Lizzo's LIbertating Love

NOTE: This sermon was preached as part of a program that included short readings from two books, What We Don't Talk about When We Talk about Fat by Aubrey Gordon and Why We Get Fat and What We Can Do about It by Gary Taubes. You can read these here. The children's book Bodies are Cool! by Tyler Feder was also read.

LIZZO

Lizzo is the stage name of American rapper, singer, and flautist Melissa Viviane Jefferson.  She’s 35 and has won four Grammys, two Soul Train Music Awards, a Billboard Award, a BET Award, and been nominated for many others.  She performed at the Glastonbury Festival and headlined Pride Festivals in Indianapolis and Sacramento. She was a musical guest on Saturday Night Live.  She is glamorous, loves fashion, make-up, and her costumes live in the same neighborhood as Madonna’s. Lady Gaga’s, and Dua Lipa’s. And….

SHE'S FAT!

Her Instagram handle is @Lizzobeeating.  She has an Amazon Prime reality show called "Lizzo's Watch Out for the Big Grrrls" in which plus size women audition and compete to become her back dancers. I’ve been a fan since she burst onto the scene about five years ago. It says a lot that she’s notable for being a sexy pop star who’s fat. But what it says is that fat people shouldn’t dress to be sexy, shouldn’t dance, and shouldn’t live out loud about who they are.  Her dog died on Christmas Eve. And she’s being sued by former employees for sexual harassment and weight shaming. Lizzo denies the charges.

“I am a proud Black woman. I love my plus-size body and I celebrate every inch of it as sexy and beautiful. I believe in hard work, striving for perfection and constantly pushing myself to do better.”

I hope the accusations are not true, but if they are - it fits the pattern of people who are oppressed for whatever reason internalizing that oppression and inferiority and practicing it against others.   When I learned about these accusations I was bummed out. It’s been wonderful having a bonafide A-list FAT superstar.

I grew up as a fat kid and all there was at the time was Fat Albert and he was a cartoon version of fat that was still easy to make fun of.  As a kid I was called lots of names pudgy, husky, pleasingly plump, stout, portly, roly-poly, tubby, and fatso.  The kids mostly used some variation of fatso, but it was all the verbal contortions that adults went into that bothered me the most.

CHILDHOOD MEMORY

On my tenth birthday in May of 1976 I went to K-Mart with mom. I can’t remember what I bought with the money my grandmother had sent. But I remember vividly what I did next. After K-Mart, we went to Barone’s – our pharmacy – which was next door.  We called Barone’s "the drug store." We got our medicine there, but we also got comic books, hot dogs, and ice cream. That afternoon of my 10th birthday, I remember mom buying me the latest issue of the Amazing Spider-Man and a chocolate milk shake.  Barone’s made the best milk shakes, even better than Friendly’s or Dairy Queen.  On the way back to the car, we passed Mr. Fournier. Mr. Fournier was the coach of a team in my little league.  Mr. Fournier looked at me and said,

“Pudge, that milkshake ain’t doing you any good. You’re chubby enough. You gotta be able to move behind that plate (I was a catcher) and run out ground balls.”

And then he smiled and winked at me. It was bad enough when other kids made fun of you because you’re fat, but it was worse when adults did.  I thought of throwing the damn milkshake at him, but that would have been wasting half a milk shake. I stood paralyzed in what I can now name as shame. My mom tugged my arm, gave Mr. Fournier the same look she gave me when I was in big trouble, and pulled me along to the car. 

LIBERATING LOVE AND LINGERING PREJUDICES

Each month I extend a spiritual challenge based on the monthly theme. This month’s challenge is to do an examination of conscience for lingering, under the radar prejudices, and to get people started I suggest the topics of fatness, being poor, and being uneducated.  Most good hearted people are aware of prejudice and understand that even the best of us have certain biases and prejudices, sometimes unconscious, that inform our attitudes and behavior.  You’ve probably done some work - or even a great deal of work - on unlearning white supremacy culture, engaging and combating racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, Islamophobia, antisemitism, and other glaring prejudices.  My challenge to you this month is look underneath those prejudices that loom large at the front of consciousness and peek under the psychic bed and into the mental closet for some persistent prejudices and biases that tend to get overlooked, especially by liberals and others with a more open-minded world view. One of those is FAT.

Reflect with me a minute. Look at this list of ten statements related to obesity and fat people. What do you think or feel when you read/see/hear them?

Fatitudes

Here's a short True-False Quiz about fat.

Fat True & False Quiz

You may have noticed a pattern. All the odd number questions are FALSE and all the even numbered questions are TRUE.

Did you learn anything about any bias you might have toward fat people? Did you learn something about the actual causes of obesity? It’s OK to not be righteous. No one is. I’m fat and I know I fall into these modes of thinking sometimes.  If you want to dive deeper into attitudes and bias about and toward fat people, there’s a great little questionnaire published by IDR Labs that gets you thinking about your own ideas about weight, fat, body image and acceptance: https://www.idrlabs.com/fat-shaming/test.php.  

Even while reading this you might you be thinking – "Yes, yes, you’re right that we shouldn’t be cruel to anyone on purpose or make fun of people for being fat, but --- being fat really is unhealthy and I don’t think it’s OK to tell people it’s OK to be fat.

That’s just it. Fat liberation isn’t about telling people to be unhealthy.  I think it’s about what’s called Healthy at Every Size, trademarked by Association for Size Diversity and Health.   They advocate a non-diet approach to promote a gentler to health than weight loss at all costs mindsets. In a May 2022 online essay Registered Dietician Cara Rosenbloom quotes Veronica Garnet and Ani Janzen who say of their approach:

"Our current five principles of HAES are weight inclusivity, health enhancement, respectful care, life-enhancing movement, and eating for wellbeing."

Gary Taubes directs us to the science to get fat straight. We’re learning more and more all the time about what actually causes obesity. He says:

“The science itself makes clear that hormones, enzymes, and growth factors regulate our fat tissue, and that we do not get fat because we overeat; we get fat because the carbohydrates in our diet make us fat. The science tells us that obesity is ultimately the result of a hormonal imbalance, not a caloric one—specifically, the stimulation of insulin secretion caused by eating easily digestible, carbohydrate-rich foods: refined carbohydrates, including flour and cereal grains, starchy vegetables such as potatoes, and sugars, like sucrose (table sugar) and high-fructose corn syrup.”

Why have obesity rates skyrocketed? Because over the last century the American diet has become increasingly full of simple sugars like high fructose corn syrup and scientifically engineered food like products full of refined carbs. They’re everywhere and in everything.  And in urban food deserts, the convenience stores aren’t full of fresh produce, but Doritos, hot dogs, and ice cream. We spent the 1970s telling everyone all fats were bad and filling people full of low-fat – and high sugar – substitutes.

The vast majority of people who lose substantial amounts of weight gain it back. The diet and exercise mantra has not led to a decrease in obesity rates.  We need to re-evaluate the way we approach fat.  When is weight truly causing, and not a symptom of, poor health?  We assume fattness is bad so we don’t yet fully study how people like my wife can be obese but have normal blood sugar and blood pressure and run half marathons and swim a mile and half for exercise four times a week. Our assumptions and prejudices get in the way of using science to figure out the real answers.  And when science finds answers social stigma and stagnant attitude keep even doctors from using them effectively.

 A 2003 study found 50 percent of the primary care physicians they surveyed viewed obese patients as “awkward, unattractive, ugly, and non-compliant,” Cited by Evette Dione in YES!

Not only is being fat not some type of character deficiency and moral flaw, it has a systemic justice component in much the way all other injustices and oppression do.  And just like all people who experience discrimination, scorn, shaming, and shunning, fat people don’t want to t be tolerated.  We want to be included. We want to be able to walk into any store or visit any website and find something in our size. Have you noticed that I only wear two suit coats? I can’t find anything in my size of decent quality in my price range, my waist is big, my shoulders broad, and my arms relatively short.

Sabrina Strings and Lindo Bacon make an argument  in Scientific American in 2020 – that

bias against fat people is actually a larger driver of the so-called obesity epidemic than adiposity itself. A 2015 study in Psychological Science, found that people who reported experiencing weight discrimination had a 60 percent increased risk of dying. Chronic diseases such as diabetes or heart conditions are mislabeled “lifestyle” diseases when behaviors are not the central problem.

RACISM

Fat liberation, like all liberation movements, needs to be approached as intertwined and connected to other struggles such as sexism, racism, and poverty.  The history of fat shaming can be traced directly to racism attitudes toward black bodies.    Sara Baartman was an enslaved woman from the Eastern Cape in South Africa. Her amble bosom and large rear end were said to be examples of primitive African body types. She was put on display around Europe in the early 18th century in freak show as the "Hotentot Venus" and   people paid extra to poke her with a stick or a finger. Eventually she was prostituted. She died at 26 in 1815.  Scientists preserved her voluptuous body parts and her remains were used to support racist theories about Africans and black bodies. In 2002, after a decade of requests, her remain were returned to South Africa.

Evette Dionne’s 2019 essay “Here’s What Fat Acceptance Is and Isn’t” in Yes! magazine reports a number of fascinating studies.

• 2010 University of Michigan “kids who were obese were 65 percent more likely to be bullied than their peers of normal weight;

• A USC study of the top 100 films released in 2016, found only two women larger than a size 14 were cast as a lead or a co-lead. Of the top 50 TV shows that year, only three women leads were larger than a size 14.

• In 2017 Fairygodboss found fat employees earn $1.25 less per hour  on average for doing the same job as nonfat workers.

You can still be fired for being fat in 49 states – yay Michigan. Although there are cities and a few states considering anti fat discrimination laws, existing federal and local anti-discrimination laws consistently don’t hold up when tested by fat people suing employers.

Quite often when people try to lose weight, they are not usually trying to lose weight for its own sake, merit worthy or not, What they are doing is trying to lose the discrimination and mistreatment they suffer because of their size. I was once told by a member of a congregation I served - at coffee hour in front of others - that the congregation would benefit if I were in better shape because fat people weren’t as good at marketing.

How prevalent is fat shaming?

MY WIFE'S SERMON

My wife is a priest in the Episcopal Church.  I share this with her permission. While on vacation this past summer in Portland, OR she preached a guest sermon at an Episcopal church. The prescribed scripture reading for that Sunday was The Gospel of Matthew chapter 15 where Jesus says:

 ‘Listen and understand - it is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but it is what comes out of the mouth that defiles.’ 

Her sermon was about fat phobia and how fat people are still the butt of jokes, cruelty, and discrimination. She received actual hate mail about the sermon. The worst was from a professor at a local university who sent an angry, hateful, curse laden email calling her just about every fat slur in the book and offering,

“Your taking of the gospel lesson, in which Jesus says that righteousness depends on what comes out of our mouths rather than what goes in, and turning it into a call for gluttony and obesity was bizarre. This may also explain why there are no young people left there. My daughter thankfully has established good eating and exercise habits. But your call to obesity would have most parents of young people scrambling for the exits.”

My wife is a large, fat woman. And her call to kindness, inclusion, and compassion for fat people resulted in hatred directed at a fat woman for being fat. 

BUT THERE IS HOPE

I published a novel in 2017 about a Catholic High School in Boston.    The title Saint Somebody Central Catholic is based on the name of the school in the story which is named after some long forgotten Irish Catholic saint and the idea that everyone – even unknown teachers and their students in a insignificant high school in Boston are all saints – holy people. I’ve always been a Universalist at heart.  Spoiler alert – it wasn’t a best seller.  After about 18 months sales dropped off and it’s a nice thing I’ve done in my life and I can say I have an author page on Amazon. BUT…

Just after the Covid quarantine began in the winter of 2020 I received an email from a woman in Australia named Sophie Henderson-Smart offering to buy the domain name of my web site for the novel.  She needed the domain name for her business. Fashion designer Sophie Henderson-Smart had started a business in Australia in 2018 making top of the line swim wear for plus sized women. She called it Saint Somebody because everyone is beautiful, holy, and special – we’re all saints. Even fat people. Or as she says,

"Inspired by all women and their beautiful, diverse, remarkable bodies we create pieces that feel incredible to wear. Luxury fashion isn't only for one body type, nor should it dictate how we view our bodies. Fashion is about how the clothes make us feel."

The Saint Somebody Swimwear Website

 I absolutely loved that when she told me why she named her business Saint Somebody. I told her she could have the domain name. She didn’t need to buy it from me, and I signed over the rights.   She also told my wife that she should pick out two or three suits from the catalog and she’d have them sent.  So, I traded the domain name for $700 worth of swimwear and the knowledge that I’m not the only person who thinks we’re all valuable, lovable, and acceptable, whatever our size.

TRauMA and RESILENCE

Histories of Trauma and Resilience

My parents divorced when I was 10. They tell me that when my dad moved out of the family home, I cried for three days, morning noon and night.

Six months earlier, the Boston Red Sox lost the 1975 World Series to the Cincinnati Reds in an agonizing game 7 where the Sox blew a 3 run lead, losing 4-3 with the winning run scored in the top of the 9th. My parents would tell me I cried for over a week straight. I was inconsolable. The tell me that twice in the week following the defeat, teachers had to send me out of the classroom because I couldn’t stop crying. When they divorced 8 months later and I only cried for three days, it was a relief that I wasn’t taking it worse.

It took me long time to bounce back from my parents’ divorce. I think all children of divorce understand how complex this can be. As in the case of many other of life’s difficulties, everyone who goes through it experiences it differently. It may be easier for some, but it’s never easy. The worst for me was having to do every single holiday twice. Christmas, Easter, and Birthdays were the worst. Somewhere between the start of high school and the end of college, I made peace with it.

And true to form, it took me much longer to bounce back from the 75 World Series. It was a rough one. I was only 18 months old when the Sox had played out much the same script losing to the Cardinals in 7 games in 1967, but in 1975 I was just old enough to be aware, very aware of how special a world series appearance is . I was prime baseball age. 9 years old, and baseball was my world. I was one of those kids who took his glove to school, who collected all the baseball card, and even kept score – a truly dying art form – when I went to Fenway Park. I listed on the radio, I watched on TV. I began reading the sports page every day. When my favorite player, Carlton Fisk waved that home run fair to win game six in 12 innings, I was as euphoric truly as I ever remember feeling. And the very next night after they blew a 3 run lead and lost the series, I was as despondent as I would ever feel until experiencing depression as an adult. Oddly, when a therapist asked me if I’d ever felt this way, I replied, “Yes, when the Sox lost the 75 World Series.” The counselor laughed. I wasn’t joking. It might not have been so bad, except two years later in 1978 Bucky Freaking Dent hit a three run homer in the top of the 7th to erase a 2-0 Sox lead and start the comeback that saw the Yankees win 5-4. Then the ball went through Bill Buckner’s legs when the Sox were one out away in the 1986 series against the Mets. By the time Aaron Rodgers homered off Tim Wakefield in extra innings in 2003, I had finally come to grips with not letting the Sox make me depressed. And all the trauma was erased in 2004 when the Sox finally won the series for the first time 86 years.

Divorce and the Red Sox are not the worst traumas of my life and they certainly don’t compare to truly devastating traumatic experiences like war, sexual assault, debilitating disease, or homelessness. Yet traumatic they were in their own way and in their own time.

Trauma is any form of shock that impacts the normal capacity to function. My parents’ divorce and the Sox losing the 75 series impacted my 9- and 10-year-old self’s capacity to function. Acutely for days and to a lesser degree for months, even years. Eventually I found the resiliency I needed to move on. I grew up and having to make my own compromises with life certainly helped me understand those my parents had to make and living through my own relationships I came to understand how sometimes things just don’t work out. Eventually Larry Bird’s Celtics made the travails of the Sox easier to take. And then the Patriots and Sox seemed to be winning championships every other year, ho-hum! I also arrived in that place where men making millions to play ball while people are hungry and taking performance enhancing drugs to do it, and well cheating to win, like the current Sox manager, put professional baseball and even the Red Sox in perspective.

As Robert Wicks writes, The question is not if we will experience trauma in our lives, It is when. None of escape the darkness and traumatic experiences. Lucy Hone is a resilience expert from New Zealand that had to put her research into practical use when her 12-year-old daughter died unexpectedly. She wrote a book about what she learned in the wake of that experience. Her book What Abi Taught Us, Strategies for Resilient Grieving was published in 2016. In her TedX Talk from Christchurch, NZ she says that resilient people practice three things the less resilient have trouble doing:

1. They get that SHIT/STUFF happens – they don’t live in woulda, coulda, shoulda land. They don’t play blame games. They don’t spend all their time wondering why and why me? As novelist John Green writes in his story The Fault in Our Stars, “The universe is arbitrary , but it’s not malicious. It didn’t come FOR YOU. Things just happen.”

2. They’re good at focusing on what they CAN do and don’t worry about what they CAN’T Do and Can’t Control.

3. They recognize the importance of the triage question, “Will this help me or will this hurt me?” in discerning what to do and discerning how to best heal.

These don’t seem like overly grand and complex strategies. They are not character traits reserved for the most superhuman of us. And yet, many of us find it difficult to practice these things in the course of daily life, never mind in the wake of trauma and while grieving. Because it’s nearly impossible to start up good habits in the spur of the moment when tragedy occurs, these are life hacks worth practicing as often as possible so when we next need them, they are in our brain’s toolbox.

These three things are a big part of why MUUS has come through the pandemic in relative good shape. Our Leaders understood that stuff happens. Pandemic is horrible, but we’d better get busy doing the best we can. And they did. MUUS focused on what we could do. We did online services; we had a continuing series of socially distanced functions and drive through celebrations. The Mobile minister drove around making visits, and the online minister had a weekly lunch. We asked will this help get through the pandemic, or won’t it? We combined with the Meriden congregation for online services and a virtual choir, we stopped paying rent for space we weren’t using. We acted like a resilient group.

Trauma researchers tell us that one of the best things we can do in the wake of trauma is to tell our stories. We tell personal stories of personal trauma, and we tell personal stories of collective trauma. Pooling our stories, we tell community stories of trauma.

Back in the day, Red Sox fans would tell stories of Bucky Freaking Dent and God Darn Bill Buckner. Each fan’s story slightly different. How the even impacted them. Where they were. How they survived the moment of pain. Together Red Sox nation had a communal story of pain. Likewise, after 2004 each Sox fan had a story of where you were when the Sox completed the Sweep in St. Louis in 2004. What relative did you call. Who in your family didn’t live to see the Sox win the series? Taken all together, this forms the lore of Red Sox nation. And so it is for more serious trauma. We all have our own personal story of traumatic things that happen to a group, a country, a congregation. Those stories will have similarities but also differences. When people live through trauma, they need to feel as though their story of the trauma is heard, that their pain of the trauma is felt and seen.

Our nation has a collective story of the trauma of the Great Depression, of World War 2, of the JFK assassination, of 9-11. Our nation doesn’t have a collective story of the Vietnam War, or Slavery and Racism and White Supremacy. One of the reasons we are such a divided nation is that we no longer share common stories of trauma and resilience. The main reason for that is for the first in our history those whose stories of the trauma of America has never been heard and whose pain and personhood have not been seen are refusing to be ignored. Historian Jill Lepore says a people NEED a common, shared story, and they will have it, they will get it one way or another. It will be trained historians, or it will be demagogues, but a common story will arise. We are caught up in the struggle for what story we tell from now on about our collective trauma.

During Covid, we have put a lot of effort into creating opportunities for you to tell your story. How are you doing? Send in your photo? Drive by to get Halloween Candy and Cornbread and Cider and Valentines. Make phone calls to each other. Check in on each other. Eventually, we will have a collective story of how MUUS survived Covid, but it must be created out of shared stories. If it isn’t then it won’t lead to resilience. We now see the first fruit of our striving to tell the story through the process of the traumatic event, we are emerging, slowly, carefully, into buying land and building a meetinghouse. Putting all our stories together through the crisis we tried to create a narrative of this time we can all claim and share as a congregation.

Resiliency is a response to trauma. We bounce back by reframing because our stories of trauma are ALSO our stories of resilience. We tell the story of not only how we suffered, but how we survived and this in turn helps us thrive. Just as there is post traumatic stress there is also post traumatic growth!

The Child Trauma Institute (at https://www.childtrauma.com/blog/fairy-tale)

Ricky Greenwald Says The concept of post-traumatic growth has been around since long before the term was coined. For example, people have long proclaimed, “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” The thing is, sometimes it does, and sometimes it doesn’t. And when it doesn’t, the point of trauma-focused therapy is to help those who have been wounded by their experiences to heal and come out stronger. In other words, when post-traumatic growth doesn’t happen naturally, we try to induce it.

Greenwald uses the archetypal Hero’s Journey, in Fairy Tale form as model to explain the post traumatic growth pattern used with children in trauma counseling to get them to face and process fears, traumas and/or losses.

• Base line, or “once upon a time,” when everything is normal.

• The call to action, in which normal doesn’t work anymore. Because now (for example), the old parents can no longer feed their growing children; or there’s a dragon in town, wreaking havoc.

• Gathering of resources to enable the hero – who typically starts out as someone decidedly not heroic – to face the challenge.

• Death and rebirth. The hero utilizes her resources, faces death (or some equivalent fate such as enchantment), and comes through. In the process of overcoming the challenge, the hero becomes transformed, for example from child to adult, or wounded to whole.

• Re-entry, in which the hero returns home, but in a new role or higher level as per the growth/transformation that has been achieved.

Once upon a time in first two decades of the 20th century the Red Sox won the world series 1903, 1912, 1915, 1916, 1918, but since then the dragons of the Curse of the Bambino – When the Red Sox sold Babe Ruth’s contract to the Yankees – wreaked havoc with the team’s success, causing them to lose the world series in agonizing fashion four times and agonizing play off loses in other years.

Then came Theo Epstein the brilliant young GM from Brookline, MA who grew up a Sox fans and used Bill James Sabrmetric statistical analysis to construct a team that WON the Series in 2004 and now the Red Sox have won the most world series of any team in the 21st century.

MUUS has also followed this model to post traumatic growth. There was the time before COVID. And then many of things that used to work for having a successful congregation didn’t work any more when the Dragon COVID forced us out of our building and online. Then MUUS stopped paying rent and we learned how to be successful with technology and online ministry and a team found land to buy to build a meeting house. And now we are getting ready to be reborn into our new home with renewed energy.

constructive-developmental psychologist Robert Keegan says, “The emotions and the experience, the gratitude or the terror, associated with transformation are very different from what transformation actually is.” In his book In Over Our Heads: The mental demands of modern life, Keegan says that transformation is not just learning new information; not just putting new things in our brains. To transform is to substantially change the form of the container itself, so that our mind, and I would say our spirit or our soul, is different, bigger, more expansive, more complex, more able to deal with shifting sands, uncertainty, disruption. When we are transformed, Keegan says we change not only how we behave and feel, but HOW we KNOW and the WAY in which we come to know.

What we have lived through in the last two years has made us different than who we were in the before times, before Covid, before Pandemic and Quarantine and Social Distancing and Vaccinations. We have come to understand in a new way the importance of community, mutual support, common values and common purpose. We have come to understand in a new way how to love each other and answer the call of love. We have come to understand in a new way who we are and what MUUS is. Both our personal and congregational histories have been through a period of trauma AND post traumatic growth. We have found ourselves to be more resilient than we realized. We will carry our collective congregational narrative into the future transformed by our experience of traumatic stress and traumatic growth. Transformed by our history of trauma and resilience.

The Mother of Trees

I’m still full of joy from a gathering of my congregation, The Mattatuck Unitarian Universalist Society, on October 23rd to bless the land that will house our new meetinghouse. It was a future forward looking event, projecting expectantly into the future of MUUS. And at the same time, we were attuned to the reality that what we did that day would one day be a very important chapter in the history of MUUS - an important event in MUUS’s past! Our ceremony and socializing on that October day looked both forward and backward, we cultivated our relationship with our Ghosts of MUUS past as well as Ghosts of MUUS yet to come. We realize that in the buying of land and building of the meeting house and developing the grounds, we are practicing being good Ancestors! We are not just the present stewards of our congregation, we are the ancestors of the MUUS members who continue the journey of Living the Tradition of Unitarian Universalism after all of us, even the youngest of us today, are long gone. It was absolutely thrilling to be aware of living out an episode of the congregation’s story in real time. We were and are part of an epic tale, living a real adventure in a saga that stretches behind us and before us.

This Halloween I come to church this morning in my Renaissance Faire costume of Barliman Butterbur, the Innkeeper of the Prancing Pony Inn in Bree on the border of the Shire where Frodo Baggins, traveling as Mr. Underhill and his three friends meet the Ranger named Strider, later revealed as Aragorn, on their way to Rivendell and the council that will produce the Fellowship of the Ring. At the Prancing Pony the group is attacked by the Ring Wraiths. I offer this so you know who I am supposed to be in this costume and not so smooth segue way into my LOTR example!

One of my favorite characters in TLOTR is Treebeard and by extension The Ents. The Ents are the ancient shepherds of the trees! They themselves resemble anthropomorphic trees, being tall, trunk like legs and branch like arms and fingers, lichen like beards and so on. Over the long ages, some have become tree-like and no longer move or talk. They blend right in with the trees. Ents, like trees, have extremely long lifespans if not killed or cut down. Thus, they seem to move and talk in what seems like agonizing slow motion to the other sentient characters in the story with whom they interact.

Italian theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli in his recent book The Order of Time – maybe even the stones are alive -yet they change so slowly that to us they seem inanimate. Reminds of me a Star Trek episode in the original series where the crew of the enterprise encounter what seems to them to be an empty planet. They hear strange buzzing sounds, but see no creatures, no aliens, no living things. Only later when they hear the strange buzzing in their ship the Enterprise do they discover that the sounds are coming from the aliens, humanoids that live and move at such an accelerated speed, the crew of the Enterprise can’t see them or hear them. They only experience them, their speech, and movement as a high-pitched whirring buzzing noise.

Physics teaches us that time dilates the faster we move and the further we move away from a gravitational center. The crew of a starship may age 40 years during a journey but back on their home planet decades or even centuries or more have gone by. The life of a Hobbit goes by in an instant compared to the life an Ent which travels a much longer, much slower path through the timeline of Middle Earth.

Human beings have quick little life spans compared to the Ents and the older Mother trees. The first time I stood at the base of a Redwood in California I was rapt in awe. It was ancient. A 1500+ years old sentinel of the forest. It had been alive from the fall of Rome to the day I stood there. This past June I visited the rainforests in Oregon where again I encountered those ancient Mother trees. Again, as among the Redwoods in CA, I felt like I was in a Time Warp, a Time dilation. The very air and space around me felt alive, aware, and had a power I could feel through my body, an energy that went back millennia. I, my entire life, a passing instant in the stretch of eons that the sentinels of the forest have watched go by. Standing under the sentinels in Oregon this past spring, I felt as if I were in a scene from the recent novel The Overstory, about the amazing complexity of the forest, the spirituality of ecology and eco system, and climate crisis. The novel’s heroine is based on the life and work of Suzanne Simard whose work gave us proof trees talk to each other, that trees and fungus form an interconnected web of existence on the forest floor. The relationship between trees and other trees and mushrooms and other plants and the soil is a woven intricacy of symbiotic existence. The relationships of individual to the whole intrinsic and elemental, essential to the very survival of ALL.

The Living Tradition of human spirituality that we call Unitarian Universalism is a Mother Tree, an Ent, something alive made up of interconnecting pieces that moves along slowly, seeming to be unchanging to us because we only see a brief glimpse of its life during our own comparatively short lives. Congregations are notoriously slow to change. Congregations are incarnations of a spiritual tradition with a very ancient history or histories in the case of Unitarian Universalism, and this living spiritual tradition, like any living thing, does grow, adapt, and change. We human beings only see, at best, a few decades of that long history, and so to us, changes in its overall trajectory, even huge shifts in its basic concept of itself as a spiritual tradition, are very hard to conceptualize and understand. Yet accepting and understanding that we are a part of something ancient that will go on long, long after we are gone, helps us to be better stewards of the tradition while we are here. And helps us strive to be better ancestors.

As human beings we are pretty good at being descendants. We look backward and see what’s gone before resulting in us and what we experience in the here and now. But we are not as good at looking forward. The climate crisis is but one example. We still haven’t reached a critical mass of humanity agreeing that this is an immediate existential crisis. We conceptualize that we play a part in history and do worry about what we will leave our children and grandchildren, but we don’t tend to think of ourselves as Ancestors. We are ancient ancestors of a far flung tomorrow.

Right now, we at the MUUS are steering the congregation through a major turning point in its history that is part of a much larger arc of the ongoing evolution of our faith tradition. We have bought land and will build a meetinghouse. This meeting house will be built with an understanding of the climate crisis and our deep connection to the trees, the soil, the water, and the air. This meeting house will be built to navigate a world immersed in technology and be outfitted from day one with computers and projectors and internet connections. Our MUUS descendants will take it as a matter of course that their congregational life plays out both inside and outside, in person and online, and their meeting house, although in Woodbury, CT has members and friends all over the country and all over the world. Those future members of MUUS will practice a Unitarian Universalism that wrestles with the big existential questions of being human in ways we can only conjecture and imagine.

Suzanne Simard says that the story isn’t about how we will save the trees, but about how the trees might save us. As we cultivate relationships not only with each other but with our descendants, we become aware of how intertwined all life is. Our own tradition made a course correction in the history of religion. When western religion had forgotten that the individual has value, worth, and dignity and individuals should not be controlled, abused, used, and homogenized, our liberal religious tradition fought back. And yet we over compensated and we are now course correcting again. The individual is important, but our culture, even our own Unitarian Universalism for many years, turned the individual into an idol. The trees teach us, we can only truly thrive when we work together as an entire community of living things. Not above creation but part of it. Not isolated individuals, but individual parts of a cohesive whole.

Our relationship with our descendants must connect to our relationship to our ancestors. The current generation is always a bridge. The stronger and more structurally sound the bridge the stronger the connection of past to future. We have a great responsibility. As the bridge between the past of the Living Tradition and the future, one of the best ways for us to be both good descendants and good ancestors is keep wonder alive, embody our values and makes decisions based on what’s good for everyone, not just what’s good for us.

Perhaps the most majestic of all terms for holiness or divinity is The Great Mystery. We still know so little about ourselves and our existence…so we should cultivate wonder, that place where we hold paradox tenderly. That place where we are brave enough to unlearn and unknow things if new information or clarification of past inaccuracies arise. This great mystery attitude is the power of our way of being spiritual and religious – because we realize we are always learning, we can’t set wisdom in stone, unchanging forever. What has come before is always in relationship with now and what is now is always cultivating relationship with what comes next.

Living through Covid has put us now in a liminal space, an in-between space – in the middle of the journey from who we were before Covid and who we will be after it. And during this time, we are living into being an in-between place between the MUUS that was before, wandering vagabonds, forging a new way to be a religious community in this area, and the MUUS that will come next – a faith community with a meetinghouse and land, and a true place at the table in a town that will need our leadership and guidance. We will be a Mother Tree in the forest of our community.