slowly grow longer.

The word “solstice” is made up of 2 Latin words meaning “sun” and “stopping,” for ancient people believed that the sun literally stopped in its tracks during the winter and summer solstices, causing the shortest and longest days to occur. The early Celtic peoples of the British Isles called the winter solstice “Yule,” which has come to be synonymous with Christmas, but it was not always so. “Yule” comes from an Old English root that means young or youth; the pre-Christian Celts, like the ancient Greeks and Romans, thought of the winter solstice as the sun’s birthday, the day when the sun begins to come back after its winter journey away from the earth. As with many of the celebrations now considered Christian, Christmas was simply laid on top of the winter holiday of the sun’s rebirth that people had been celebrating for thousands of years. (The return of the Sun Child on the winter solstice is why some UU churches hold a Child Dedication in their service at that time of year. This year, we did not have any families desiring a dedication, but hopefully we will in future years.)

It is difficult now to cast ourselves back, to put our modern selves in the place of the folks of the Northern Hemisphere during pre-urban, pre-Christian times. These agricultural peoples were dependent on the sun for the growth of crops and for their survival through the deprivation and bitter cold of the winter. Just living through a northern European winter in those days was quite an accomplishment. During the long winter months, people were cut off from their normal outdoor occupations, were faced with un-certain supplies of food and fuel, and were unable to easily communicate with friends and neighbors. Almost as deadly as the possibility of starvation was the certainty of long stretches of both fear and boredom.

The earliest peoples were afraid because they may have thought it was possible that the sun might not return, that spring might not arrive. It would be only natural to fear that you yourself or members of your family might not survive to see the spring, even if it did come. There was no reliable means of weather forecasting, so the fierce winter storms must have seemed even more deadly, arising as they did with so little warning.

What is truly wonderful is the reaction these people had to their straitened circumstances during the winter solstice. With all they had to worry about, you might think the Celts would have come up with a winter ritual of sadness and grief, or at least full of intercessory prayer to assuage their troubled hearts. Instead, these humanistic pagans developed Yule, a holiday time full of parties, feasting, drinking, and play-acting. They splurged their food and fuel supplies on gatherings of friends and family, spiced with song and laughter, lit with bonfires, Yule logs, and candles. They dragged evergreens into their homes, somehow assured by their eternal greenness that spring would indeed come and death was not the end of everything.

The highlight of Yule was something like Mardi Gras – the “Feast of Fools,” a tableau or informal play where everything of importance was mocked and turned upside-down. No subject was too painful to made fun of; no personage or personality too exalted to escape the unerring needle of the people’s satire. From among the villagers, they chose a Fool King, whose every command had to be obeyed, no matter how ridiculous or how licentious. They sang silly, meaningless songs, whose lyrics of “fa la la la” come down to us today in certain carols. They got drunk on homemade mead, a beer made from honey, and overindulged in pies made from everything in their cupboards: preserved meat and dried fruits and honey and nuts and spices – the precursors to our own minced-meat pies. They were afraid of the dark and the cold – so they ate, drank, and made merry. They were afraid of death, so they had a party to make fun of death. How touching! How brave! …how very human. I love them for it, and we all owe them a debt of thanks. (Indeed, if our spiritual ancestors had had THEIR way, we wouldn’t celebrate Christmas at all! Let alone with all these admittedly pagan trappings.)

Unlike our early human ancestors, for the most part we moderns no longer fear the dark time of the year (especially not here in New Orleans, where, as Mark Twain once famously said, we have only 2 seasons, one being summer and the other not.) But we are still afraid of the dark – we fear the dark parts of ourselves and the dark unknown of the future. We have made darkness a villain, as UU Jacqui James has pointed out, even our language proclaims it. But we forget the importance of balance; we forget our own mixed-up natures; we forget and begin to demonize all that we do not like and do not understand and fear. We need to be reminded that all life needs sunlight and dark, growth and rest, summer and winter; that all beings are made of good and bad, strong and weak.

Years ago, Audubon Montessori School gave my son Stephen a science assignment: he had to develop his own experiment. He came up with the idea to discover under what conditions plants grew best. He and I went to a nursery and purchased 3 nearly-identical plants, and got advice on how often to water them and what to feed them for optimum growth.

When we got home, Stephen put one in a dark closet, one in a closet with the light turned on all the time, and one on the living room windowsill, where it received the benefit of both sunlight and darkness. All 3 plants were otherwise cared for in exactly the same manner – all 3 were watered regularly and all 3 got calcium feedings made from water and crushed eggshells.

After the first week, we noticed some slight differences among the 3 plants. For one thing, the plant in the dark closet was not quite as green and healthy-looking as the other 2. Secondly, the plant in the lighted closet was definitely the tallest and had grown the most. After the second week, however, the differences became much more marked. The plant in the dark closet was really sad-looking – some of the leaves were brown and curling and the entire plant had lost even more color. The plant that got light all the time was no longer the biggest or the greenest – that honor went to the plant on the windowsill. By the third week, Stephen had 2 plants that were nearly dead: the one in the dark and its opposite, the one in perpetual light. The only plant that continued to thrive was the one in the living room window, receiving both sunlight and darkness in the natural way of things.

Everything living on the earth needs both light and dark for growth and health and wholeness. This is known in every culture around the globe, and there are dozens and dozens of origin stories about the beginnings of creation, when earth-beings complained either of perpetual day or perpetual night, and received the gift of both. In her insightful book, Dreaming the Dark, published by UU publishing arm Beacon Press, Starhawk reminds us of the healing power of darkness, and encourages us to look deeper into our fear of the dark:

…Where there is fear, there is power.…We need to dream the dark as process, and dream the dark as change, to create the dark in a new image. Because the dark created us.…The dark [is] all that we are afraid of, all that we don’t want to see – fear, anger, sex, grief, death, the unknown.

The turning dark: change. The velvet dark: skin soft in the night, the stroke of flesh on flesh, touch, joy, mortality.…Birth-giving dark: seeds are planted underground, the womb is dark, and life forms it-self anew in hidden places.

The question of the dark has become a journey… How do we find the dark within and transform it, own it as our own power? How do we dream it into a new image, dream into actions that will change the world into a place where no more horror stories happen, where there are no more victims? Where the dark is kind and charged with a friendly power: the power of the unseen, the power that comes from within, the power [that] is the spark of every nerve and life of every breath…

To answer Starhawk’s heart-felt question, I look to the same playful spirit that animated the pagan Celts celebrating Yule, a childlike spirit that befriends that which we fear. In the wonderful bedtime book, There's a Nightmare in My Closet, children’s author and illustrator Mercer Mayer tells of a young child who is afraid of the dark and is convinced that a Nightmare lurks in his dark closet. The story does not assert that there is nothing there – instead, the Nightmare comes out of the closet and turns out to be more frightened of the child than the child is of the Nightmare. The child comforts the ugly Nightmare when it cries and tucks it tenderly into bed – a not neglecting to carefully shut the closet door. The book ends with the child musing, “I suppose there's another nightmare in my closet, but my bed’s not big enough for 3.” (I suspect that if a second Nightmare did materialize, this kid would find a way to fit it in.)

We in New Orleans have had to face our worst nightmares – What if the levees broke? What if we lost everything? What if our church was filled with dirty floodwater? What if the city was crippled and broken and wounded? And we found out, somewhat to our own surprise, that we could survive, that we could even, at times, thrive, that we could hope and plan for a better future, that we could even retain our grit and sense of humor. Our worst fears came true, and we came out on the other side – not unscathed, certainly, but at least still whole, still able to cope, still able to love each other and this exasperating city of ours. Yes, there is still of lot of darkness to be faced – the lack of grocery stores, the dearth of healthcare professionals, the scarcity of high quality, reliable childcare, the many schools that have not reopened, the shrinkage of affordable housing, the malfeasance and unreliability of too many of our elected officials – but still we carry on, facing what must be faced, fighting we needs to be fought, and still managing to celebrate every small recovery, every tiny victory, every insignificant holiday, let alone Christmas and New Year’s.

We can learn from the dark – the real dark, that we need for rest and respite and creativity and new birth, and the metaphorical dark, our shadow sides, our fears. Let us make friends with the healing dark, and connect with those feelings and emotions of which we are most afraid. We need the balance. May we strive for the balance, and reach for the healing darkness when we need it. So might this be! AMEN – ASHE – SHALOM – SALAAM – NAMASTE – BLESSED BE!

“OVERCOMING THE HOLIDAY BLUES”

“OVERCOMING THE HOLIDAY BLUES”
A Sermon by the Rev. Melanie Morel Sullivan
First Unitarian Universalist Church In New Orleans
Sunday, December 16, 2007

For what seemed like a long time, I could not relate when people said they had wonderful memories of family holidays. It seemed like all I could remember was negative: my mother and father arguing over the size of the Christmas tree and whether or not it had too many lights on it; my mother finding fault with al-most everyone around the holiday table; the drudgery and nag-ging that went with the clean-up afterwards; my father drinking too much at the New Year’s Eve party; and so on. When other folks spoke nostalgically about family holidays, I hardly knew what they were talking about. At the end of one especially memorable holiday, as we drove away in tense silence, my son Stevie piped up from the childseat in the back: “Mommy, why is Grandmom always so angry?”

And then I grew up – and realized 2 very important things. The first was that nobody has perfect holidays celebrated with perfect families, and the second was that there was a lot that was funny, beautiful, and worth holding onto from those holidays of my childhood, youth, and young adulthood. Now that I’ve been able to look at my parents and my family holistically and with compassion, there’s a lot to be grateful for and to remember with love – my mother’s fantastic, never-to-be-duplicated giblet gravy; my father’s sense of humor and play; the way the long table looked, laden with food and bright with well-loved faces reflected in the candlelight, seen from the perspective of the children’s table (and how we longed to grow up and graduate to that big table!); the laughter and the stories; my mother’s fancy china and silver used only at the holi-days; the smells of cinnamon, nutmeg, and allspice permeating the house as my mother and grandmother did the holiday baking, with the awkward help of us children; the familiar and be-loved Christmas ornaments coming out of their wrappings and being placed with care on the tree; the way the presents felt never-ending on Christmas morning. It’s not that I have forgotten or am denying any of the negative things that happened – but I have been able now to put them into a larger context, and now I can savor the good as well.

Since it is my firm belief that none of us, whatever we think we remember, grew up in a perfect family, this is a good lesson to learn. As adults, we have choices: we can choose to hold onto all the negativity from our past and be resentful and angry, or we can choose to view our parents and family members as human beings doing the best they could in the circumstances in which they found themselves. Forgiving them and ourselves for our shared lack of Norman Rockwell and Martha Stewart perfection, we can move on to seeing our childhood and youth from an adult perspective, and be better able to recall and value the positive things that were there all along.

Of course, some people have the opposite problem: everything they remember is bathed in a golden glow of nostalgia. The past is so glorious and wonderful that nothing in the present can come up to the lofty standards of family holiday celebration that were set in those distant years, or in the years before the storm. Either they silently sulk and pout over the disappoint-ment that the present has become, or else they are loud and vocal about their shattered expecta-tions. Either way, they cast a pall over the holidays for everyone else. (It just goes to show you that not only are realistic expectations a good thing, but so are realistic memories. Whenever we are tempted to say disparagingly, “This is not like I remember” it might be good to keep in mind that what we remember may not be exactly what happened.)

There are many other reasons that people experience the holiday blues, and being a mem-ber of a flawed family is only one of them. For many of us, the loss of loved ones through death or divorce or forced absence is made more acute and painful by the holiday season, with our memories of those who will not be present made all the more vivd by the repetition of familiar rituals. For those with beloved partners or parents or children who have died, or intimate rela-tionships that have ended, or beloved family members far away and can’t come home, every holiday is a painful reminder of those who are dearly missed.

After my father died in 1991, we his surviving family members wondered how we could open presents on Christmas Day without him there, wearing his jaunty Santa hat, sitting on a small stool by the tree, carefully handing out gifts so that each person unwrapped a present at the same time. We solved our dilemma by designating my younger brother Val to wear the hat and pass out the gifts in Daddy’s stead – and thus we remember and keep a little family tradition alive in a new way.

For any of us with family members or partners who have died, it is a good thing to recall that person to the holiday gathering, to say things like, “This is the way your grandfather always liked the stuffing,” or “I know my wife would have been proud of the way our daughter-in-law has decorated the house.” We always say in Unitarian Universalist memorial services that our loved ones live on in our memories and in our lives, and so it is right and good to say their names, to remember their favorite things, to retell the stories and cry and laugh together – and thus our loved ones are brought into our midst once again.

Holidays after a major trauma are also difficult. After 9/11 in the Northeast, and after Katrina here in New Orleans, there are added burdens to deal with in the midst of our holiday season. Even if we did not lose our house and our favorite Christmas decorations (not to men-tion all our belongings) in the storm, we can still feel sad and uncomfortable. Some of us might wonder if it is all right to celebrate the holidays until things feel “normal.” But our refusal to hold our beloved and familiar holiday rituals would serve no useful purpose, and only add an additional grief to all the other burdens we have been carrying. Perhaps the best response we could make to all that has happened is to make our holidays sacred and important once more – not through spending and commercialism, but through our connections to each other and those we love, through acts of kindness and generosity to those who have less than we do.

What’s the one best response to overcoming the Holiday Blues? I saw a psychologist once on TV who gave a simple 2-word suggestion: Respond differently. You may still have all the same dysfunctional family members you always did, but you can act differently yourself. Don’t answer back; don’t nag; don’t whine; don’t lose your patience; don’t resort to sarcasm. Whatever was your usual and customary response to the slings and arrows of outrageous rela-tives, Respond differently. Don’t let your “hot buttons” get pushed, and you’ll be amazed how much you’ll enjoy the holidays. Respond differently to the tyranny of gifts. You do not have to spend yourself into oblivion to show your love to those aorund you. Give the gift of yourself instead – make a home-made certificate for a back or foot rub, or a walk down Magazine Street, or seeing the “snow” on Fulton Street. There are many ways to give the gift of time to a loved one that would be more treasured than any material gift.

The same is true of your nostalgia for the lost Golden Age of family holidays. If you feel like complaining and pointing out how Christmas was better “before” – whenever “before” is to you – hold your tongue and strive to see the good in what is happening now. If your regular practice is to keep silent and brood, try sharing your memories in a positive way with younger family members. You’ll not only make a connection; you’ll probably also make some new young friends as well.

A second way to chase the holiday blues is to practice forgiveness. Did you mess up the generations-old recipe for something? Forgive yourself, enjoy the holidays anyway. Did Uncle Harry make the same old sexist jokes? Forgive him – he’s an old man and been telling the exact same jokes for at least 5 decades and nothing you can say will change him now. Did the kids act up and behave like all they’ve had to eat is Coke and candy? Forgive them – you acted the very same way yourself when you were a kid, after eating the stuff in your stocking or the candy gelt in the dreidel game. Did you break the last surviving ornament saved from Katrina? Forgive yourself, make another one, hang the empty hook, let it go. Practice forgiveness and the art of letting go, and you will find the holiday season much improved.

In addition to teaching yourself to respond differently and learning to forgive, there are other ways to enhance the holidays and get rid of the blues. Bring back old family traditions and religious rituals. Like my family did after my father died, you can invent new traditions, new takes on old rituals. Is grandma not here to make her famous whatevers? Gather the kids together and use an old recipe to make it, telling stories. Whatever seems lost to you, whatever you miss most, bring it back by creating new family rituals of gladness and gratitude.

Finally, the sure-fire, never-fail, always-works way to banish the holiday blues is to get outside yourself. It’s not at all difficult to find people in far worse situations than yourself, no matter what your circumstances. When you give of yourself in acts of love and service to those in need, you automatically feel better, enlarged, your spirit enriched. And it’s not like there’s a dearth of need – sadly, there are many, many people in need right now in the Crescent City. Talk to Robert Sullivan or Jeanne Barnard or Jyaphia Christos-Rodgers about opportunities to get in-volved in our wider community, with the homeless under I-10 or in Duncan Plaza, or folks struggling to come home and make a home in the Lower 9, or with one of the many agencies who provide gifts and help to local needy families and individuals.

And there’s us, your own church. There are so many needs not covered by the church budget, and there are so many worthwhile and important ministries carried on by our church. “Many hands make light work,” my grandmother used to say as we baked all those holiday cookies. All you have to do is speak to President Ann Maclaine or Vice-President Cherie LeBlanc or me, and we’d all be glad to let you know of the needs the church has for both volun-teer time and donations of money in any amount.

Want to overcome the holiday blues? Here’s the recipe: Respond differently, practice forgiveness, bring back old family traditions, invent new rituals of gladness and gratitude, and get outside yourself in acts of service and compassion. If your sadness is deeper than the holiday blues, make an appointment to talk privately with me. I am happy to hear you out, offer what-ever help I can, and I can recommend local counselors and therapists. If money is an issue, there’s both Red Cross funds and the Discretionary Account to assist you. Whatever you do, don’t suffer in silence – and for heaven’s sake, don’t isolate yourself.

There’s an old story that makes the rounds of ministers as a sermon illustration. A small child is trying to lift a heavy object with no success. A parent comes into the room, sees the struggle, and asks, “Are you using all your strength?” “Of course I am!” the child impatiently exclaims. “No, you’re not,” the parent rejoins – “Yes I am!” “No, you’re not using all your strength,” answers the parent, “Because you haven’t asked me for help.”

Chasing the holiday blues can’t be done all alone. Holiday blues can be very strong, and so you need to use all your strength. Overcoming the blues is a job for a family, however you define family; a job for community, however you constitute community. And when we come together in love and joy, practice patience, forgiveness, and gratitude, the holidays can be trans-formed into the best ones we ever had.

Let us model breaking the mold of holiday tyranny with our Litany of Recovery:

LITANY FOR RECOVERING FROM THOSE HOLIDAY BLUES
by the Rev. Melanie Morel-Ensminger

The 10 unwritten rules for holiday gift-giving are:

1. You have to give a gift to everyone you expect to get one from. Congregational Response: “I don't have to do that!”

2. If someone gives you a gift unexpectedly, you have to reciprocate the same year. Congregational Response: “I don't have to do that!”

3. When you add a name to your gift-giving list, you have to give that person a gift every year after that. Congregational Response: “I don't have to do that!”

4. The amount of money you spend on a gift indicates how much you care for or about the recipient. Congregational Response: “I don't have to do that!”

5. You have to give people gifts worth roughly the same as the ones they give you. Congregational Response: “I don't have to do that!”

6. You have make sure the presents you give this year are worth roughly the same as the ones you gave last year. Congregational Response: “I don't have to do that!”

7. If you give a gift to one person in a category (such as a co-worker or a neighbor), you have to give to everyone in that same category, and all the gifts should be similar in value. Congregational Response: “I don't have to do that!”

8. Women have to give gifts to all their close women friends. Congregational Response: “I don't have to do that!”

9. Men never give gifts to their male friends unless it's alcoholic beverages. Congregational Response: “I don't have to do that!”

10. Whenever you have trouble with any of the above rules, remedy the situation by buying more, and more expensive, gifts. Congregational Response: “I don't have to do that!”

Waiting – An Advent Lesson”

Lesson from the Holidays, Part 1 of 10: "Waiting - An Advent Lesson"
By the Rev. Melanie Morel-Ensminger
First Unitarian Universalist Church of New Orleans

Sunday, December 2, 2007

In many Christian churches, the traditional Christmas Eve liturgy is called “Lessons and Carols.” In this sense, a lesson is a reading from scripture. But it led me to think about what we religious liberals can learn from the different but related holidays of the season, and so, this service begins a series of 10 services for the winter holidays, lifting up some lessons to be learned. Next Sunday, we will look at Hanukkah and learn the story of how the Christmas tree came to be, and we’ll trim the church tree.

On Saturday, December 15, there will be a very special Saturday evening service shared with our UU sisters and brothers in GNOUU, the Greater New Orleans UUs, and our guest speaker will be none other than Charles Dickens himself, in the person of the Rev. Roger Brewin. Please invite your friends and family to join us for this Victorian celebration, and if you’re in the mood, feel free to dress in the style of the late 1800s. The next morning, December 16, we’ll learn some ways to cope with the holiday blues.

On December 23, in honor of Yule, the rebirth of the sun at the Winter Solstice, we will look at what can be learned from darkness, and we’ll also hold a dedication of infants and parents. Please contact me or the church office if you’d like your family to be a part of the dedication in that service, if your child has not yet been dedicated.

Then comes Monday, December 24^th and we will celebrate Christmas Eve with 2 services: a 5:30 pm Unitarian Universalist Communion of Peace, and a 7 pm Family Service with a children’s nativity tableau and special music. Both services will end with a candle lighting ritual. In between, there will be an Open House with hot wassail and Christmas goodies. Bring your family and friends and show them how we UUs keep Christmas.

On December 30^th, we will hold a Jazz Funeral for the Old Year with a brass band. 2007 has been quite a year, and this service will help us to enter the year with lighter hearts. The holiday series continues on January 6^th with a service on the lessons of evolution, and will end on January 13^th with a service on the journey of the Magi, after which we will enjoy kingcake at Coffeehour. (And you know what happens if you get the baby!)

This morning’s service looks at Advent. For Christians, it is a time of waiting and quiet reflection before Christmas; it symbolizes the long period of anticipation for the coming of the Christ. For many children, Advent is the countdown to the presents on Christmas, and there are lots of Advent calendars families can use to make waiting easier on little ones.

Waiting is the lesson of Advent, and like everything else in life, it has the potential to be either good or bad. Sometimes waiting can be positive. The old adage, “Good things come to those who wait” – said to many of us as impatient children by our grandparents or parents – became a common saying because it is often true. Some things can’t be rushed. No matter what you do or what you want, babies take 9 months, seedlings take 2-3 weeks, bread takes 45 minutes to rise, a turkey takes at least 3 hours to cook, and houses and churches take how long they take to be built or rebuilt – and it’s always longer than you hoped or wanted.

But other times waiting is the wrong thing to do. If your toddler is wandering off in a mall parking lot, for instance, or if your kitchen catches fire while you are preparing your holiday dinner, waiting would not be a good thing. In the classic story by Arnold Lobel, Toad glumly waits for a friendly letter to come in the mail – even though his best friend Frog is right there in front of him. In the story by UU minister Robert Fulghum, a young American woman sobs in the Hong Kong airport about her lost ticket home – which she is sitting on top of. Waiting is sometimes the wrong thing to do, especially when it keeps people from doing what needs to be done.

Unitarian Universalism has always been a religion of action, not of words, not even of meditation and prayer, although of course many UUs do meditate or pray. Our historic watchword has long been, “Deeds, not creeds.” We UUs follow orthopraxy (right behavior), not orthodoxy (right thinking). Waiting is a form of inaction, and as such is not comfortable for most Unitarian Universalists. Waiting can even be harmful, especially when immediate action is called for.

The young woman in the Fulghum story had everything she needed to move on, but she didn’t know it. She was stuck, overcome with powerful negative emotions that glued her to her seat; she felt helpless and lost and confused and sad. So she sat and waited and sobbed and mourned her situation. If she had gotten up off her chair, she would have discovered that it was in her power to get where she wanted to go. No one was preventing her from getting there, she was stopping herself. She was sitting on her ticket.

Waiting. Right now, this very minute, approximately 12,000 homeless New Orleanians wait under I-10 on Claiborne Avenue, in the large encampment in front of City Hall in Duncan Plaza, and who knows where else in the city, waiting for decent basic homes to live in. Every single homeless shelter in the metro area is full, overfull, turning away people every day. Most public housing is closed and slated for demolition. Many of the homeless have jobs, but cannot afford the higher rents post-Katrina; many more of them worked before the storm but cannot in their present situation find employment. The weather will eventually turn colder, and city officials speak publicly of “getting rid” of the homeless, and “cleaning up” Duncan Plaza, but where are these men, women, and children to go? In a recent guest editorial in the Times-Picayune, the Rev. David Crosby of First Baptist Church wrote:

Many important matters are still unattended in our city including the perplexing problem of homelessness. Somebody might ask why these problems remain unsolved.… It’s all a matter of deploying ourselves and our institutions, public and private, to address the need. When you think of the homeless in our great city, think this: they’re waiting on you. [Times-Picayune, 11/07]

Waiting. In our congregational situation, waiting would also be wrong. There is so much to be done in our church and in our city that it is easy to feel overwhelmed and over-powered, and not get started. But start we must. With a task this enormous, I am reminded of the old joke about how to eat a whale – one bite at a time.

There is important work to be done right now in our church, and there is no rea-son to wait. The faithful, faith-filled work of coming together as a congregation cannot wait, and must be done now. We can’t wait for our building to be finished before we resume fellowship and social justice work. We must knit our community together, and not just through shared worries and fears and long To Do lists, but also with fun and food, like true New Orleanians. We must gather more regularly for meals and game nights; we need to have more fun together. We must restart small groups who will meet regularly, to share our beliefs and dreams and what gives our lives meaning. All the myriad things that must be done for our building can be broken down into small, manageable tasks that we can accomplish together. We must find or develop the kinds of social justice activities that engage the hearts and energies of our congregation. With so much to be done, and fewer people than the church has had in a long time, it can be very hard to get ourselves in gear. But we must not succumb to the temptation to “sit on our ticket.” Some decisions will be made in their own time and cannot be rushed, but we already have everything we need to move ahead on some things right now. Waiting would be wrong.

In every UU church I have served in 15 years of ministry, there are always 1 or 2 or 3 individuals whose commitment to the church is undeniable and admirable, but whose interpersonal behavior is problematic, either because they are too territorial about their area of church work, or because their tempers are unpredictable and explosive. Many times, lay leaders won’t address the situation. They wait – hoping someone else will say something, hoping the problem will go away on its own. (Hint: this almost never happens.) By waiting, leaders seem to condone the behavior. New folks get their feelings hurt or feel shut out, and leave the church. Waiting is not usually a good leadership strategy.

On my way to church this morning, WWOZ played a gospel version of the old reggae ballad, “Sitting Here in Limbo.” For Christians, Advent can feel like limbo, a 4-week period of not-Christmas. For New Orleanians, where we are right now is like limbo – not-Katrina, but not-recovery either. We can take comfort and strength form the words of the song: “Meanwhile, they’re putting up resistance, but I know that my faith will lead me on.”

Several years ago, in the newsletter of the Church of the Larger Fellowship, then-seminarian Eliza Blanchard wrote a short Advent meditation:

For Christians, [Advent] calls for reflection as well as joyful anticipation, since the infant they await represents redemption, salvation in the hereafter.

For those of us focused on bringing about salvation in the here and now, the season offers us the opportunity to ask: What are we waiting for? There is no one anticipated event that we expect will save the world.…

During this season, we may rest for a while in the glow of holiday lights, but we do not wait. We will not stop working for all to share life’s blessings. We light our lights, pick an avenue for change, and work in the world, knowing we have the power to make it a better place.

You know those holiday commercials that urge you to buy right now, saying: “Don’t delay! Operators are standing by!” Well, don’t pay any attention to the commercial materially, but let’s take those words to heart spiritually. Act now! We already have the power. We don’t have to wait – there is work to be done in our city and in our church and in our lives, and there is no reason to wait. There is no one anticipated event that we expect will come to save the day or the church or the city or the world. It’s up to you, to us. Your family needs you, the church needs you, the city needs you, the world needs you. They are waiting on you and me. So don’t delay! Get up off your ticket! So might this be! AMEN – ASHE – SHALOM – SALAAM – NAMASTE – BLESSED BE!

“WHERE DO THE MERMAIDS STAND?”

A Homily for the Welcoming Congregation Program
By the Rev. Melanie Morel-Ensminger
First Unitarian Universalist Church of New Orleans
Sunday, November 11, 2007

In his famous book, All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kinder-garten, UU minister Robert Fulghum tells of a time early in his ministry, when he was given charge of a group of energetic and rambunctious Sunday School children. On the spot he invented a game called “Giants, Wizards & Dwarfs.” He told the kids, “You have to decide now which you are – a gi-ant, a wizard or a dwarf,” and he showed them where to stand in the class-room. At that point, a small girl tugged at his leg and asked, “But where do the mermaids stand?” “In this game, there are no mermaids,” he replied and the little girl bravely rejoined, “Oh yes there are – because I’m one.”

Now this little girl knew who and what she was and she was not about to give up on either her identity or the game. She intended to take her place wherever mermaids fit into the general scheme of things. Where do the mer-maids stand? Where do they fit, all those who are different, all those who do not fit into the prefabricated social boxes and pigeonholes and categories? “Answer that question,” wrote Fulghum, “and you can build a school, a nation, or a whole world.”

With the Welcoming Congregation Program, we are not so grandiose to think that one church alone or one religious denomination alone will build a nation or a whole world, but we do aspire to build one welcoming congregation, this one. Our aim is to be formally declared by the UUA that we are a church that is open and welcoming to people who are gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, intersexed, and queer.

Many of you may wonder why we need the designation as an official Welcoming Congregation, feeling that since we have a statement of nondiscrimination in our By-Laws, and since we have so many open b/g/l/t/i/q persons as leader, and since we have had 3 openly gay ministers, we are already hospitable enough. I remember that about 16 or so years ago, when my son was around 9, he heard the word “lesbian” on TV for the first time. Stevie asked me what it meant, and I explained the term by pointing out the women-who-loved-women in this church, whom he knew and whose homes he had visited, with whose children he played. Stevie’s response showed me how First Church had completely normalized this – he shrugged and said, “Oh, I didn’t know there was a word for it.”

But since our church has never gone through the Welcoming Congregation program and then taken a congregational vote on the topic, people seeking a Welcoming Congregation on the UUA website would not find our church listed. Without that “imprimatur” or seal of approval, newcomers to the church have no way of knowing that we think we’re a pretty welcoming lot. Being on the list means something.

While it is true that in recent decades our church has been a warm home for b/g/l/t/i/q individuals, those with long memories will recall that we have not always been so open. In the early 1980s, the question of whether or not our church would co-sponsor a Gay Pride Celebration was so controversial that a church policy had to be written about public support for potentially contentious issues. Other long-timers might remember that in the late ‘80s, in a survey of the members and friends prior to a ministerial search, a large but minority percentage of respondents said they would be uncomfortable with a gay or lesbian or transgender pastor. (To its credit, the Search Committee that year did interview and seriously consider a lesbian candidate.)

It’s not just where do the mermaids and others who are different from what society’s norms stand, but where do they go to church? Where can b/g/l/t/i/q people worship in religious community and be accepted and welcomed for who they really are? Where can they offer their gifts? We UUs love to say how we celebrate diversity, and that is indeed a very good thing, but becoming officially a UU Welcoming Congregation makes it a concrete and formal reality, just as going through an anti-racism program makes us better able to confront and deal with oppression based on skin color.

In my boasts about this congregation over the years – and God forgive me, I have bragged about this church – I have always talked about this church’s willingness to grow and change, to move always in the direction of being more open, more inclusive, more hospitable to the stranger. I have always felt it was in the pioneering spirit of our founding pastor Parson Clapp, part of our historic efforts to always be on the forefront of social justice issues, and true to our historic name as the Church of the Stranger. I have to say, I was surprised to learn on arriving back here that the congregation had never taken the step of voting to be an official Welcoming Congregation. I’m sure there are a thousand good reasons for that, including the thought that the church was already as welcoming as a UU church could be. But now, in this new era for our church and for our city, we are called upon to make things right, not just in our minds and hearts, but also on paper and on the UUA website, to make things formal and definite now that have been in our spirits and our practice for quite some time. Let’s talk together in the coming months about what it means to be welcoming to all the “mermaids” out there, and then, when the time is right, let us vote as a congregation to be designated by the UUA as truly Welcoming. Let us do this because it is to our benefit, and much more importantly, because it is the right thing to do, and because not to do so would be to perpetuate gonizing pain for countless people, some of whom we already know and love. AMEN – ASHE – SHALOM – SALAAM – NAMASTE – BLESSED BE!

“ALL SOULS LOVE JAZZ”

ALL SOULS DAY HOMILY
UUCF REVIVAL COMMUNION SERVICE
West Shore UU Church, Rocky River, Ohio
The Rev. Melanie Morel-Ensminger
Friday, November 2, 2007

Scripture Readings: Ezekial 18:4, Psalm 145:10-11, Hebrews 12:1

“All souls are mine” says the Lord to Ezekiel, and in the Crescent City we’re glad to know God’s looking out for us, ‘cause it sure feels like no one else in authority is. We’ve fallen off the national radar, and must fend for ourselves, relying on the kindness of strangers.
Yesterday, as my plane circled over New Orleans for the first leg of my journey here, I could see spread out below me in the morning light a sea of tarp stretched over roofs, in the color known around town as FEMA blue. And I thought of what all those blue roofs mean to the people down there in my city – the losses of homes and belongings and precious keepsakes, the deaths of loved ones, the destruction of neighborhoods, the long diaspora and forced exile, the loss of jobs, the breakdown of the services and re-sources that ordinary Americans expect from their local, state and federal governments, the right to feel secure in your home. In some cases, the blue tarp was the last work done, and in the 2 years since the storm, the tarps have shredded and the tatters blow forlornly in the wind.
Another quote from scripture comes to me, from Zechariah, a vision of restoration to another devastated city:

Thus says the Lord of hosts: Old men and old women shall again sit in Jerusalem, each with staff in hand for very age. And the streets of the city shall be full of boys and girls playing in its streets. Thus says the Lord of hosts: If it is marvelous in the sight of the remnant of this people in these days, should it also be marvelous in my sight? says the Lord of hosts. (Zechariah 8:4-6)

The Postal Service reported recently in the media that the greater New Orleans area is now back up to over 80% of its pre-Katrina population, but judging from comments on the street and in letters to the editor, most of the remnant of this people does not believe it. Still, while the city does seem exceedingly empty in some quarters, it is true that old men and old women again sit on their stoops and comment on neighborhood doings, and certain streets are at times full of boys and girls at play. A musician friend of mine said to the crowd at a recent outdoor concert, “Idn’it great to see kids again? Remember how after the storm when there were no children in the city and how awful that was?” Children are back in the city, and it is indeed marvel-ous in our eyes; surely it is also marvelous in the eyes of God.
I am grateful for this opportunity to preach to you and bring you dis-patches form a drowned city, news from a wounded but still great city. I bring you greetings from a place where some values have been turned up-side-down. For example, how would you react to a giant pile of trash and debris outside a house or building in your neighborhood? I mean really big, spilling over the curb and into the street, huge. You’d be upset, right? You’d think, “What’s wrong with those people; somebody should do some-thing.”

In New Orleans, a gigantic pile of destroyed belongings and building debris is a sign of HOPE. New Orleanians drive by and grin, giving the workers there a thumbs-up. We think to ourselves, “Another house being worked on! Another family or business coming back!” and we’re giddy with happiness and optimism. A local candy maker has even memorialized these symbols of renewal with a special confection of pretzel sticks, coconut, raisins, and marshmallows drizzled over with chocolate, called “trash piles.” (They’re delicious – you can order them online at BlueFrog.com. We need the money.)

Yes, the New Orleans sense of humor is still evident since Katrina; it seems sometimes that a healthy sense of irony is one of the things keeping people afloat. But the biggest and best things keeping us sane and together are our music and culture. Jazz has always been the heartbeat of New Orleans, but since Katrina, it’s also our CPR, our nourishment, our true mir-ror. We need its reminder of the uses of many voices, the urgency of the hu-man heartbeat, the deliciousness of diversity, the necessity for improv and creativity.

It may be hard to believe, but in a diminished New Orleans, there is more music, and more free music, than ever before. If music is our medi-cine, then we’ve been prescribed regular doses. At every outdoor festival and concert, the crowd is white and black and Latino and Asian, young and old and middle-aged, middle-class and working class, little kids running around, dancing. We smile and greet each other, no longer strangers, but brothers and sisters in a shared adventure, fellow travelers. We share reno-vation stories, ask about each other’s Road Home money, curse our insur-ance companies, and shake our booties to the music, dancing with each other. We eat red beans’n’rice and jambalaya. All souls love jazz, and we thrive on that beat, we draw our sustenance from it. It is our communion.

As my son’s parain (godfather) says on his answering machine, “We’re just struggling to get back to abnormal.” Jazz helps, so do our fes-tivals, and our food. We keep up our cultural traditions, like going to the cemeteries on All Saints to leave chrysanthemums for our beloved dead, trying to ignore the destruction wreaked in our historic cities of the dead by the floodwaters. We secondline every chance we get to whatever brass band is out parading the streets. (Second-lining means following alongside and behind a brass band, dancing and waving handkerchiefs; the band is the “first line.”) We do our best to get back to abnormal.
This is not the first time that New Orleans has come close to total destruction; both the tides of history and tides of water have threatened us before. Back in 1870, New Orleans writer Lafcadio Hearn wrote about the conditions after the Civil War to a friend in Cincinnati. With apologies to our host congregation, I share with you a part of that epistle:

Times are not good here. The city is crumbling into ashes. It has been buried under a lava flood of taxes and frauds and maladmin-istrations so that it has become only a study for archaeologists. Its condition is so bad that when I write about it, as I intend to do soon, nobody will believe I am telling the truth. But it is better to live here in sackcloth and ashes than to own the whole state of Ohio.

So that’s how things are with us. We may be crazy, and we probably are, but we’d rather live in a drowned city we love with a thousand chal-lenges, than live somewhere clean and pristine and efficient. We are wounded but game, down but not out. We are held together by love – love for each other and our families and our ancestors and our neighborhoods and religious communities and our traditions and culture, and our music. We depend more than ever on the kindness of strangers. We are committed and determined about the rebirth and restoration of our beloved, messed-up city. We know that only those who have experienced death can experience resur-rection. We know that recovery is not a sprint, but a marathon. We are New Orleans and we believe, with all our hearts, in the powers of resurrection, communion, and connection.

Let us join our voices as one in our unison reading.

“FEAR NOT” A Sermon for Halloween

“FEAR NOT” A Sermon for Halloween

Sunday, October 28, 2007

The Rev. Melanie Morel-Ensminger

First Unitarian Universalist Church of New Orleans

Our country is awash in fear. Some of the fear is based in lived experience. People in the Northeast fear another terrorist attack; people in the Gulfcoast fear another hurricane; people in New Orleans fear crime. Some of the fear is engendered by our leaders, such as the ginning-up of hostility toward Iran, and dark hints that we need yet more internal security measures to be safe from sabotage. Some of the fears are politically-based. One on side, there is fear of a collapse of Medicare and Social Security, fear of losing jobs and savings, fear that the growing deficit will consume the budget and kill any hope for national health insurance. On the other side, there is fear that the country’s moral center has collapsed, fear that we will be seen by our foes as weak and vulnerable. Fear is the common currency of our times.

When an angel or divine messenger confronts someone in scripture, the first thing they say is, “Fear not.” It is one of the most common expressions in the Bible. Citations in the online Biblical concordance run to 8 pages; it appears 7 times in Genesis alone. It seems that from time immemorial, we human beings have had a lot of fears, and need a lot of reassurance. I’m certainly no angel, but this Halloween sermon has one important message for all of us: Fear not, be not afraid.

Personally, all this fear-mongering disgusts me, and I despise everyone who tries to manipulate us by using it. It’s not that I don’t have a healthy respect for some kinds of fear – a certain amount of fear I actually good for you. Dr. F. Forrester Church, minister of All Souls UU Church in Manhattan, (a church that’s been a good friend to us), wrote a book several years ago called Freedom from Fear, in which he describes 5 kinds of fear:

The 1^st is spontaneous fear, what Forrest calls “fright,” and it can save your life, as when a little voice in your head tells you the smooth-talking stranger cannot be trusted, or when, instinctively, you slam on the brakes to avoid hitting the car in front of you. Fright is a physical, adrenal response to perceived life threats that arises from the part of the brain called the amygdala – what some call “the animal brain” – without passing through the cerebral cortex or rational brain. In most of us, it passes quickly, leaving us with dry mouths and pounding hearts. (When this response occurs when no real danger exists, it’s called a panic attack and requires clinical attention.)

While fright is a physical fear, the 2^nd kind is intellectual – our old pal worry. Worry is the product of the rational and imaginative sides of our brain, allowing us to project our fears about what might happen into the future. While fright can be a good thing, giving us the instant response that could save our lives, worry serves no useful purpose. Let me say that again: Worry serves no useful purpose. What if our loved one is in a plane crash? What if I lose my job? What if the levees break again? The cure for worry is to realize that you can’t alter a single thing about the future by fretting about it, and there’s no proof that worrying makes you better able to cope.

The 3^rd fear id personal and emotional, what Forrest calls “emotional self-consciousness” which most of us would recognize immediately as insecurity, the fear of being seen as inadequate. This is the fear that makes many people avoid public speaking or occasions where they might be the focus of attention. This is the secret fear that causes so many of us to feel like a fake, no matter how self-confident we may seem from the outside. Almost all of us suffer fro this at least some of the time – I know I do! I’m concerned that my spouse might discover I’m not as wonderful as he thinks I am; I worry y’all might find out I’m that good of a minister. One trick to coping with this fear is to do your very best, and accept that you are “good-enough” – a good-enough spouse, good-enough person, good-enough parent – and that good-enough is truly good enough. Another good coping mechanism is to remember that everybody else is so centered on their insecurity that they’re not concentrating on you at all!

The 4^th fear is guilt. Guilt is the fear of being found out, of being caught at wrong-doing. Since every single one of us has done something wrong some time, we are easily tripped into guilt feelings. For example, how many of us feel a vague sense of unease when we see a police car behind us? Even if we are not speeding at that moment, we know we have driven over the speed limit in the past, if not today. While feeling guilty when we’ve actually committed an offense is a healthy sign of a working conscience, amorphous free-floating guilt can contribute to a general sense og anxiety, which can invite all 5 forms of fear into your life.

The 5^th and final form of fear is dread, the existential fear of being out of control and not in charge. Dread keeps us up in the middle of the night, the nameless, formless fear that we can’t keep bad things from happening. Our protests won’t stop all wars, our personal efforts to recycle won’t save the earth, and we can’t move hurricanes, stop wildfires, or quiet volcanoes. In the general scheme of things, we human beings are small and insignificant, and realizing this can sometimes bring a person to the edge of despair.

Since August 29, 2005, most New Orleanians have been living in a state of fear so pervasive that we don’t even consciously feel it any more. Most of us are riddled with fear, a lot of it unexamined and unacknowledged. The fear in this area since Katrina is compounded by the fact that all of us have something fearful in our pasts, and the hurricane and its aftermath gave us a hook to hang all our fears on. The costs of living in a constant atmosphere of enveloping fear are both psychic and physical – and the toll is being seen in the rise in stress-related diseases and the climbing rates of suicide and depression in the city. The price of all this fear is too high to pay.

Choosing to live without fear (relatively speaking, since you need to have your healthy fright response) means doing 4 simple but challenging things:

1^st, remember it’s not all about YOU. Fear is attracted to an unwarranted sense of self-importance. Forrest suggests suing the “1-hour rule” – whatever it is, it’ll likely be over in an hour, and you can deal with just an hour, can’t you?

2^nd, want what you have, and don’t obsess over what you don’t have or what you’ve lost. Focus on those folks in your life who love and care for you. Enjoy the possession, the partner, the job you have, and don’t get depressed over what you lack.

3^rd, do what you can; don’t despair over what you can’t. Yes, it’s true – you won’t be able to fix everything that is wrong in the world, and yes, it’s true, life is not fair – but don’t let that stop you from doing what you are able to do, and enjoying what you can.

4^th, be who you are; stop imagining a better self who lives a better life. As the Buddhists say, “Be here now,” and don’t focus excessively on the future or the past. Stop pretending to be who you are not – the relief will be tremendous.

In “The Wizard of Oz,” the Cowardly Lion is the most courageous character, yet he always afraid. When I was a girl and learned of all my dad had done in the labor and civil rights movements, I told him I was proud of him for being so brave. “Oh no, Mimi,” he told me, “I wasn’t brave – I was afraid all the time. I just did what had to be done.” True courage is NOT being fearless – courage is not letting your fears rule your life. “Fear not” does not mean having no fear. You will still be afraid, but freedom lies in choosing to go on, to walk through, live through, your fears, and come out on the other side, your true and authentic self, whole and safe and free. AMEN – ASHE – SHALOM – SALAAM – NAMASTE – BLESSED BE!

TRANSFORMATIONAL ABUNDANCE: BLESSINGS OVERFLOWING

A Sermon on Stewardship by the Rev. Melanie Morel-Ensminger First Unitarian Universalist Church in New OrleansSunday, October 21, 2007

As my colleague Tim Kutzmark points out in this morning’s Reading, we Americans live in a culture that constantly preaches the bad news of scarcity, that every day tell us that there isn’t enough of almost everything. Advertising informs us we’re defective, not good enough, that we’re all lacking in something that it just so happens we could buy to get a little better. Taking all this in, you could end up believing that we’re falling behind and that everything everywhere is getting worse. You just might be justified in concluding that there’s no hope to be found.
The immediate aftermath of the storms 2 years ago reinforced this way of thinking for people in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, and, at the time, it was the right way to think. No one could be or should be blamed for feeling like things kept getting worse, that we truly were falling behind, and hope was indeed a scarce commodity.

But there is a tide in New Orleans tradition that is older and stronger than the American culture’s myth of scarcity, and stronger still than the pessimism engendered by the hurricanes’ destruction and our leaders’ malfeasance. The Crescent City preaches a different gospel, good news for those of us sick of the message of “not enough.” That message is, “Mo’ better” or “Have some mo’” – as when your waitress urges you to have a second dessert, or when the band plays yet another “last set,” or when you walk into a neighborhood bar, and there’s free red beans and rice, just help yourself, or when you go to hear Kermit Ruffins play, and he serves you barbeque from the back of his Escalade. The culture of New Orleans says that more is better, and that there is always more to be had.

As most of you know, over the past week New Orleans non-profit radio station WWOZ has been conducting its fall membership drive. What impressed me was how upbeat all the DJs were in their appeals to the audience. They said things like, “If you like what we do, and want us to keep on doin’ it, pledge now,” and “This is what we do, and nothing is gonna stop us from doin’ it, but it sure would help if all you listeners made a pledge.” Another DJ said, “We’re all volunteers here, doin’ this out of love, and we’re asking y’all to show some love.” Yet another said, “Not everyone can pledge a thousand or 5 thousand or 10 thousand dollars, we know that – but we want you to know that we appreciate every single $40 pledge we get, and we don’t love you any less than we love our big donors.”

They did not say, “Pledge or the station will have to close.” They did not say, “We know everyone’s hurt from dealing with the storm, so we know you really can’t pledge.” They did not poor-mouth or guilt-trip or harangue. They played the best music they could, featured live interviews with some of New Orleans’ finest musicians, and reminded all of us listeners that all of this was possible because of love for ‘OZ. They put their trust in the abundant good feelings that the listeners have for what ‘OZ does, and took for granted that those positive emotions would translate into monetary support.

We embark today on our 2 nd stewardship campaign since the storm, and this year, we will be taking a page out of the WWOZ playbook. We will not poor-mouth or guilt-trip or harangue. We will not tell you that we will close if you don’t pledge. We will not whinge and cry, “Poor us!” We have put our trust in the abundant good feelings that our church’s members and friends have for what this church does and what this church means, and we are taking for granted that these positive emotions will translate not only into monetary support, but also into willing hands for the work that lies ahead. And like ‘OZ, we promise that we receive every pledge, from the lowest to the highest, with the same love.

The storm is past, both literally and figuratively, and it is time to move ahead with both faith and hope. In the immediate aftermath of the storm, we needed courage just hang in there. But now different virtues are called for. It is time for us to recognize and utilize the overflowing blessings we already have. We are blessed with an abundance of commitment, an abundance of talent, an abundance of dedication. We are blessed with an abundance of volunteers from around the country, witnesses to the relationship and connection we have with churches across the country, not just our fellow UUs but people of every faith and no faith. We are blessed with an abundance of visitors, people apparently not put off by our unfinished building and our lack of luxurious amenities, but perhaps drawn by our very challenges, as well as by the spirit with which we face those challenges. We are even blessed with an abundance of money. You don’t believe me? Try this:

Raise your hand right now if you have at least $2.00 with you (not counting whatever you are planning to generously give in the Offering later in the service)? Keep your hand up, and those of you who don’t have it with you, but who have at least $2.00 at home or in a checking or savings account, or under your mattress, raise your hand. Look around you. Do you realize how incredibly wealthy we are? Three billion people in the world live on less than $2.00 a day, while another 1.3 billion get by on less than $1.00 per day. (adapted from a sermon by Rev. Nicholas Brie, pastor of Trinity Evangelical Lutheran Church in Maryland, found on the Internet)
We may not live on Audubon Place, but we’re all rich, richer than over 4 billion people in the world! (However, if you do live on Audubon Place, please talk to me after the service about your pledge.)

Many churches operate from a scarcity mentality, and not just those in Louisiana and the Gulf Coast in the aftermath of the storms. But all over our denomination, congregations are discovering something wonderful – that the spirit of abundance is self-replicating, that giving away money attracts money, that being generous generates generosity. UU churches have found that if they regularly dedicate their offertory to an outside cause, the overall offering goes up. In other words, the more they give away, the more they get.

Some things are automatically self-fulfilling. If you tell a child she is a liar, the child will lie. If you tell a teenager he’s nobody, he will be hate-filled. If you tell a congregation they can’t do something, then they can’t. But self-fulfillment works in the other direction just as well. An average person constantly told they’re beautiful will blossom. Underachieving students told they can, will. A congregation assured of abundance will have abundance, and have it abundantly.

In the intertwined history of this church and this city, we have an example of abundance begetting abundance. In the generation before the Civil War, there were 2 businessmen who had grown wealthy through their industry and intelligence. One was Judah Touro, a Jewish man from Rhode Island, the other was John McDonough, from Baltimore. They had several things in common. Both were unmarried – Touro due to an unhappy youthful love affair with a first cousin; McDonough is thought to have been gay. Both started out penniless; both were later among the city’s business elite.

But there the similarities ended. During their lifetime, Touro was renowned for his philanthropy (including notable donations to this church), while McDonough was thought a little tight with a dollar. Touro’s example might have been a spur to McDonough, for on the latter’s death in 1850, to the surprise of his contemporaries, McDonough’s vast estate was left to the poor of both New Orleans and Baltimore, from whence we get the McDonough schools. After years of generosity, when Touro died 4 years later, his will also left a fortune, endowing both Touro Infirmary and Touro Synagogue here, as well as Touro Cemetery and Touro Synagogue in his native Newport, Rhode Island, and libraries and parks in other cities. Generosity inspires generosity – it always does.

I have every faith that we will have a great stewardship campaign this year, partly because I already know we had a great campaign last year, even in the wake of the storm. But I also have faith in this congregation and in its future, and I know one thing: Living and giving abundantly can transform your thinking and your life – and our church. So might this be! AMEN – ASHE – SHALOM – SALAAM – NAMASTE – BLESSED BE!

“Which Side Are You On?”

A Sermon by the Rev. Melanie Morel-Ensminger
To Introduce the Test of the New UUA Curricula
Building The World We Dream About
First Unitarian Universalist Church of New Orleans
Sunday, September 30, 2007

I was raised on a steady diet of protest songs. The Morel family would while away the hours on long car trips with all the old songs of free-dom that my father, a CIO organizer, had learned at Highlander Folk School in Tennesee in 1940, songs like “Union Maid,” “We Shall Not Be Moved,” “Solidarity Forever,” “Joe Hill” and of course, “We Shall Overcome.” My sermon title comes from an old favorite of my dad’s, a song written by a Kentucky coal miner’s wife in 1931. The lyrics question whether the lis-tener is on the side of the striking miners and their hungry families or on the side of the rich owners, declaring,

They say in Harlan County, there are no neutrals there;You'll either be a union man or a thug for J. H. Blair.

The original chorus resounds, “Which side are you on, boys? Which side are you on?” As years passed and issues grew, the song was given new momentum and additional lyrics by folks in the Civil Rights Movement, the farm workers’ union, the peace movement, and many others. Which side are you on? Seventy-six years after the song was first written, the question still haunts us. Which side are you on?

As we prepare to begin a series of workshops to test the new curric-ula on race and ethnicity being developed by the Unitarian Universalist Association, it is good to ask, “Which side are you on?” Is it possible for anyone in America to be neutral about racism and ethnic discrimination, or in a way, do we all live in Harlan County, Kentucky? When it comes to race and ethnicity, which side are we on, as white people, as New Orleanians, as Unitarian Universalists?

I know, I know, none of y’all is going to raise your hand right now and say, “Oh yeah, count me in, I’m on the side of racism and ethnic cleansing.” But what does it mean when we say we’re on the right side? What are we willing to do? What are we willing to change? To paraphrase an old question about Unitarian Universalism, if it were against the law to oppose discrimination and inequality based on race, class, and ethnicity, would there be enough evidence to convict us?

Perhaps we in New Orleans are like the proverbial canaries in the coal mine. (Back in the day, coal miners brought caged canaries down into the mine with them; this was not for entertainment, but for safety – the little bird would be the first to be visibly affected by poison gas or a lack of oxygen, and the miners would know to evacuate a dangerous situation.) Race, class, and ethnicity affect all of America, but there’s almost never a good media illustration of how this plays out – but Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath changed all that.

In September 2005, nearly everyone in our country with a working television witnessed a graphic, on-going example of how race, class, and ethnicity make a difference in people’s lives. We saw that race, class, and ethnicity could put a person in danger in a catastrophe; we saw that race, class, and ethnicity could add to a person’s burdens during a time of crisis. We saw that race, class, and ethnicity could affect a person and family’s ability to rebound and recover from a disaster. Now, the real fact is, people in oppressed racial, class, ands ethnic groups in our country already knew this – as the New Orleans expression goes, “They been knowing it” – just as they been knowing that race, class, and ethnicity add to a person’s burdens every single day, even when there isn’t a catas-trophe – but for comfortable privileged Americans all across the country, the Katrina survivors on their TV sets were like dying canaries in a mine: clear illustrations of a dangerous, poisonous situation that invisibly and insidiously affects each and every one of us, every day, but that many of us hardly notice.

The purpose of this morning’s sermon is not to accuse or blame or elicit guilt. These feelings are useless in fighting oppression; they are numb-ing and deadening and self-defeating. They result only in denial and paralysis and inaction. As long as those of us who are privileged and comfort-able, those of us who are white or middle-class, get mired down in accusation, blame, and guilt, we are unable to work to effect permanent change. The best that “liberal guilt” can do for people being adversely affected by race, class, and ethnicity is exactly that – “do for.” “Do for” is a nice way of saying “noblesse oblige;” it is good works done as charity from a standpoint of privilege. While I am not here to condemn anyone for getting involved in charitable good deeds for those in need, I do say unequivocally that such work, however noble and well-intentioned, does not change anything. As Unitarian Universalists, we ought to be about the business of changing systems and structures – real, systemic change that alters the paradigm of haves and have-nots, of justice and injustice, equality and inequality.

There is an alternative to accusation, blame, and guilt. We can learn and develop ways of being true allies in the struggle for justice and equality. We can start to offer our hands horizontally in friendship instead of downward in hand-outs. We can stand with people in need instead of standing over them. We can place ourselves squarely where our Unitarian Universalist principles say we’ll be – on the side of justice, equity, and compassion; on the side of the inherent worth and dignity of every person, on the side of the democratic process. In short, we can transform ourselves from passive complicity with an unjust system into active anti-oppression allies, working to dismantle racism, classism, ethnic distrust, and all other oppressions.

But the very first step in that direction is often painfully difficult. The first step requires that we UUs acknowledge that we are not already “saved.” (In general, UUs dislike traditional religious language, but this is an example where we UUs rely on the old religious language to extricate ourselves from an uncomfortable secular position.) We Unitarian Universalists want to believe that we are already on the right side, that we are the good guys by virtue of being UU, that we are “saved” from the All-American sins of racism, classism, and ethnic discrimination. Most UU congregations insist they don’t need to do anti-racism workshops or Welcoming Congregation programs, because of course we’re not racist or classist or homophobic or discriminatory in any way.

We like to point to our denomination’s racial history: our support for abolition, the activism on behalf of the franchise to male former slaves, and our activism in the civil rights movement of the 1960s. We honor our UU martyrs, Jim Reeb and Viola Liuzza, killed in 1965, and the untold number of Unitarian Universalist ministers and lay people who answered Martin Luther King Jr.’s call to Selma. We may be hazier on the less savory aspects of our denomination's record on race, but we are sure that we UUs have more to celebrate than to regret.

We look back with pride on the UUA’s record on rights for gays and lesbians, on being the first American denomination to ordain an openly gay person, the votes at General Assembly supporting same-sex marriage rights long before it was fashionable. Again, we may prefer not to know about the times and ways that UUism supported the status quo on BGLTI rights, but on the whole, we’re pretty sure it’s a record to boast of – and boast we often do.

I can hardly wait for the next issue of the UU World magazine, for there is sure to be a barrage of defensive letters about this month’s cover story about classism in Unitarian Universalist theology. Good religious liberals that we are, we are positive that “isms” are someone else’s problem, that we are not implicated in racism or classism or ethnic discrimination, since we are good people who do not feel or practice bigotry or hatred towards anyone.

I understand that reaction, because it’s exactly how I felt the first time I participated in an antiracism workshop with the People’s Institute of Survival and Beyond. When I think back on it, I’m mortified by my insufferable smugness; I don’t know how my old friend Ron Chisom put up with me. “I’m just here to help out,” I thought to myself at the start of the 3-day workshop, mentally patting myself on the back, “Racism certainly has nothing to do with me – my parents were civil rights activists who worked for integration; I’m one of the good guys.” I wanted to continue to believe in my own innocence; I wanted to be “good” – and not only that, I wanted my purity and goodness validated by people of color and poor people. But I have to come to know, slowly and painfully, that when it comes to oppressions in our country, none of us is innocent, none of us is neutral, none of us is uninvolved. All of us are implicated in an unjust sys-tem that is part of the very fabric of our lives.

The system we’re enmeshed in is not only unjust, it’s complicated. A gradated set of privileges and comforts are doled out, carefully calibrated by gender, race, class, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and culture. A single person can straddle different discriminatory categories – one can be a black or Latino middle-class woman, or a poor white gay man, or an Asian-American adopted into a white family or a formerly working class Italian man now identifying as a white professional. But however mixed (or mixed-up!) our category, it’s clear that being against oppression is not about the good people identifying the bad people and then fighting them. That would be easy. It’s really about recognizing where we ourselves and the institutions we love are caught up in the unjust system, and then committing to working to make things systemically better, no matter how long it takes and no matter how much it hurts.

One way to get started with what might turn out to be a life-long process of learning and growing would be to register for and attend the sessions of “Building The World We Dream About,” the brand-new UUA curricula being developed for adult programs in UU congregations. It is an honor that our congregation was one of the churches selected as a test location for this important new course, and it is more than likely due, at least in part, to the scenes of post-Katrina apocalypse that UUA officials viewed from 2 years ago. Your participation in this course will help to shape it, as it in turn helps to shape your new perceptions and perspective on race and ethnicity; you will be in on the ground floor of some-thing very important for Unitarian Universalism as well as for this church and this city.

Classes will be held on the first and third Thursdays of the month. The first session will be held this Thursday, October 4, from 7 to 9 pm; participants are asked to make as strong a commitment as possible to attend at least 75% of the total sessions for maximum impact and group cohesion. There will be a minimal registration fee assessed to cover copies and mat-erials, which can be waived in case of hardship. Flyers are available on the Greeters’ Table, and our course facilitators, Howard and Tina Mielke and Esther Scott, will be able to answer questions about the course during Coffeehour. I am excited to be a participant, and I hope to see many of you there too.

The words used for our Chalice Lighting came from an essay entitled “Family Values” in the UU World magazine several years ago; in it, Dr. Ronald O. Valdiserri of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, warned us all:

...Our world is defined by the people who live in it. People who aren’t all the same, who differ in color and sexual orientation and social circumstance, are part of our human race. If we refuse to listen to them, if we refuse to share societal resources to meet their ex-pressed…needs, we will pay a price. We will lose something of what it means to be human. [UUW, Jan./Feb. 1995]

Our city, our country, our world, is made up of many different people – white, black, brown, red, and yellow; rich, poor, middle-class; professional and blue collar; Northern and Southern European, African, Creole, Hispanic, Native American, Pacific Islander, Asian; straight, gay, lesbian, bisexual, intersexed, trans, and queer. The many ways we can be categorized can be sources of enrichment or they be used as bases for discrimination. There can be no neutrality. We are either working for justice and equity and diversity, or we are passively accepting the sad world as it is now.

Which will we choose? Which side are we on? The right decision will change our lives forever. So might this be, for ourselves and for our children! AMEN – ASHE – SHALOM – SALAAM – NAMASTE – BLESSED BE!

LAYING OUR BURDENS DOWN:

LAYING OUR BURDENS DOWN: A Homily for Yom Kippur
by the Rev. Melanie Morel-Ensminger
First Unitarian Universalist Church of New Orleans
Sunday, September 16, 2007

This past Thursday, our Jewish sisters and brothers marked the start of a new year with the celebration of Rosh Hashanah; this coming Saturday, the High Holy Days of the Jewish liturgical calendar culminate in Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. On Yom Kippur, practicing Jews look inward, acknowledge where they have fallen short of ideal, things done and things undone, and recognize the burdens they’ve been carrying of unhealthy and unresolved feelings and emotions. As a liberal congregation, we take this opportunity between the Days of Awe to make our own internal assessment, and to lay our burdens down, symbolized by those small stones.
In Hebrew, the act of letting go, casting away, our misdeeds and inactions and unhealthy emotions is called tashlich. Rachel Stark, a member of Unitarian Universalists for Jewish Awareness (UUJA), writes:

I imagine the ritual of tashlich as a physical act into which we can put our disappointments and frustrations, a means to cast away all the ways in which we acted as we wish we had not, all the ways we failed to act as we wish we had. In striving to be kind and strong and moral and thoughtful and friendly and brave,
we all fall short. Tashlich gives us a chance to try again to be our very best selves.

No matter your theology or spirituality, tashlich is important, even vital. There is a line commonly heard in many UU memorial services: “Tears unshed are like stones upon the heart.” But it is not only unshed tears that can be like a burden of stones on the heart and the mind – all unresolved emotions are like that. Carrying around – lugging around – feelings we haven’t dealt with, emotions we haven’t expressed, tangled unresolved issues, all end up as an invisible backpack of boulders, weighing us down, preventing us from experiencing joy and being truly happy.

New Orleanians have a lot of burdens right now – dealing with losses of property and people and pets and even precious landmarks, we are burdened by our memories, our grief, our survivor’s guilt, and our resentment and rage at what happened to us and continues to happen to us 2 years after the storm. We are burdened with bills, with formaldehyde fumes in our FEMA trailers, with bureaucratic red tape, with recalcitrant insurance companies, with governmental indifference, corruption, and incompetence. The rest of the country and our federal government don’t always seem to understand us, and sometimes seem to blame us for our predicament. Most of the time, we feel too busy, too caught up in our lives, too burdened, to deal with our knotted-up emotions and feelings – taking time for ourselves in that way seems like a shameful indulgence. I am not naïve enough to think that one congregational ritual in a Sun-day service will magically take care of all the burdens being carried by the members and friends of this church.

Two, three, four rituals wouldn’t do it, although personally I think it might help. Working through all that happened and all that is still going on will take months and even years of conscious, intentional work. (Many mental health experts say that many of the symptoms of post-traumatic stress do not even surface until at least 2 years have passed because people are too occupied with coping.) As your minister, I want to help you with that working through – I am here for you, and I want you to know that you can call me, make an appointment to come talk to me, and ask me for referrals.

For this year. I am your minister, and I want to help to ease your burdens in every way I can. What happened to us, to New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, during and after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, was not our fault. Nothing we did caused what happened or drew it to us. We are not in any way responsible. But Yom Kippur teaches us an important lesson: we are not always at fault for events that occur in our lives, we are not always responsible for the things that happen to us – but we are totally and completely responsible for how we respond. (In fact, “responsible” literally means “able to respond.”) We can make positive changes in our lives and in our behavior, we can alter course, turn around, make a new start – which is the real, literal meaning of “atonement.” Maybe the hand we’ve been dealt is a lousy hand, maybe life has been unfair to us, but that’s the way the levee crumbles. As your mama probably said to you more than once– I know mine did – “Life is unfair.” All that matters is how we act now.

This is the deal: by destiny, we have been placed here in this city, at this time in history, with our particular skin color, family constellation, brain power, gender identity, and social situation. You could change what city you live in, but pretty much nothing else about that list can be changed. This is the hand we’ve been dealt, or that we have chosen. How we will live, how we will act, how we will cope, how we will move forward from here, whether we will deal in a healthy productive way with our emotions or not, all that is entirely up to us. Let us take this to heart, and make the right choice.

Let us choose life.

AMEN – ASHE – SHALOM – SALAAM – NAMASTE –BLESSED BE!

Water Ceremony

Water Ceremony

Sunday, September 9, 2007

The Rev. Melanie Morel-Ensminger

First Unitarian Universalist Church of New Orleans

Words for Meditation

We come back together again as one community of faith after a summer of diverse experiences. Some of us have had a summer of travel, of family times, of relaxation, of reading at the pool or by the pool, of long lazy afternoons. Some of us have had a summer of hard hot humid days, volunteering in the heat, helping our community, working on our own houses or those of relatives and friends, or in other ways putting in sweat equity to rebuild our loves and our city. Some of us faithfully attended worship here this summer; some of us visited other congregations; some of us took a few Sundays off.

But here we are, together once again, reconstituting our faith community at the start of another church worship year. We give thanks for the support and care of this church, for the diversity and challenge of Unitarian Universalism, for the richness of our lives, in its complex mix of joy and grief, satisfaction and aggravation, rest and toil.

Mixed feeling seem to be the order of the day for New Orleanians; in the New Normal, it seems hard if not impossible to have an uncomplicated emotion. Even our beloved Water Ceremony is touched with ambivalence – because how we feel about water has changed forever. New Orleans musical genius Allen Toussaint compares love to water, as a torrent that can both nurture and destroy:

“Like a flower, drinking from the pouring rain

The same rain that could wash it away.”

With pain we acknowledge that “the same rain,” the same water that leads to growth and brings sweet refreshment, also brings destruction and death. Water is life-giving and life-destroying. Under one circumstance, we love it; under another, we hate and fear it. When it washes over us at the Gulf shore, we’re delighted by the feel and power of it. When it washes into our homes and our church, it brings terror and loss. The same rain can be welcomed by some, and shunned by others.

Introduction to the Water Ceremony

Although it is a beloved tradition in most Unitarian Universalist congregations around the world, the Water Ceremony is not a very old custom, being only about 30-some years old. The first UU Water Communion was held in the mid-1970s at the first Women & Religion Convocation held at a retreat center in Grailville, Michigan. The organizers of the conference asked that the participants – UU women from all over the continent – bring with them a small amount of water from their homes, to be poured together into a common bowl at the opening worship service. The water symbolized that although the women came from many different places, were of different backgrounds and life experiences and social situations, they were Unitarian Universalist sisters, of one liberal heritage.

It was a powerful metaphor of unity in diversity, of a community united across all the usual lines and categories that serve to separate and divide, and the women who were there were greatly moved by it. Many of them returned from Grailville and shared a version of the ceremony with their congregations.

In the years since, the idea of the Water Communion has traveled all over our denomination, from east to west, north and south, in the U.S., to Canada, even to UU congregations in Australia and New Zealand. Perhaps as an indication of a growing hunger in UUism for more ritual, congregation after congregation took it up. Most hold the service, as we do, to mark the start of a new church worship year. As you might expect with a Unitarian Universalist ritual, there are almost as many ways to do Water Communion as there are UU congregations. Most of the churches with memberships over 200 have people contribute their water silently; while smaller churches give opportunity for individual sharing. Some divide the waters by the points of the compass; some by experiences the waters represent.

Over the years of the Water Communion’s evolution in UU congregations, many ministers and lay leaders have become concerned that the ritual lost its original intent of honoring diversity and enhancing community. In some congregations, recitations of water gathered from Tahiti and Paris and Alaskan cruise ships have overshadowed waters brought from local lakes and rivers – not to mention water from garden hoses or kitchen taps. (In the original version, the women brought water from their homes, which represented themselves, not places they had visited, which would have represented how much disposable income and free time they had.)

The Water Communion’s true and continuing purpose is not to report on, as we used to do on the first week of elementary school, “What I Did During My Summer Vacation” which not everyone gets, but instead “How I Felt This Summer,” to highlight our congregation’s connection and closeness, despite our diversity in terms of life experiences and spirituality. Despite the labels we give it, all water is the same; despite the labels society lays upon us or even those we give ourselves, we human beings are also all the same. The Water Ceremony reminds us of this great truth, and that is why it doesn’t matter where the water comes from.

I realize that not everyone will agree with what they might see as a negative change in the way Water Communion has been done in the past. But I ask that you open yourselves this year to what is, after all, only a return to the original roots of the ceremony, and remember that while nobody ever intended for it become exclusionary, sharing stories of fabulous trips among a group that includes people who couldn’t afford even a weekend away does leave folks out, and reminds them uncomfortably of their economic challenge, and the gap between them and other church members. Especially in post-Katrina New Orleans, we are more aware than ever of how people can be negatively impacted by class and race. Let us resolve to eliminate as much as possible the traces of those differences in our midst. (In any case, we can always go back to doing the ritual in the more familiar way next year, seeing this year as an experiment and not as a forced permanent change.

With this ceremony, we begin a new worship year, as well as a brand-new shared ministry. We have come home to this church and to this religious movement and to this great but damaged city; we rejoice to be together once again. Let us bring our water together as we bring ourselves together – willing to commingle, willing to be changed and affected, willing to be poured forth in acts of love and service.

I ask that you listen with your heart to the reading that is to come, opening yourself to the feelings and emotions that have washed over you this summer, and choose when to pour your water. Some of you may wish to pour water more than once, as you may have had experiences that affected you in different ways this summer. When you come forward to pour your water, if you feel moved to do so, you may briefly share aloud something about your water, but it is also fine if you wish to pour silently. If you didn’t bring water, small cups of water are available at the entrance table.

Water Communion Ceremony

Everyone present may participate in our Water Ceremony, whether you are a first-time visitor or a long-time member. If someone near you has no water, please share some of your water with them. Let us act out our sense of connection & relationship. Whoever we are, wherever we come from, we belong to one another; what affects one of us affects us all.

The winds of summer have blown us about, and today we return to this liberal community of faith, where we draw sustenance to live out our faith in the world. Among us, there have been many journeys this summer, some of them physical, some of them mental, some of them emotional, some of them spiritual. Some journeys have been a combination of many of these.

Some of us here have had experiences this summer that gave us respite from our hectic and busy lives, leaving us feeling rested and renewed, ready to face the rest of the year with energy and a sense of hope and optimism. We have brought still waters of rest & renewal.

Some of us here were lucky to have had experiences this summer that elated us, brought us times of gladness, experiences that lifted our hearts. We have brought shining waters of joy & happiness.

Some of us here have had experiences this summer that came near to breaking our hearts, stormy experiences of such deep loss and pain that we shed countless lonely tears. We have brought with us storm waters of grief & sadness.

Some of us here have had experiences this summer that portended large or small alterations in our lives, in our families, in our work lives, in our relationships; roiling changes, whether welcome or unwelcome, that brought disruption or discomfort to our lives. We have brought rushing waters of change & transition.

Let us take a few moments to reflect on our summer experiences, and to decide when you wish to pour out the water you have. You may want to divide your water and pour more than once. I invite all of us to bring our respectful & compassionate attention to all those who come forward as the water is shared – notice who shares at what point, especially those who share in silence. Let us make a point later to ask each other how we’re doing; to care for one another – which is much more important than asking where we’ve traveled.

Let us be together in a spirit of unity, entering into a short time of reflection, remembering the summer months, and beginning our church year together.

Let us bring forth Still Waters of Rest & Renewal.

Let us bring forth Shining Waters of Joy & Happiness.

Let us bring forth Storm Waters of Grief & Loss.

Let us bring forth Rushing Waters of Transition & Change.