I’m from Michigan, in what is still called the Midwest – located in the mid east section of our country.  Odd.  Once, it was in the far west, for few had ventured past the east coast.  A similar misnomer applies to the so-called northern California, by which they mean central California, where San Francisco is.  Redding and Shasta are in the real northern California.  But old words have a way of sticking, be they about geography or religion.  Our religion may have been defined in the Boston area, but it isn’t confined there, neither for our history or our future.

As I hope it is also true for you as an individual and us as a fellowship, my center is not in Boston.  I center myself in my mind and heart.  You are centered in yours.  We center ourselves as a fellowship in Grants Pass.  I have had faith that Unitarian Universalism honors my existential center as it would any person’s and our fellowship’s similarly.  But this has not always been the case, as I will relate.

Unitarian Universalism might be summed up as having come to honor the seemingly paradoxical meaning of the word “one.”  Like two sides of the same coin, we are each and all one in our individual, unique, and precious lives, and we are one in this world together – one with our loves, our families, our fellowship, our community, our nation, our humanity, and our planet.  Neither side of that coin can be denied or avoided.

In this oneness we have the latitude to think freely for ourselves, to live our life our way, to do our religion the way we choose.  This obvious ability is innate, for we are freeborn earthlings.  But knowing it and cherishing it and practicing it is the result of long struggles, both as a country and as a religion.  Living as we choose, rather than how the king or pope chose, is a hard-earned, recent, and vulnerable ability.

The UUA in Boston does not decide what religion is for you or our fellowship.  The polity works like this.  If you are a Member of this fellowship you can vote for a Board.  The Board of Trustees is responsible for the program, assets, and liabilities of the fellowship.  The UUA is not made up of individuals; it is made of fellowships and churches.  It coordinates and offers guidance, but it does not own or rule.

Within the UUA is a wide variety of congregations, from formal Christian ones celebrating liturgies similar to a high Episcopal Church, to radical humanist groups who choose to eschew all supernatural ceremonies, prayers, and pretenses.  The seven Principles preached across the country and published in our orders of worship are the recent agreement on common beliefs.  They are not rules.

If we track such statements of belief back we find ample examples of an exception clause added to various stages of belief.  By signing the book and becoming a Member you are not bound to any creed or dogma.  This in itself is a sort of statement of belief – that we can and do differ – that we have the latitude to explore various new approaches.  Thank God for that, or thank our forbearers, for otherwise we’d be stuck with beliefs like this one, offered by Judge Henry Pirtle of Louisville in 1853:

Whereas there is a misunderstanding of the views of Unitarians on important subjects, it is deemed proper to make some declaration in reference thereto:

Resolved that we regard Jesus Christ not as a mere inspired man but as the Son of God – the Messenger of the Father to men, miraculously sent – the Mediator between God and Man – the Redeemer of the world; and that we regard the miracles of the New Testament as facts on which the Gospel is built.

(pg. 79, Freedom Moves West, Charles Lyttle)

These words seem alien and out of place to us, but for most Unitarians of that era, they spoke of their shared beliefs and they were offered to squelch the more liberal, thoughtful, and ethical impulses of the Western Unitarian Conference.  The WUC, born in the mid 19^th century, actually had its roots in the seminal characters who founded Unitarianism in our country.

William Ellery Channing formalized what became orthodox Unitarian theology at the start of the century, accepting the insult that they were Unitarians (harkening back to European anti-trinitarianism, holding that God is one, not three-as-one).  For Channing, Unitarians were Christians who believed they could read the Bible using reason, and not just take it all as God’s Word.  An alternative title for this faith was Liberal Christian.  Only later would the other branch of European Unitarianism, Socinianism, holding that Jesus was an ideal man, not God, emerge in Unitarian settings in the developments of Transcendentalism, ethical religion, and humanism.

This different strand had connections to Joseph Priestly, who held pro-French sentiments, a radical thinker and scientist who had been run out of England.  His more thoughtful and free-thinking approach connects to Emerson’s Idealism (also known as Transcendentalism) and especially to Theodore Parker.  Parker dared to state that the value of Christianity did not rest on preposterous miracles as exaggerated in the Bible, but on the teachings of the man Jesus, who showed us to the way to live freely and responsibly.  Lincoln’s “government of the people, by the people, and for the people” was lifted, almost word for word, from a Parker sermon.

While we celebrate Emerson and Parker today, they were an embarrassment to Unitarians in their time.  Almost all Unitarian pulpits were closed to Emerson after his notorious “Divinity School Address” of 1838, and while Parker is touted as not just smart (he spoke five languages), popular (he attracted thousands in Boston), and principled (he kept a pistol by his desk because he was a target for being an abolitionist), in his day, Unitarians were defensive about him, shrinking from charges of our Deism and infidelity.

While Emerson and Parker roused defensiveness at the Harvard Divinity School, a new school in northwestern Pennsylvania, Meadville, began exploring Parkerite ideas, again to the consternation of eastern Unitarians.  The American Unitarian Association didn’t like the upstart preachers and did almost nothing to help them expand the faith in the Midwest.  More than that, when such enterprising liberal evangelists organized their own Western Unitarian Conference, Boston tried to discredit and undermine it.

At issue was whether such preachers were really Christian, confessing their faith in Jesus as God or at least the son of God, and for that matter, in God Himself.  It was abhorrent to orthodox easterners to support by dollar or title any of these freethinkers.  This led to the formation of the Free Religious Association, celebrating Transcendentalist and other worldly progressive ideas, which in turn evolved into the anti-war and humanist positions in the early twentieth century.  Higher biblical criticism, Darwinism, and socialism all found some footing in these western churches, much to the loud criticism of their local fundamentalist neighbors and to the embarrassment back in Boston.  Orthodox Unitarians resented western free-thinking ones for opening the faith to non belief and unbelief.

Some lamented that our spiritual growth had “ceased to be an object of fear” and criticized the “dead negations, its everlasting platitudes against forms and creeds, its insufferable cant and conceit, its senseless screams for liberty.”  (pg. 165-166, Freedom Moves West)

Conservatism often ruled.  Funds were withheld.  Bossy dogmatists were dispatched to reign in the unruly freethinkers.  For half a century, orthodoxy attempted to contain the independent thinkers.  By 1918, during what we now call World War One, the AUA board voted that any Society which employs a minister who is not a willing, earnest and outspoken supporter of the United States in the vigorous and resolute prosecution of the war cannot be considered eligible for aid from the Association. (pg. 227, Freedom Moves West)

Coercing conscience and violating congregational autonomy can emerge from Boston.  It wasn’t until 1936 that this sad resolution was regretted as contrary to the fundamental Unitarian principle of freedom of thought and conscience [and pledging] never in the future shall the economic power of the organization be used to influence the opinion or conduct of any minister or society.  (pg 227)

I must emphasize that these disturbing incidents are the exception, not the rule.  Mostly, gradually, freedom of thought has supplanted the mostly Christian creed of early Unitarianism.  Both it and the sister religion, Universalism, have moved to an inclusive eclectic stance that accommodates Christians, humanists, and others.

Within our churches and between them, there was and is a tension between those inspired by the sentiments and ideas of Christianity and Free Thought.  Tensions over slavery, economics, and other social issues distressed congregations.  The economic downturns of 1857 and 1929 pressured congregations to agree to disagree rather than part into two expensive sites.  Progressive thought is precarious, but it is also passionate and persistent.  Orthodox thought is prevalent, but it is also passionate and persistent.  Such are the characters of our churches and fellowships, and indeed, the human community.  How to get along – one and one within the larger one?

As a liberal minister, it is my job to remember that my perspective is not necessarily known or accepted by others and that other’s perspectives are what they sincerely hold, however difficult that can become in the dynamic diversity of community.  In other words, if you are basically Christian, that’s OK and I believe you are informed, comforted, and guided by it.  Similarly, if you are an atheist, that’s OK and I believe you are right to hold what you deem to be true and right.  Beyond respect and tolerance, creative synergy can emerge in both from respectful engagement, while estranged trouble follows fractious factions.

I’ve been estranged from the UUA for over fifteen years.  I had been bothered by their growth strategy involving forsaking the fellowships that support it and investing mainly in new start-ups in large metropolitan areas, and then by seeking injured souls rather than cultural creatives.  Instead of attracting the movers and shakers we once were known for, they went for numbers in cities.  Instead of supporting the over half of the congregations that make up the UUA, the fellowships, they invested in a few minister-led settings of their own choice and design, using your money for their agenda.

Then, when I raised what I thought were thoughtful ideas in the touchy area of homosexuality, my ideas were not engaged, but shunned.  Among other issues, in the face of group pressure for unanimity, I was the only minister in the Pacific Northwest chapter to say I would go a congregation the UUA had deemed to have denied settlement to a gay minister.  I did this because I believe it is the congregation’s business to decide who they call to their community more than it is Boston’s.  The accusation of homophobia can be appropriate, but it can also be a power play.  Honoring the “inherent worth and dignity” of gays, laudable though that is, doesn’t mean forsaking it for all others, and it doesn’t empower Boston’s overruling “the right of conscience” and the “democratic process” of the congregations.

This all got portrayed on the front page of the district’s newspaper as if I were in dialog with a colleague on it, when in fact no one asked me why I had voted as I had.  The ministerial wagons circled tight and I was out.  At the last district meeting I attended during that era, a prominent and popular gay minister vaguely railed against “those who violate our principles” and wondered if it is time to run such people and positions out.  Ironically, I was running a video camera on him.  Disappointingly for our movement and me, I was not standing with him in a dynamic engagement of ideas.

Since the early days in Boston, Unitarians can exhibit, as Charles Lyttle relates, “Calvanistic legalism and Puritan authoritarianism.”  Self-righteous judgmentalism is endemic in western religion.  It’s what some love to do.  Some love to judge just who is in and who is out.  I helped move me out by crossing the forbidden line and twice necked with a young woman barely related to my Ashland congregation.  Unlike President Clinton, I said what I did, but wild accusations took hold.  This resulted in much upheaval, a letter of reprimand from Boston, my resignation, and my being treated like a hideous criminal.  I’ll spare you the insulting broadside I inherited.  Fourteen minutes of kissing meant more than eight years of successful service and led to fourteen years of shunning by colleagues.  I reached out to all the ministers who came to Ashland since, but none have reached out to me, nor have any colleagues other than Rick Davis of Salem.

During this self-created exile I could have re-entered ministry elsewhere, but I had lost the spirit for it.  This congregation, which I had helped establish in 1987, the UUGP, helped put me back on my feet and stand me in the pulpit again.  That led to serving a few others on an intermittent basis, but mostly, I made my way via non-ministerial labors.  When Ashland came open again last fall, fourteen years and four ministers later, and I stumbled around below the poverty line doing work that doesn’t actualize my talents and calling, I applied.  A month later, what I thought was before their search committee turned out to be stalled in Boston, held up by someone who determined I wouldn’t even be allowed to try to relate to where I had had trouble.  What I had helped build, tripling the congregation and buying a lovely building, just down the street from where I’ve lived for over twenty years, was denied me in Boston.  I was chagrinned.

I was also very broke and worried about it.  I couldn’t help but compare what I do for this UU congregation and what I make in return and what the UUA does and how much they make.  I serve and scrape by; they take and manipulate from afar.  My gripe isn’t with you.  I have mostly good relations with my congregations, but Boston doesn’t seem to see or appreciate that.

Reluctantly, I applied to another west coast fellowship.  I have something to give and some UU fellowships can afford to pay me for it.  This brings up my ambivalence about those aspects of UUism that don’t enthuse me, but it beckons forth my enthusiasm, hoping a mutually beneficial relationship can ensue.  If not, I’ve other things to do in life.

I am centered in me, not Boston.  You should be centered here, not there.  I don’t fully trust the trends and power plays that take over Boston.  Recently, we’re expected to deliberately reach out to blacks, despite the lack of them locally and the presence of Latinos and less-affluent people perhaps more needing our religious ways.  We’re encouraged to use “a language of reverence,” and look, I suppose, more Christian-like.  An embarrassment about humanists and atheists persists.  All this is OK if we remember that our religion is our business, to be enjoyed in our way.  The ways of religion are many and varied.  I don’t expect you to accede to any particular creed or deed, mine or theirs.  I want you to fulfill your UU and American inheritances by being fully yourselves in the ways you deem best.

Reverend Brad Carrier

For the UU’s of Grants Pass

October 4, 2008

Filed under: Unitarian Universalist by brad
No Comments »

Are Unitarian Universalists Christian?  Some are.  Some aren’t.  The question is as old as the religions themselves, going back to their forming and founding.  The answer depends on who gets to answer.  If orthodox (that is, “conforming to approved doctrine”) Christians get to determine, then no, we’re not.  We’re heretics, which word comes from “those who choose,” because we choose to see and say our truth, our Christianity, as our religion.  That’s older than the Protestant Reformation, for the early Christians differed too, some claiming to win and own the authority to say who’s in and who is out.  Before it was even called Christian, it was the Jesus Movement, a set of those enthused by the story of Jesus, and they differed too.  There’s differences right there in the scriptures between the apostles and disciples.  The only one who would know what it meant to be a Christian would be the Christ Himself, that is, or was, Jesus.  Would Jesus worship himself?  Would he want or allow others to worship him?  Would he demand to be believed in and exalted, or be a bit more humble?  Would he tithe?  Would Jesus be a Christian?

Well, I’ve wandered back to the source to illustrate there have always been various sorts and forms of “Christian.”  Who gets to say who’s in and who is out has always been a hodgepodge of grabbing and grasping, some saying they get to say, others saying it otherwise.  It’s a simple claim of definition and, hence, contention.

There have always been those who claim to have the authority to say what is orthodox and what is heresy, who is in and who is out, and there have always been those who say what they say has no sway and “we’ll do it our way.”  We’re in that tradition.

Historically, of course you remember that both the Unitarian and the Universalist religions were Christian.  Each claimed scriptural rationale to restore their Christianity, Unitarian meaning “God is one, not three,” and Universalist meaning there is no hell, for “God loves all.”  Both did so amidst the ire of scorn and even the fire of the stake from other Christians.

Dogmatism transcends Christianity, but Christianity has often been dominated by dogmatism.  Since the earliest to today it has been met by others doing what they want anyway.  There are thousands of Christian religions.  It isn’t as though the Protestant Reformation created only a few more orthodox faiths.  The diversification goes on.  We’re part of it.

Before we got labeled “Unitarian” in the Boston area in the earliest nineteenth century we were called “Liberal Christian.”  The Universalists got to be known as the “no-hell Christians” and were one of the largest faiths on the expanding U.S. frontier.

So we’re Christian by historical roots in both Europe and America, but we’re also part of a larger, if undefined, tradition of trying to see and say the truth as best we can.  That and the affirming of the wisdom of our freedom to think, say, and live as we choose is part of the larger human endeavor.  Freely saying the truth is trans-religious.  It resides in the heart of science, literature, and all art.  It is at the core of who we are.

So if we UU’s still consider ourselves Christian, it includes honoring the wisdom of freedom in us as we are to think and speak the truth as best we can.  This of course differs greatly from those Christians who claim they know the teachings of God and are willing to impose them.  They’re also part of a trans-religious phenomenon in humanity: presumptuous bullies.

Well, that’s an extreme.  There is always that kind of person in all cultures.  Fortunately, we’re protected from them by our secular First Amendment.  And more importantly, most Christians are not the scary dogmatists we remember or fear.  Most Christians are decent people trying to do what they deem is right.  More Christians see through and put up with the dogmatism of their religions than say so.  People think for themselves whether encouraged or allowed or not.  We happen to be in a tradition of making tradition as we go, trusting a dynamic, pluralistic process that lets us think and speak for ourselves and differ more than most Christian religions tend to do.  We’re the liberal Christians who let Humanists, Pagans and Atheists in, and we like them.

It should also be said that our congregations vary in how Christian they are.  Some UU’s very much claim their Christianity.  Others do not consider themselves Christian at all.  Many incorporate it as part of our history and culture along with elements of other faith and philosophical perspectives.  The east coast often appears more traditional in form, and the west more experimental, but even that is a generality.  And within any congregation are a variety of faith perspectives.  Within any one person’s life there is variation over time and even within one’s private perspective and belief.

We could ask whether we want to be considered Christian.  Some would; some wouldn’t.  I suppose it depends on what Christian means.

If it means the only way to be saved from hell is to have faith that Jesus is the one and only incarnation of God, I doubt there are many Christian UU’s.  If it means having faith saves you and that you’ll then be forgiven no matter what you do, and you will probably be bad anyway because you’re born under the curse of Adam’s sin, I doubt many UU’s would say they’re Christian.  If it means voting for any sort of candidate who is against abortion and for war, all with an attitude of self-righteous conviction, then I doubt many UU’s are Christian.

But if being Christian has less to do with Paul, Augustine, and the tradition grown on them, and more to do with Jesus and the way he was, then more UU’s will be Christian.  One of the more enduring and hopeful aspects of Christianity is Jesus.  His daring honesty and kindness, his wide inclusiveness, his challenging teachings – all these call us to be us more fully, like he was, fully.

Plus, now that we know more about those primal Jesus Movement groups of the first and second centuries, the more human and humanistic we see the followers of Jesus were.  The gospels of Philip, Thomas, and Mary speak to our intelligence, openness, and heart.  (See Elaine Pagel’s exploration of these fascinating pre-canonical writings.)

Buried for two thousand years and discovered only in 1945, the scriptures unearthed at Nag Hammadi showed a Jesus who was more concerned with illusion and enlightenment than sin and repentance.  He not only let Mary Magdalene preach, he would kiss her on the mouth.  Peter was jealous of Mary and disputed her place as teacher, claiming the lineage for men only, especially himself.

We forget that “Christ” was a title, not Jesus’ last name.  Jesus did not claim it for himself; it was applied to him by others, especially John and Paul.  Paul never knew Jesus, yet he claimed to know Christ.

Centuries later, Augustine would expand on Paul to justify the sacraments and the authority of the church.  When Constantine converted to Christianity in 313, it was partly a political move building on Augustine’s teachings that God rules through the bishops and the emperor.  Because we are fallen beings, we need to be ruled, Augustine reasoned.  Yet, John Chrysostom argued that we are created in the image of God.  It is by our free and common decision that we arrive at self-rule.  Living under the emperor was the result of sin, not its fix, Chrysostom explained.  Government rules by force, he complained.  We, however learn how to live with liberty and justice.

We know that Augustine prevailed and that Christianity soon became the established religion of the empire, imposed by decree.  Dogmatic force became the way of the church, from forming the canon to the Inquisition.  Christianity came to resemble the Roman soldiers more than Jesus.

It took eons for sensible religion, humanistic freedoms, and science to emerge from the certitudes of the church.  The Unitarians questioned the inflated status of Jesus and pointed out that the Trinity, so important in the rituals of the Catholic Church, was not scriptural.  Nor was the concept of hell, the Universalists explained.  Like the trinity, hell was a construct in the minds of some.  It was the ultimate fantasy of cruel, dogmatic minds.

Christianity had come to insist death could be overcome by belief in Jesus as the Christ.  It cited miracles in the Bible as evidence of this assumed truth.  “If he did not rise,” said Paul, “our faith is in vain.”  But Emerson mocked this reliance on miracles and advised the young ministers at Harvard that the miracles of the bible were as some monster while the miracles of natural existence spoke constantly around them and in them.  “Historical Christianity,” Emerson said, “has dwelt, dwells, with noxious exaggeration about the person of Jesus,” blocking the spontaneous love in us, resulting in “the friend of man is made the injurer of man.”  Rather, he urged, “always the seer is a sayer.”  He bemoaned the result of not having primal religion in us.  “Genius leaves the temple to haunt the senate or the market.  Literature becomes frivolous.  Science is cold… Society lives to trifles…”  Rather, we need to know and show that “God is, not was.”

The young Theodore Parker expanded this, teaching that the truths of Christianity rested not on fantastic miracles but the truths of the Christian frame of mind and heart itself.  Emerson and Parker were scandals of their time, heretics.  They sought to awaken souls to the miracles of the natural world and the wonders of the inner.  Come alive in this life, they taught, not some fancied afterlife.

Decades later, Kenneth Patton developed an inspiring set of readings and rituals designed to relate us to the natural world, both outer and inner.  His church depicted an atom at one extreme, a galaxy at the other, with worshipers in between.   The free-thought and humanist aspects of an honest, living religion found home in our Unitarian and Universalist churches.

If Christianity rests on dogmatism and miracles then UU’s aren’t Christian.  If Christianity rests on inclusivity, rationality, kindness, forgiveness and being alive in one’s being like Jesus was alive in his, then UU’s are more likely to be Christian.  If Jesus was tuned into God in a way that all humans can be, UU’s can be Christian.

If Christianity is owned by those who wish to keep it a matter of belief in Jesus as God in a way no one else is, the Bible as complete and inerrant, and the sacraments a magical way to fix our sins, then I suppose not only would we not be Christian, we wouldn’t want to be.  Why identify with and support that which you don’t believe and wouldn’t recommend?  But to leave the definition to the dogmatists is also to mock the life of Jesus and all those who tried to come alive in the ways he showed us to live.  Because Paul claimed to know Christ in his way doesn’t mean we can’t in ours.

If Jesus was one with God like mystics of the western and eastern worlds also experience, if he cared for humans despite their labels, if he spoke his truth despite pressure, if he invites us to live so totally, then we can identify with him.  If “Christ” means that in us that is of God that we relate to and activate because of his inspiring example, then we’re more likely to want to be Christian.

The long and short of it is that this consideration is an old one.  I do not resolve it for us.  We decide and declare as we go.  All told, after all the history and the persistent notions of sin and salvation, after all the other strains that have come into our fold, from humanistic to pagan, I would suppose we were Christian but have grown to something beyond it.  What label to call it, I leave for you to decide.

Brad Carrier

For the UU’s of Grants Pass

© March 7, 2010

Filed under: Christianity Critiqued, Unitarian Universalist by brad
No Comments »

These letters are acronyms for four kinds of drugs that I would like to explore in this sermon. Basically, I will recommend them as possibly problematic but potentially beneficial for persons and society.

On the whole, and especially compared with the Counter Culture, I have not found a lot of interest in entheogens or other drugs in our UU culture. UU’s have concern for civil liberties, curtailing a needless and excessive police/prison state, the right for people to live their own lives as long as it doesn’t hurt others, scientific and medical interest, some experimentation with recommendation and some with warnings, latitude for ministers to be honest, but overall, not a keen craving to know or try such sacramental substances.

UU’s have cared about sacraments, though. Emerson quit the Unitarian ministry only a few years into it, saying he wouldn’t pretend to transform the Communion bread and wine into the body and blood of Jesus. He preferred natural and manifest miracles to feigned ones, snowflakes and intuition to Transubstantiation. Emerson wanted to acquaint us with divinity directly. His 1838 address to the graduating Harvard seminarians is a classic call for them to “know” and manifest God directly, not just read and preach bout It. “Alas for the unhappy man that is called to stand in the pulpit, and not give the bread of life… The village blasphemer sees fear in the face, form, and gait of the minister… [Yet] all that is clearly due today is not to lie… That which he venerates is still his [or her] own, though he has not realized it yet…”

I introduce this largely unspoken and potentially risky topic with Emerson quotes, because I agree with his stance about life and ministry. I take my job as simply this: to give my truth and care for those around me. Also, like Emerson, I am far more excited by snowflakes and consciousness than I am by many religious or spiritual teachings and topics. The actual miracle enthuses. “Enthuse” comes from “having God.” It is akin to “entheogen”: in-God-generate. In my lifetime, compared to all other experiences and aspects of existence, entheogens interest, inform and attract me more than most things and ideas. I’m not attracted in an addicted sense, but out of promising curiosity about intense and meaningful experiences. I also agree with many partakers (Huxley, Shulgin, Ball) that these substances are good for persons and society. So, sit back and enjoy a different sort of a Drug Awareness Sunday, a sort of Free Drug Event (without the actual illegal drugs). I know you didn’t ask for such a sermon, but I thought you’d be interested in hearing something other than the perpetually misleading “Just Say No” campaigns. UU’s may not be into drugs, but I’m proud that it is a place where we can attempt some useful honesty about them.

Some definitions: By drugs I mean any substance we take to alter our mind or mood. That’s a large category, from aspirin and coffee, through Valium and Vicadin, through addictive and problematic meth, heroin, coke, and alcohol, to many entheogens, four of which I’ll describe. Obviously, this is a wide category with wildly differing effects. Lumping them all together and calling many of them bad and making them illegal is a clumsy and destructive a way for a society to go. Alcohol can enhance an evening, and it can ruin a life and culture. We should admit this, advise and adjust, not create a police/prison/mob world of fines, prisons, and enormous profits. Not all drugs are the same; we should honestly delineate. Taking meth, inhaling glue or snorting gasoline alters one’s consciousness, but affects health, lives and society in deleterious ways, whereas taking entheogens affects those same dimensions in predominately positive ways. I honor these sacred aids to us and will not shrink from publically praising and promoting them. They’re too good for us, and the damage done to them and us by the War on them is an un-American shame, an insult to our inherent freedom, an assault on our divine prerogatives. That declared, I would also admit that even these divine aids can be misused. I recommend the neutral and natural state as a touchstone for all drug use or explorations. If one can’t spend periods without their drug of choice (be it problematic or promising) it is a misbalance, a clinging to an idol or a habit. Healthiness and regular living in society should be served by the drugs, not the reverse, where too often some are “always stoned but never high.” But neither should our reasonable concerns and cautions be the only thing ever told about drugs, especially the entheogens. So let’s consider these four entheogens, moving from the milder and more recreational to the more profound.

THC

Delta-9 tetrahydrocannabinol is the chemical name for the primary part in pot’s getting people high. You might think marijuana (or cannabis, or pot) is relatively new. In fact, it goes back thousands of years in Africa and India. It both relaxes and energizes, promotes the enjoyment of the day, and has few side effects. Some kinds make you want to work: Mine workers in South Africa used to have two pot breaks a day, to get them working again. The two thousand year old shaman mummy found recently in China had some in his grave. Old Shiva in India was said to carry some concentrated resins, hash, in his belt, and it is still used by many Saddhus and others in India today. In fact, it is the center of a transnational, worldwide culture, enjoyed all around the earth, far more than we’re hearing about. Our own modern Properties and Chemicals text used to describe it as: “A mood enhancer, almost invariably for the better.”

But you wouldn’t know these things in America. In the early twentieth century it became politically expedient and commercially lucrative to deliberately lie about pot by linking it to Mexicans and lunacy. What Americans didn’t realize then, or since, is how commercial interests wanted to eliminate the supply of hemp so that cotton, timber, and nylon could be sold instead. Hemp is the weak cousin of pot. It used to be a patriotic duty to grow it for fiber. Washington and Jefferson both did, and there is good evidence they also enjoyed it as a smoke. How ironic and tragic that what helped inspire our core spiritual values in America, as in “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” has been twisted into a convenient excuse for intimidation and imprisonment in a growing police state.

Having been around a pot culture for almost 50 years and seeing the “Reefer Madness” propaganda that persists is to see how sinister and mistaken the drug warriors are. Giggles, munchies, laziness, rebelliousness, and creativity should not be threatened or invaded by armed intruders, wreaking emotional and legal agony on innocent citizens. This divides us from each other, our police, and the truth. Fortunately, medical marijuana has acquainted many who otherwise would never have understood this. Marijuana is a mild, pleasant, interesting, effective medicine. Grandma used to rail against the devil weed; now she’s more fun and pleasant when she smokes it. Both California and Oregon are on the path to legalize and capitalize on the same stuff it has direly cost to futilely persecute. Would that I could, I’d share lots with those of you who wanted. We could have a Drug Awareness Sunday that you’d probably find relaxing, musical, funny, and imaginative. It saddens me to see people endure bleak, difficult, or just plain boring lives, growing old and dying having never known the aids and options THC and the other entheogens afford.

MDMA

Ecstasy was synthesized in the 40’s and was only rediscovered years later. It is the Love Drug. Its effect lasts two to six hours. It grants a temporary reprieve from paranoia, anger, resentment, worry, and relationship woes into a time of honest, easy love. It was being used by marriage and family therapists to good results with couples until it was declared a Schedule I drug, unsuitable for use or even study. It also has had much success with those soldiers suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, wounded deeply in their emotional memory and functioning. (The harsh restrictions have been somewhat relaxed.) Couples can live decades in simmering anger or co-dependent mutual binds. One session of MDMA can open up fearless loving-kindness. This can give voice to all they really have inside that had been shrouded by troubles. Repair of the relationship, or at least loving-kind understanding and acceptance of the other, is effortlessly likely. Ecstasy isn’t as psychedelic as LSD. It isn’t very visual. An investigator in Shulgin’s PIHKAL described it as “all the joy and beauty I can stand.” Grand affection for another, others, and the cosmos is certainly experienced. Many young people also take this at raves. Sex while on it can be wonderful, except sex isn’t wanted as much as the lovely relating. The genitals aren’t awakened as much as the heart.

LSD

LSD is a whole order of magnitude more interesting and powerful than THC or MDMA. Though substances near to it in effect go back thousands of years (in certain mushrooms and molded rye) it wasn’t until around 1940 that scientist Hofmann tasted its tasteless power and discovered its fascinating effects. Kaleidoscopic visions of fractal paisleys coupled to a profound sense of meaning and cosmic connection swept through him, as it does for many who tried it since (or will). Not every experience is predictable. It can vary from person to person and time to time. It can be a disorienting or frightening experience, and some people have had trouble or worse. That admitted as the unusual case, it can be used in mild doses while functioning well in society and in large doses for a profound journey into consciousness, energy, and meanings far removed from our usual daily frame of mind. Some people take it only once, satisfied they have encountered a reality undergirding and informing the rest of their lives. Others do it many times in their lives. I’ve noticed a sort of anti-addictive quality to wanting it. It actually wards off wanting it too frequently and leaves a lasting afterglow of “knowing.” An LSD trip can last 12 hours. It is astonishing to see how small the actual substance is to then find how big it is in our consciousness. (When I showed some to my aging father, inviting him on a trip, he thought I was joking. After it set in he knew how extraordinaire it was. After a long period of silence he remarked, “You have not reached my mind.” An adept observation.) One can’t remember all of what one encounters and carries from a LSD trip when coming out of it, much less years later in a sermon. It seems a portal into a deep, profound, colorful, energetic self and world. I cannot help but resonate to William Blake’s painting of a man living in a lovely and majestic world poking his head through its veil to see an even more wonderful one.

DMT

5 MeO DMT is the specific form of DMT that I’m more familiar with. The other variety, N,N-DMT, is more explicitly visual, with brilliant, colorful displays of complex symmetrical patterns, along with the sense of cosmic connection. 5 MeO DMT is even more direct and overwhelming than that. It has been called the God Pill by some. The active chemical is found in certain grasses, barks, and the facial juices of a toad. (How shamans came to suck toads’ eyes, I don’t know.) It also is found in the cells and neurons of all mammals. This is the active ingredient in Ayahuasca, a native mix of one plant that overcome’s the body’s defense of the active ingredient in time for another plant’s active ingredient to work its wonders. There are two types of churches in America that ingest this sacred brew as part of its ritual worship, including a local one. I have not attended, partly because I don’t want to have a powerful spiritual experience put through a particular ritual and assumed theology. Then there’s the throwing up. Throwing up is unpleasant, then relieving, but yucky, especially in a congregation of others, some of whom are also throwing up. You have to wonder why people would go to a communion that might make them throw up.

Before I go on to describe the DMT experience, let’s ask this about these sacraments: Why would people willingly throw up, eat bitter cacti that won’t chew yet feels like snot, drink the pee of the honored leader who got the first round of the special mushroom, tempt psychic annihilation/restoration, risk legal repercussion, and encounter disapproval from an ignorant, disapproving public? What is it about DMT, LSD, MDMA, THC, and other related entheogens such as psilocybin mushrooms, peyote, mescaline and the like? What is so good about these things that people endure and risk all sorts of unpleasantness to have them? Not that every encounter with an entheogen is difficult or unpleasant; quite the opposite, for most experiences are profoundly positive, life-affirming, love-awakening, and utterly delightful, if sometimes wildly difficult, then revelatory. People risk police, scorn, expense, vomiting, having one’s ego dissolved and reassembled – because it’s worth it.

When I inhaled a long toke of 5 MeO it took less than a minute for me to fall back into a ringing, energetic vast expanse of centralized bright energy felt to be my real me, my self before, below, and beyond my usual me. God, Love, and Me were One. I gushed, “Oh, Yes! This is It! It is Real! I am satisfied. Oh, my God! Thank You! Yes!” Though my body was there, I was centered in vastness, alive with pure, wild energy. I knew the Oneness of it all, of us all. I knew love is the portal and the destination. I felt overwhelmingly grateful for my whole life, all my ancestors, the cosmos, the sacrament, and the couple who voyaged with me. My life felt satisfied. I had found it. All the other efforts of my life, and all the attempts with entheogens, led to this, and I was glad. Were I to die, which I will, I have made it to an answer.

DMT is in the cells, tissues and neurons of all mammals as well as the plants mentioned. It may be the natural substance our pineal gland secretes in abundance at near-death experiences. The advantage of the drug is that you don’t have to actually die. You can get a quick, egoless view of your entire life in some deep and important way, or a profound immersion in Being itself, or inclusion in the Oneness connecting us all. It is hard to convey the overwhelming power, meaning, and profound loveliness of this entheogen – a sacrament that delivers. It hardly seems fair or wise to try to outlaw and eliminate this way to visit our deeper reality.

What is it about love, being, and God that should be kept from the citizens who want it? Etc. We haven’t time to explore any more entheogens, or consider other kinds of drugs that people try or resort to. Many natural and synthesized options exist. Some, I warn against. These I favor. Some, I would never try or promote. These I promote with sensible intentions and cautions along with positive purposes and advice. I have a deep appreciation for the plants, toads, shamans, scientists, and guides who find, design, evaluate, and share these sacred substances. They’re far more beneficial than the stuffier mechanisms (church) and lesser drugs (alcohol, opiates, speed) that we have used so far.

Humans are adventurous psychenaughts, curious to explore all manner of consciousness alteration. We should warn and recommend. The possibilities and blessings inherent in these entheogens call humanity to a new world of loving relations. It is as if the universe has given us the keys to itself. The God we sought outside we can experience within. To say it any less plainly or honestly than that would be to fail Emerson’s charge to know divinity directly. “Always a seer is a sayer,” he said. “Only he can give, who has.” “God is, not was,” he reminded. Live in your own actual soul. “…the soul of man is not an organ, but animates and exercises all the organs; it is not a faculty, but a light; it is not the intellect and the will, but the master of the intellect and will… When it breathes through his intellect it is genius; when it breathes through his will, it is virtue; when it flows through his affection, it is love.”

The Easterners say our real self is of the mind and energy of God. Atman and Brahman are One. We find it in our body, yet it isn’t just our body. They say, “Neti, neti,” meaning, “not this, not that,” not this temporary situation, not that desire. It’s not a thought or any idol. Aspiration and anguish are the outer efforts of an inner soul forgetting it is born of, and is the bearer of, Love. Tat twam asi (Thou art That.) Within all effort is a divine ease. Entheogens encounter it, reassuring us.

Acquaint us directly with divinity, indeed!

Reverend Brad Carrier

For the Unitarian Universalists of Grants Pass, Oregon

© May 2, 2010

Filed under: Sex, Drugs, & Rock ‘n Roll by brad
2 Comments »

(I believe in human wholeness – not fragmentation, not partiality, not alienation.  Does this include sex?  Yes!  What the Creator built in we should not shame and alienate.  The topic is vast, the approaches to it are many, and the feelings about it can be prone to upheaval.  What I offer here is limited, provocative, reasonable, and sincere.  I appreciate my liberal congregation, which took this in thoughtful stride.  The version they heard was about half as long as what here follows.)

“Oh, God!”

Have you ever cried this out at orgasm?  This is raw prayer, honest prayer, uncontrollable prayer.  It isn’t a reading in a liturgy, like one we’d use in church, but it can be even closer to God.  Perhaps you cried it out when shaken to your thrilled core.  Perhaps you then felt foolish or guilty for having put God and sex so close together.

That’s what I want to do here today, put God and sex back together.  I want to affirm how we’re made to be inside ourselves and with each other.  I want this for all of us of any age, for as Helen Caldecott reminded us, “We’re sexual from womb to tomb.”  Good.  This is how we’re made.  We can live up to ourselves.

Before I go on to say “yes” to sex we need to acknowledge and include that within us, and those with us, that say “no.”  I heard that Andy Warhol said, “Sex is the biggest nothing there is.”  We’re not always sexual, and when we are it can be an occasion for inner conflict, or guilt, or disgust, or regret.  Sometimes, “Oh, God” is an utterance of remorse over sex.  There are ample reasons to say “no” (pregnancy, disease, disruption, jealousy, dislike).  I could spend the whole sermon on “no.”  Such sermons are common, predictable, and safe.  But they’re also misleading, un-whole, and unhelpful.  I’ve something else in mind and heart, something more suitable for us whole humans and the whole human community, something worthy of the latitude allowed me in a liberal pulpit.

The impetus for this title came during a small group discussion in which three grown women admitted they had sexual feelings, including orgasms, since the age of three or four.  They were not affirmed, protected, and allowed in that realm; instead they were ignored, shamed, punished, or used.  Many people go through life with guilty, private secrets, not knowing most others also have theirs.  Tales of sexual trouble and tragedy are common and can be told in church, but telling of deep gratitude and wild enjoyments is hardly ever shared publically, especially not in church.  Such imbalance fails our human condition and our religious authenticity and responsibility.  When the women shared their isolation and shame, I resolved to make sure there would be at least one pulpit to say yes to sex.  What good is my position as minister unless I live up to my calling to affirm and assist humans as we are and can ideally be?

Putting God close to sex is hardly typical in our western religious mindset.  We’re far more familiar with unease and shame than we are with comfort and celebration.   There’s ample parts of the Bible admonishing us to avoid and distain sex, and only a few places where it is praised.  A printer’s error in 1631 resulted in a Bible that said, “Thou shalt commit adultery,” but few took it as God’s Word.  We think of God as beyond sex or against it, fully forgetting sex is how we’re made, and how we’re made is not a shameful thing.  Saying otherwise seems to presume to judge Creation with our petty, puritan morality.  We’re made sexual, and we’re then made uneasy about it.  The only thing to equal our human interest in sex is our propensity to be easily shamed about it.  An anti-sexual morality is as persistent as it is presumptuous.  For some it is as simple as this: “Ever feel sexy?  Guilty!”  For those believing human nature is basically flawed and fallen, deserving of condemnation and punishment, needing of supernatural redemption, morality can obsess to anti-sexuality for all but married procreative purposes.  Affirming sex can seem devilish.  Exactly backward.

In our creation myths in Genesis we remember that although God had created the whole cosmos, from light to humans, in six evolutionary steps called “good,” another creation story intrudes about the alienation that comes from dividing that goodness into what we wrongly think of as “good and evil.”  Adam and Eve were “naked and not ashamed” before believing the subtle deceiver that they could know good and evil like the gods do.  When they eat of that sort of false knowledge they suddenly realize they are naked.  Ashamed (because now they “know” good and evil) they try to hide from God who made them whole and good.  Then “they knew they were naked and were ashamed.”  What was innocent and whole became fractured and fallen, alienated.  False knowledge leads to shame which leads to blame which leads to pain.  Alienated from their own bodies, each other, their garden, and their God, they go off to have harsh lives alienated from all the goodness that was rightly theirs.  The subtle deceiver has us scurrying ever since, shaming our innate nature and blaming each other about it, barring us from bounty.  Sex was not sin; calling sex sinful was.

The subtle deceiver wasn’t just a snake way back when; it was all the subtle deception since and still.  Saint Paul advised if we cannot remain celibate we should marry.  He advised that even then, it should be performed without passion, perfunctorily, just like it can get in a marriage.  Saint Augustine expanded on Paul’s view that sex was the original sin, saying it was God’s punishment on us.  Though the old church included the natural sexual attributes of Jesus and Mary in its art, as the ages rolled the church became more and more anti-sexual.  Priests barred from marrying could appear chaste but be perverts.  Witches would not only be accused of sleeping with the devil, they would be sexually tortured in a combined investigation and punishment, her tormentors aroused by it.  This sadism is seen also in depictions of hell, where naked people are tortured.  The self-righteous can be aroused by what disgusts them.

There is something very wrong with how anti-sexuality divides us from ourselves, each other, our garden, and our God.   Sex is not our sin, but saying it is seems to be.   From mutilation of our bodies, souls, and society, deliver us, Lord.

Victorian wives were to be chaste, above it all, no matter how numb it made them.  Meanwhile, prostitution flourished for their husbands.  Freud opened the topic up.  Kinsey took a huge survey.  Turns out we are more sexual than we knew.   Some reacted, saying we shouldn’t give in to our animal natures, not noticing that animals are only sexual when it pertains to procreation, which is not often, once a year for many.  Humans do it round the cycle.  Humans are the only animals to do it in the bushes, out of sight.  We’re sexy and guilty.  The only thing to equal our frequent interest in sex is our propensity to be ashamed about it.

Some animals and most humans engage in self-sex, masturbation.  Yet few admit it.  When Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders merely mentioned letting children understand it she was quickly fired.  Her recent conclusion: We live in a sexually dysfunctional society.  I agree.  It is because we don’t live in an erotic society that we’re stuck in a neurotic one.

Mark Twain had fun with the topic.  He said masturbation had the least to recommend it: “As an amusement it is too fleeting; as an occupation, it is too wearing; as a public exhibition, there’s no money in it.”  (Dawn, 285)   Dr. Kellog (the cereal magnate) taught the remedy for masturbation in boys was cutting the end of their penis off and sewing it back up, all without anesthetic.  The practice crept into American delivery rooms in the 1870’s and is still automatically performed in some areas.  Similarly, British gynecologist Isaac Baker Brown claimed women’s troubles were due to the same mono-sexuality, citing eight stages of their diseases from hysteria to idiocy, mania, and death.  Clitorectomy was the cure.  He finally went insane and was discredited in England, but his advice came here and was a recommended procedure to fix the scourge of self-pleasuring as recently as 1936.  Sadly, hideously, mutilating a woman’s precious body by cutting off her tenderest place so she won’t be sexual persists worldwide to the astonishing extent of 137 million girls hacked up a year!  The sin isn’t in the sex; it is in the anti-sex.

What I wonder is: what are we naturally and ideally?  Some see correlations in the animals.  Some think such correlations are pointless, that biology is not destiny and that we have the latitude to be different than our animal inheritance.  They dismiss such correlation as “the naturalistic fallacy.”  In response, I would call that stance “the naturalistic fallacy fallacy.”  Our animal nature doesn’t determine our behaviors but it does have some influence.  Ignoring such won’t inform or help us.

Consider whether we are monogamous and should be (for both men and women).  For a while we were chided: why can’t humans be more monogamous like most animals are?  But when we looked closer at the animals, almost all were non-monogamous.  A mere 3% of mammals are monogamous.  The chimps and bonobo apes we’re closest to are very promiscuous.   We’ve long-looked at chimps, noting they’re like humans in that the males try to hoard and control the females and will use violence both to ward off rivals to have at their females.  This seemed to justify the stance that we are inherently sexual, domineering, jealous, and warlike.  Then we recently discovered the bonobo apes just across the river from the chimps, also our closest cousins.  They too were promiscuously sexual, even more so than chimps, exchanging sex as a favor or to ease social tensions, but in their case, the females are in control of themselves, so they have lots of sex with a variety of the males, and the whole troop is more peaceful.  Does this also model and justify our similar behaviors?  Could free love be natural for us?

It seems clear both behaviors are common in humans.  But even intelligent anthropologists like Helen Fisher tended to dismiss the bonobo example because it seems so alien to how we think we are.  (Fisher, Anatomy of Love, 329)  Even in science there can be a bias against bonobos – because they’re so polymorphously perverse.  Yet when we look closely at chimps and bonobos, we find we’re also like the sexier latter.  Both humans and bonobos copulate throughout the menstrual cycle as well as during pregnancy and lactation.  Both human and bonobo infants develop slower than chimps, needing more care and community.  Both bonobos and humans use sex for sociability.  Bonobos and humans French kiss and face each other during sex.  Bonobos and humans, but not Chimps, have the gene to release oxytocin, the molecule for compassion, trust, generosity, love, and eroticism.  (Sex at Dawn, 72-78)  Both are very sexual, but one in a mean and warlike way, the other in a relaxed and peaceful way.  If we’re like chimps and bonobos, we need to ask which is more natural for us and which way is better for us.  The accusation is that our fallen natures are as bad as chimps.  The solution to that shame, blame, and pain is that we could be as good as bonobos.

Are humans naturally monogamous?  If so, why would we sneak around so much despite the dangers, prohibitions, and punishments?  Helen Fisher in her Anatomy of Love says:

Public whipping, branding, beating, ostracism, mutilation . . . divorce, desertion, death by stoning . . . such cruelties are meted out by people around the world for philandering.  Given these punishments, it is astonishing that human beings engage in extramarital affairs at all.  Yet we do. (87)

Christopher Ryan and Cecilda Jetha, in their important Sex at Dawn: the Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality, focus their echo of this even more tightly:

Think about that.  No group-living nonhuman primate is monogamous, and adultery has been documented in every human culture studied – including those in which fornicators are routinely stoned to death.  In light of all this bloody retribution, it’s hard to see how monogamy comes “naturally” to our species. (98)

Ryan and Jetha study the prehistory of modern sex via animal studies (especially chimps and bonobos) and cross-cultural anthropological studies of monogamous and non-monogamous groups of people.  Not only do the closely-related animals indicate we aren’t cut out for monogamy, successful models abound where married women are allowed their many lovers.  Ryan and Jetha document how widespread and successful multi-partner love lives are for humans and how frequently and presumptuously anthropologists have tended to ignore, explain away, and judge this.  We inherit an assumption: that monogamy and jealousy are natural and even divine.  Instead we find communities around the world that have more social cohesion and peace by allowing married couples their multiple lovers.  The chimp model is not our only option.  There is more bonobo in us than we’ve been allowed to discover, explore and benefit from.

The Mosuo women of southern China are expected and protected in having their autonomy, including regularly having sex with numerous lovers.  They have no words for murder, rape, or war, and rather than husband or wife, they have a word meaning friend.  The Inuit offer not just beds to travelers, but their wives as well.  The Kulina women of Amazonia ritually reward those men of the village who bring them meat, but they’re not to bed their own husbands.  The Mehinaku of Brazil find extramarital relations to contribute to community cohesion.  The Warao of Brazil suspend ordinary relations for the ritual mamuse, where the free-love fest is considered honorable, as are the children of it (a practice of many communities around the world).  The Matis people are typical in thinking many men father a child, where such plural seeding and parenting is considered mandatory.  In Islam the Nikah Misyar (traveler’s marriage”) and the Nikah Mut’ah (marriage for pleasure) are both blessed options.  (Dawn, 90-104, 113-137)  Even in Afghanistan, Rafsanjani blesses the “Sigheh,” a temporary marriage of hours or months.

As a generalization, where sex is coupled to ownership and control, inequality and violence are common, but where sex is more an autonomous decision, equality and peace prevail.  Ryan and Jetha locate the change from sexy and bonobo-like to mean and chimp-like in the rise of agriculture.  Stable settlements around grain silos allowed for hoarding, inequality, a division of labor (assigning women their restricted roles) scarcity, and war.  Even our diet got worse.  Agriculture, writing, war, and civilization go together, but how well?  Freud said civilization is born of sublimation.  Perhaps that’s the problem.  We’ve sublimated our natural urges and connections into a perverse economy and a worse ecology.  We may have needed a work ethic to discover new lands and work them, but do we still?  Does creating jobs to make disposable stuff that has to be recreated make sense in a world of depleting resources and accumulating poisons?  If we were to “make love, not war” how might that go?

We know that making love on the sly doesn’t go well.  Secret affairs, when discovered, are occasions for ample anger over betrayal.  Hurt and reprisal run rampant, then persist.  But consider: Reactivity often creates more injury and upheaval than the actual sex did.  Affairs need not result in family fracture.  We begrudgingly admit and allow F.D.R his Lucy, and Bill his Monica, and we reluctantly accept Eleanor’s and Hilary’s keeping their wayward husbands as if demeaning but necessary.  We aren’t so ready to understand and accept that, like the founding fathers and mothers, they might have “an arrangement.”

Some take the whole mess of presumed monogamy, with the secrecy, sneaking, and lies to be itself due to a lack of love, not a protection of it.  Some people don’t believe affairs must result in tragedies like divorce.  For them, fidelity transcends monogamy.  They seek to be true to their lover or mate in the long run, not be ruined if he or she gets close to others during her or his life as is natural to do.

Some seek an honest revealing of who they are and how they feel with and for each other.  They seek to allow their mates many lovers, not as an offence against their marriage, but a part of it.  Tristan Taormino interviews many sorts of this type of couple in her book Opening Up: A Guide to Creating and Sustaining Open Relationships.  She writes in a frank and realistic tone, admitting the advantages and pitfalls of such values and ventures:

Many people in monogamous relationships deal with cheating all the time: the fear of cheating, the suspicion of cheating, the discovery of cheating, the aftermath of cheating.  Nonmonogamous folks recognize that during a lifetime you can and will be attracted to other people even if you are in a wonderful, fulfilling relationship; they make room in their relationship for these attractions rather than allow them to cause anxiety, jealousy, and unreasonable expectations. (Pg. 27)

Instead of fidelity being based on monogamy, fidelity is to the person.  Such ventures range from swingers who only want non-romantic sex with strangers to various “arrangements” of couples regarding the sexual, romantic and practical parameters they will or will not allow (which might include non-monogamy) to formal families of three or more sharing legally-binding life-long commitments.

With half of our marriages “failing” (amidst a backdrop of an alienated society prone to launch needless wars while polluting and exhausting our natural resources) perhaps the admitting and embracing of our pleasures and prerogatives in our private sex life, social love lives, and marriages might elevate and heal us.  Assuming this can only lead to trouble while then consigning us to the oftentimes lonely, dull, and soul-exhausting confines of monogamy (complete with assumptions of jealousy, betrayal and tragedy) will likely lead to more of the same old social troubles.

Sex is not our sin.  Sex is part of the whole goodness God built in.  Enjoying that alone or with various others may not ruin us as much as denying and punishing it.  Transforming jealousy into compersion (taking joy in one’s mate enjoying another) might be just the key we need to unlock the opening of a more whole, healthy, loving society, difficult though that transition might get.  Affairs don’t have to result in divorce.  Friendliness and flirting ought not to be occasions for accusation, upheaval, and simmering hostility.  Inside us and amongst us, our sexuality needn’t be a big problem, a sin, a sure sign we’re wrong and alien from goodness and God.  Sex is part of a blessing we can be grateful for, one we can celebrate privately, socially, and in church.

My effort is not to convince you so much as remind you that you and your loved ones are free to fashion the sort of life you want, including regarding sexual and relational matters.  If you want monogamy, choose it and be fulfilled in it.  Most do and some of them are satisfied, sexually and otherwise.  But many couples and singles are not, and they needn’t remain at odds.  If you want something else, say so in an authentic, trusting, and responsible way.  If you want a relevant religious community, support each other in the ways that you can.   (A UU group discussing this can be found at UUPA.org.)

I am impatient with those who say, “Oh, we tried open marriages in the 60’s and they didn’t work.”  Well, we tried marriages in the 60’s as well, and they didn’t work either.  Therapists might know what didn’t work, but I doubt very many get paid $100 an hour to hear how well it is working.  What we have is an overall puritan culture that assumes we should be monogamous and that we should be ashamed and punished if we’re not.

I would add a caveat to this: Monogamy during the breeding years makes some sense.  Even though many primitive cultures practice “partible paternity,” believing many fathers make a baby, we know only one does.  Someone else’s child can be a visible reminder to a husband that he’s raising some other man’s offspring.  While some can act like Saint Joseph and love the child anyway, many can’t, so I see sensible reason for monogamy in this aspect.  And I grant its safety and wisdom for those sincerely wanting monogamy and are able to follow it later in life too.  What I don’t assume is that it is suitable for all couples everywhere.  It is their business to agree and explore whatever option they choose.

Another caveat is that many of the sexier cultures studied are small, stable, and isolated.  They have a supportive culture that understands, accepts, and nurtures what they do.  They agree, together.  The norm is to share, not hide or hoard.  But most modern humans live in large cities of mostly strangers easily moving to other places.  Will the children of many fathers have many fathers to care for them?  (Too many lack any fathering, even by their genetic one.)  Do we have a supportive culture that accepts and honors women’s sexuality and that can overcome our usual jealousy?  Can we move from hoarding and hurt to sharing and compersion?

What we need is a supportive culture exploring, blessing, and practicing the freedom and responsibility of a more natural human sexual community.  That nascent community is thin and scattered but important for such pioneers and our society.  What seems foreign and wrong might turn out to be natural and right.  Ryan and Jetha’s point might be right:

. . . when some loudmouth at the bar declares that “patriarchy is universal, and always has been!”  It’s not, and it hasn’t. . .  Societies in which women have lots of autonomy and authority tend to be decidedly male-friendly, relaxed, tolerant, and plenty sexy.  Got that, fellas?  If you’re unhappy at the amount of sexual opportunity in your life, don’t blame the women.  Instead, make sure they have equal access to power, wealth, and status.  Then watch what happens.  (Pg. 134)

When women are entrusted, protected, and praised for their sexual choices the men also get what they want.  Beyond possessiveness and jealousy might be pleasure and peace.

It isn’t just women’s externalities that are crucial; it is the interior surges and desires that must also be known and valued.  A fascinating study (Bailey and Chivers at Northwestern University) paired people’s responses to erotic pictures to their actual arousal as measured by instruments.  There was no discrepancy for heterosexual men, homosexual men, and homosexual women; what turned them on really did and what didn’t, didn’t.  But for heterosexual women the reporting didn’t match the arousal.  They tended to report arousal only at socially-sanctioned activities, especially between husbands and wives.  But their actual response was to be turned on to all sorts of sexual combinations and kinky acts.  In other words, women tend to hide what turns them on.  They’re far sexier than they’ve been said, told, allowed, protected, and praised in being.

This makes some sense when we remember how disproportionately women inherit the long-term results of sex while the other three populations don’t.  It is women who get pregnant by men, swelling their bellies, putting them through sometimes difficult births, requiring their nurture, all of it lasting as much as a lifetime.  In a society of “all against all” women suffer the most and are easily abandoned by those who escape responsibility.  They’re told they’re chaste, hounded if they’re not, used as breeding stock and hearth keeper, and basically not honored for their holy role as mothers and sex mates.   A key to renewed sexuality is affirming, honoring, and allowing women to have and admit their sex-making, not just their home-making.

If we are to have freedom we must live up to responsibility.  The book Opening Up seemed fun and adventurous at first but became a chore when it got to group rules, property ownership, and tax status for group marriages.  We’d like to play, but as the song reminds, “that’s what you get, folks, for making whoopee.”  Love leads to sex, yes, but sex also leads to love, and love is sometimes difficult and dutiful.  We connect as persons.  We connect as a society favoring various norms.  How those norms shift is for us to decide, not some prissy, presumptuous prude wagging his finger at us from the 4^th century.   Considering how various animals and human communities do it helps us reunite the religious with the natural.  Instead of “I, hiding and hoarding me and mine,” we might fashion “us, being free with and taking care of each other.”

As we begin to evolve out of the agricultural, patriarchal age of inequality, with scarcity amidst overabundance, frequent warfare, and ecological suicide, where people languish for lack of simple touch, sex, and mutual kindness, where “all against all” is assumed to be better for us than common abundance, widespread freedom, and supportive mutuality – perhaps we can and should call on God via that honest prayer, “Oh, God!”  Sex in and of itself is not our sole salvation.  But I doubt we’ll have personal and social happiness and peace unless we once again make it part of our healthy wholeness.

So, yes to sex!  Thank you, God for this ancient, urgent lure and love.  Thank you for our wonderful bodies.   Thank you that what we’re attracted to what is really there and easy to find solace and satisfaction with.  Thank you for our wild pleasures.  May we dare to be ourselves as fully, exuberantly, and responsibly as we are made to be.  Walk boldly back through the flaming swords of shame and blame into the honest innocence of your sexual self.  Whether wanton and wild or gentle and mild, whether alone, with another, or with others, God is gladly with you.  Be ye not ashamed.  Be ye restored to your inherent whole self, sex included.

Reverend Brad Carrier

Based on a sermon presented to the

Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Grants Pass

Grants Pass, Oregon

© November 14, 2010

(The following poem, found after delivering the above sermon, makes a fitting finale.  We say “yes” to sex and so come closer to God, but God says “yes” in sex and comes closer to us.)

LEDA,
After Rainer Maria Rilke (c. 1910)

Zeus, always needy for sex,
Readying with whatever trick at hand,
Any ploy he thought might work,
He wanted that girl,
He wanted her real bad,

Yet when he became a swan,
The landscape of his attire, the white,
It blinded him, and for the moment,
The god stopped, he had to orient himself.

And she, she knew what was in store,
I want to tell you,
She was some gal! No question about it.
She desired the experience,
She always sought a role in history.

Her vanity, big time,
She lived in era before acknowledgment,
She had no idea, the seven deadly sins.

The swan suddenly returned to his purpose.

He lowered his neck and his head,
Right through her open arms,
No resistance there, and his bill,
After it kissed her breast,
It easily reached around her neck.

His wings encased both her arms to the shoulders.

Once he entered her,
When he released himself,
He recognized oh how delightful
The feathers, the feel of his feathers,
And verily he became swan in her loins.

Filed under: Sex, Drugs, & Rock ‘n Roll by brad
No Comments »

The most unusual wedding I ever performed was of a woman to herself.  On the shore of Lake Michigan I pronounced this lovely, creative creature One, adding, “What God hath joined together, let no one rent asunder.”  Of course, this was a spiritual ceremony, not a legal contract, though the marriage issue could be stretched to consider calling such a union a marriage.  Or should it?  Just what is a marriage, who qualifies, and who decides?

Let us consider marriage, gay marriage, and the human family.  My purpose is to propose a vision of our society where all sorts of unions are honored, including that of same-sex couples, but does so not by winning an argument and overwhelming the traditional perspective on marriage.  A democratic society ideally evolves, not by cutting off sides, but incorporating them, so that all can get what they value.

It is probably a professional detriment that I usually see both sides in arguments.  Rather than take a side, I see all sides.  A similar drawback pops up when I watch football with the guys.  I cheer for any good play by either side, whereas I should be picking a team and cheering only for it.  Unlike the side-taking typical in sports, debate, adversarial law, and judgmental religion, I often see the other side’s perspective and sympathize with it even when I don’t entirely agree.  Instead of either/or, I tend to see both/and.  Instead of win/lose, I would rather we arrive at win/win.

In the religion business it helps to be judgmental.  Job security is favored by praising one’s own group while defining out just who is wrong.  In some religions, an abhorrence of anything homosexual prevails, and the very notion of same-sex couples marrying is deemed somewhere between absurd and depraved.  Gay people learn to avoid such a group, or if caught in it, keep quiet, lie, or cave in to shameful confessions.  In other religions, gayness is welcomed as a valid lifestyle option and gay weddings are celebrated.  Those uneasy with this, or those cleaving to a traditional definition of marriage, are subtly snubbed as un-hip or blatantly branded as bigoted.  Each way has a circle of inclusion and exclusion.  I see both ways as unwarranted and unwise.  Because I see past the side I’m on to the larger cultural conversation I tend to see reasons for the positions my side tends to dismiss.  Friends and colleagues see me askance; I wish to clarify.

I come to this position with lonely trepidation.  The liberals I’m usually at home with don’t get my reasons for defending the conservatives.  Friends and colleagues who I like and admire don’t know how to take me.  In reaching out to the other side I risk alienating my own.  I have no authority or position to decide such issues, nor paid time to research it, and speaking out on this controversial topic doesn’t gain me any advantage – other than the long-shot possibility of enhancing human fulfillment in community, which is repeatedly and unnecessarily divided.  I can’t just cheer for the home team as if the other team has no inherent dignity as well.  So let me stand shakily here to share with you influences on my limited perspective before taking on the touchy issues around homosexuality, gay marriage, and marriage in general.  (Some of this I have already written towards.  An editorial and a sermon are available at my web site: earthlyreligion.org.)

At eight years old I was molested by a gay man at an armory in Berea, Ohio.  I didn’t know what to think of it other than be afraid.  Years later I engaged in typical pre-teen learning about sex, mostly with other boys.  In my mid and late teens I was occasionally approached by various gay guys who, I’m glad to report, were usually more hopeful than hurtful and more polite than persistent.  It was optional behavior I opted not to pursue.  In seminary I grew close to a gay guy who was fun, intellectually adventurous, and theologically astute.  We shared a lot on many levels, and though we called each other “lovers,” it was more platonic than and not as sexual as he wanted.  Forty years later, he remains one of my closest friends.  He’d feel right at home in my home town, which I like in part for being gay-friendly.

In liberal religious UU circles, gay welcoming has been an informative and heart-warming experience for me and others.  Just as ministers to our movement used to come as outcasts for theological views, so have we welcomed lots of openly gay ministers.  I’ve been able to know many gays, from elderly lesbian couples as auntly as my aunts to guys hankering for brief meetings in their sub-culture.  But when colleagues in a UUMA meeting attempted to secure a unanimous vote that we ministers would boycott any fellowship or church that was accused of denying its pulpit to someone because he or she was gay, I voted against it.  I believe it is a congregation’s prerogative to call to its pulpit and program whoever they most want, not whoever Boston most wants to place.  Precluding their decision is just what I don’t like in the UUA.  Our congregational polity, like our morality, comes from within and for our reasons.  It is not to be dictated from afar because of pressure politics and power plays.

It is as permissible to declare homosexuality moral as it is to say it is immoral.  Both are moral positions.  Each can be argued with emotion, logic, and scripture, but neither deserves exclusion from the human conversation.  Homosexuality falls within the larger category of sexuality, which in general I believe is good for us to admit and celebrate.  But I don’t insist that others have my perspective.  All humans have a life context in which they believe what they do and do as best they can.  Honoring that process is the liberal way.  Shaming or overpowering it is the essence of judgmental dogmatism.

Just as conservatives were once so side-lined they mounted a concerted effort to take their stand in the organic wisdom of our collective society, but then went from Goldwater to Reagan to Bush, so have gays come out from the closeted exclusion of the 70’s to parade and demand their place in our community.  My concern is that this needed perspective has assumed a domineering stance that ridicules, insults, and alienates those who don’t also hold it, and that this could create an exploitable voting block in reaction.

Following California’s recent vote on Proposition 8 (defining marriage as between a man and woman) the supporters of the measure had their house addresses published, marking their homes for potential retaliation.  The assumption is that those cleaving to a definition of traditional marriage are necessarily “against gays.”  Absent from this stance is any credence given to the possibility that such persons are more for traditional marriage than against gays.  Are they asked about this distinction?  Is it feasible that most of those favoring a traditional definition of marriage would also favor a marriage-like category and mechanism allowing for same-sex couples to have a public celebration for a socially sanctioned, legally protected union?  If that were so, would gays welcome this approach (which is offered in many places now) or would they demand the standard marriage?  Would they continue to demand it even if it resulted in voter reaction electing more conservative war-mongers and theocrats?  How far should we push people to make them agree with our thinking without understanding theirs?

I sympathize with the sentiment and legal needs of gays wanting to marry.  They pair bond just like heterosexual couples do, and they fuss, and get jealous, and provide parenting, and hold property together, and they separate, etc.  It seems two main things are desired: social sanction and legal protection.  What I’m not knowledgeable enough about is whether the policies relevant to marriage are intended to favor stable, monogamous heterosexual couples who intend to birth and raise their child or children.  Are all such policies suitable for couples who cannot have their own genetic children, and could there be policies crafted explicitly to such couples?  I know this also is complicated by many opposite sex couples who never intend to have children, or marry late in life, and other exceptions to the traditional marriage.  It seems the definition of marriage is under examination.  Just who gets to declare what it is or isn’t?

Some say the state has no business in marriage.  I disagree.  The state gets called in to adjudicate divorce settlements in terms of property, income and liability sharing, and the welfare of children.  In terms of tax policies and laws, the state is very involved.  This is why the democratic process of various views being conveyed to representatives is appropriate.  Should marriage be wide, including any and all who want or demand it, or narrow, specific to various functions?  The answers aren’t so easy.

Gays say they just are gay; they have no choice in their attractions.  They note there’s always a minority presence of gays in community, whether that is 3% or 10%.  They point out the occasional homosexual contacts in various animals as evidence of its being natural.  I speculate that gayness would tend to select itself out, for such sex doesn’t lead to rebirth, but that group survival might welcome gays to limit population while promoting group cohesion.  While I hold that non-coupled promiscuous sex is permissible, gays tend to pair bond just like straights do.  If they want to marry, shouldn’t it be their civil right to do so, walk the isle, take up cohabitation, and share their assets and liabilities along with their time?

So simple are these points it is hard to see what hesitations others might have.  While being gay is a given, leading to the civil rights analogy to those who just happen to be of a certain race, optional behavior isn’t the same thing as skin color.  We’re asking those unfamiliar with such urges to approve of them as God-given and beyond moral question.  Is it similarly true that bi-sexuals also have no choice?  As homosexuality normalizes, so does the chance of being hit on and the choice to respond or initiate.  This might be fine, for an erotic community is preferable to a neurotic one, but consider homophobic reactions.  As persistent as homosexuality is in the human community, so is homophobia.  Would animal studies also demonstrate reaction against same-sex contacts, and if they did, would that justify it as natural?  I don’t care what the author of Leviticus had to say on the topic, but I note his strict abhorrence is typical in the human community.

A subtle shaming gets applied to homophobic people.  What is homophobia?  Those who hate and kill gays are homophobic, but so are those who are merely unfamiliar with gays and uneasy being with them.  Should the latter be accused of the former?  Does anyone who questions homosexual behaviors and requests in society become a gay-basher merely because of questions and unease?  It may feel smug for the liberated to taunt homophobic people with the innuendo that they are secretly gay, but does that respect their place in life, inherent dignity, and further mutual understanding?  Are all those who see marriage as a contract between a man and a woman towards having children in a viable, durable unit – bigots?

Some say gay marriage is the “same thing” as traditional marriage.  Others feel a need to “defend” traditional marriage from various changes.  Gays object that their civil rights are being denied and that “whoever loves” should be able to marry.  Each side demonizes the other, dismissing and dissing their motives and reasons, thus thwarting the mutual respect, dialog, and resolve all deserve.  Marriage is much more than love.  It is a life-long legal contract specifying some core rights and responsibilities for the husband and the wife towards insuring a viable and just future for the children.  If we open marriage to “whoever loves” what should we then call the institution we had called marriage?  Is there no relationship between it and the expectation of monogamy assuring the father his paternity of the children, the security of the wife after giving her body and life over to the family, the parameters of property and extended family – all evolved to serve the altricial (dependent) infant and maturing child?  Should all policies designed to serve this traditional situation apply to any who want it?

The call for gay marriage opens the question as to just what marriage is.  The one word marriage, along with lots of social expectations and legal protections, now serves a much wider set of situations than breeding and raising children.  If I marry at my age my wife or I would get the other’s Social Security at death, whose ever were larger.  Heather McCartney was awarded $48.7 million for her 20 year marriage to Paul beyond the $70,000 a year child support.  That’s $47,000 a week earned to be with Paul.  Some cultures advocate many wives per man.  Others provide a weekend marriage to try it out.  Should these be included too?

What about the single woman who I married to herself?  If there were spiritual, financial, or legal benefits for her declaring that a marriage, should it be allowed?  As soon as same-sex couples can marry it opens the possibility of marriages of three or more, be they all one sex or mixed.  Some polyamorous groups want marriages with three or six people in them.  If an even larger group wanted to be married should it be allowed?  Why must marriage be of two people only?  Why not one, or twenty?   Why not weekend marriages or five year renewable contracts?  I raise all these unlikely scenarios not to argue for them or to ridicule the call for gay marriage but to open the question as to just what is marriage.  Perhaps many kinds of marriages are needed.  Who gets to decide?  For what purposes?  What is the state’s role?   The church’s?

What I would like is for same-sex couples to have the social sanction and legal protection they desire and deserve.  I’m not sure widening the parameters of marriage as-is to accommodate them is advisable, especially considering the many reasons for the traditional marriage and the many people who seek to defend it.  If the government ends up deciding to include them, that’s OK.  But I suspect the current compromise in the form of “civil unions” or “domestic partnerships” helps create a viable social and legal category that satisfies their needs and desires.  What’s needed here is a more poetic and honorable label so that such couples don’t end up feeling like “second-class citizens.”  Perhaps “Same Sex Marriage” could fit the unique needs.  Full-fledged legal and social protection and sanction should be established that doesn’t forsake the meaning of marriage but protects gay unions.  It isn’t for me to decide.  I’m not arguing finalities here; I’m contributing to the considerations.

What I want is for my liberal friends and colleagues to be wary of calling people names without understanding their reasons, thus pushing them into an exploitable enemy category inaccurately and unfairly.  We need not all think alike to love alike.  As gays become more publicly typical and straights who never knew them now could, fears and prejudices will diminish, and comity in community will deepen.  What seemed strange or scary can become simply us.  Win/win.  The whole human family should feel at home in America.  America has never suddenly lived up to the promise of its pluralism.   Gradually, we come to realize and actualize “the inherent worth and dignity” of all, including those who differ from us, as we progress.

The Reverend Brad Carrier

For the UUF of Grants Pass

© February 1, 2009

Filed under: Sex, Drugs, & Rock ‘n Roll, Unitarian Universalist by brad
No Comments »

“These things abide: faith, hope, and love, but the greatest of these is love.” (1 Cor. 13:13)

“Love, oh love, you crazy love.” Love is the cause and core of being human. Lusty love, luscious love, languid love, lively love, lovely love, we yearn for love, go wild in love, grow stale in love, grant our love, give it, get it, grasp it, lose it, find it, make it, grow it, get saved by it. Annoying love, obsessive love, exploring love, ignoring love, deploring love, exporting love, controlling love, embroiling love, confounding love, astounding love, compounding love, costly love, bossy love, lousy love, lonely love, atoning love, free love, more love – we humans know the risk, and yet we want it.

“The Greatest thing you’ll ever learn is just to love and be loved in return” (Eden Abez)

On this Valentine’s Day let us consider if we have learned this. How are we at love? It is so human to wonder and care and try and want and miss and hold. We are born of love, love of our parents, love of all our ancestors, love of life’s yearning for itself. How can we be better at love? As religious liberals allowed to honestly consider such topics, as Universalists seeking to love all as God loves all, we can ask in the most cosmic sense and the most intimate, how can we be loving more and be more loving? Love, the yearning to join and replicate, is built into the chemical bonds that make life. From crystals to amino acids to cells to organisms to animals to us, love builds us. From a crystal “wanting” to grow to our “wanting” another, love is built in, seeming to us as attraction, appreciation, and affection. Look at the animals. The birds grow close, share the nest, feed the chicks, and they send their dear ones off. The bull elks bash their heads together, striving with all they have to prevail in order to gain access to those juicy cows. Are not chemistry, bonding, contending and succeeding not part of what is in us?

I don’t want to commit “The Naturalistic Fallacy,” saying that nature’s patterns determine our human ways. We can do it differently if we want. In the afterward of the second edition of Dawkin’s Selfish Gene, he admits that though the worms he studied didn’t demonstrate altruism, we humans could decide to be more giving anyway. I think he was too reductionist. All kinds of cooperative and kind behaviors are also in nature and are built into us. Let’s not commit “The Naturalistic Fallacy Fallacy” either. Should we ignore all similar behaviors to us in the animals as if such tendencies had no influence in us at all?

For instance, we have long been told our closest animal is the chimp. Chimps have a social structure where big males jealously dominate smaller or weaker ones, and so keep more females for sexual partners and mothers. The females are mostly loyal, but they sometimes sneak out and mate with the bachelors in the bushes. We’re told we’re wicked for also being like this – jealous, domineering, sneaky, unfaithful. This is the sort of “animal behavior” we’re to acknowledge but overcome, cleaving to our one mate only and ever. Curiously, on the other side of the Congo River from the chimps, on the “left bank,” as it were, are the pigmy chimps. Physically, they look more human than chimps do. Look at their gait and mouth. These apes, also called the bonobos, are more matriarchal. The mother apes raise their babes served by the males and other females. The bonobos do a lot with sex. Lots of times every day they have short copulations with various males or sometimes females. The babes are right there to see all this, sometimes still clinging to the mother. Rewards are given and disputes are settled with quick promiscuous sex. The bonobos are more peaceful than the chimps. They’re the “free love” apes.

We humans share the same limb of the huge family tree with both the chimps and the bonobos. If chimps somehow justified or modeled domination, ownership, and war, would the bonobos legitimate communal respect, free love and peace? Somewhere between our ape-like beginnings and the first writings of history the creation myths I love so much arose. Curious that the affirmation of all nature, including us, including our sexuality, of Genesis One would be overshadowed by the Garden of Eden myth where the fall from innocent attunement was caused by judgment, and marked by shame, of sex.

‘Yes, we have no bonobos, we have no bonobos these days.’ Except, we do. There’s always been a free love aspect to the natural human community. Any honest telling of the Founding Fathers would show how practiced these guys were at trying to be fathers. But, their bold, humanistic faith in us as we are comes after a tortuous human diversion. Pre-agricultural humans are believed to have been more egalitarian. Not much hoarding when one’s people were mobile gatherers and hunters. It is only when settled populations start farming grain that women could be put to work processing it. Inequality of wealth led to power over others at home and war on the frontier. Wives were owned. They were a dependent breeding and working stock. Even into the industrial age, women were owned as wives (complete with a strict expectation of monogamy – to try to insure what is unsure) or used as slaves, servants, and prostitutes. Lovers there have always been, though, for not even the most vigilant dominate chimp or sultan succeeds in preventing flings and clandestine lovers.

No matter the rules, there’s a bit of bonobo in all of us. In our changing society women are no longer always kept. Independent income allows for independent choices. The great venture of democracy puts trust in us. As we lose the susceptibility to be told and bossed by a dominate male, be he pope, king, boss, or husband, and instead have trust in ourselves to fully be who we really are, other relationships will emerge. There are good reasons and rewards for living your life as “one man, one woman, one lifetime.” But putting all love in that container can keep it from flowing and growing.

If we consider how crucial love is in humans we see its larger scope and hope. Human babes are born far earlier than comparable mammals. Our babes are utterly dependent. They’re born early to get this marvelous big brain out without hurting the mother or infant. For months, we’re dependent on love. We need milk and touch and eye contact and soothing sounds and warm embrace. Babes who don’t get that just wither and die, or maybe they persist in life, lacking in essential assurance and safety. We’re born dependent and we die dependent; we’re held, wiped, fed. In between we learn to be dependable, independent, and interdependent. The mammalian bond of love, touch, and play isn’t just for kittens and babies. Our reliable mutuality informs every stage and phase of human activity and community. Love is not just as the brief spurt of pleasure during sex; it is life-long in every direction. Love influences every aspect of human community. Where it is present and practiced, we flourish. Where it is absent and mocked, we wither.

How can we love more and be more loving? From sex to infant to child to sibling to student to lover to worker to parent to relations to country to world – how can we notice the love that nurtures us and make the ways to give it back? How do we be more universalistic, expanding both the breadth and depth of love in our lives, for those farthest from us to closest, to us inside, how do we find the ways to both love more and be more loving?

“Monogamy,” to alter Winston Churchill’s quote on democracy, “is the worst form of relationship, except for all the others.” We praise and impose monogamy as being synonymous with fidelity, as if it shows and grows love. However, I would assert that fidelity transcends monogamy. We are faithful to being there for the other person as they are and become, for better or worse, not making our love contingent on whether they ever love another. We don’t expect parents to love only one child, or children to love only one parent. We don’t assume all our needs will be magically met by only one person. Monogamy makes a lot of sense when the couple is of breeding age. Beyond that, there is more leeway for having various forms of love in addition to the primary relationship.

Some people even envision new sorts of families, where three or more could “marry.” The UUPA community holds a strong value in open, honest, acknowledged multi-partner love lives. This is not betrayal, for it is open and agreed to, with secondary partners needing the consent of primary ones. They try to maintain their primary love while also loving more. They wish to come to church as a sanctioned unit, not hide their dear ones in shame. It is a new coming out, testing our tolerance and understanding in unfamiliar ways. This seems risky and prone to upheaval, both for the people who wish to pursue this and for those around them. But consider the fragmented and then healed nature of many of our families now. Instead of merely “my X” as the result of a rancorous separation, various parents tend to their offspring and continue caring for their former spouses for their whole lives. Family exists across the marriages. It needn’t be trouble persisting. Children can know their blood parents, not just their step parents. Former spouses can care for each other in ways they never knew before. Family transcends and enfolds various marriages.

We romanticize life-long monogamous relations. We claim models in the animal world, but on closer examination find that hanky panky goes on. A tenth to almost a third of some birds are sired by other than the primary social mate. DNA testing on supposedly monogamous couples shows some two to three percent of the offspring are sired by someone else than the apparent husband. While over half of men (towards 70%) stray at least once during a marriage, almost as many women do too (30% – 60%). Sometimes the most apparently devoted wives have sudden flings with macho sorts of men. Usually, revelation of such extra-marital affairs is met with great upheaval, accusation, hurt, retaliation and assumed divorce. It need not be so if we seek a more informed and compassionate understanding.

Without being reductionist, we can see how our chemistry challenges our love. Testosterone drives sex in men, and to a lesser extent, in women. When a man is successful, admired and moneyed his testosterone goes up. Women are keyed into this, for mating upward in social status is inherent in both animal and human populations. They get excited by status and swagger, especially during the ovulation portion of their monthly cycle. Meanwhile, the thrill of initial love, with its attendant spike in dopamine, has waned for both husband and wife. The thrill of sex or romantic attraction creates and then resides in the oxytocin of comfy connectedness. This bonding agent, high between mother and newborn, is high also in stable couples. High, but dull. Attraction turns to exhaustion. Men shoot hundreds of millions of self-cells a day in as many places as they can; women guard their few monthly self-cells, seeking just one man to father the child and stay by her. He can come and go, as it were, while she gets stuck with the results – life-long results. We can see how her need for support, and his need for assurance the babes are his, both work toward monogamy, but that monogamy itself can be seem like monotony.

Familiarity breeds contempt, yes, but familiarity can also breathe content. It depends on how people understand their mutual predicament. Can we admit marriage can become a bore and a chore, trying always to serve it, losing our soul as we go?

Something Else by Nin Andrews

“Sometimes you say I’m something else, and you mean I’m good, really good, but honey, don’t say that, please? Reminds me how my dad used to say, I’m just not myself today. As if here were some kind of imposter dad. Then he’d ask things like: Why don’t you go play with James? Has the dog had his walk yet? Will you kindly get out of my cotton-pickin’ hair? Sometimes he’d come home from work carrying his hat and a brown paper bag, and I’d know he wasn’t my dad… My mom often said he wasn’t the man she married. And I thought about that. How, when they were married, I wasn’t me, either. I wasn’t anyone. I didn’t like to dwell on that. It kind of gave me the creeps, but I liked to ask, Were you really in love then? Of course, she’d say. Did you hold hands? Yes. Kiss in public? Sit on his lap? Yes, yes, I did all that. Once She even showed me photos she kept in her lingerie drawer beneath her slips and silky things she never wore anymore: him in his spats and slick-shined hair, her in a pink crinoline cocktail dress with her long bangs clipped back in pearly barrettes. Not a thought in her head, except maybe Don’t I look swell? And Love me. And he did. Did he say so? He said it every day. He was something else back then.” (“Something Else” by Nin Andrews, from Southern Comfort. (c) Caran Kerry Press, 2009)

Love fades. Attraction leads to fulfillment, then emptiness often. The oxytocin serves our relatedness and family stability. It reduces cortisol, the wearing stress reaction chemical. But to be whole, we need some passion, some sizzle, some fun. I would not chase us because we are built this way. Rather than insult the Creator by saying we’re flawed, maybe our expectations of our relationships are flawed. And it’s not just sex that we want with others. Our romantic love life is part of what keeps us alive. Can we agree to help find it with each other? Can couples admit their attractions without cringing for fear of reprisals? Can we admit we need various kinds of persons at various times of our lives? Can fidelity to the other transcend the expectation of monogamy by the other? Can love of one’s spouse be so selfless as to be glad and supportive of their knowing occasional others, closer to a polyamorous ideal, more bonobo than chimp?

It depends on how honest and adventurous we are. This is largely influenced by the supportive culture around it and the norms and agreements of what is fair and loving and not. I’ve seen settings where hugs are given in every direction. Current couples get along easily with former lovers. Jealousy is admitted when needed, and held as need be, but a more generous ideal is admitted and attained. Other settings tolerate no hugs. Every hug is eyed suspiciously, cause for confrontation, ready to be riled. Attractions are not honored; they’re shamed, ridiculed, seen as failure, betrayal. Which sort of expectations did you come up with? Which would you like to continue with? Lest we be blinded by the narrow norms of our somewhat puritan culture, let us consider the mistress system in Europe and the wives-have-their-lovers system in South America, South India, and South China. In these cases, community cohesion and lack of violence prevail. In places were women are owned and repressed, stoned, whipped, burned, and shot, jealousy and righteousness ride rampage, blinding all understanding, compassion or love.

Sex was not the sin in the Garden, judgment was, and shame, blame and pain were the alienating consequences of forgetting the great good that God made for the shallow goods and evils of subtly deceiving moralists. Love and sex are not our fault; they are our origin and glory. I’m not for us breaking into a free-love frenzy. But I am for freeing love. Couples need not dissolve because of attractions, connections, and honesty. We can be with each other with all our fears and failures, and we can be with each other with all our daring wholeness and success. Who is to say? If we were to get out of the dominating, jealous, repressive style of the chimps, and into a more egalitarian, liberal, and communal style of the bonobo, what might come of it? We’re neither chimps nor bonobos, but of something akin to both. Being human is becoming aware of how love pervades our very existence, enlivening our private and communal souls. Can we be authentic, supporting each other as we go deeper than fear and reaction? Can familiarity breathe content? How to love more and be more loving?

Reverend Brad Carrier

For the Unitarian Universalists of Grants Pass

© February 14, 2010

Filed under: Sex, Drugs, & Rock ‘n Roll by brad
No Comments »

I’d like to start by thanking Hearne, Jordon, John and others from the Rogue Valley Metaphysical Library for sponsoring these free Tuesday evening lectures. The donation you gave at the door goes to them to help them host this ongoing service. My humble perspective on sex is one among many varied topics on these Tuesday evenings. These cover everything from healing to finance to space aliens, so I figured this fits right in. I can’t claim to be an expert in the topic, though I’ve had my many moments, and have given it a lot of thought over my life. When I accepted the 14th of February date and picked the title, I didn’t notice it was to be presented Valentine’s Day. So I’m adapting my talk to include not just what is lovely under the leaf, but the leaf itself, that is, everything from sex to lovers to the love of nature.

Cupid and concupiscence share the same root word. Cupid you know. Concupiscence implies the problem of desiring eagerly. Are desire, pleasure, lovemaking, and satisfaction problems? They certainly can be. I could exhaust my time here with a litany of sexual woes. I’d rather dwell on and celebrate the wonders.

Having announced the title, I realized I may have gotten carried away with my alliteration. I like the lifting the leaf part and the loving part, but “lovely”? I have to admit, genitals up close look more odd than lovely, unless we can see the beauty in them like Georgia O’Keefe did. If we think of all the wonderful things they do for us, from fascination, to arousal, to exquisite orgasms, to pregnancy and birth, we have to say, “Well done, God.”

Similarly, nudity is nice, because while no one looks that good, no one looks that bad either. I get to be nude with others at the sauna, hot tub, or nude beach. It’s comfortable. People are just people with various body shapes. There’s something innocent and whole about it, something those afraid to be nude or who sit in judgment of it may never understand. Too bad it’s so taboo. We’re all nude under our clothes, and we all came through a vagina because our parents had sex, so why be ill at ease about our body or each other’s? The powerful curiosity we have for each other’s bodies has been satisfied in our culture gradually. Sex magazines began showing the nipple, then more, then the hole truth. Curiosity satisfied, I can enjoy women at the sauna simply as women. Their very different bodies are all beautiful in their own functional and natural way. It would be hard to explain this non-sexual ease with nudity to those from cultures that equate any view of any part as provocative. Imagine the shock of Internet porn to sexually repressed cultures.  Those barred from our nude reality are most embarrassed and angry about it.

I knew an old man who revealed to me a lifetime of interest in women’s butts. He was fascinated with his fascination with how they looked, the various types, the subtleties of motion. I had to admit, men look. (Later I learned women look too.) Simply muscles of motion attached to a pelvis capable of giving birth, it is because of this intriguing shape that meetings happen, dinners are offered, vows are made, babies are born, and lifetimes are intertwined. Mere muscle and fat combine to make the ass an asset. He had to admit it only to me, for he knew others would take it as shocking.  Our natural interests stay hidden, like some disgusting secret. Yet, we look, perhaps with sneaky peeks. Have you ever peeked? Did you have to sneak?

Here’s my thesis: It is a shame we’re taught to be ashamed. Shame disrupts living well in our own bodies, our natural attractions and connections with each other, even our entire society. It is when we cannot enjoy an erotic culture that we end up enduring a neurotic culture. Finally, it can improve.

Examples of shame: Years ago, I noticed an ad for a bra that read, “The Natural Look: no nipple show-through.” Recently, Attorney General Ashcroft had an eight thousand dollar screen erected in front of a statue of Lady Justice, because she, even only as a statue, was bare breasted. Just after that, in Washington D.C., in the lofty and inspiring Library of Congress where they were restoring the magnificent art on the domes and walls, I noticed they were painting out women’s nipples. They blurred them over or discreetly covered them up. Is there something wrong with women’s nipples? Are nipples dangerous? Should we all be alienated from nipples? Is this something we wouldn’t want children ever to see? Evidently so, for when Janet Jackson briefly flashed her distant breast during the Superbowl Game, the country went irate. Colin Powell’s prudish son Michael imposed a $550,000 fine on CBS. So scorned and shamed were the networks, that ABC pulled “Saving Private Ryan” from being shown, not because it showed hundreds of humans being shot and maimed, but because they used swear words while doing it.

This reaffirms our values, we were told. Swearing and breasts are considered unacceptable, but the two hour systematic shredding and maiming of Jesus in Mel Gibson’s “Passion” movie of that same season was presented as “a lesson for the kids.” It is because they’re so bad and need to be forgiven that this happened, it was explained to the children.

(For further rant on this, see “Passion’s Fog” on my website, earthlyreligion.org. I integrate Gibson’s movie with “The Fog of War,” a devastating look at the propensity of some to inflict widespread agony while feeling justified and righteous.) What values do we promote?

Another example: Why is it that we look at the constellation Orion and say the three stars hanging down are his sword when it could be his huge penis? He seems to be standing there, hip jutted out, his arms up in pride and celebration, showing the whole galaxy his whole magnificent form. We give him a sword – a weapon – rather than see or let him show his dick. Sword: good; dick: bad.

As our leaders ramp us up to World War III while boasting of their “values,” we should consider what our values really are. Do our religions shame our natural dopamine- and oxytocin- laden pleasures for bodies and connection while driving our reactive minds and emotions into judgment, shame, fear, and hate? Are our amydgalas taunted and taught into a socially-expected, low key post traumatic stress syndrome in the name of religion?

Here’s the facts, friends. We are born of sex. We inherit a more evolved and elaborate process than mitosis. We no longer simply divide cells to create a new organism. We long ago evolved a meiosis system of having two sexes which have to come together to create a new organism. Sex wasn’t invented for humans, but humans inherit this evolved animal mechanism. Yet, oddly, some humans seem ashamed of it. They see no irony in the presumptuousness of negatively judging Creation’s design.

Just to make sure we’re all in this together and understand the subject of which I speak, let me take a little survey here. How many people in here have genitalia? If you have either male or female genitalia, please raise your hand…. Go ahead and admit it; it’s not a sin.… How many here have enjoyed your own genitals on your own? How many have shared them with another or others and really liked it? Why any hesitation or giggling? Why not pride and celebration, like Orion? Have we been tricked out of gladly relating to our own and each other’s wonderful sex organs and pleasure centers? Are we ashamed of what Creation has built into us, and covered our sex with leaves and clothes and swords instead? Let us lift the leaves and love the lovely.

When I use the metaphor of the leaf, it is recognized. We all know what’s under the leaf. Our society, along with many others, rests on the cosmogonic myth of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, the eating of the apple, the fig leafs, the expulsion, and the supposed need for redemption from our fallen state. The myths a culture holds orient an underlying meaning. Myths are neither facts nor lies; they are symbolic underlying truths in persons and culture. I want to unpack and reinterpret the Genesis myth.

(I do not take the Bible to be the one, only, and inerrant Word of God. Rather, it is a very human collection of stories, histories, and views of God. It isn’t sacred because it’s true and you better believe it or else; it’s sacred because so many revere it. It is one of the scriptures of the world. As such, it has power in us and in our culture. )

Interestingly, the books of Genesis at the beginning of what we call the Old Testament are the foundation for the scriptures of all three of our world’s great theistic religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, though each adds more to it in the form of the Torah, New Testament, and Koran, respectively. These initial scripture passages inform all three religions, and all three influence their respective cultures. I suspect that a misinterpretation of the Genesis creation myth lies at the heart of the trouble these religions bring to this world. Reorienting how we view this myth might help not just our sexuality, but our world.

Please consider. Genesis One, page one of the Bible, tells of an evolutionary creation of all nature taking six steps. The God is Elohim, a name containing singular and plural components and male and female images. Elohim God creates light and sees that the light is “good.” S’he does this for land, sky, plants, animals, and humans, each and every stage of which is seen as “good.” Both males and females are created “in the image and likeness” of God. There’s only a bit of instruction in Genesis One. There’s a diet offered (fruits, nuts, and herbs that bear their seed), an instruction to “replenish the earth,” and the problematic phrase, “you shall have dominion” (which we’ll get to in a bit). There’s no demand for worship, simply the creation of the natural universe and the value-label that, seen in its entirety, God calls it, “very good.”

Oddly, the world created, there’s a second creation story. Genesis Two and Three tell of YHWH God (a name having singular and masculine parts only) created the world in a very artificial and engineering-like style, making the dirt and mist of a desert into Adam, as well as all the trees. As if in an operation, putting Adam into a deep sleep, God takes out one of his ribs and makes it into a woman. (This was back in the time when women could take a ribbing.) You know the story. They are naked together and with God in the Garden of Eden. No problem. They can eat of all the trees except one – the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. A snake subtly tricks the woman into eating it, and she then shares it with Adam. Suddenly, their eyes were opened in such a way that they knew they were naked, felt shame for that, tried to hide from God, and began blaming each other and the snake. God punishes them by expelling them from the garden to live lives of toil, trouble, and pain, placing a “cherub with a flaming sword turning in all directions” to guard against their re-entry. The first covenants are formed, the first murder comes, and soon the animals regard the humans with fear and dread. Shame, blame, and pain prevail.

It is this second version of creation myth which the apostle Paul centered on in his founding of Christianity. “Christ” was not the last name of Jesus. It was a title applied by Paul and others. Paul reasoned that because of this original fall, all need redemption, which Jesus secured in his expiatory sacrifice by willingly dying on the cross only to be magically revived. Matthew, Paul, and many of the related Gnostics, as well as the ascetic Essenes, viewed sex as something shameful, something in the way of finding God. If this were merely a Buddhist-like warning about desire it wouldn’t have grown into a fanatical ascetic formula. Jesus may have come though a vagina, but it was too scandalous to believe he started there. The liberal bishop Clement allowed sex in marriage, but only for procreation.

Hundreds of years later, Augustine deepened the Original Sin to mean all are fallen and all need the redeeming grace of Christ, which the church administered in the sacraments. He went so far as to declare our interest in sex, and our being born because of it, to be sure signs of how fallen we were. Augustine had been a Manichean (a philosophy that the flesh is bad and the spirit is good). He didn’t like the natural world or the empiricism of examining it. He reasoned: “Put a straight stick in the water and it appears to bend; ergo, you can’t trust your senses.” Instead, trust the church. Reason wasn’t logic, argumentation, or free thinking; it was the ineffable, invisible world of God brought down by the church for understanding and obedience. Tertullian reasoned: “It is to be believed because it is absurd.”

In the earliest days of the Christian church this assumption that sex is wrong predominated and prevailed, along with a fanatical close-mindedness that made those with other ideas the enemy. Bishops Irenaesus and Tertullian said any who differed were heretics due ridicule, expulsion, and worse. Punitive zealotry often prevailed. For over a thousand years sex and science was suspect, while chastity and faith were praised. The early emphasis on dogma and obedience prevailed, eventually resulting in the Crusades, the Inquisition, the Reformation (which toyed with irrelevant parts of the faith formula while ignoring more fruitful theology), the hundred years of holy wars, the burning of the heretics and witches, and the general clamp on free thought and natural enjoyments. It was more in spite of our religions that our enlightened humanistic democratic freedoms and effective scientific methods emerged than because of them.

The astonishingly apparent, yet utterly overlooked aspect of this is the obvious point of the two creation stories taken together. God creates an evolutionary, natural universe that includes all of us and all of life, and calls every bit of it “good.” Then, the natural wholeness of that goodness gets divided and destroyed when a subtle deceiver has us see it as “good and evil.” Sex was not the sin; seeing sex shamefully was the sin. When the judgmental, punitive mind prevails, what was created good by God gets confused into an alienating array of shame, blame, and pain. There is nothing wrong with our genitals, our interest in them, or our attraction to each other’s. There is something wrong with the thought, be it religious, political, or marketing, that divides us from ourselves, from each other, from our garden, and from our God.

Evil is not mentioned in Genesis One, but perhaps it can be extrapolated that what God made and declared good ought not be denied, dismissed, denigrated, or destroyed. The problem phrase in Genesis One is “you shall have dominion.” It brings to mind heartless kings arbitrarily bossing about people and laying thoughtless waste to the land. What if dominion were better translated as sovereignty? Much as our Declaration of Independence states, we are born with an “unalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” We aren’t subjects to be ruled by authoritarians. We aren’t worms having to believe and obey the Liviticus’, Paul’s, Augustine’s, and Pat Robertson’s of the world. We’re not obliged to live by what Mohamed or Buddha or anyone says. We’re free, fallible, able, responsible human beings complete with minds that think and genitals that we like.

Ironically, those who would shame you and judge God’s good creation as fallen are the ones expecting you to agree with them and obey. They claim the knowledge of good and evil, just like God, just like the myth warns. The knowledge they offer is alienating; it creates sin. They have built their theologies on a guilty, needy world of believers who have faith in their formula. Be guilty, not ethical. Believe, don’t question. Obey, don’t think. Little do most realize that the ongoing subtle deceivers in the garden are the religions (and I don’t mean to denigrate snakes by saying this).

(I claim the right to critique religions. They can say what’s right and wrong, but so can I. So can you. Religions don’t get to avoid disagreement just because they claim some sanctified protection. Piety protects the power that it plies. From Texas to Tehran, religions push a frenzy of fanaticism, confusing our sense of judgment with their judgmental ness. They all need critique.)

I am more familiar with our own. Raised Catholic, then infused with our widespread Christian culture, I went to India, then earned a Masters of Divinity at a highly-regarded seminary at the University of Chicago, and for over thirty years had a lot of latitude to think for myself as a liberal minister.

But our religions are not alone in shaming and repressing our sexuality and love of nature; many forces assume these values, reactions and judgments. I met an elderly woman who had trouble peeing all her life because her mother once whipped her for peeing under the porch. A few years ago, a woman was arrested for breastfeeding her baby in a darkened theater. People keep the nearly universal practice of masturbation universally secret. What most do, few admit. Those parts of the body that are soft, tender, pleasurable, and vulnerable are those parts most reviled. Some religions cut off the tips of boy’s penises, or worse, hack off the clitorises of young girls to “keep them from being sexual.”

This anti-sexuality extends into the natural world and our right to investigate and enjoy it. Science was thwarted for centuries because its methods and findings offended the religious powers. Some theologians taught that all of creation is fallen. The plants and animals are there to be used, even if they’re used up. From the Cedars of Lebanon to our own Port Orford cedars, exhaustion is the norm. Soils eons in the making have washed away. Precious aquifers get drained and polluted. Almost half the songbirds in the New World went extinct because they had no fear and so were easily shot for amusement. Do you see the incredible presumptiveness of the religious perspective that would judge nature as fallen or expendable? What God created and called good, religions judged as flawed and fallen.

This whole wonderful world, billions of years in the forming, this magnificent, interdependent array of life, multi-millions of years in the evolving, these miraculous human bodies complete with smart brains, eons in awakening – all these ought not be denigrated and dismissed by stuffy zealots from days of yore or in our time. When Ronald Regan’s pro-business, anti-environmental policies were being questioned and his Secretary of the Interior James Watt was asked whether such policies could have a detrimental effect on life in future generations, he quipped, “I don’t think we have many generations left before the Lord returns.”

An annoying oddball in his time, the sanctimonious Watt was the cutting edge of whole armies of righteous anti-environment, anti-free love, anti-scientific fanatics. They rule the airwaves, all branches of our government, most commerce, and all the pulpits (from what we’re able to hear on our media). Meanwhile, global warming and its potential to trigger a sudden ice age threatens us all. The mounting of World War III, with the same old cast of good guys and bad (or is it bad guys and good?), proceeds according to plan. (See the book “Shock and Awe” and how it wound its way into the neo-con’s “Project for a New American Century,” created prior to the invasion of Iraq, which was all part of a long process that did in Jimmy Carter’s “moral equivalent of war” (and his promotion human rights) and replaced it with a glut of waste, ruin, and torture.)

We can sanctimoniously mount and launch wars such as depicted in “Saving Private Ryan,” but it would be bad to swear. Freud said, “Civilization is born of sublimation.” By that he meant we repress our innate natures and instead do the work of building up our society. I think he’s right, and that is our problem. We are born of a civilization that has been against sex and nature. We have forgotten life is good and have substituted other goods in their stead.

We’re not alone in this. The once erotic Hindu culture, which celebrated and idolized divine lovers, became a culture divided, the men in one place, the women another, all wrapped up tight in apartness. Many societies have adopted a puritan-like stance. The only thing to match our human interest in sex is our human propensity to be shamed by it. It is trans-cultural.

But not universal. There are cultures where sex is simply part of what people like and do. From Brazil to China, there are places where the women do the picking. They have husbands, but also lovers. They take lovers occasionally throughout the year and during yearly festivals, which deliberately favor liaisons for sexual enjoyment and loving reasons. Jealousy is regarded as less than love. There tends to be not much violence in such places. Could a more erotic society make for a less neurotic one?

The final image in the Garden of Eden story intrigues me. A chubby little cherub angel wields a flaming sword turning in all directions to guard the return to the garden. I see this as a union of the opposites symbol. Innocence and terror coexist. We have to be able to inhabit our own bodies, think for ourselves, and go through the false opposites to reconnect with our wholeness. We have to dare the fires of supposed shame to feel at home in our good bodies and be free with each other. We have to question and free ourselves from the phony set of goods and evils to reclaim our rightful place in the original goods. We can stand naked before God, not with shame or even unease, but with comfort, pride, and gratitude.

Would this violate humility or fulfill it? We tend to see humility as “oh, I am not worthy; thou art great,” or “I’m not to be noticed.” I prefer historian of religions Houston Smith’s twist. Humility, he says, is “being oneself fully in a way that allows others to be themselves fully.” It is self-actualization for one’s self and others. It allows democracy to evolve into an ideal form. Could this be doing our religious work: honoring the Creator by taking our humble human place as co-creators proudly protecting, promoting, and enjoying Creation?

I’d like to suggest we start by being glad about our sexuality. Feel good about your feelings. Sense your sensuality. Enjoy your arousals. Grant lustiness to yourself and each other. Let your juices swell, surge, and flow, just as they do in the garden. What if we looked under the leaf and loved the lovely? What if we exercised sovereignty in our body, relationships, country, and world? What would democracy look like if we were less gullible, subservient sheep, and more healthy, whole humans? Nature, human nature including our sexuality – all this is part of a wise creation. Maybe if we celebrated it more and helped it to flourish more we wouldn’t spend so much time wastefully and forlornly living outside the garden.

Finally, I’m not interested in overthrowing any religions here. Rather, I’d like to suggest that the three great monotheistic faiths reexamine the first three chapters of Genesis towards wisely admitting others had it wrong, then bravely putting it right. Earth can be a garden playground of universal freedom and abundance. We could live well here sustainably and enjoyably for millions of years to come.

There are leaves of shame and blame covering our own bodies, over our connection with each other, over the ways we do our religion and work our government, and over the way we relate to nature and God. Lift the leaves and love the lovely.

Brad Carrier, M. Div

At the Rogue Valley Metaphysical Library 258 A St., Ashland, Oregon

© February 14, 2006

Exercise: From a meditative frame of mind, recall any difficult experience of embarrassment or shame. If appropriate and possible, forgive the offender. Love your self.

Now recall any wonderful experience of pleasure. Love those involved.

Resolve to be open to enjoy such times again. Release any tension you may carry in your genitals. Be grateful to Creation’s God, and relaxed and glad in your body.

Be in a sense of communion with Nature. Love it in you and love being fully you in it.

Filed under: Earthly Religion - God’s Goods, Sex, Drugs, & Rock ‘n Roll by brad
No Comments »

Dogs don’t dance.  I’ve been to many a bouncy dance situation where everyone is jerking and swaying, but the dogs just walk around.  They’re not alone.  Lots of animals don’t display an interest in music or dancing, and I’ve noticed most young children also don’t dance.  Only a few rare ones seem to get the beat and try to bob up and down with it.  As they mature, though, they do get it and start liking certain songs, going to dances, and sometimes playing an instrument.  This is a good thing.

I don’t want to say other animals have no music.  Maybe I can’t hear the nuance and beat that they do.  Frogs and crickets certainly make a mesmerizing multi-rhythmic set of sounds.  I’ve listened to the badly-named mockingbird go on for hours in an endlessly varied set of songs as well – so pleasing and beautiful to my human ears!  Curiously, the apes we humans are closest to also don’t dance or appear to make music together.  However, parrots definitely dance.  Not only will they mimic our sounds and talk in an array of voices, they get the beat.  Check out You Tube to see how Snowball the parrot obviously gets the beat big-time.  He sways, jumps, and jives, radically going from side to side.  When the song or beat changes, he does too, grooving in time to the new music.

Some theorize that parrots, dolphins, and humans all have a part of our brain that is the seat of both music and language.  If language is part of what makes us uniquely and marvelously human, could music be crucial too?

Welcome to the third in my trilogy.  We’ve somewhat explored sex and drugs.  Now let’s consider rock, or jazz, or pop, or opera, or classical, or tribal.  What is it about a set of sounds that moves us so?  We are touched inwardly.  We move outwardly.  Meaning and pleasure are merged.  I go to sleep with a song in my mind only to wake with it still there.  Why?  What’s the purpose?  What can we do with it?

My influences started in the womb, hearing and feeling my mother’s heart beat and rhythmic breathing.  I don’t remember that or her and my earliest communications, but I do remember family parties where we’d all sing “Side by Side,” or other easy, fun songs.  Dad would play the piano and Uncle Paul would strum jazz guitar.  Mom was good on the ukulele.  Dad had wanted to be a concert pianist, but when three fingers on his right had got squished off in a huge press in a factory in Detroit, he had to settle for octaves rather than complete chords.  Even so, he liked the Romantics, and played them with passion.

Though I had heard Frank Sinatra, Perry Como, and 50’s pop, I remember being stirred early on by the sound of Nat King Cole’s voice.  He was smooth, resonate.  But when Ray Charles hit the radio, I knew there was something there I wanted.  The ache, the beat, the harmonies all grabbed me deep.  It was about then that Elvis also came on the scene.  So much was made of him as a Big Star that we forget what a great voice he had, back when a clear lyric was the point of music.  Then James Brown pulled me into some really funky rhythms, and to this day, racist though it may sound, I usually like black music better than most white music.  The Beatles and Pink Floyd seemed to open up a whole new way of music.

Rock in those days was not only urgent and stirring, it conveyed meaning.  The lyrics actually said something about how to live and what the war was doing.  Dylan’s “Masters of War” and Steppenwolf’s “Monster” conveyed honest disgust with the meat-grinder our country was becoming.  Paul Simon’s “Old Friends” pointed us beyond our generation and our angst.  The song-writers were our philosophers.  The so-called 60’s music, which really flowered in the early 70’s, was meaningful and moving.

I started plunking on our home piano, trying to make sense of sheet music and music structure.  Note by note, I’d figure it out, get it in my hands, and then enjoy.  Later, and lately, I try to get my guitar to wail and whine and chop like Jimi did and my favorite living musician, local Jeff Pevar, does.  I tried sax for a while and played a couple of gigs way back when, knowing part of a scale.

The most enjoyable music creation for me was my recent involvement in a small group of people to gather weekly to engage in spontaneous vocal improvisation.  We had one rule: “No rules.”  We had no leader, no plan, no song.  We’d just listen, find some sounds, explore them, let them evolve, let rhythms emerge and change, and we’d often be surprised at the astonishing “songs” we’d create.  No matter how badly we might think we were at singing, there was latitude to try anyway, and to try other ranges and sounds from our own voices.  Some songs were horrible.  We’d be caught in cacophony, an annoying clash of noise.  But if we kept with it, sometimes something lovely would appear out of the mix, especially when members would listen to others as much as themselves, finding some jam, some riff, some evolving phrase to sing with, participate in, follow, and lead.  Doing this was extremely endorphic.  We’d end, erupting in laughter, often going off into word games, jokes, or other ventures born of minds afire with music.  We called ourselves The Joymongers.

Harmony theory fascinates me.  Why do some sounds wrench while others elevate?  I learned that long ago Pythagoras found the natural notes of a scale generated by a vibrating string.  Interestingly, his seven note scale wasn’t the exact same as what we now use; it was better.  Old instruments were set to a key that could play that just scale in that key only.  Other keys didn’t work, for the spacing between the notes was not equal.  Bach tweaked them to be equally spaced, mathematically even, so that instruments could play in any key and with each other.  What we hear is then bent off from the natural scale.  The just scale has the real 3 in between the minor and major versions, and the real 7 is located between its dominate and major versions.  What we hear is a bit more mechanical than natural.  But fretless instruments like the violin and voice can hit those sweet notes that resonate in us just right.

Even so, I set out to understand modern harmony theory.  Gradually I collected two fat books of sheet music for the piano, one popular and show tunes, one simplified arrangements of the classics.  I often soothe myself by playing some simple Satie, Mozart, Chopin, Shostakovich, Jobim or others, and I try to jam with cheat sheets based on Basie, Herzog, Porter, Gershwin, Van Heusen, Brubeck, etc.  I am fascinated why, and befuddled why, certain chords make me ache or sigh, why some sounds are dull or wrong, while others make me come alive.

What is music?  Why do some sounds touch and inspire us?  Why do we move to really good beats?  What is the origin and function of music for humans?

Is it merely coincidence that all human cultures generate music?  Anthropologists speculate as to when humans started using tools, controlling fire, and generating written language.  How old is music?  Does it play a role in our survival, evolution, and community?  Bone flutes have been found from 40,000 years ago.  Rhythm, chanting, singing, and dancing bring many a community together.  Long before we carved out flutes or made harps we must have clapped and slapped to the beat, and a melodious voice may have been not just fun to sing or hear, but a factor in attracting a mate, hence steering selection and evolution.

Psycho-biologist Colwyn Trevarthen documents a five month old blind baby raising her arm to “conduct” her mother’s familiar song a bit before the beat.  He claims, “Our brains possess a storytelling sense that is an essential component of musicality from the beginning.” (Science News, Aug. 14, 2010)  They even cry in musical patters heard while in the womb.  Then they welcome the “goo-goo’s and ga-ga’s” we adults use with them as the further foundation of both language and music.  Stephen Malloch, of the University of Western Sidney, calls this early exchange “communicative musicality.”  Probing mom-baby verbal exchanges, he finds inherent pulse, quality, and narrative.  In twenty five seconds, patterns of introduction, development, climax, and resolution can be discerned.  Swedish researchers Eckerdal and Merker, a physician and a neuro-scientist, trace the development of sing-songy coordination of hands and voice in such early rituals as “Itsy Bitsy Spider,” suggesting these help align the babes in later social rituals.

Musical rituals in society are intricate and extensive.  They include: bonding, relaxation, creative expression, trance, learning, revolt, worship, persuasion, mourning, work, myth, entertainment, expressions of love, and more.  Why is this inessential activity, found across human cultures, so universal?

Harvard physicist Leonid Perlovsky speculates early hand gestures and sounds conveyed emotion, but the thinking, language-laden mind created a disconnect from those emotions.  Language then sets the stage for music to reconnect to those emotions.  Aniruddh Patel, of the Neurosciences Institute in San Diego, sees music as a human invention, an adaptation of neural circuitry serving other functions, much like our ability to make fire.  Like fire’s benefits to us, music helps us remember information and conduct community cohesive rituals.  It helps us adapt and function, so we use it.  But I suspect music is more essentially human than mere tool.

Consider what happens to babies when the sing-song interchanges with their mothers don’t go well.  Mothers with borderline personality disorder (who fear abandonment, feel empty, and act impulsively) tend to form intense, but unstable relationships with their infants.  They feel so alienated and alone that their baby’s attempt to pull them into melodic exchanges is like “trying to grab fistfuls of water.”  Such mothers (and those with obsessive-compulsive or paranoid personality disorders) lack the rhythmic flow babies seek, and instead use an awkward monotone the babies don’t get.  Such babies withdraw, vocalize only a little, and easily get upset.  Depressed mothers offer more, but in an unexpressive voice devoid of timing.  Their infants interact hesitantly, mimicking the flat delivery.  Simple rhymes and lullabies do more wonders than we knew.

Same for us humans at the other end of life.  Alzheimer’s patients remember better when the information is sung.  Evocative music helps them recall lost emotions and memories.  People with Parkinson’s misjudge time and have trouble coordinating walking and talking.  Music helps their difficulty by providing a sense of organized time and tempo.   Stroke victims who listen to music have better recall and less sadness and confusion, plus they walk better to a tempo.  Autistic people, who have trouble knowing how others feel, respond well to emotions in songs.  It calms those with anxiety disorders and boosts pleasure for depressives.

Music touches our whole brain our whole life.  Istvan Molnar-Szajacs, neuro-scientist at UCLA, says our brain seems on fire when listening to music.  He explains brain-imaging studies show listening to music “lights up, or activates, more of the brain than any other stimulus we know.”   Emotion, memory, motor control, timing, and language areas are all lit up by a good song.  The primitive cerebellum keeps track of the beat.  The motor cortex gets our foot tapping.  The auditory cortex makes a mental map of the tones.  The hippocampus rouses up memory and meaning.  The amygdala responds differently to major and minor chords and is soothed by skillful repetition.  The prefrontals keep things orderly but then step aside to let improvisation flow.  The limbic system (our emotional center) is affected greatly, firing up our pleasure centers to squirt out dopamine much like eating chocolate or having sex do.  Aha!  There’s our trilogy again.

Children trained in music hear words better in noisy situations.  Those unsatisfied with hanging chords are more sensitive to sentence syntax too.  Listening to music is good, but playing or singing it is better.  It improves memory, motor skills, and motor control.  Not reading or doing music can get you by, but we do much better all around by practicing both.  We shouldn’t be so quick to trash music programs in schools.  We’re built of music and thrive with it.  Music is more integral to who we are and how we can be than we ever knew.

Imagine what the world of sound would be like if you were deaf.  When one function is lacking, our brain nicely compensates by building extra neurons in needed areas.  Consider poor Beethoven, jilted by a hoped-for lover and going deaf besides.  Talk about emotion in music!  His anguish wrenches out aching minor flat ninths and more in the “Moonlight Sonata.”  Or think how much more tuned into your hearing you would be if you were blind.  How much more of the crucial inflection and pure sound of people’s voices would you be able to hear?  Which brings us back to Ray Charles.  He, soulful, gave soul to us.  Musical soulfulness is a part of our wonderful human wholeness.

In closing, there is one aspect to modern music that leaves us lacking.  More and more, people listen to recorded music in individualized formats.  It’s handy to have our iPod plugged into our ears, but not very communal.  Here-to-fore, to have music one had to be present to play it, or at least be near those playing it.  For most of human history, music is what we did together.  We sing hymns in church though, though.  I remember Roland Matthis at the Red Hill Universalist Church outside Clinton, North Carolina.  At six foot three he stood in the back pew and loudly sang out, badly.  I loved it.  Everyone who heard him could think, “Well, if he can sing this hymn, so can I.”  It isn’t the skill of the singing congregation that thrills me; it’s the sincerity of the prayer and the willingness to join in the singing that makes it work.  Singing lights up our whole brain, connects us to each other, and taps into an ancient and essential aspect of our being wholly human.  Our precious human lives are formed, touched, and refreshed by hearing and making music.

Reverend Brad Carrier

For the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Grants Pass

Grants Pass, Oregon

© December 12, 2010

Filed under: Sex, Drugs, & Rock ‘n Roll by brad
No Comments »

Thirty years ago as a young student minister in Michigan I preached against our government’s persecution and prohibition of drugs. In the back of the room the local police and prosecutors sat, glowering. In the front, in the pulpit, I rolled what appeared to be a joint. However, because marijuana was illegal, I had to use imaginary marijuana, relying only on the placebo effect for our shared spiritual experience. I toked it up, held my breath, and passed it around as a communion. Most people took a toke on the invisible joint, but others merely passed it on. Some wouldn’t even touch it. I don’t think the police tried it.

I thought then that surely the American people would see the sense of decriminalizing marijuana. It would take its place along side of alcohol at parties and would be the optional herb in people’s gardens. It was, after all, a mild drug with a five thousand year history of being favored by spiritual teachers, musicians and workers. It didn’t have medical drawbacks or anti-social consequences. Smokers tend to appreciate aesthetics, listen or dance to music, either get laid back or energized (it effects people differently), talk philosophy, eat sweets and giggle. I remember playing John Prine’s song, “Illegal Smile:” “Well, I just went and put on an illegal smile It don’t cost very much and it lasts a long while Won’t you please tell the man I didn’t kill any one I’m just trying to have me some fun.”

Little did I realize having fun is sin to the conservative puritan mindset and how it would be demonized like in a witch hunt. Little did I realize how horrible the drug situation would become and how our government helped make it all the worse. I pictured people being able to grow and give pot as a free sacred gift from nature to be shared among friends. I pictured also being able to buy it at stores, paying taxes on it that would fund various worthy causes. I pictured people also being able to take enthiogens (in-God-generate) what amounts to sacraments (such drugs as L.S.D., Mescaline and the like) on special occasions in protective settings, such as church events, retreat centers, and therapeutic centers.

I assumed people would prefer these drug options to those other enjoyable but problematic drugs like illegal heroin and legal valium. I’m not glad about the problematic drugs, but they’re not the problem they’re said to be, and that problem is made all the worse by our government’s bull-headed backwardness towards drugs.

If we consider drugs to be any substance people deliberately take to alter their mind or mood it would include everything from tobacco to alcohol and other legal drugs and it would include illegal drugs. By persecuting some of these drugs our government has created a monster. At the turn of the last century the addictive drugs were available in soda pop and at drug stores. Only Mexicans and black jazz musicians smoked marijuana when the government started publicizing it as an exotic narcotic that made people have wild sex and go on murder sprees. Not mentioned was that powerful lumber, cotton, fuel and synthetic industries wanted to eliminate hemp as a product so that their other materials would have to be used. The very plant that George Washington promoted was slandered and rendered illegal. When it became popular in the 60’s the deliberate misinformation continued, as did the harsh and illogical persecution. As its price rose, so did criminal profits, and along with them, the marketing of imported addictive substances like heroin and cocaine.

Given reliable education and free choice people tend to pick substances that they enjoy but which don’t ruin their lives. In parts of the world that have access to various intoxicants, indigenous people tend to the mild form of them. In South America natives chew cocaine leaves. In East Asia, they boil the poppies as tea or maybe simmer them into opium. But in neither place do the people in general get lost in the rarified forms of crack or heroin and the resultant addictions. We could drink Everclear till we puke, but we tend to choose a glass of wine instead.

Sadly, I watched the Counter Culture lose its purity and wander into all manner of problematic drugs. When speed came along, it wasn’t the government’s policing which changed that bad habit, it was the drug culture’s own realization and slogan “Speed Kills” that changed people. But then they went into heroin and downers and Cocaine, which morphed into Crack, and sniffed glue and huffed gasoline and migrated lately back to speed, called Meth. It gave credence to the so-called “gateway” theory, the plausible notion that if one high was good, a stronger one was better. Many people who got caught up in addictive and problematic substances had earlier smoked pot, hence, the gateway.

Missing from this logic is that they predominantly and typically don’t. Some 70 million Americans have smoked pot, while less than half a million use heroin. That’s a 140 to 1 ratio clearly indicating most don’t go on to harder drugs. In fact, if it is a gateway, it is a gate that swings two ways. Given the option and inexpensive availability, many heroin, cocaine, speed and alcohol addicts get off their habit by using pot. The gate may lead away, but can lead back. Moreover, the gateway phenomena is made worse by the prohibition against pot, for it drives the price up and puts its users in contact with pushers who would rather sell addictive drugs. What could and should be grown inexpensively and locally is instead repressed, and in its stead addictive and socially disruptive drugs are imported in a vast lucrative industry of criminal organizations and hypocritical corrupt governments. Thus, mere smiles and giggles became medical, social, and constitutional nightmares. Talk about gateways!

There are few venues in which to consider such confused and contentious issues. The American public has been propagandized to ignore its problems with the drugs alcohol and nicotine while being told all illegal drugs are about the same and that they’re the next thing to the devil. I’m proud that my own small liberal denomination, the Unitarian Universalist Association, has repeatedly called for an inclusive and intelligent reconsideration of these issues. A sub-group, UU’s for Drug Policy Reform, working from earlier nationally-agreed calls for study, reflection and action, asks that our congregations vote this June on an Alternatives to the War on Drugs Statement of Conscience. In it, they make the helpful distinction between drug use, drug abuse, and drug addiction. They state, “drug use is erroneously perceived as drug abuse, behavior that is out of control and harmful to others,” but that, “using a drug does not necessarily mean abusing the drug, much less addiction to it. They go on to say, “we do not believe that drug use should be considered criminal behavior.”

The distinction is a good one. Go on line to search the research on this issue. You’ll find ample categories labeled “drug abuse” but few to none as “drug use.” The presumption inherent in the category is that any use is abuse. Consider also that reports of trouble with drugs comes from police and counselors, who deal with troubled people, but there is no mechanism to invite or report stories and statistics of those who use drugs without either abusing them or being addicted. While the draft statement does call for the usual switch to therapeutic remedy for abuse and addiction, it does not clearly affirm the right of people’s personal use. Yes, there are people who need medical or psychological help, but not all use is abuse. I think we should be able to use many simply because we want to.

A counterpart is clearly understood in alcohol. Alcohol kills some 23,000 Americans a year from the poisoning and diseases it creates, a similar amount from related auto wrecks, and another similar amount contributing to our country’s suicides. We all know how alcohol abuse can injure families and society. But we also know all alcohol use is not alcohol abuse. Your glass of wine at dinner isn’t the same thing as chugging a quart of whisky. Use is not abuse, and does not warrant police surveillance, doors bashed down, guns pointed at your head, assets confiscated, charges leveled, expenses incurred, prison terms imposed, rights denied, and reputation ruined. Yet, the assumption is any use is abuse if it involves illegal drugs.

Far more people die yearly from legal drugs than illegal. Tobacco kills about 400,000. Alcohol, 45,000. Between 14,000 and 140,000 die a year from prescription medicines. How many people die from marijuana? None. None ever in history has been reported. More people smoke marijuana than use all the other illegal drugs combined. It leads to no deaths and contributes to no serious social harms (as does alcohol and meth), yet accounts for 1/4th of our country’s inmates, more than for murder, rape, robbery and assault combined.

The War on Drugs advocates consistently conflate marijuana’s mild effects into whatever dire statistics they can assemble, but do not distinguish which drugs do what, nor which the police and DEA prosecute. They act like all “drugs” are the same. In Oregon in 1999 some 300 deaths were related to heroin, cocaine and meth, while none were related to pot, yet the news called them “drug-related.” Marijuana is easily sniffed by dogs or found in the urine of a smoker, sometimes weeks later, so it’s easy to detect and catch. Police can appear successful in the “War on Drugs” by catching pot smokers and growers while using the problems of other drugs as their rationale. Peaceful hippies go to jail; pernicious crime organizations continue to profit from far more dangerous drugs.

Like most wars, the War on Drugs costs an enormous amount of money, injures the innocent, overpowers legal protections, and lays waste to rationality and truth. It alienates people from each other, their schools and their police. It creates a police state, where the federal government arbitrarily declares which drugs it won’t allow, over-rides long-established constitutional protections, more than doubles its prison system, and presumes to override state law and citizen privacy. This adds to whatever problems there are in drugs and ruins its own credibility. Instead of being able to rely on its advice, teens and adults have learned to disbelieve their one-note song – that all drugs are equally bad. Kids learn that pot isn’t the devil it is said to be. They go on to conclude the government lies about other drugs too. Soon they’re huffing paint or glue, thinking they’re as innocuous as pot. They’re not. They grow up seeing their government repress both the truth and the people. The people, the law, the truth, faith in freedom, our constitutional rights – everything American is defiled. This is a war on its own people, traditions and constitution. It’s a cultural war.

Richard Nixon, G. Gordon Liddy, Ed Meese, Ronald Reagan, and William Bennet all waged an ever-escalating war on those they deemed the enemy – largely, the counterculture and blacks. Despite Nixon’s own commission, which recommended de-crimilization of marijuana, Nixon increased the laws, took control from the Department of Health, Education and Welfare and delivered it to his own Czar, brought in the CIA and created the DEA. Reagan allowed his Justice Department to expand RICO laws to permit police agencies to confiscate property affiliated with drug possession, funding the police industry like a modern day Sheriff of Nottingham. He had his wife urge Americans to an “outspoken intolerance.” She declared causal users were “accomplice[s] to murder.” William Bennet instituted a “Zero Tolerance” policy for the country’s schools. He claimed the drug problem, “comes from this tradition of freedom and liberty,” and that beheading drug dealers was “morally plausible” if “legally difficult.” Darell Gates, founder of DARE and Chief of Police of the LAPD, declared to Congress, “casual drug users should be taken out and shot.” Mandatory Minimums stuffed our jails and created scores of new ones, placing non-violent drug users in for longer than robbers and rapists, leaving them resentful and connected.

Of course, this war is very costly, to the government and its victims alike. Our federal prison system has nearly tripled, our police must harass people they know are not destructive socially, and our courts are clogged with thousands of otherwise peaceful, law-abiding citizens. Is this the best way to address people’s propensity to use intoxicants and explore consciousness alteration?

Years after that first sermon, I’ve watched our country make worse decisions after bad ones. Lies are repeated, broadcast even on broadside barrages of propaganda where all TV stations show the same silly show. Schools teach, not fair investigation of the facts and critical thinking, but obedience to authority. People such as you, who ought to have a right to take what you want as long as it doesn’t injure others, are denied that option. Substances that have for eons been considered sacred sacraments, such as marijuana, peyote and mushrooms, are put in the same toilet as the addictive and problematic drugs. “Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” has been denied to all on the whim of a few, riling the fears of the many, ruining fair relations for all.

So, yes, I urge you to consider voting for the Statement of Conscience calling for Alternatives to the War on Drugs. I agree with Francis Burford, UU of the First UU Church of Houston, that the War on Drugs “violates every one of our seven principles.” Were it legal, I’d share some of these drugs with you in what ought to be our free and protected prerogative. This statement of conscience is one small step you can take to help sway the momentum away from a war on culture and towards a rational, compassionate, and creative solution for all. An alternative would have been my being able to use an actual joint in that church service thirty years ago. As part of a “drug awareness campaign” I’d share some with those police, let them have a real toke, engage in some funny banter and, yes, giggle together. An alternative is to have faith in freedom, to respect the persistent opinion of three or four generations of Americans who have all called for a more liberal, rational and less crime-ridden approach. An alternative is to undercut the enormous world-wide dominance of the crime syndicates and begin investing in health, education and welfare again.

Instead, we went into a war against our own people, with some wagging the finger of shame on others, even though they had no idea what it was they were talking about. In the Reagan era, spending for education did go up some 70%. However, spending for police and prisons went up some 600%. In 1984 Michigan spent less than 3% of its budget on prisons and 37% on schools; in 1988 the prisons jumped up to over 7%, while education fell to 30%. In two hundred years Congress had passed only 58 mandatory minimum laws; in 1986 it passed 26 having to do with drugs. Over 25% of the prisoners in federal prisons are there for marijuana. It’s costing us upwards of $50 billion a year.

So I would propose an alternative approach. Legalize marijuana. Doing that alone would decrease the number of drug offenders in our country by 90%. We should jail people only for crimes against persons and property, not their internal states. Provide treatment for addicts and drug abusers. Institute realistic, reliable drug education programs, alerting people to real dangers and avenues to of alternative change. Distribute the more problematic drugs via pharmacy, undercutting the street price in all cases. Tax marijuana if you want, but also allow people to grow and give it. Provide avenues for the deliberate and safe experimentation and spiritual practice of the enthiogens.

If the U.S. can’t or won’t initiate these changes, Oregon should. Let Oregon continue its populist tradition of going its own way. It would be a boon to the housing industry, the convention industry, and the chocolate chip cookie industry. Oregon could be one place in this country (founded by hemp growers and smokers, you remember, the revolutionaries who proclaimed we are endowed by Creation with the right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”) where that would be a living, re-legalized reality.

Reverend Brad Carrier

For the UU’s of Grants Pass and Central Oregon

© May, 5 & 12, 2002

Filed under: Sex, Drugs, & Rock ‘n Roll by brad
No Comments »

What and who are we, and whither would we go, and why, really?

I start to answer these questions, not by copying what others say, or by mouthing what others expect me to say as a minister, but by honestly saying what I think I know.

As you know, I entered ministry via a route through embalming.  At 18 I looked closely into death.  It awakened a wonder at the structure of our bodies and an appreciation for our precious, limited life.  Too often, religion goes past the body to an afterlife or an instead-of-life and doesn’t honor the wonderful fact of our having life at all.  From stuff, gravity, and light, we are assembled.  We didn’t do it; it does us.

But it ends.  Let me bring us some reminders from David Shields’ new book, The Thing about Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead:  By age 20 our strength and coordination have peaked, as has our flexibility; our IQ and brain size have maxed out by age 25; by 30 we’ve reached our tallest stance and densest bone mass; by 40 our grip is declining.

It’s not all bad news, though.  At 45 our vocabulary is three times what it was at 20.  And fortunately, if you live to be 90, you’re unlikely to get cancer; your tissues have grown too tough.

Cicero claimed old age starts at 46; he died at 53.  Mozart died at 35, Byron at 36, and van Gogh at 37.  Victor Hugo said, “Forty is the old age of youth.  Fifty is the youth of old age.”  Orwell said, “At 50, everyone has the face he [or she] deserves.”

So, though we are granted time in wonderful bodies, they wear out and we die.  We’re all going to die.  That’s part of my message here today.  The other part is . . . well, you’ll have to listen (or read).

The most frequent answers to this situation, and the most vexing questions to my materialist philosophical perspective, come from the religions – western and eastern.  The west postulates an afterlife.  We use our time here to determine how we will spend eternity in heaven, hell, or in between.  The east offers an instead-of-life, a Self prior to and independent of these corporeal bodies, which, if known and merged with during our embodied life, takes us out of the apparent limits of material reality and the deaths we must all encounter.

Though I doubt both perspectives as fanciful imagination and wishful thinking unsupported by our predominate experience, I’ll grant the few reasons for claiming such possibilities.

When Tony Cicoria was struck by lightening at age 42 he watched from above as someone resuscitated his body.  It was a realm of peace, and apparently, detachment from his body, for he viewed it from on high.  His whole life raced before him, and though he had no emotions about it, he did have a state of pure thought, of ecstasy.  Then, suddenly, he was back in his body.  In his case he went on later to develop an uncanny fascination with music, and he went on to give up his career and family to devote all his time to being a concert pianist.  Various physical explanations have been offered.

But such out-of-the-body experiences abound.  I myself had one at age 8.  With a broken arm, and under ether in a hospital, I heard it being set as I hovered near the ceiling.  (The only other direct experience of not being limited to my body – the occasional sense that I can feel when others are thinking of me (especially if there is emotional content connected) and synchronicities (meaningful and uncanny coincidences) make me wonder about mechanisms for such information.)

My Dad shared with me his fascination with mystical experiences and showed me the book by Maurice Bucke, Cosmic Consciousness, in which he recounts various experiences of prominent people who either went out of their bodies or underwent some profound encounter with a spiritual reality as to totally devote the rest of their lives to its lessons or lure.  They often call this encounter God.  Carl Jung believed religious experiences that seem to come from outside and knock your life into profound change are mysterious but real.

If we can fly out of our bodies, then maybe we can fly off when the body dies.  The old Chinese text The Secret of the Golden Flower claims we can cultivate a swirling light body within our physical body during our lifetime, using meditation, which grants us the ability to escape death.  Christianity was largely based on the promise of not dying, or at least being resurrected after we do.  (I won’t comment here on the shadow side of this depicted in the “Night of the Living Dead” movies.)

Muslims count on a paradise stacked with virgins.  Mormons look to eternity with their family.  Shamans are supposed to be able to contact spirits in other places and/or departed ancestors.  Voodoo practitioners, in a sort of spiritual counterpart to the mob’s protection racket, can be hired to either inflict evil spirits on others or ward them off.  The Tibetans claim to know about various spiritual benefactors or demons.  The Hindus say we are a Self that incarnates in a series of bodies until we realize our real nature.  The Catholic Church says we have guardian angels watching over us and that the saints are for sure in heaven.

Are all of these perspectives true?  If not all, then which?  How would we know?  Who are the experts?  Lots of people claim to know, or feel like they know, or believe someone else who claims to know via revealed scriptures or their advanced state.  Having been close to many dying people, I’ve asked a few to come visit me after they’re dead; so far, none have.  Maybe I’m not advanced or sensitive enough to perceive them, or maybe they’re not allowed to contact the living.  Or, maybe they’re not even there.

The Dali Lama says not seeing a thing is not the same as seeing it to not exist.  This is similar to Donald Rumsfield’s quoting of Cicero, “The absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence.”  My not knowing whether I or you have an eternal soul doesn’t prove that you don’t.  And a hundred experts from a hundred traditions claiming we do (though oddly, in a myriad of forms) doesn’t prove we do.  What are we to do?  No matter the hype or hope, we all die.  Even Lazarus died, eventually.

Before I share one such perspective that intrigues me, let me first alert you to a conclusion I use based on my limited perspective, my admitted ignorance: No matter what, if anything, comes after death, I’m sure we live prior to death.  I’m interested in “life this side of death” and “religion this side of God.”  No matter what ultimately might be true, I’m interested in what is “at least” true.  Who and how we are matters to these, at least.   Even if we don’t have a discrete ongoing soul, life and culture live beyond us.  For a while, we have our time within the larger on-going-ness of life and culture.  We have all this at least to live in, to learn about, and to love.  Pining for more seems greedy.  Is not this life in this universe enough?

But, skeptical unease not withstanding, it is also at least true that while in these bodies in this life we have a persistent intuition that this is not all there is.  We sense a presence as dear as it is invisible and as visible as it is dear.  What we see of this amazing universe may not be all there is.  Something divine may run it all and still ride in our hearts.  In our hymnals we have a reading taken from the Chandogya Upanishad:

You could have golden treasure buried beneath your feet, and walk over it again and again, yet never find it because you don’t realize it is there.  Just so, all beings live every moment in the city of the Divine, but never find the Divine because it is hidden by the well of illusion.

So, admitting I may be in the well of illusion, let me responsibly report some intriguing possibilities that take us beyond our bodies and deaths.

Meher Baba is typical of the gurus and avatars that assuredly bring us such a message.  He claims he realized his divinity at age 18 and decided it was so real he would never speak of it or anything else again, instead using the stronger reality of his God-realized presence to awaken people.  He gave up all talking and writing at that time and never spoke another word.  He died in his sixties.

Though he did not speak, he would point to the letters around a chalk board, and later, use hand gestures which his disciples would interpret.  Using this time-consuming method he nonetheless “wrote” many books and touched the lives of multi-thousands.  In a matter of a fact and un-boastful way, he claimed to be The Avatar, more advanced and rare than an awakened master, rarer even than a savior like Jesus.

He “said” of his not speaking, “I have not come to teach, but to awaken.”  He claimed asking to know God by words and thoughts was like trying to see with your ears.  The mind has its functions, but only the soul can know God.  I’ll quote some selections from his apparently-authoritative and ironically-titled book God Speaks.

Reality can never be understood; it is to be realized . . . Therefore, the GOAL is to realize the Reality and attain the “I am God” state in human form.

God cannot be explained, He cannot be argued about, He cannot be theorized, nor can He be discussed and understood.  God can only be lived.

To understand Maya [the force that keeps us spiritually blind] is to understand the universe… Intellect in particular plays into the hands of Maya, for the intellect is not capable of that consciousness which realizes that God is Truth.  Truth can only be known after one transcends the cosmic illusion which appears as real owing to Maya.

“Maya, the principle of ignorance, can only be transcended when the spiritual aspirant is able to realize that Maya is God’s shadow and as such is nothing.  The enigma of Maya solves itself only after Self-realization.”

“…everything pertaining to the spiritual seems paradoxical – God, whom we do not see, we say is real; and the world, which we do see, we say is unreal.

“We must lose ourselves in order to find ourselves; thus loss itself is gain.  We must die to self to live in God; thus death means life.  .. We must become naked of selfhood by serving nothing, so as to be absorbed in the infinity of God; thus nothing means Everything.”

Existence is, whereas life appears to be.

Existence is God, whereas life is illusion.

Existence is eternal, whereas life is perishable.

Existence is freedom, whereas life is a binding.

In this vein, let me share also a teaching of The Blind Saint of Vrindivan, who I visited in India with my friend and guru, Dr. Vasavada, in the early ‘70’s.  This is from his little book, “Saddhana – Spotlights by a Saint.”

Dissociation from the mind is also a radical means of purification of the mind.  To dissociate from the mind is to become its beholder as if something outside our self.  This means, instead of removing the various impurities of the mind one by one, starving the mind of its very food derived from our association with it.

Here are some of his maxims.

Right use of the present is the root of progress.

Renunciation of wrong action spontaneously leads to right action.

Returning good for evil destroys the evil.

All power is a trust of the weak.

Acquired wealth is a trust of the poor.

Forget your virtues and other’s vices.

All fear is grounded in body consciousness.

Inherent in one’s own reform is the reform of all.

The humanist in me grants there is a time to go beyond thinking, grants wisdom to these teachings, and has curiosity about those who sense God within and so discount these bodies and this world, but it also rouses up anger at their using this world as a mere stepping stone to some other, or an irrelevant illusion masking a more important reality.

While in India, I gazed into the eyes of the last remaining Asian lions; they’re being driven to extinction by cattle ranching.  I also saw hideous poverty, especially in the cities, and even in the countryside I saw rivers that bubbled with poisonous effluent.  The twin realities of environmental degradation and human suffering run rampant in both the west and the east, and their religions don’t seem to care or help.

I had gone to India dismayed at the western religions for treating earth and life as a mere stage set for a divine test.  Nor did our religions object much to napalming the Vietnamese for vague reasons.  The gift, grandeur, and beauty of life get reduced to the realm of dominion in the west and to mere maya in the east.

I also ran in Shree Bhagwan Rajneesh in India.  (I’ve told you how sick I was and how riled up I got towards him; though this was an actual encounter, I have since come to admire his bold teachings.)  He sat in white robes sporting a big Rolex on his wrist and big diamonds on his hands and went on about how we are not the body and this world is not real – that it is all only illusion, Maya.  Meanwhile, near there a thousand souls lived in the urban squalor of tin and cardboard huts with no toilets.  They suffered like I was suffering.  It seemed dismissive and offensive to blithely brush off the hard reality of this world while sitting in opulence and adoration.  I wanted to punch him just to see if he would identify with his detached soul or incarnated body.

Though I reacted to the notion of Maya, I grant some psychological wisdom in the understanding.  This milder form of Maya is seen in the Buddhist teaching: One can fear a coiled snake only to discover it is only a coiled rope.  We take our ideas as so real, when they’re often just coiled rope.  We get so overwhelmed by our ideas sometimes.  But at the end of our life, in those instants when we see all our life flash before us, which ideas then matter?  Does our fear of coiled snakes run our lives when there is so much else to see in the room, in our lives?

The coiled snakes of desire or aversion, of obsession and compulsion, of thinking we know our selves when we don’t – can run our entire lives and ruin this lovely world.  In my life, the angels of synchronicity and the inner call to overcome the snake-delusions of church and market have me seeing the mere rope that all their lies (and mine) have been.  Religious teachings, marketing claims, lifestyle lures, political promises, our own habitual thoughts – all these can be the maya that captivates and misdirects our soul.

“What profit it if one gains the entire world and loses one’s soul?” This is not so much get to heaven by believing in the far-fetched notions of zealots (early and current) so much as whether we learn to be our soul while we are alive.  “Break the chains of ignorance while you are alive,” Hafiz (or Kabir) advised, “Do you think ghosts will do it for you when you are dead?”  Realization will never be found in the future; it will only come, if ever, in the Now.  Worrying about a future afterlife distances us from the eternity we can access by our silent, complete immersion in our everpresent Now.  When we are in our presence, in our now, we are touching an eternity that is always new.  Practice that.

In this vein, I would take the combined wisdom of Meher Baba, the Blind Saint, Emerson, Krishnamurti, Deepac Chopra, Eckhart Tolle, Gay Hendricks, and me to suggest this:

Have gratitude for what is, but learn to be detached enough from it to allow fuller understandings and more creative options to emerge.  Question what others teach and you think you know.  Heed and honor the feelings of your decisions.

Develop and deliver the fruits of your own nature to the world; be a co-creator along with creation as best as only you know.  Have intensions for the future, but put your attention in your now.  Go lightly and easily.  Have faith that a life well lived is not only its own reward, it is rewarded, for both are karma.

This, at least, we have:  We have this world this side of any other.  We have life this side of death.  We have our selves this side of conformity.  We have love this side of fear.  We have the Now this side of time.  We have, as Emerson reminded us, the religious this side of the religious ideas.  Do we live freely and fully in what we have?

Not only do I find it hard to believe that this astonishing vast universe, made up of everything from sub-atomic quanta coming into and out of existence on the micro level to the swirl of galaxy clusters on the macro, with us knowing it in the middle, is nothing but an elaborate illusion, I find it insulting and irresponsible.  Why pine for afterlives and other realms when we haven’t known, honored, and served this one?  Why seek the Creator by wasting Creation?

Perhaps there is a meeting on a middle ground.  There is no false dichotomy.  We can love this world as part of a larger reality.  Our earth is just a mere speck seen from the vast reaches of the larger universe, but it is our speck, our large, lovely home, spinning reliably for us to live on, and learn from, and love.

The rainbow was to be the mark of the covenant, a sign of our constant relation to something beyond us.  And as rainbows split the singular white light we usually see into the seven lovely colors of a much wider electro-magnetic spectrum, just so, our place in space and time leads us to far vaster realities.  Our reality is the doorway to Reality.  Who and how we are here determines not only what is likely to befall us here, it is our relation to the beyond.

Reverend Brad Carrier

For the Unitarian Universalists of Grants Pass

Grants Pass, Oregon

© March 2, 2008

Filed under: Healthy People & Planet, Physics to Mysticism by brad
No Comments »