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So much of staying in relationship is keeping our word to others. On this Mother’s Day, we consider those nurturing relationships in our lives and how living up to our word can help to heal, and help to seal, our most important relationship.

Hurricanes can be fun. I learned this at a young age. In the early eighties, I was living with my family in Connecticut in a house where only the main road and a creepy old graveyard, with a gate too hard to operate without pinching tiny fingers, lay between the Long Island Sound and the beginning of our property line. Reports came in that a hurricane was making its way up the eastern coastline. Our family watched the news, which was only on a few times a day then. We listened to the radio, and then we made a plan. My folks decided we would evacuate.

Now, I want to be clear about what evacuation meant in Connecticut in the early eighties. We gathered our pajamas, our sleeping bags, and our toothbrushes, and we ventured about five miles in the station wagon to the next town to stay with my parents’ good friends who had kids we liked a lot. My parents’ friends were in fact the friends who introduced my parents to one another, so the eldest daughter, who is two years older than I am, and who is still one of my best friends today, likes to tell people that we have been friends since I was negative two.

So we might not have been evacuating in the ways we see sometimes on the television news, but being away from the coastline and from our house with a lot of trees overhead made sense. Our friends’ mom was really creative and fun. She had plans for all of the kids to help with. I remember doing things, like collecting candles, finding all the flashlights and all the batteries. I’m sure we saved some water, too. But when all the chores were done, more of what I remember is waiting for things to stop working, you know? I remember wanting to see the electricity to go out, to see some trees tossed to the ground, to see the roads turned to channels for streams of water that weren’t there before. I wanted to see a little chaos, a little destruction. I felt a kind of awe in the presence of something so powerful that it could make the lights go out, make the trees sway past breaking, and make water run through the streets of town. And I was going to get to see it all happen.

Now that I am older and can reflect on that day, three things strike me. First, the fun of coming together to help protect each other is really something beautiful. In the face of danger, being together made us all less afraid. And that is really one of the most important parts of that entire experience for me. Second, this early experience with nature and its power is one that has stayed with me. Nature is one of the great reminders that we are in fact human, and we are mostly powerless over winds that might fell trees and snap power lines, not to mention floods that might overflow ancient graveyards to reach my front door. And third, children, at least this child, at times, are the most adorable, enigmatic, little psychopaths we might ever meet. Who else sits and waits for destruction to happen around them?

Now, I do not mean to poke fun. Psychopathy is not a laughing matter. But even experts in this field acknowledge that many of the traits associated with psychopaths survive in small measure in many adults to lesser degrees. In an article by Barbara Bradley Hagerty in The Atlantic a few years ago, she explained that “certain psychopathic traits have survived because they’re useful in small doses: the cool dispassion of a surgeon, the tunnel vision of an Olympic athlete, the ambitious narcissism of many a politician.”[1] Odd that she doesn’t mention the curious second grader who just wants to see the lights go out and the trees come down, but I bet that’s in there, too. I think something else was going on through that storm though.

In the years I’ve lived since second grade, like many of us, and especially in a place that has experienced truly land altering weather and geologic changes, we understand the difference between the storms we see coming and the storms we don’t. The storms we see coming are communal events in many ways. We would wait and wait to see if school will be closed. We gather canned goods, bottled water, and cash. We talk with each other about all about our preparations to withstand the storm. And then in many cases, not a whole lot happens, but we are together in the preparation, sleeping bags, toothbrushes, and pajamas at the ready. We are ready for those storms we see coming. But what about those storms we don’t?

With satellites streaming Doppler and other tools, the discipline of predicting weather has changed. More or less we know when things will be rolling in. Sometimes we get a surprise, but we usually get a warning to evacuate these days, that is if you don’t live on, say, an island. But weather does not hold the only storms we face together. There are other storms in our lives.

Someone snakes the spot we are angling for at Costco. Someone makes that terrible entrance from University on to H-1 East a lot closer than is comfortable. Someone bumps into us on the sidewalk because they are looking at their phone and trying to walk. I am just listing things that happened to me this week here, I confess. But when things like this happen, another kind of storm gathers strength. And I’m not only speaking metaphorically. Some psychologists call what happens at these times a limbic storm, when the amygdala lights up and we respond to threats or danger in a range of ways, perhaps with a dignified “Excuse me” or maybe with a less dignified response while safely encased in the hermetic seal of our car at Costco. However they pop up, these little thunder bursts, these storms, are a part of our daily lives, especially in a place where people drive like they do here.

But psychologists, along with the rest of the world, are also concerned with what happens when larger, more dangerous storms rage through people. This week, the nation of New Zealand joined the siblinghood of places where attacks on people singled out for their religious beliefs lay waste to the lives of the innocent for too many and to the innocence of life for everyone else. But sadly, tragically, events like the attack on two mosques in Christchurch are not new. You don’t have to read very far in the Hebrew Scriptures to find a man in a rage who kills his brother. There are a lot of other terrible things that happen in those books that men—and to be clear, in those books, like today, it is mostly men—but there are terrible things that people blame on some kind of emotion that took over them, like a storm that they could not tame. And the same is true in many, many cultures.

There is the story of Kahalaopuna from the first Hawaiian faith, who was a direct ancestor of the Manoa ridge back and the red lehua trees. Kahalaopuna was engaged to Kahui of the powerful family that ran what is now Waikiki. And some of their male associates thought it fun to suggest to Kahui that they had enjoyed the company of Kahalaopuna in the past. Kauhi became so enraged that he violently killed Kahalaopuna. But after he buried her body near Kaala, the tallest mountain on the island, her spirit floated to the top of the lehua tree to tell her tale to passersby. And when her parents learned of this violence, they located their daughter’s grave and restored her to life.[2]

Sadly there is scarcely a culture that does not have stories like these. Of course, when something is only a story, it has the wonderful potential to teach those who seek to learn a way of living that is restorative and meaningful. History is different, of course. Though we can learn from history, the tragedy of so many instances when the storms of emotion overcome people is that real people, ancestors of our humanity, lose their safety, their security, or even their lives because of it. And like so many of the facts of our own history, our own existence, these same themes seem to be echoing out from our history. As Mark Twain is often credited with saying: “History does not repeat itself, but it rhymes.”[3]

Today we hear real news of storms raging worse and worse across the globe, more catastrophically impacting the lives of us here on this planet, and most catastrophically impacting the lives of the global poor on this planet. And yet we have political leaders who deny that there is anything we can do about it, before the storm. They seem to want to wait by the window like a strange child who wonders what will happen rather than doing anything to help. And again this week we have the real news of the destruction by so many males—and again, it is usually males—that comes from rage breaking forth like clouds rolling over a mountain and ravaging lives amid the thunderclap of firearms, becoming all too familiar in the lives of humans who seek to practice their faith in peace. And yet too many political leaders fail, fail, and fail again to take action before the storm, even though it’s a storm we all see coming. And these are not the only kinds of storms we know. They are only the ones whose destruction is so direct and obvious.

I have a friend who talks often of his love for the sound of lightly falling rain outside his window. He even plays recordings of light rainfall to help him relax. And it’s not too far a leap to learn about those times when he suffers with bouts of depression, when the light rainfall settles into his own soul for a while. And there are so many other ways that the lighting that flashes, neuron to neuron, leaping the distance across synapses in our bodies, in our brains, racing, raging, through our mostly liquid water forms, bring crashes of thunder to our inner selves, where literally a storm brews in our own minds. It comes sometimes as rage, sure. But the storm comes as embarrassment, shame, and longing. It comes as loss, disappointment, and want. There are times when thinking of what goes on in my head, as weather systems we see before us, makes more sense to me than centuries of psychology science has ever explained. And on this I know I’m not alone.

Because roaring through the pages of history and literature and religion are story after story after story of the storms we all have known. The oldest preserved piece of written literature pretty much anywhere, The Epic of Gilgamesh from ancient Mesopotamia, contains some very human storms in the lives of the heroes of that story. But a massive flood, a deluge, eerily, if not intentionally, similar to the one Noah had to navigate, drives much of the climax of the story. And stories of storms are about as common in religion and literature as just about any other motif. But like so, so, so many of the stories, it’s not the storm that matters at all. It’s what happened before the storm that counts.

Do you gather round you those closest to you, or at least the animals, two-by-two? Do you seek out the ways to see, even if the lights all go out? Do you find or build a shelter safe from the storm? Do you plan to make cookies and just decide to eat the dough when the electricity fails? Sorry, I was just having a flashback to that hurricane in my childhood.

We heard from Michael today about Hawaii Men’s Shed and the ways that his group navigates the uncharted waters of so many whose lives seem to change overnight.

Way over yonder
Is a place that I know
Where I can find shelter
From a hunger and cold.

And we talked about those ways that storms gather in our own souls.

When the night is cloudy
There is still a light that shines of me
Shine on till tomorrow
Let it be, let it be.

And we wonder together at the ways that we as children can see our way in the storm, keep away from the trees that can’t stand any more, and stay safe from the flood cresting the banks below the ancient graveyard and stretching across the street to our front door.

Make channels for the streams of love.

Because here’s the thing. In this month of balance, when we consider what it means to be pono, in right relationship. when we look that the sense of kaulike and balance what we need in our lives to be able to weather all that we face, we can learn so much from the natural world we inhabit, that with the right community gathered together, with the right preparations made together, and with shelter that can withstand the storm together, lightning that drives through the waters to rumble out a thunderous clap, need not lay waste to entire communities.

Pain, the storms in our minds and bodies, which might hurt to hold inside, need not lay waste to any more lives. We can honor more fully the wonder of nature, the universal experience of human pain, when, and really only when, we have done all, all, all, we can before the storm, to be sure that our siblings around the world, and in our shared community, and under our very roof, gathered together through he storm, are safe, are protected, are loved.

Then, and really only then, the storms we know can pour out blessings upon this earth we share.

And may it always be so.

[1] Barbara Bradley Hagerty, “When Your Child Is a Psychopath,” The Atlantic, June, 2017.

[2] Martha Beckwith, Hawaiian Mythology (Honolulu: Univ. of Hawaii Press, 1970), p. 152. University of Hawaii reprinted this text from its original publication in 1940 by Yale University Press for Vassar College.

[3] Investigators of attribution cannot actually locate a place where Twain said this.

Growing up, a lot of the stories I heard were about animals. Some of the most beloved characters in literature are nonhuman animals who act a lot like human animals. I remember one in particular: The Fox and the Hound.

One of the moments in the story that is indelible for me was when the two characters Tod, the fox, and Copper, the hound dog meet. Tod sort of plainly states, “I’m a fox.” And sort of out of nowhere, Copper, responds very boisterously, “I’m a hound dog.” It was memorable, clearly.

But following each character’s self-revelation, the action of the story unfolds. The juvenile animals become fast friends. And not long after that, we get one of those “move the plot along” montages while a song entitled “Best of Friends” plays in the background. We see the horseplay and fun, and we see the tenderness and care that develops between the young friends. It’s sweet.

But then, forces in their lives convince them that rather than friends, they are supposed to be mortal enemies. Even the wise old owl, Tod’s adoptive mother, explains that this is just the way of the world. And there the sweetness turns to tragedy. Fate or circumstance, maybe even genetics, maybe even misdirected or unreturned affection, if we really want to play cultural critic, tear their friendship apart. The dramatic device at the heart of the drama is this: the common perception by a society that the fates of these two animals are sealed by their very nature.

As a matter of scientific fact, hound dogs and foxes aren’t that far away from each other on the tree of life. One primary difference is the domestication of dogs and the lack of domestication of foxes. In fact, foxes tend to be recluse and solitary, avoiding humans as much as they can. Of course domestication on its own is not a genetic trait. It’s a way of describing a set of behaviors and outcomes, a set of expressions of the animal’s genetics. And the fate of these animals seems sealed by these outcomes.

But there is a special group of foxes that has become more and more distinct from their fellow foxes over time. I don’t mean over millions of years. I mean over the past few decades. See, in the 1960s, when a Soviet geneticist Dmitry Belyayev refused to believe some of the theories of more respected, higher-ranking scientists, he got, shall we say, reassigned to a very cold place. Far away from many of his superiors, he began experiments in breeding based on some of his observations of the wildlife around him. And what drew his fascination were domestic traits he’d noticed in some foxes.

His question was whether by selecting the foxes exhibiting these traits for breeding, generation over generation over generation, could he bring about a fox that is domesticated, that likes to be around humans? Like a hound dog. Well the answer is yes.

And after decades he created a species of fox that comes when its called, that retrieves toys, that likes to snuggle up with their humans. But that wasn’t all that happened. By performing this generations-long experiment, Belyayev was surprised to discover that subtle physical traits began to be expressed alongside the traits that seemed to control temperament. After more and more generations of the less wild, more dependent foxes were bred, the foxes began to get slightly more floppy years, not the kind of alert ears we are used to seeing on foxes. They began to get curly tails, the kind we like so much on our puppies. More and more, these foxes started to act like and to look like some of the more common breeds of dogs we all know and love. Some in the scientific community call this experiment the greatest experiment in selective breeding ever. Others remarked that Belyayev made the single greatest contribution to solving the mystery of how dogs were domesticated into companion animals for humans. And still others are just jazzed that they can have a fox as a pet now. Of course, at $9,000 each, they are not for everyone.

But if the wise old owl, who told the fox and the hound that they could not be together because of their very genetic make-up, was just a little more up on her Cold-War era Soviet research, maybe Tod and Copper could have lived happily ever after instead of trying to kill each other, as nature thought was intended.

Today while we bless so many of the lives that make our lives better, we have a chance to behold something of the wild in our midst. Isn’t some of the fun of having a non-human animal around watching what on earth they are doing, how they are responding to the world they inhabit now, and wondering what could have formed the impulse or the reason for what it is they do? Many assume that these habits come from a time and a place where they made sense, but on this island, in the constant vigilant protection of a human animal, they don’t any more.

Yet there they are, the wild things that remind us of something, perhaps, in ourselves once upon a time, before we had become so well-mannered, so well-adjusted to this life we have built for ourselves and for each other, before the wild things in ourselves slumbered upon mattresses and pillows, journeyed long distances…in cars and airplanes, gathered food…at Foodland, before human animals were civilized, domesticated, brought to heel, not by a few decades of selective breeding, but by millennia of it.

And in the last few millennia, one of the forces that seemed most concerned with the remaking of the human…has been religion.

Indeed, loud voices proclaim that religion itself was a product of a time when humans were facing a wild world they could hardly understand. So it was religion that sought to explain, comfort, make sense of the wild world we inhabited together. Many, if not all, of the world’s deepest, oldest faiths, attach meaning to geologic, astrophysical, or weather based phenomena because these were the kinds of wild, untamable things that threatened them. And often the bridge between the human and the divine, the way to appease or cleanse the relationship between the human and the divine, lay squarely, where? With nonhuman animals.

Through writings, through excavation, through legend and story, the relationship through time of humans to their companions on this earth is filled with sacred and powerful relationships. Long before the ancient god of the Hebrew people was said to grant dominion or responsibility to humans, ancient Egyptians, Assyrians, and other communities were exhibiting both the importance of domesticated animals in their daily lives and the importance of those same animals in their sacred lives. Some animals were worshiped as gods or as worldly vessels of the divine. Others simply played a role in allowing humans to stay in one place for a longer time, rather than roving nomadically. Some were sacrificed in rituals meant to appease the divine, to smooth things over between humans and what was out of their control.

But through the generations, through the conquering, the taking, the dominance of culture after culture, something began to happen in all this worship. In many of the most dominant cultures on the planet a relatively new idea of a god emerged—the idea of a single, great, all powerful, all knowing, unknowable God took hold in the religions of the Abrahamic faiths held by those who wielded the most power in the world. And it was when the idea of such a powerful god took hold that the questions started for some. Some humans who were thinking critically, if not philosophically, wondered, “What on earth could we possibly do to impact or affect such a powerful being?” “Why would a god so powerful care that this one goat was made a sacrifice in its name?”

In a polytheistic faith, gods can be jealous and jockey for supremacy. They can act out in surprising ways to gain more power over other gods. But not when there is just the one, all-powerful idea of God. The competition was over.

For many it was the generations and generations of an idea of a god that grew larger and larger and more powerful that led some humans to come to the conclusion that human actions could not meaningfully influence such a god to view us differently or not. For some, this idea of a god became so distant and unknowable, that it made as much sense to them to conclude that there is no god. And that is what many did.

Today, among the sources of this, our Living Tradition, are the teachings of those who viewed the world’s organized, ritualized faiths, and found them wanting: the humanist, the non theist, the atheist. They found faiths wanting not only of reason, but wanting of real compassion for the full breadth of the lives that are interconnected in the universe. They found them wanting not only of proof, but wanting of the reverence for what we doknow of the natural universe, and awe for what we do notknow. They found those faiths wanting not only of sincerity, but wanting of the wonder contained in facing honestly and sometimes painfully, questions of evil, justice, and responsibility. It is from the teachings of many of these brave souls that many humans stopped searching for the best ways to mediate between the wildness of the world and some divine force causing it, and to experience it firsthand, themselves. And perhaps more importantly, they began the work of breaking down the all-too-prevalent myths of superiority of one kind of life over another that are rampant in the stories forming the foundation of many faiths that are used so often as a reason or apology for why humans oppress other lives, as an explanation for why they are given over to some kind of wild, untamable passion, or how they received some kind of divine privilege to do so. So central to the teachings of our atheist and non-theist siblings is the work of taking the responsibility ascribed to a supreme all powerful god in the stories written millennia ago, and placing responsibility for human action, for the care-taking of where the wild things are in our own animal make up, squarely where the responsibility should be: in the palm of our hands.

In the 1960s the experiment began. The banished, hopeful adventurers wondered together what it would mean to set in motion generations of decisions that would help to bring about the most pronounced, effective traits in the subjects of the experiment. The ideas of Unitarians and Universalists, wild in many ways to those watching this experiment, likely wondered what would happen when all the wild things are in one place together, when humanists and atheists sit beside Christians and Jews, and seek together what might be shared, what could be common, what will be, in a word, blessed.

And what will the world say, hen over time, through generations of new beginnings, when this place, where selfless love of others, where dedication to the cause of justice for all, where devotion to the sacredness of creation reigns supreme, becomes the outward expression of our belief or non-belief in something greater than ourselves? For truly, where would anyone rather be after this week, than in a place where we know truly that you do not have to think alike, you do not have to believe alike, you do not have to walk alike, or bark alike, to love alike.

You may be a fox. You may be a hound dog. But you are home, in this place, where the personal things you believe or don’t believe are valued, where the public things you do in the world matter as much as what you believe about the world, where the private things, what might have kept you apart, separate from others, can be healed by a community of understanding, of acceptance, of care.

You are home here, where the wild things are. And may it always be so.

Sometimes life just isn’t fair, right? Seems like sometimes no matter where you go, someone’s right around the corner waiting to get over on you. Sometimes it feels like you’re not even safe from this right in your own neighborhood. I learned this firsthand a few months ago. It was a beautiful, bright June morning. It was actually King Kamehameha Day, when I arrived home from coffee with some friends. And I felt pretty lucky that morning because I found a parking space close to my house. Usually there were temporary signs on little sawhorses posted by this spot restricting parking there for construction vehicles, but it was a Kamehameha Day miracle: there were no signs up this morning.

And I thought, “Wow, I like how seriously people take this holiday.” But then on the way to my apartment, I noticed that the signs that used to be up werethere, but they were face down by the curb. And when I saw this, there was a little, tiny twinge in the reason portion of my brain that wondered if those signs were taken down by the construction company with the license to use them, or by some enthusiastic revelers who knew that the next day was a holiday, and not a workday. But the sure and abiding faith I had in this holiday and what I understood to be the lifting of the parking restrictions on this day, overrode any twinge of worry. And besides, if someone saw my car there, and saw the signs were down, they wouldn’t dream of putting the signs back up next to my car…and then be monster enough to have my car ticketed or towed, right?

And so it was a few hours later, into this blissful holiday mood in my apartment, maybe enjoying some iced coffee, that the faint call of tiny trumpets intruded, tiny trumpets better known as a car alarm, but the brief protest of the alarm ended quickly, and besides, I didn’t recognize it as my own. But again, for an instant, I had the fleeting sense that it might be my Malibu’s call of distress, but again I rested confident in the idea that this holiday meant my car was safe from attack.

So it was when I went to my car to meet a friend for coffee, when that sinking, awful feeling, lurched in my belly, as all the tiny twinges I ignored all came to be, when there was no car in the spot. But there they were. Along the curb, someone, a monster, replaced the “No Parking” signs that were down, including one right next to where my car used to be. It was just sitting there, silently mocking me, scorning me, one of the sawhorses of the apocalypse.

Maybe it was fitting that this occurred in June, when the earth is at its maximum tilt toward the sun, when there is the least amount of balance between the night and the day, when the Earth is at one of two of the most precarious angles of the year spinning through space. It was far from the time of year we celebrate today, the time of year when we are called again to consider balance between the night and the day, between the faces of the earth and the faces of our own community.

This is my favorite kind of holiday. There are many kinds of holidays or celebrations we enjoy together. Some like King Kamehameha Day might be a fixed date, but it is celebrated on a particular day so it can be most effectively commemorated with parades, or feasts, or with the well-known and well-loved tradition of tipping over “No Parking” signs. These are the kind of holidays that are very human. They are attached to a date in a calendar created by humans and have some wiggle room in when they’re really celebrated.

But an equinox is not like that. Neither is a solstice. These are events that happen at a fixed point in time and space. The equinox happens to us. We don’t pick the day or the hour to commemorate it. It just happens to us at a fixed instant. There is an astrophysical certainty to the moment, down to the atomic second when the equinox happens. Google tells us it was 3:54 pm yesterday, here in Hawaii. And no matter where else you were in the universe at that time, that is the instant it happened. Isn’t that kind of relaxing—the same event happening to all the people at exactly the same time?

Maybe it’s so relaxing or maybe it stands out a little because this kind of treatment, the same thing happening to all the people of the earth at the same time, seems somehow only to be possible by things as powerful as the star at the center of our solar system or the forces that fling our earth, wobbling from axis to axis, around this system at mind bending speed. Only things this powerful, it seems, can accomplish the feat of impacting all the world in exactly the same way.

Because the world, most of us know, the world we think of as part of what humans are doing on it and to it is not living into this lesson of balance. Taking questionable towing practices out of the discussion for the moment, there are vastly more painful and pronounced examples of this imbalance surrounding us every day. But let’s look at just one that was in the news this week.

Many of us saw stories this week about where we are as an economy ten years after the great economic meltdown of 2008. That meltdown might have been one of the more disgusting human-created events, born of the unholy union of unquenchable greed and unconscionable morals. And on its anniversary recognized this week, many outlets ran stories with sort of a then vs. now spin. But the bulk of what I read had one message that kept coming through: people on the whole did not recover from that collapse as well as many economic indicators might tell us. Yes, the stock market has roared back, but the lives of the people who live in this country did not. And it is no mystery why this is the case.

We have seen, we have felt, we have lived, for an entire decade, in the reason why this disparity exists. The stock market is roaring back because the lives of many people are not getting better. See, the ways that more employers began treating more employees after 2008 was with the very clear message that “You should just be happy you have a job. Look around you. People are out of work everywhere.” Many employers used this as a chance to cut payrolls, cynically, even when their company was not affected directly by the downturn, and companies heaped more and more responsibilities on employees who stayed, sometimes combining two jobs into one, and expecting those “lucky enough” to have their jobs to do both jobs. Many businesses were remade in this way in 2008, and many have not changed much, aside from being more profitable and more of an awful place to work. And when you add the erosion in many states of any kind of public option of healthcare, employers continue to gain power and advantage not only over employees, but over the very health of employees’ families. And so it remains out of balance. And sometimes, individuals react in funny ways to the imbalances we feel. And I am not immune.

See, since King Kamehameha Day, I have to own up to doing a little bit of backsliding. For those of you unfamiliar with the more evangelical strands of the tapestry of faith in this country, “backsliding” means returning to some of our old ways we used to take part in before we found a new way. See, after my car was towed I sent a very nice letter to the construction company suggesting there was a misunderstanding and that they might consider reimbursing me for the cost of the tow. They didn’t answer.

So I sent a second letter to the company, all beginning with “Aloha” and ending with “Mahalo,” all only one page, just a few well-reasoned paragraphs, maintaining that I believe this might have been an oversight that can easily be corrected. They didn’t answer again.

So 1, 2, skip a few, let’s flash forward to this past Thursday morning, when I walked into Courtroom 10A at 1111 Alakea street to plead my case before a judge. But when I walked into court Thursday, I was not alone. The clerk was there in her spot by the bench. And there was another person there, earlier than I was to court.

I sat toward the back of the courtroom. He was seated almost in front. And I watched as he took out his cellphone. He took pictures of the legal papers he had with him, and I could tell he was smiling when he did. Not something you see every day in court. Then he raised his cell phone to eye level, switched the phone to “selfie” mode, and he made sure to get as much of the courtroom and the entrance to the courtroom in the shot as he could before he smiled real big and took his selfie.

And something quiet in my mind, not unlike what told me I might reconsider my parking job said, “That’s my guy.” And when the clerk asked him what case he was there for it became clear we were on opposing sides of the case. This was the guy I’d hauled into court. This was my monster. And when he realized who I was, he came right over to me, he put out his hand, and he smiled and grinned like a kid, like the kid we are all inside, and he said, “I’m sorry about all if this. And I’m sorry about not responding to your letters.”

And then we talked for about fifteen minutes about pretty much everything other than this case: what it’s like being a commercial contractor in Honolulu, what it was like to go from lawyer to minister, real stuff. And in the end he confessed that he knew skipping the court date would have been the wiser strategy, but he really came down to the courthouse for the fun of it.

I wish I could tell you all of what happened after that, but the mediation process we both agreed to enter requires confidentiality for all that went on during the mediation. But I can tell you that outside of the mediation, after getting to know each other a little bit, and even after tangling a little with me over arguments and numbers and how things would go for him at trial, my adversary, my faceless monster and I settled the case…but not before he tried to hire me as his lawyer.

One of the things that can get confusing in our daily work together, in the challenges we face, the imbalances we experience, the seeming forces that oppose us at times, is the challenge of asking whether it is other people, individuals, who present opposition to what it is we want to do, or whether the very field of play we are on is skewed or unfair, pitched against us somehow.

The Unitarian Universalist movement has been focused for some time on the question of this field. We have been asked nationally, and here at this church, to look intensely at systemic racism and the oppressive forces of white supremacy culture at work, in play, on this soil. Sure, we can look at the lingering effects of the past ten years, but that is really like looking at a few of a team’s seasons rather than the entire history of a sport. Theologians, economists, and more than a few scholars of history suggest that America’s soil, the fields where the worst, the perhaps unredeemable actions, of a capitalist regime played out, might never be healed without wholesale, massive acts of reconciliation and even reparation. They suggest that we need to change entirely the game that has been stacked against members of our society, and in particular those members whose forebears were subjected to the institution of slavery, in real and tangible ways—not in ways that can be defunded, overturned, or turned to a political game.

And the reason they say this is not only to try to right one of the most horrific wrongs in history. They suggest that the impact this work will have on the soul of the entire nation, the entire capital system we live in, would be hugely beneficial for everyone in the system. The entire field of play would be altered for everyone forever, approaching the balance once again this day reminds us is possible.

In our shared belief in the inherent worth and dignity of every person and its twin belief that we are part of an interconnected whole, there lies a very hard proposition to accept. Even those who take advantage of others, who misuse power to gain advantage over others, who want things out of balance, some Unitarian Universalists would argue, our First Principle to affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of all, suggests to me that I have to include those people, all  people, in this belief.

And there are times I can see that, when I can get there, when I can love their inner child grinning back at me in delight, but I assure you the moments when I can do this are not those moments when I’m staring at an empty parking space where my car used to be, or when a group of eleven men whom one political party has seen fit to place on a Judiciary Committee, plans publicly to question a woman who dares to unearth and share publicly a trauma she experienced at the hands of a person who could well enjoy a lifetime appointment to one of the most influential posts in the nation. It’s hard to get there sometimes friends.

But in the balance we celebrate today, taking on the energy of new members in this community, greeting new members yesterday over food, fellowship, and fun, or even meeting someone face to face who I thought was picking a fight but was really just busy, there is a bright shining gleam of that dignity, and the suggestion of this principle does yet again find a balance on a personal level.

But the history of systematic oppression, where the playing field is not even at all, where the power wielded over the individual is not the mere whim, caprice, or thoughtless word or deed, it is a stacked deck and a fixed game. Where that is the case, we must do more than shake hands or shake it off. Our Seventh Principle, that we are part of an interconnected whole, suggests that actions we take to heal a hurting world can be felt beyond our interpersonal relationships. And so it is fitting that we unveil officially the display of the 7 Unitarian Universalist principles, and the 8^thprinciple, adopted here by this congregation, devoted to dismantling oppression and systematic racism in our world. It is a beautiful and a fitting reminder of so much of the work this congregation has done already. And even the way the 8^thPrinciple came to be displayed involved a decision by your Board of Directors to find a place of prominence. Your Gallery Team and Aesthetics Team took significant time and consideration both to find just the right spot and to provide some comments about the look and feel of the presentation. Individual members devoted time and resources to its creation. And even friends of the congregation, children, spouses, some of whom are not even members, lent their talents and expertise to this project. And your new 8^thPrinciple Task Force saw to its completion.

We now unveil this marvel of cooperation and hope. And as we do let us be reminded not of words on a page, creeds of old, or rules to follow. Rather let us acknowledge the imperfections of language that yet help point us to the perfect balance our wobbling world tells us today is possible, the balance between the compassion for individuals that comes with embracing new souls, and the compassion we carry to our wider world from doing so, the balance of the justice that starts as it always should at home, in this, ourhome, the justice that might ring out in the world from the start we make here together, and most important, the balance of the joy that comes when what was lost is found here for so many, and the joy our work together might stitch into the fabric of this interconnected, wobbling world, strengthening it for those who will come after us.

And may the dreams we know waking, and the dreams we know sleeping, come at last into harmony with all we sense in this world to be right, and just and true. And most of all, may we give life to these dreams together. And may it always be so.

Many attest that we learn by doing. As wonderful as teachings and ideas may be, without action, ideas don’t come to much. We will explore what it means to select a teaching and put it into a practice that might shape our lives.

Can you remember some of the images in the poem, Kindness, that Martina read? Staring out a window forever, eating chicken and maize. An Indian in a white pancho dead on the side of the road. Gazing at bread. Naomi Shihab Nye is an artist at the very height of her powers, surely. And no matter how many times I hear that poem there are parts of it that still surprise me. There are parts of it that still move me, even though those parts have been repeated to me over and over.

It’s one of the most famous poems of the last few decades. And what makes a poem successful, really, just like a song or a story, is that people like to hear it again and again. In fact, it’s a poem that is probably worth repeating and repeating until it’s committed to memory, until the pathways are lain in just right to recall its splendor. It’s probably worth changing our brain to make room for a poem like that. For surely that is one purpose of repetition, to change ourselves somehow. But not everything we do over and over is as pleasurable as reading a masterwork or hearing one read as beautifully as Martina did.

Some of the things we repeat in our lives are painful. Some are even mind numbing. And some make us wonder what on earth we were ever thinking. See, some you may not know this, but I am in a relationship. It’s one I’ve been in for a long time, and yet it’s a relationship I question daily—one that has brought me a lot of good feelings and peace and one that has brought me pain, disappointment, and utter exhaustion at times. See I have a relationship with…running.

Yes, of course, there are times this relationship takes me to wonderful places. On my most recent trip to the mainland, this relationship took me through winding paths lined with towering timbers in Washington State, listening to my nephew, safe on his bike, tell me all about the different kinds of computer codes he’s learning. This relationship took me through the streets of my youth a few weeks ago, staying with a childhood friend, running took me past those fields where I played soccer, that graveyard where I dared friends into harmless danger, and the school where I spent all of my high school years. And this relationship took me through the hills around Portland, Oregon with the groom of an upcoming wedding I’ll be officiating. And I delighted in these changes, these new locations, because between you and me, running and I have been in a little bit of a rut. I know you’re not here to listen to my relationship issues, friends, but hear me out this once.

On Friday morning, I went for a run with a friend. We did the course we’re used to running together. It lacked the terrain of Oregon, the memories of Rochester, the adorableness of Washington, but what it did have was the familiar position of Diamond Head crater on my right and the Pacific Ocean on my left. A trip around the crater with a friend of many years: not too shabby, I know. But speaking of knowing, by this time, my friend and I know this course really, really well now. In fact in the year I’ve been here, I’ve repeated the course so many times that I’ve gotten to know the very contours of the run, those sneaky places that someone driving by would hardly notice are there. But your legs will tell you loud and clear.

See, when you know a place, when you repeat, over and over, the exercise of navigating that space, you learn even the slightest changes in the road. But as our feet pounded out the rhythm Friday morning, something felt different. As a matter of fact, were any of you up and about early Friday morning?

It. Was. Humid.

It was humid enough that at one point I said to my friend that I sincerely felt water resistance, not just wind resistance. And so this route, this course, the concrete and pavement I knew so well hadn’t changed one bit. The path I traveled was the same. But what wasn’t the same, was me. Whatever was happening with the weather, what I’d eaten or not eaten, whether I’d gotten the kind of sleep I needed, the course is the course. It was my body that was responding differently.

Repetition, reading the same text over and over, traveling the same course again and again does something to us. Rereading, rerunning, reveal: they reveal something new, something hidden, something changing. Not in the text—what it says is what it says. Not in the course—where it goes is where it goes. But rather in ourselves.

Poetry and exercise are not the only places where we experience repetition. Sometimes repetition is our aim. This is especially true with particular kinds of texts. In the faith traditions of much of the world, repetition is part of they ways those faiths are practiced. In many of the Judeo Christian forms of worship, prayers, the structure of worship or liturgy, even some of the songs that are sung, all rely on repetition. The text in those worship services and in the lives of the followers, are absorbed or reflected upon in deep and meaningful ways through repetition of those texts.

But a tradition where repetition is even more prominent than in the Judeo Christian traditions is in Buddhism. The lives of many Buddhists rely on a practice of repetition to embody the essential elements of their faith. The Three Jewels of Buddhism are how followers describe the three basic tenets of the faith. The first is the Buddha, the enlightened one or the enlightened nature that is present in the universe. The second is called the Dharma, which is the word for all the teachings delivered by the Buddha, often in the form generations of Buddhist practitioners inherit today as written texts. And the third is the Sangha, which is the community in which the Dharma is taught and practiced alongside others in the faith. These three jewels, the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha, form the bedrock foundation from which the practice of the Buddhist faith grows.

One of the things visitors from the mainland notice when they come to this island is the number of Buddhist temples all throughout the Honolulu area. I am unaware of any city on the mainland with this concentration of Buddhist temples. In this neighborhood alone, in a radius of a mile or two, there are probably half a dozen. I’ve even seen some hidden back in these hills when my relationship with running took me up and down the Pali and through the Nu’uanu streets. There’s even a large Buddhist school right down the road.

So it could make someone unfamiliar with the Buddhist faith and its expression in the world a little confused. They might ask, “Well, if they’re all Buddhist, can’t they all just go to the same temple?” And what this question reveals is a misunderstanding about Buddhism that is commonly and often repeated in the world. What many fail to grasp is that the sects, flavors, languages, interpretations, expressions of the Buddhist faith in the world, are as varied, different, manifold, and vibrant as the many ways that those in the Abrahamic faiths (Jewish, Christian, and Islam) are expressed. A student of this subject could get a degree in Eastern Religious studies with a concentration in Buddhism and still not fully grasp the shades and variations of Buddhism on this island alone.

As varied as these expressions of Buddhism are, one of the things that so, so many forms of Buddhism, including those represented in our neighbors on the Pali Highway, depend upon, rely upon, build their very faiths upon…is repetition. That’s right.

See repetition is at the heart of Buddhist life. The sutras or the sacred texts that contain so much of the Dharma, were not always written texts. They were committed to memory through repetition and passed on orally from generation to generation, repeated and repeated and repeated, until they were finally written down. But before they could be written, in order for the messages and the texts to stay alive, the tool of repetition was used so that those committing the texts to memory would have an easier time of remembering them.

For a vivid example of the importance of repetition to this faith, we can behold one of our neighbors, Soka Gakkai International.

Soka Gakkai practices a type of Japanese Buddhism called Nichiren Buddhism, founded upon the writings of a Buddhist monk in Japan in the Thirteenth Century.[1]

One of the most remarkable parts of practicing with Soka Gakkai is the repetitive chanting of “nom myoho renge kyo.” I’m guessing one or two of us has spent some time with this chant? I have. I had a friend who was really into it. I attended a service where there was a lot of chanting of this phrase. You don’t have to spend long at one of these services to sense that this practice, this repetition, has the power to change you. It’s almost as if the repetition chips away at something in you, or it brings out something in you, and doing the chanting with a room filled with people, all repeating, all chanting together, is powerful. And here’s why that is.

Friends, at too many moments in our lives, we are seen as commodities, as commercial units. We are called consumers by economists, customers by businesses, subscribers by Netflix, users by Facebook, followers by Instagram, but almost never people, never humans, by interests concerned with collecting the money we have. We spend long enough in a day, taking part in our economy, and its easy to feel like the cog in the machine all of these commercial interests want us to be.

And so the idea of repetition, or chanting, something almost like a machine might feel like a lot of things. It might feel pointless. Why say the same thing over and over an over. I heard you the first time. It might feel a little inhuman. Who the heck goes around repeating the same thing over and over to themselves? A person with some issues, right? It might feel uncomfortable. Yeah, it should feel uncomfortable. That’s a good thing.

Because we are people, because we are human beings, we are not actually repeating anything. We can say the same words over and over, and every single time, those words are a little different. We have a little more air or a little less air. Our tongues strike our teeth or the roof of our mouth a little different. The volume we use is slightly greater or lesser. There is no way around it. Stitched into the repeating message, the chanted hope of a gathered people, like our neighbors up the Pali, like millennia of practitioners before us, is a deeper, hidden, powerful message: “you are human.”

The tool is repetition. The task, the work, that this tool is deployed to deliver is…“you are human.”

The more you try to work to repeat something perfectly a second, a third, a fourth, a fiftieth time, a thousandth time, the more and more you will realize, “you are human.”

And you are one of a kind. You are one…of a kind of living beings on this earth. And that kind of being is a human being. You are one of a kind, yes. You are one of our kind. And our kind has some traits. There are things our kind shares. There is something intangible about our kind, you see. You might call it a…kind-ness about us.

And in this moment we are going to learn something handed down to us about our kindness, something about the kind of beings we can be. Send from your mind now those messages about who you are. Send from your mind now those messages about who you are supposed to be. Send from your mind now those messages about who your neighbors are. And send from your mind now those messages about who your neighbors are supposed to be. Rest instead in this moment. Rest the part of your mind that supposes anything, anything at all. And listen to what our ancestors tell us about ourselves, about our kindness.

When the heart has grown in loving kindness
Your dreams become sweet
You fall asleep easily and waken contented

When the heart deepens in loving kindness
Your thoughts become pleasant
And your body heals more easily

When your heart fills with loving kindness
Angles and Devas will love and protect you
And animals will sense your love and not harm you
And people will welcome you everywhere
Your babies will be happy
And if you lose things they will be returned to you
And if you fall off a cliff a tree will always be there to catch you
And the world will become more peaceful around you
And you will bring the blessings of a loving heart to all you touch

The great scholar and teacher Jack Kornfield shares this text in a meditation and he describes it as something collected and repeated throughout centuries in temples throughout the world. In a live version of this meditation, after he reads the line “And if you lose things they will be returned to you,” the audience, breaks into laughter. And without upsetting his meditative rhythm in the slightest, he recognizes the laughter and simply adds, “That’s what it says.” And they are some fantastic promises.

But friends, I tell you true, every week I struggle with the temptations to come before you here, and to repeat whatever insanity has been bubbling from twitter feeds, from trials, or from television, and then to knock them down with our Unitarian Universalist values. I know it feels good to do that. It feels good to hear that. And there are times when we are called to do that, and we will. But I believe repeating those messages, re-tweeting those lies, re-living those experiences, without also remembering to repeat for ourselves those things that remind us who we are, the kind of people we are, that we are one of a much greater source of kindness, can be damaging over time. It will only wear us out, like running a course that never ends.

We always must take time to return again to who we are. Both Unitarians and Universalists were given their names by others after years of defiance. So much of why I love Unitarian Universalism is because of what we defy. But a life of spirit, a life of purpose, cannot only be about what we oppose, what we run from. A life of meaning also cannot only be about passing pines, cresting hills and trotting past our old ways of learning, running and running toward what we think we’ll find somewhere else. Sometimes renewal in our life requires returning again to the home of your soul, and finding and sitting with the kindness that is there.

Maybe we are eating food, maybe chicken and maize, and sensing in that sacred act something of the eternal. Maybe we are passing graveyards or a stranger struck dead along a roadside bathed in white, a soul we’ll never get to know, and sensing our finite selves. And maybe, just maybe, we are only gazing at bread, and knowing, we are not what we eat. We are what we repeat.

And may it ever be so.

[1] For amplification, see https://www.sgi.org/about-us/buddhist-lineage/nichiren.html