WELCOME TO THIS FRIENDLY CHURCH

First Universalist Church of Norway

May 23, 2010

“Our mission, as we live our historic, liberal faith, is to nurture

spiritual growth, honor diversity, and offer service with love”

PRELUDE(s)

WELCOME AND ANNOUNCEMENTS

Good Morning! And welcome on this .............. day! [West Paris: I know we had a surprisingly well attended Pot Luck Friday night. It was good to see so many people after we had almost cancelled it thinking there might be hardly anyone at all who would come. Is there a report from the Rhubarb Pie and Rummage sale that took place yesterday?] Norway: [Today is the deadline for turning in pledges for our Stewardship Campaign so we can create a budget for the church’s next fiscal year. If you haven’t done so as yet I’m sure Mardi would be happy to take a verbal statement of your intention after the service. Please speak to him after the service. Are there other announcements?]

UNISON OPENING WORDS # 505, by Thich Nhat Hanh

Let us be at peace with our bodies and our minds. Let us return to ourselves and become wholly ourselves.

Let us be aware of the source of being, common to us all and to all living things.

Evoking the presence of the great compassion, let us fill our hearts with our own compassion - toward ourselves and towards all loving beings.

Let us pray that we ourselves cease to be the cause of suffering to each other.

With humility, with awareness of the existence of life, and of the sufferings that are going on around us, let us practice the establishment of peace in our hearts and on earth. Amen

INTROIT

CHALICE LIGHTING WORDS by Annie Foerster, adapted

Come we now out of the darkness of our unknowing
and the dusk of our dreaming;
Come we now from far places.
Come we now into the twilight of our awakening
and the reflection of our gathering.
Come we now all together.

We bring, unilluminated, our dark caves of doubting;
We seek, unbedazzled, the clear light of understanding.
May the sparks of our [being together] kindle our resolve,
brighten our spirits, reflect our love,
and unshadow our days.
Come we now; enter the dawning.

Please light the chalice after these words and then lead the congregation in our covenant. Thanks for helping with the service!

COVENANT

Love is the spirit of this church. These are our goals.

To worship God in Freedom,

To affirm the dignity of all people,

To dwell together in peace,

To serve one another,

And to seek the truth in love.

[With Hans Christian Anderson’s “The Princess and the Pea” as the take-off point for this service on dealing with the small annoyances that can trouble our lives, I’m taking the opportunity to choose a couple of hymns that, because we so rarely have evening services, we hardly ever get to sing. Hymns such as ...]

HYMN When Darkness Nears # 50

RESPONSIVE READING “These Roses” # 556

These roses under my window make no reference to former roses or to better ones; they are what they are; they exist with God today.

There is no time to them. There is simply the rose; it is perfect in every moment of its existence.

Before a leaf-bud has burst, its whole life acts; in the full-blown flower there is no more, in the leafless root there is no less.

Its nature is satisfied and it satisfies nature in all moments alike.

But we postpone of remember. We do not live in the present, but with reverent eye lament the past, or, heedless of the rriches that surround us, stand on tiptoe to forsee the future.

We cannot be happy or strong until we too live with nature in the present, above time.

CANDLES OF JOY and CONCERN

A STORY FOR ALL AGES see attached copy

OFFERING, OFFERTORY, and Sung Response

From you I receive, to you I give

Together we share, and from this we live.

ANTHEM Heather and the Choir

SPOKEN and SILENT

PRAYER, MEDITATION, REFLECTION Richard

Let us give special thanks and grateful appreciation today for the lilacs which have blessed us with their presence here this Spring. Though fading now, we will not forget their colors or their fragrance, and will look forward to their coming yet again, as they always do, in the springtime of the year.

We are grateful also for the fiddleheads and the new-mown grass, the early warmth that has stolen away the chill still lurking in our soil and made possible the May-time planting which will mean more abundant fruits and vegetables and flowers in our fields and gardens.

But we are also somewhat worried about the greenhouse warming of the earth and the melting of the glaciers, the rising waters of the sea and the challenge faced by every form of life which must adapt to new environments and altered conditions for the birthing of their young, all of which has happened before in the billions of years-long history of our planet, but which we have not experienced or sufficiently planned for.

In the midst of our delight at the resurgence and rebirth we know the Spring-time brings – hand-in-hand with our joy – comes trepidation, comes wondering about the future of our children, and of other’s children all around our globe, comes pause for thoughtfulness about the survival not only of our expectations and our dreams for humankind, but also fear comes of the struggle for survival that may pit all hard-pressed peoples of the earth against those like ourselves that seem to bear less burdensome a challenge, less threatening a catastrophe.

In the midst of continuing plenty, amid both natural and many human- generated wonders, still enjoying surpluses and both earned and unearned abundances, allowed the opportunity for reflection and planning that wealth brings us, let us consider the inter-connected web of life that being blessed has allowed us to perceive, and begin to think on how the gifts of nature and of nature’s gods and goddesses can more equally be shared.

Be present Spirit of Life and Giving in our wonderings as you have been in our wanderings. Help us breathe with the earth and fly with the moon and the sun as they create the circles of the seasons. Live in our hearts and our minds, in our feelings and affections and our love. Grant we find it in our spirit and our faith to include in our thoughts, our prayers, and our actions, all the beings in the web of life. Let our special thanks and our grateful appreciation inform all we do and all we are, as individuals and as a gathered and covenanted community.

SILENCE

So may it be. Blessed be. Amen.

MUSICAL RESPONSE Heather and the Choir

READING “Five A.M. in the Pinewoods” by Mary Oliver

I’d seen their hoofprints in the deep needles

and knew they ended the long night under the pines,

walking like two mute and beautiful women

toward the deeper woods,

so I got up in the dark and went there.

They came slowly down the hill

and looked at me sitting under the blue trees,

shyly they stepped closer and stared

from under their thick lashes

and even nibbled some damp tassels of weeds.

This is not a poem about a dream, though it could be.

This is a poem about the world that is ours, or could be.

Finally one of them – I swear it – could have come to my arms.

But the other stamped sharp hoof in the pine needles,

like the tap of sanity, and they went off together

through the trees.

When I woke I was alone, I was thinking

so this is how you swim inward,

so this is how you flow outward,

so this is how you pray.

“The Summer Day” also by Mary Oliver

Who made the world?

Who made the swan and the black bear?

Who made the grasshopper, I mean –

the one who has flung herself out of the grass,

the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,

who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down –

who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.

Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.

Now she snaps here wings open, and floats away.

I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.

I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down

into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,

how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,

which is what I have been doing all day.

Tell me, what else should I have done?

Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?

Tell me, what is it you plan to do

with your one wild and precious life?

HYMN You That Have Spent the Silent Night # 41

SERMON “The Princess and the Pebble” Mr. Beal

One of the things I hope you are not doing with your life (wild or tame or somewhere in between), is lying awake at night, tossing and turning and unable to get comfortable despite the twenty layers of consumers goods piled on the bedspring and the twenty things you may not have needed but were on sale for a really, really good price ... piled on top of the layers of consumer goods to help test your sensitivity to the hard little aggravations of your life and the state of your world.

I hope, unlike the princess, you fall comfortably asleep despite the uncooked pea ... or the sharp edged and knobby pebble ... which have been secreted below all those layers of comfort. Sleep without the slightest suspicion that you are being tested for your degree of awareness and level of conscientiousness about the needs and problems all about you. I say this – about hoping you go right to sleep as though neither you nor anyone else had not a care in the world – for at least two reasons. The first is that you’ll need your sleep if you are bothered about the state of the State, or the state of the Nation, or the state of any number of things which are challenging the in-retrospect-not-so-bad world in which we grew up ... and if want to do something about the things we will likely face in this world-in-the-making. Tired people are not very good change agents.

The other reason is that while sensitivity is often a wonderful thing, too great a degree of sensitivity can be paralyzing. There was an article in the paper just yesterday about a woman who had to be rescued from her cats. She loves cats. Is sensitive to their needs and wants to care and provide for them. When strays came into her yard she began to feed them. Like a stray cat I was once adopted by, she found they followed the food she put outside the door into the house, and became not a stray cat but a house cat. This happened over and over again and as the stray cats came in from the cold, feral cats began to come into her yard to begin the process of moving from feral to stray to house cats. The cats, of course, had kittens. As cats are wont to do. Her children and her friends and neighbors pointed out she had barely enough money to feed herself, let alone dozens of cats, or to meet her doctor’s bills, much less the veterinarian bills she would need to pay. “Take them to a shelter” they advised her. But, sensitive and tender-hearted, she couldn’t manage to do that, though she was relieved when someone reported her and the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals came and carted her cats off to a shelter where those who could be adopted would be given homes and families that could take care of them. The SPCA agreed she could have two of them back once they were spayed. One presumes most of characters in the story will live happily ever after.

Or at least that would be the case if that story was written by Hans Christian Andersen, who doesn’t actually tell us who this princess who knocked at the castle door, drenched from the downpour she was standing in, really was. We don’t know if she was really a princess or just a very clever working girl who quickly figured out she was being tested for her sensitivity quotient, and managed to stay awake long enough to prove herself at least as sensitive as the average princess. Like many other deserving and non-deserving young women, she married the prince, became a queen, and lived happily, or miserably, ever after. Hans Christian Andersen does not say.

And it’s not, from my point of view, ever wise to sleep atop twenty mattresses and twenty comforters. It’s kind of perilous up there if you’ve ever tried it. Nor is it wise, if you are super-sensitive, as I know many of you are, to allow your sensitivity to dominate your life. At least not your sensitivity to the terrible problems we face, problems like the drift of oil onto the shores and into the marshes of the Mississippi delta, and ensnaring pelicans and smothering turtles. These problems are like homeless cats, if you do not balance them with other types and kinds of things to think about, especially things to appreciate and take comfort in, they proliferate. But if, like Mary Oliver, as she records in the book I read from earlier, you develop a means of seeing the wholeness of the human and the natural world, the balance implicit in all the things which are. The balance that reveals opposites when we look for them. Life balancing death. Hope despair. Winter the heat of summer. Rain the dryness of the fields. Day night. Loneliness friendship. Depression exhilaration. I try to find this balance for myself. Appreciation to balance frustration. Moments of success to balance times of failure. Sometimes I enlist allies in this search for equilibrium, oftentimes poets.

Mary Oliver has another example of what I search for and find helpful in her book “The Truro Bear and Other Adventures” published by Beacon Press. This one is titled “Hannah’s Children.”

They will come in their own time,

Probably in the black Funnel of the night,

And probably in secret –

No one will see their marvelous coming

But the other goats and Maple the pony.

Now, on the evening of the last counted day,

We latch the stable door.

As the white moon rises

She settles to her knees.

Her curious yellow eyes – Old as the stones of Greece,

Of the mountains that were born with the world –

Look at us in friendship, And then look away.

Inward. Inward To the sacred groves.

And there human is balanced with animal, human history with human myth, the birth of the goat with the continuing birth of the imagination, the evening with the night. I find there to be solace and perspective in that poem, as I find them in very many of our human connections and interactions with nature. Not all of them, of course, for we have much to atone for. But there are springs of freshening water gushing from deep in these granite hills and springs of empathy and awareness rising up from deep in human evolution and consciousness.

Fairy tales are portals, access points to ancient ways of seeing and understanding. Even written fairy tales, like “The Princess and the Pea,” often come from older stories from the countryside, as Hans Christian Andersen says his story came from people in the wilds of Sweden. Myths, poems, stories and tales, like music and dance and almost all of the other arts, come rising up from the human, sometimes from the human consciousness, sometimes from the unconscious. They are part of what has and what continues to keep us “human.” They help us keep our balance.

The words of our final hymn are by another familiar poet of New England’s land and seasons, flora and fauna and spirit:

HYMN Oh, Give Us Pleasure In the Flowers Today # 64

CLOSING WORDS By Marjorie Leaming

Let us go forth into the world through a door of hope for the future, remembering these words by Martin Luther: "Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree." So may it be with us.

PARTING CIRCLE

“Carry the flame of peace and love until we meet again.”

POSTLUDE(s)

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