This week we continue our eight-part series on “The Book of Hope” co-authored by Jane Goodall and Douglas Abrams.
We are beginning the third and final section of the book Becoming a Messenger of Hope, and in this section we look at Jane’s journey from her early days as a young animal researcher in the jungle to becoming a world-known inspirational figure. She encourages all of us to become messengers of hope.
The title of this week’s talk is “The Lifelong Journey.” We had our first group discussion on the book two weeks ago during zoom coffee hour and we recorded the session. If you would like to view the session you will find the link in today’s supplemental material. The service will be available at 10AM on our YouTube Channel followed by Zoom check-in and coffee hour at 11AM. You’ll find the links listed below.
Have a good week-end everyone.
In Ministry,
Dave
HERE IS THE SERVICE LINK FOR THIS WEEK’S SERVICE(Please note it won’t be active until 10AM on Sunday morning)
https://youtu.be/pvtVNKRO3DE
HERE IS THE ZOOM LINK FOR SUNDAY:
David Hutchinson is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting.
Topic: UUHoulton coffee hour and check-inTime: Feb 13, 2022 11:00 AM Eastern Time (US and Canada) Join Zoom Meetinghttps://us06web.zoom.us/j/83783793362?pwd=U2hiK0VsYm5qRjNQbStGVWhyYnFLQT09
Meeting ID: 837 8379 3362 Passcode: 198275
Virtual Offering Plate
If you would like to send in your pledge or donation simply drop an envelope in the mail. The address is listed below. You can also send your donation electronically with our new payment system on the church website. Simply go to uuhoulton.org and click “Donate” on the menu and it will explain how the system works. You can set up a regular monthly payment plan or donate in single transactions. Thank you for your generous support!
UU Church of Houlton61 Military StreetHoulton, ME 04730
Two Paths, One Life
BY REVEREND ZENSHIN FLORENCE CAPLOW
Rev. Zenshin Florence Caplow isn’t half Buddhist and half Unitarian Universalist — she’s completely both.
I am an ordained Zen priest and an ordained Unitarian Universalist minister. I might give the Sunday sermon from the pulpit of an old stone UU church in central Illinois, wearing a robe and a colorful stole, and the next night an online dharma talk for a Soto Zen center in Chicago or Santa Fe, wearing black koromo and rakusu. On any given day I might meet with a member of my UU congregation to talk through a thorny family conflict, and later I might sit with a Zen student to discuss living the precepts.
I’m a sixth-generation Unitarian, down a line of women from my Iowan great-great-great-grandmother, Jane Potter, to me. Jane Potter’s obituary, from 1901, reads, “Mrs. Potter became a charter member of the Unitarian church in Cherokee when it was organized ten years ago. It was a moment of rare joy to her when, with her husband, children, and older grandchildren standing beside her, all pledged their loyalty to the higher life of religious ideals and strivings.” The women of my family asked the most famous woman minister of their time, the Rev. Mary Safford, to help them found their church.
I find that people of all ages, and many beliefs, are longing for ways of understanding that can provide a support in these stormy times.
Unitarian Universalism is nearly unique among American denominations because it’s “noncreedal,” meaning there’s no obligation to a shared theological creed or understanding. A person can be an atheist UU, a Christian UU, a pagan UU, and yes, a Buddhist UU. I’m on the board of the national UU Buddhist Fellowship, and we estimate that at least one in ten UU congregations have a Buddhist group associated with the congregation.
What UUs do have in common are commitments to human dignity, to caring for one another and others, and to responding to the injustices in the world. Unitarian Universalists have always been a tiny fraction of the American population, but have had an outsized role in many of the great progressive movements, from abolition and women’s suffrage in the nineteenth century to the Civil Rights and gay rights movements of the twentieth century.
I’ve come to realize that I’m not alone in being “transreligious.” Methodist pagans, Catholic Zen students, Jewish Sufis, Vajrayana practitioners who also practice African spirituality—there is nearly every combination of tradition and practice that can be imagined. I’m not speaking here of people who have a dilettante’s interest in more than one tradition, but of people who are deeply committed to and engaged in different spiritual traditions. I think of the dharma teacher Jan Willis, who wrote the book Dreaming Me: Black, Baptist, and Buddhist, or the time I visited a tiny, remote Catholic monastery in the mountains of Italy, where in the crypt below the chapel there were, mysteriously, Zen cushions lined up neatly on the ancient, marble floor.
As a UU minister and community leader, I find that people of all ages, and many beliefs, are longing for ways of understanding that can provide a support in these stormy times, whatever those ways are called and whatever tradition they hail from. The Buddha himself said that the dharma was medicine, and the Lotus Sutra teaches that, through “skillful means,” the dharma can heal and liberate in thousands of ways.
Sometimes I think of Zen as being about a different set of questions than the great theological issues of the West, especially the question of God versus no God. In the West we divide people into those who believe in God, in whatever form, and call them theists, and those who don’t believe in God, and call them atheists. I think of Zen as neither theistic nor atheistic, but rather nontheistic. The questions Zen addresses are in a different realm than beliefs about God. So, at least for some Christian Zen practitioners, there’s no conflict between Zen and Christianity.
I grew up in the seventies, with the real and present dangers of nuclear war and environmental degradation. Reading about genocide and racism, the Holocaust and the Vietnam War, made me despair about humans and their doings. As a UU, I knew I was supposed to roll up my sleeves and do my part to make a better world, but it was overwhelming for my young spirit.
For me, the faith and values of my mother’s sincere, midcentury Unitarian Universalism weren’t enough to sustain me. When at age eleven or twelve, I found the books of Alan Watts, I said to myself, with relief, “Ah ha—here’s someone telling it like it really is!”
I might not have survived adolescence and young adulthood without the powerful teachings and practices of Buddhism. I learned meditation in my teens, began practicing Vipassana in my early twenties, and found Soto Zen in my late twenties, when I became a student of Zoketsu Norman Fischer (a transreligious Jewish Zen Buddhist). My gratitude for the dharma is as wide as the ocean, and that gratitude led me to ordination and teaching within Soto Zen.
However, the spirit of the feminist Unitarian women in my family made me painfully aware that the liberatory teachings of Buddhism appeared to have sprung from only one half of humanity—the male half—and there was no way this was the whole truth. In the monastery we chanted the names of more than ninety generations of ancestors from the Buddha to now, and all were male. I began looking for the teachings of Buddhist women, and from that search came the book The Hidden Lamp: Stories from Twenty-Five Centuries of Awakened Women, a collection of women’s powerful words and practice I edited with Reigetsu Susan Moon. I credit my Iowan women ancestors for giving me the clarity and courage to bring these stories out of hiding.
In my forties, I walked into a UU fellowship in Flagstaff, Arizona. Gay marriage was illegal everywhere except in a few states, and longtime gay couples in the congregation were going to California and getting married, and then announcing the news to their religious community to cheers and tears of joy. I cried, too, moved to my bones by a religious tradition that affirms “love is love” without hesitation. In that moment, I began considering UU ministry, although already ordained as a Zen priest. I hoped that my decades of dharma practice would be a gift I could bring to the people I’d serve.
When I was training for the ministry, a seminary friend asked me what percentage I thought of myself as Zen Buddhist versus UU. “Sixty-forty?” she asked. “Fifty-fifty?” I laughed and immediately said, “One hundred–one hundred!” I meant that I saw my two practices and traditions as completely interrelated, interpenetrating, and interdependent. Over time the picture has become subtler and more complex, but I’d still answer in the same way.
ABOUT REVEREND ZENSHIN FLORENCE CAPLOW
Reverend Zenshin Florence Caplow has served as a minister of UU congregations in Washington, Colorado, and Illinois. She’s also a Soto Zen priest in the Suzuki Roshi tradition.
Session Five Supplemental Material
The Book of Hope (part 5)The Indomitable Human Spirit
We have now made it to the half way point in our series, part five out of eight, and today we look at Jane Goodall’s fourth reason for hope, the indomitable human spirit. Let’s take just a moment and review Jane’s four-point outline. Her four reasons for hope are
- The Amazing Human Intellect
- The Resilience of Nature
- The Power of Young People
- The Indomitable Human Spirit
Douglas Abrams begins the chapter by asking Jane, “What do you mean by the indomitable human spirit and why does that give you hope?”
It’s that quality in us that makes us tackle what seems impossible and never give up. Despite the odds, despite the scorn or mocking of others, despite the possible failure. The grit and determination to overcome personal problems, physical disability, abuse, discrimination. The inner strength and courage to pursue a goal at any cost to self in a fight for justice and for freedom, even when it means paying the ultimate price of giving up one’s life…It’s an ability to deliberately tackle what may seem to be an impossible task and not give up even though we know there is a chance we may not succeed. This indomitable spirit requires the amazing human intellect, imagination, determination, resilience, courage – and of course, hope.
And like previous chapters, this chapter is mostly made up of stories to illustrate her point (Jane’s preferred teaching method). I found her childhood memories of the German Blitzkrieg and the Battle of Britain during World War II to be especially compelling. These were undoubtedly some of her formative experiences that she carried with her in each of her life adventures. She also shares personal stories of people she knew who endured and overcame great life challenges, including her second husband Derek Bryceson, who was wounded in World War Two when his plane was shot down in North Africa and told he would never walk again. As Jane says, he was determined to prove the doctors wrong and he succeeded!
She tells the story about Rick Swope, the man who rescued a chimpanzee, Jo-Jo from drowning at a zoo.
She tells the story about two Chinese men, one blind and the other with no arms, who working together planted thousands of trees to restore degraded land around their small rural village.
And both she and Doug share contemporary examples of heroism and activism; the response to the Attack on the World Trade Center, protests at Standing Rock, firefighters this past year in Australia, Europe and in the American West, and the most recent crisis, which we are still in the midst of, responses to the coronavirus pandemic.
On page 155 Jane says,
All these stories of heroism, of courage, of self-sacrifice illustrate the indomitable spirit that is so often revealed by danger. Of course it is right there all the time, but so often nothing happens to call upon it…While the courage of the indomitable spirit is often revealed in times of disaster, as we have said, this is not true for everyone. some people go under. And I do think this is linked to resilience, and if we are optimistic or pessimistic. (page 160)
Doug adds,
Psychological resilience is the ability to cope with crises and to remain calm and move on from such incidents without long-term negative consequences. Like a resilient ecosystem that recovers after a natural disaster or human-made disturbance, resilient people are able to recover – though it may take time depending on the severity of the trauma…Archbishop Desmond Tutu once explained to me that suffering can either embitter us or enable us, and it tends to ennoble us if we are able to make meaning out of our suffering and use it for the benefit of others.
Here is a quote by Jane on page 150 that is one of my favorite in the book so far.
“All life’s challenges are like our own individual curriculums that we must work hard to follow and master.”
workshop exercise:
So, last week during zoom coffee hour we had our first group discussion on the book, using the companion workbook by Easy Growth Publishing.
One of the questions we asked is “Do you consider yourself an optimist or a pessimist?”
If you had to self-select, in which category would you place yourself? And instead of just making it one or the other, we added a sliding scale or a gradient continuum from one to ten; one being most pessimistic and ten being high-end optimistic. And in different settings or situations your score or rating may change. As you reflect on your response and your emotional content connected to an event or a challenge you can start to see how we all swing back and forth between various levels of despair and hopefulness.
And secondly, what I’ve noticed in the Jane Goodall book are two basic types of challenges, one being at the personal level and the other being larger stories and challenges at the global level. Each type have their own particular challenge. The take-home assignment in our zoom coffee hour was too make two separate hope lists; one list of your personal hopes and fears that you have faced or are facing in your life and a second list of the global hopes and fears that you have – as humanity faces challenges now and in the years to come.
Once you have those two lists, go back and apply question one to each item and come up with a score for how hopeful or pessimistic you are on each item. This will give you an idea of what issues are significant for you and how you’re feeling about them. One of the aims of this book series is to see your hope-score improve (at least a little bit) from the time you start the book and when you finish.
What I find so inspiring about Jane’s story is how she shares her personal challenges along the way and how she would find ways to adapt and change when she needed to.For example, in the early days in Gombe when she was trying to establish contact with the chimpanzees, they would simply run away from her over and over again. How much time did she have? Would they ever stop running away and would they ever accept and trust her? Time was running out and so was funding…These were Jane’s fears and the odds of success were not in her favor, but as she says, she was obstinate and just wouldn’t give up.
In closing, Jane talks about the importance of finding your own role and finding meaning in what you are doing. Without that there is no hope. This brings it all down to the individual level and that is one of the key components of hope studies.
One thing that is really important is to help people realize that they, as individuals, matter. That they each have a role to play. That they were born for a reason…Without meaning, life is empty and day will follow day, month will follow month, and year will follow year in mindless succession. Those are people who have lost hope and sometimes it is possible to rouse them from a seemingly meaningless life with a really good story, one that will reach their hearts and wake them up.
page 169
At the end of the chapter Jane shares a fictitious story from the book “Lord of the Rings” which has also been make into a movie.
Jane says it’s an inspiring story for the hopeless because the might the heroes were up against seemed utterly invincible – the might of Mordor, the orcs, and the Black Riders with horses and then on those huge flying beasts. And Samwise and Frodo, two little hobbits, traveling into the heart of danger on their own. I think it provides us with a blueprint how we survive and turn around climate change and loss of bio-diversity, poverty, racism, discrimination, greed and corruption. The Dark Lord of Mordor and the Black Riders symbolize all the wickedness we have to fight. The Fellowship of the Ring includes all those who are fighting the good fight – we have to work so hard to grow the fellowship around the world.
“The world is indeed full of peril, and in it there are many dark places; but still there is much that is fair, and though in all lands love is now mingled with grief, it grows perhaps the greater.” ― J.R.R. Tolkien The Fellowship of the Ring
Study Questions from the Workbook:
1. Jane Goodall relives with so much satisfaction the connection she feels with nature. Have you ever felt intimately connected to your natural environment? Can you describe the feeling?
2. Can you describe the places where you feel connected to nature the most?
3. Jane’s narration is replete with stories of people who have exhibited the indomitable human spirit of never giving up in the face of excruciating circumstances, even taking altruistic action while risking self-harm. What examples of the indomitable human spirit have you witnessed?
Link to the first session of the book discussion recorded during zoom coffee hour: https://youtu.be/gQPprkl6ly8
Joys & Concerns
When one of us is blessed we are all blessed.When one of us experiences sorrow we all feel the pain.
We are saddened with the passing of Leola Bishop a long-time member of UUHoulton and a precious one. Her smile lightened a room when she walked in. Here is a photo taken on the front lawn of the church at Ingathering in 2019 just before covid changed all of our lives. Leola never shied away from a photo opportunity. We will miss her dearly.
It’s Super Sunday!Even if you’re not interested in the game, it’s a good time for food, nachos, the half-time show and even the Super Bowl commercials…
Please send in joys and concerns during the week to dave@backwoodsblog.com and I will post them on the Support Page.
Prayer List
For those recovering from COVID-19 in the state of Maine
Local emergency personnel and hospital staffFor our state and national leaders as they respond to the current coronavirus crisis
For those working for social justice and societal change Pray for peaceful action and democratic process in our nation
Prayers for refugees in Eastern Europe, Central America and for those along our southern border
Concerns regarding the new covid variant Omicron
Prayers for the easing of tension on the Ukrainian border between Russian, NATO and US
Prayers for all those struggling with discouragement, the winter blues or depression this time of year.
Prayers for the family of Leola Bishop during this time of loss and grief
The Four Limitless Ones Prayer
May all sentient beings enjoy happiness and the root of happiness.
May we be free from suffering and the root of suffering.
May we not be separated from the great happiness devoid of suffering.
May we dwell in the great equanimity free from anger, aggression and exclusion.
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