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Theologically, most of us as UU's assert that heaven and hell are not places but states of mind that we experience here on this earth. We talk about believing in "life before death." But how many of us miss it? Often, it is not the external busyness of life that has me waiting to live, but the busyness of my mind. It is so easy to get caught up in remembering times in the past when I took a risk and failed, or work out the most detailed scenarios of all the things that go could go wrong in the future.
The Buddhists refer to this aspect of our being as our "monkey mind," and scientists would identify the part of our brain that does this as our neo-mammalian brain. We can be very thankful that our ancestors millions of years ago developed it - it is exactly what helped them to make sense out of patterns and make choices between options. But that doesn't means it is always easy to live with it now.
We even do this as a religious community. I've heard it said that we can't make the difference of a "real" religious community until we're bigger than we are, or that we need to all agree on some more things before we get started making communities of justice. I hear all the time that people want their church to grow, but not to look different than it is right now. We can easily spend much of our time as a people worrying about what a newer future would look like with us as a vital voice in our society, but if we wait for that to happen on its own, we will have missed the opportunity of a lifetime.
We spend so much of our lives waiting to live, so much of our lives worrying about the past or the future. But as we know, we have such a brief time to live the life that wants to live in us.
Originally delivered by Aaron White on August 10, 2008
The text for this sermon can be viewed online at
http://austinuu.org/sermon/
© Aaron White 2008
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