100 Ways to Kneel and Kiss the Ground
The Rev. Benjamin Maucere
The Call to Worship, From Mevlana Jelaludin Rumi, 13th century Sufi poet and mystic: Today, like every day, we wake up empty and frightened.
Don’t open the door to the study
and begin reading. Take down a musical instrument.
Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.
The Sermon:
From Rumi,

These spiritual windowshoppers
who idly ask, How much is that? Oh, I’m just looking.
They handle a hundred items and put them down,
shadows with no capital.
What is spent is love and two eyes wet with weeping.
But these walk into a shop
and their whole lives pass suddenly in that moment,
in that shop.
Where did you go? “Nowhere.”
What did you have to eat? “Nothing much.”
Even if you don’t know what you want,
buy something to be part of the exchanging flow.
Start a huge, foolish project, like Noah.
It makes absolutely no difference what people think of you.
"Did you brush your teeth today? Did you brush your mind?" In the video "Living by Heart," this question is asked by Harry Scoelfield, a wise old man now who was minister of this congregation from 1947 to 1957. Equating oral and spiritual hygiene is both humorous and accurate.

Of course, there are some those who have problems with the word “spirituality.”
But I think it is an aspect of, well, spiritual depth that we use traditional religious language. Language, of course, that we define — rather than abdicating the responsibility to the orthodox.

We're clear on the difference between evangelizing and proselytizing, and we affirm that we, too, can evangelize, and share the glad good news of our liberal faith without proselytizing and telling people they're going to hell for believing the wrong thing. You don't go to hell for your beliefs though your actions might result in a living hell.
We can speak openly of salvation, knowing that we are saved, not in the next world, but in this world, through living lives of meaning and connection, in the service of love and justice.
I'm intentional that in worship services, when we meditate, we meditate; when we pray, we pray — we don't invite you to enter into some vague "spirit of prayer and meditation." This is in keeping with a Zen saying: "When you walk, walk; when you run, run; above all, don't wobble."

As for spirituality, consider this African folk tale. (from Robert Bly, in the introduction to The Soul is Here for its Own Joy)

Once upon a time there was a man who had about twelve cows, and he loved his cows. Every morning and evening he would praise them for the amount of milk they were giving and praise them for their beauty. One morning he noticed that the amount of milk had lessened. Each day for a week he noticed the same thing. So that night he decided to stay up and see what was going on.

About midnight, he happened to look up at the stars, and he saw one star that seemed to be getting larger. It was — and the light got stronger as the star came closer and closer to earth. It came straight down towards his cow pasture and stopped a few feet from him in the form of a great ball of light. Inside the light there was a luminous woman. As soon as her toes touched the ground, the light disappeared, and she stood there like an ordinary woman.

He said to her, "Are you the one who has been stealing milk from my cows?" "Yes," she said, "my sisters and I like the milk from your cows very much." He said, "You are very -beautiful. And I'm glad that you like my cows. And so this is what I want to say: If you marry me, we can live together, and I will never hit you and you won't have to take care of the cows all the time. I'll take care of them part of the time myself. Will you marry me?" She said slowly, "Yes, I will. But there's one condition. I have brought this basket with me, I want you to agree that you will never look into this basket. You must never look into it, no matter how long we are married. Do you agree to that?" "Oh, I do," he said.

[So of course what happens is what always happens in stories like this. Everything goes fine for a while, but eventually his curiosity gets the better of him and he opens it, looks inside .... and then he begins to laugh.] "There's nothing in the basket! There's nothing in the basket! There's absolutely nothing in the basket! Nothing! There's nothing in the basket!" He kept saying these words and laughing so loud that his wife eventually heard the laughter.

She came into the house and she said to him, "Have you opened the basket?" He began laughing again. "I did!" he said. "I opened the basket! There's nothing in it! There's nothing in the basket at all! There's absolutely nothing in the basket! Nothing is in the basket!" She said, "I have to leave now. I have to go back." He cried out, "Don't go! Don't leave me!" She said, "I have to go back now. What I brought with me in the basket was spirit. It's so like human beings to think that spirit is nothing." And she was gone.

He couldn't see it, so he didn't think it existed. I think most of us are not this blind—it’s important to believe in something we can’t see. We can't see spirit, but our very lives depend upon it.

I'm not talking about a spirit—some disembodied element of ourselves that astral-projects. I don't know anything about that. I'm certainly not talking about spiritualism, or contacting the spirits of the dead.

I'm talking about our sources of hope and healing, of compassion, of being present in the moment. Spiritual development.
The realm of spirit is the realm of awareness—of ourselves and others.
It is the experience of awe, mystery, and wonder.
It is the recognition of the sacred in the ordinary.
It is our yearning for intimacy and ultimacy.
It is the profound realization that we are all connected.
Frances Vaughan wrote of spiritual outcomes and indicators. Some of the indicators are: presence, emotional transformation, motivation, and purpose.
Presence includes authenticity and the awareness of self and others.
Emotional Transformation entails compassion replacing judgment, forgiveness replacing anger, and the expansion of our circle of empathic identification. We become larger.
Our motivation changes from fear to love, from ignorance to understanding and the liberation from bondage into freedom.
And our purposes include the relieving of suffering, awakening new perceptions of reality, self-realization and self-transcendence, and the connecting of mind and spirit with action in the world.
It is all part of turning the wheel of prayer and action — taking our passion for justice out into the world, then returning inward in contemplation, that experience might become wisdom.

It is kneeling and kissing the ground. And, as Rumi tells us, there are hundreds of ways to do it.

I've heard it said that Unitarian Universalist don't kneel. The extent to which that is true is an indicator of our spiritual impoverishment.

No, we don't prostrate ourselves to an angry God. But we can say, with Mary Oliver, (excerpt from "The Summer Day," New and Selected Poems.)
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?
UU minister Forrest Church famously said that religion is our human response to the dual reality of being alive and having to die.

It's a response. Not a denial. Not a running away. God knows how many ways there are to do that. An inordinate amount of human ingenuity is dedicated to finding ways to avoid it; to escape it; to numb it.

But a response. From the Latin, re-spondere. To promise. It's the sacred call of life to which we give ourselves in answer.

At our best, we know that we're here to cultivate our minds and hearts. To keep them both open; that they both might be filled.

In the words of Universalist minister Kenneth Patton, ("Let Us Worship," reading # 437 in Singing the Living Tradition.)
"Life comes with singing and laughter,
with tears and confiding,
with a rising wave too great to be held
in the mind and heart and body,
to those who have fallen in love with life."
Most spiritual practices are intended to keep us, as we say in our Principles and Purposes, open "to the forces that create and uphold life."

Worship in a religious community is one of these ways. For many, our Sunday Services are the only time they take for such a purpose. But there's spiritual work that can be done in community, and other work that can only be done alone.

As Edward Stevens argues in his book, Spiritual Technologies: A User's Manual, "If you can find time for a coffee break, a superfluous phone call, a mindless TV program, you can find time for a [spirituality] break."

You can sit, you can walk, you can dance, you can think, you can pray. There are hundreds of ways to brush your mind. There's a lot of information out there about various practices. If you live a very hectic and stressful life, you may respond best to mindfulness meditation. Or you may need to put your mind to work chanting a mantra. If your life is sedentary, maybe movement meditation will work for you. For those who respond best to images, there are visualization meditations. For those who spend a lot of time alone, group spiritual activities might be best. Just find something and stick with it—don't be a "spiritual windowshopper.

Buy something to be part of the exchanging flow."

One simple exercise is to practice the spirituality of saying "thank you." In a wonderful book by Jonathan Safran Foer called Everything is Illuminated, there's an old man who has been entrusted with the care of a young orphan girl named Brod. She becomes the most important thing in the world to him. When he goes to bed one evening, he thinks to himself, "It's late, he thought, and I must be thankful for everything I have, and reconciled with everything I have lost and not lost. I tried very hard to be a good person today, to do things as God would have wanted, had He existed. Thank you for the gifts of life and Brod, he thought, and thank you Brod, for giving me a reason to live.”
And, finally, from James Wright's poem"Northern Pike:"
All right. Try this,
Then.
Every body
Else is going
To die in a loneliness
I can’t imagine and a pain
I don’t know. We had
To go on living. We
Untangled the net, we slit
The body of this fish
Open from the hinge of the tail
To a place beneath the chin
I wish I could sing of.
I would just as soon we let
The living go on living.
An old poet we believe in
Said the same thing, and so
We paused among the dark cattails and prayed
For the muskrats,
For the ripples below their tails,
For the little movements that we knew the crawdads were making under water,
For the right-hand wrist of my cousin who is a policeman.
We prayed for the game warden’s blindness.
We prayed for the road home.
We ate the fish.
There must be something very beautiful in my body,
I am so happy.
Amen.