PEACE OF MIND, PEACE OF HEART
August 25, 2019
WA: Deb Pascale, SL: Gwen Heuss-Severance, Cindy Chelcun, Laura Patey;
Music by Linda Pawelek and Violin SANITY
Newsletter Blurb: Beloved hymns yearn for “peace like a river in my soul”. Dona nobis pacem we sing – “give us peace”. And in parting until we meet again, we say “Go in peace, believe in peace, create peace.”
While we are often called to think and act large for world peace, for peace on earth, for peace among nations, in this worship service we look closer to ourselves and the ways we find peace for our souls, minds and our hearts.
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Ringing of the Bell (bell on pulpit, hit with mallet three times

Gathering Music: El Rey Que Tanto Madrula (13th Century French Dance) Violin SANITY

Call to Worship Reading: Wild Geese by Mary Oliver Cindy Chelcun
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. Meanwhile the world goes on. Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes, over the prairies and the deep trees, the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting – over and over announcing your place in the family of things.

Chalice Lighting Rich Stockton
We gather this hour as a people of faith
With joys, sorrows, gifts, and needs.
We light this beacon of hope, sign of our quest For truth and meaning, In celebration of the life we share together.

Welcome (incl. announcements, warm welcome to visitors, welcome to summer services, refreshments provided by greet neighbors(optional)

Hymn* SLT#100 I’ve Got Peace Like a River

Reflection #1: Searching for Peace of Mind – Gwen Heuss-Severance
I think I became an adult when I was 12 years old and went away to boarding school. It was the 1950’s and I knew what my parents expected of me: good behavior, good grades, and a letter home every Sunday night. The roadmap of my life was both straight and narrow, with virtues right out of the Scouts Handbook: honesty, cleanliness, thrift, self-control, hard work, responsibility. Do this and the good life was assured!
And so, I did. I got a college degree, I got a teaching job, I got married, I got children – all the benchmarks of a successful adulthood. My life was secure, predictable, and peaceful.

And then I was 40 years old. I had been married for 21 years, I was a wife, and a mom to 2 emerging teenagers, and I was having anxiety attacks. I was frightened. I was dreaming in black and white. My “straight and narrow” life felt like a prison and I couldn’t imagine living like this for another 20 or 30 or 40 years. What had been secure, predictable and peaceful was boring, boring, boring!
So, I did what you would expect. It was 1980’s. I began therapy. I joined a woman’s group. I fell in lust with a woman. I felt alive and powerful. At 42 I was having a full-blown adolescence! I began to experience life as a profound and exciting adventure full of joy, fun, risk, challenge, connection. I felt like I was waking up. Life was scary and electric: full of color and feeling.
As I began coming out, I was lucky enough to have a mentor who knew the challenges and pitfalls of living in the closet and how to balance my public and private personae in the world of independent boarding schools. My divorce was fairly easy. I kept my job which included my housing. I kept my family and friends. And I worked with straight and gay allies across the country to make schools safer for LGBTQ students and faculty. The anxiety attacks ended.
But the wisdom of my mentor called me back to the importance of “peace of mind” and the necessity of balance. She would say to me, “the most important thing in the world is peace of mind”. In the beginning, I heard her, but I didn’t listen. A few years older than I, she had retired from her headmistress job, gone back to school and had become a counselor-caregiver for Hospice nurses and doctors. And then the brain tumor came back. Her desire for, her search for “peace of mind” became her journey and her anchor until her death in 1989.
It has taken me many years to begin to understand what peace of mind might have meant to her and to both experience it and actively seek it for myself. Peace of mind is hard because I’m easily so easily distracted. As Mary Oliver writes –
I want to think again of dangerous and noble things.
I want to be light and frolicsome.
I want to be improbable beautiful and afraid of nothing,
as though I had wings. – “Starlings in Winter”. Mary Oliver

But maybe it’s possible to find wings in mindfulness. Maybe the journey isn’t so much about getting or doing or becoming anything. Maybe it’s about unbecoming everything that isn’t really you so you can be who you were meant to be in the first place; So, you can be a human being more than a human doing.
At this stage of my life, my journey is to find love and connection and delight with my partner, my family- both real and invented – and this beloved community. And to savor all that these relationships offer.
Lest you think that I claim to have reached some permanent and magical plateau of enduring peace of mind and smugness, let me assure that I have not.
I am an 81-year-old privileged white woman and I am angry. I am angry at gun violence, climate change, racism, poverty, greed, injustice, and corruption. I could easily become an ostrich and stick my head in the sand. And sometimes I fantasize about running away to ……wherever peace of mind resides.
But then I take a deep breath and another. I remember that peace lives right here in our minds, in our hearts, in our souls. Beloved hymns remind us that there is “peace like a river in my soul”. Dona nobis pacem ¬¬–peace be with us. “Go in peace, believe in peace, create peace.”

Connection and Meditation Rich Stockton
Joys and Sorrows

Meditation: Mary Oliver Laura Patey
I go down to the shore in the morning and depending on the hour the waves
are rolling in or moving out,
and I say, oh, I am miserable,
what shall—
what should I do? And the sea says in its lovely voice:
Excuse me, I have work to do.

Silence (leader sits down and counts to 100+)
Musical Response: Flower Duet Leo Delibes Violin SANITY

Reflection #2: Peace of Heart – Cindy Chelcun
I love Mary Oliver’s poem “Wild Geese.” It conveys to me not just the finding of “our own place” but also the PAUSING to do so.
All the way back in 1955, Anne Morrow Lindbergh wrote this, in “Gift from the Sea:” If we stop to think about it, are not the real casualties of modern life…the here, the now, the individual and ….relationships?” She could identify, 64 years ago, that we were drifting away from that PAUSE.
This morning, I’d like to suggest a process for pausing to find our place, a process of INVITING GRACE INWARD: soft, gentle grace.
Huston Smith, a respected scholar of religion and philosophy who lived from 1919 to 2016, included GRACE as one of the core common features among world faith traditions, offering a definition of “being right with all that is,” in the Christian tradition, “karma” in the Buddhist, “Dao” in Daoism.
For me, recently, the essence of grace viewed in this inward way is both permission and encouragement for self-care.
For many of us who find our way to Unitarian Universalism, we bring a legacy and a lifetime of accumulated learning about taking care of others: families, friends, communities, those more vulnerable than ourselves. This value brings us tremendous life meaning and purpose and helps us to see SOME of our places in the family of things. The actions it promotes at USNH are what drew me to this amazing UU community when I moved to CT a few years ago.
Throughout my own life, and before I became a UU, I had abundant modeling and encouragement to care for others: my active volunteering parents, my wonderful teachers in the late 1960’s, the societal needs arising as I grew up during the Vietnam War, the War on Poverty, the Civil Rights movement. I followed my heart into careers of service in college student development and then in private practice as a mental health therapist. And I met head-on the challenge of finding a balance: maintaining SELF-CARE as I was drawn to CARING FOR OTHERS.
It was in the mid – 1980’s, I think, that I had an extraordinary opportunity to be in a conference with the Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh at a conference. Familiar? (the philosopher and prolific writer, who led a reconciliation hermitage in France for Vietnam War veterans from both the US and Vietnam). I was blown away by the solutions he offered, via mindfulness meditation, to this challenge of staying internally healthy while continuing to offer service.
So, ever the over-achieving first born that I am, I set right out to master his form of meditation the next week! I bought a chime! I did walking meditation, washing dishes meditation, brushing teeth meditation.  “Breathing in, I calm my body. Breathing out, I smile.” I taught these meditations to my anxious clients, finding myself relaxing in my therapy sessions as I tried to help them.

Alas, it took me a few years and additional philosophers to fully comprehend why meditation is called a “practice,” and not a mastery  Yet I didn’t give up, thankfully, as I practiced self-care in my continuous striving for balance.
Then in 2009, the plans my husband and I had made for our relaxing and meaningful early retirement vanished, when he died of an hereditary cancer at 58, just 2 weeks after we went to Washington DC to see the inauguration of Barack Obama. 11 days later, our 26 year old son had life-saving surgery for the same cancer, and during the next 7 years, I witnessed 5 more cancers in our little family: 2 in my daughter (same genetics as her Dad and brother), 1 in my own Dad, and 2 in my Mother. 7 cancers in 7 years, whew. Oh, the love I gave to my children and parents ~ all of whom are cancer survivors ~ for I knew how to give love. But finding care for myself, and my practice of meditation, were lost for many years.
Then came my move to CT, to be near my kids, and my discovery of USNH just after the 2016 presidential election. I was so ready to renew those deep and meaningful internal connections…. and I cried at almost all of the services for the first year. Inspiration and wisdom were abundant at USNH, I discovered, even as we all faced increasing tumult around us during the past 3 years, and rose to service in countless ways.
Is balance any easier to achieve within a community of caring? Well, in some ways, YES! In other ways, the daily onslaught of troubles in our world creates consistent challenges to that balancing act. I heard Stephen Colbert say in a recent interview that his team is constantly editing, as news reports pour in rapid-fire, up to minutes before the show begins each day. It made me think of how we are “re-setting” our hearts and action plans on a daily, or hourly, basis, holding firm all the while to our values of caring for those in need.
So, back to “inviting grace.” I believe that pausing to connect with our deepest selves ~ through meditation or any other practice ~ allows us to connect even more deeply with others. It’s tricky, but there is the balance, in pausing to remember that we can connect in both ways. Inviting grace to ourselves ~ accepting our shortcomings and our depletion and our uncertainty of focus at times ~ gifts us with peace of heart, to bring in turn to our outreach in the world around us.
And so, shuttling back and forth, grace inward, giving outward, pausing in the middle when we remember, we PRACTICE BALANCE, and continuously create and recreate PEACE OF HEART.

Offertory Rich Stockton introduced by WA, collected by ushers, received by SL and all recite response to the offering)

Music: Appalachia Waltz Mark O’Connor Violin SANITY
Response Rich Stockton We are building Beloved Community With our labor and with our treasure. With gratitude, we receive the offering, May it help us to fulfill our mission in the world.

Reflection #3: Creating Peace – Laura Patey
I would like to share some of what I have learned about creating peace. I have come to understand, that for me, peace is routed in authenticity and connection. This is not something I understood easily. I have engaged in thoughtful reflection over many years to come to this understanding for myself.
I am one of six kids. Throughout my late adolescence and young adulthood, I remember going home for the holidays and my siblings were there with their significant others. They shared stories about the lives that they were building and their hopes for the future. I tended to just talk about work, because I didn’t feel like I could talk about who I was. I was not out to my family and my life felt very compartmentalized. It took a very long time for me to come to a place of inner peace that allowed me to bring together the many facets of myself. I struggled to understand myself. My relationships with others, while very rich, often did not include all the facets of who I was. I didn’t come out until I was in my early 30’s.
The process of coming out and learning to become my more authentic self has been a transformational process for me and for others in my family. I have discovered that for me, the process is rooted in connectedness and is really all relational. It is only when I am my most fully authentic self and relating to others authenticity – that deep connection and peace are present.
When we truly connect with others who WE perceive to be different from ourselves – we can come to discover that that there is far more commonality than there is difference. This process of connecting as authentically as possible is something that I am always striving to do.
I have been an advocate for those who are marginalized, for as long as I can remember. This was even true for me as a kid. When I advocate for folks who are marginalized, it’s a matter of making sure that they know that they’re valued and loved. That connectedness gives both of us a greater sense of self and allows us to make other connections. I believe that’s our purpose on Earth.
As you may know, Leigh and I are adoptive parents. We have two sons, each of whom came home to us at age 11. Both of our sons bounced around in foster care for years. They had not only been removed from their birth families and lost all of those connections, but they had each been adopted and their adoptions disrupted, once again losing important connections. Disruption is the word they use when the adoption does not take root and each of the boys landed back in foster care. It is hard for me to imagine how they had the capacity to connect with anyone after so much hurt and loss. Out oldest son, Jesse, had been with his adoptive mom for four years and one weekend she dropped him off at respite care and never came back and he never saw her again.
Kids who have been in foster care have had so much pain and loss in their lives that they often have a hard time making connections. Working through the pain with children who have experienced disrupted connections and teaching them that they are valued and loved are critical elements of creating peace and has proven to be the most important part of our lives together.
We armed our boys for the reality that not everyone was going to value our family. That was okay, as long as we surrounded ourselves with people who did: our church community, our family, friends, and others.
When our younger son, Alex, was in school – one of the administrators said, “Well, you know, these kids…”. I was like, “Which these kids are you talking about? What are your expectations? Do you see this boy as a human being? As someone who has unbelievable skills, assets, and compassion? Or do you see him as a marginalized kid who is OK to throw away?”
That sort of attitude can kill a child’s soul and spirit. As a family, we talked a lot about embracing who we are and all parts of our identity. We talk openly about the pain and loss that EACH of us has experienced. We learned a lot from each other with our willingness to be in the hurt places together.
I have come to view peace as a state of mind. It is a very personal thing, yet I believe that we only experience it in relation to others. It’s about human connectedness. Peace is this inner sense of well-being and knowing that you are valued as an individual and that you are loved.
Peace is attainable if people can be vulnerable and be willing to sit with someone else’s vulnerabilities. This is how we get to a place where we can diminish fear and anxiety and ask, “What is it that we can do together more powerfully than either of us can do in isolation? How can we together create peace for ourselves and beyond ourselves?” I know that it is possible. We continue to live it!

Hymn* SLT#121: We’ll Build a Land

Extinguishing the Chalice (unison words) SLT#681: Rich Stockton
Deep peace of the running wave to you.
Deep peace of flowing air to you.
Deep peace of the quiet earth to you.
Deep peace of the shining stars to you.
Deep peace of the infinite peace to you.

Benediction: For the Garden of Your Daily Living Gwen Heuss-Severance
Plant 3 rows of peas: Peace of Mind, Peace of Heart, Peace of Soul;
Plant 4 rows of squash: squash gossip, squash indifference, squash grumbling, squash selfishness;
Plant 4 rows of lettuce: lettuce be faithful, lettuce be kind, lettuce be patient, lettuce really love one another;
No garden is complete without turnips: turnip for meetings, turnip for service, turnip to help one another;
To conclude our garden, we must have thyme: thyme for each other, thyme for family, thyme for friends.
Water freely with patience and cultivate with love.

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For this morning’s music, thanks to Linda Pawlek and to Violin SANITY – Lisa Rautenberg and Gretchen Frazier. Lisa and Gretchen have appeared at Carnegie Hall and barns in rural Maine, and just about every type of venue between the two. They combine classical, early music and folk traditions with many strings and no frets.