The Heart of Enlightenment

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The Insight that Brings Us to the Other Shore

The sermon followed the Heart Sutra, which is linked above

Sermon – The Reverend Rachael Hayes

It might not surprise you to know that I was a dreamy mystic of a child. I remember being struck by awe as I pondered, what are the odds that I was born in my family, at this time, in this country, on this planet, all while I was supposed to be doing cursive handwriting exercises at my desk in second grade. I have always been a little suspicious of the idea of reality when infinite variables could affect what is or seems to be true.

And then, in my second semester of seminary, I took a class on Zen practice and thought. We gathered at 7am in the chapel four days a week, and the routine of bowing and sitting and walking meditations was a good though sleepy routine. Creeping into that chapel lit only by candlelight, the yawning empty space feeling strange and formless around us. For those 14 weeks, we were a sangha of practice, thought, and struggle, about 35 of us held in the circle, coming back to each other in those early mornings.

We read works by contemporary Buddhist thinkers, like Thich Nhat Hanh, Charlotte Joko Beck, Zen Master Seung Sahn, and Jack Kornfield. We watched our own thoughts cross our minds like clouds in the sky. And every week we chanted the Heart Sutra, though not the version I read to you. I still keep a copy on my office wall and chant it from time to time. This text has sunk into me through repetition.

The sutra known as the Heart Sutra in English and called Prajñāpāramitāhṛdaya Sutra in Sanskrit. The Heart of Perfection of Wisdom. This text is beloved in East Asian Buddhism, and some scholarship points to it being of Chinese origin. The body of the sutra is a discourse from Avalokitesvara, the bodhisattva of compassion, whose very name means “the one who sees the world” or “the one who hears the world.” In this sutra, it’s Avalokitesvara who gives testimony of gaining insight of the way to attain Nirvana, both seeing reality and hearing the suffering that can be alleviated by the insight.

And Shariputra, well, Shariputra doesn’t get it. Without getting into the various ways he’s been represented over the centuries, Shariputra in this sutra is kind of a stand-in for someone who wants to be the best student and get it intellectually. You can see why a master’s degree student might feel a certain kinship with Shariputra. Absolutely dedicated and devoted, but, you know, just not there yet.

Ten years ago, Thich Nhat Hanh generated this new translation of the heart sutra, the version that I read, and his Plum Village community has multiple beautiful chant recordings of it online. You can use your favorite search engine to find “Plum Village Heart Sutra” or even download the Plum Village app, where you can hear some gorgeous harmony versions as well as Thich Nhat Hanh chanting it in Vietnamese. This new translation leans more strongly into the idea that everything is connected. There is no fact or truth or material object that exists independently, no sensation, perception, action, or awareness that exists independently.

Shariputra is the one still stuck in duality, still obsessed with non-being and emptiness over being and form. Avalokitesvara perceives that being and nonbeing are equally true, that form and emptiness coexist.

The Heart Sutra reminds us that insight and compassion are interdependent. Nirvana is not a way to bypass or negate suffering. Avalokitesvara, upon enlightenment, works for the enlightenment of all beings, you know, even my old friend Shariputra. Insight brings us closer to those who are suffering, but it reminds us that suffering is not all there is. There is no space or time or person for whom enlightenment is not possible.

The Heart Sutra reminds us that enlightenment has more to do with letting things go than attaining anything at all. Like the raft in our story earlier, we let go of that which has served its purpose. When we let go of pain in the past, we cease to suffer from it in the present moment. Easier said than done sometimes–remember, I’m Shariputra here too.

And the mantra, the great mantra, the very best most effective mantra, as per the sutra, “Gate, gate, paragate, parasamgate, bodhi svaha,” translates as “gone, totally gone, gone to the other shore, the shore of wisdom.”

Buddhists from East Asian lineages will celebrate Bodhi Day today if they’re using a Gregorian calendar, or in China it’s called Laba and will fall on January 7th this year. South Asian Buddhists celebrate Vesak Day instead, which will come in May. Bodhi Day is a day for meditation and religious services, though Chinese Laba celebrations also include a special porridge and kick-start the New Year season. And it feels good to remember that this community of people trying to make it to the other shore is bigger than myself alone–or you, me, and Shariputra. There are multiple local sanghas, including the Hopping Tree Sangha that meets in our own social hall. Because it’s not about your enlightenment, or mine, or Shariputra’s; it’s for all beings. All of us, going to the other shore together.

Photo by Aziz Acharki on Unsplash

Greater Together

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Oh friends, this is not the sermon that I wanted to write. Even though I would never endorse any political candidate from the pulpit, I think you know me well enough to know that this was not the election result I wanted. And I’ve spoken with a lot of people this week who have had Feelings, feelings with a capital F.

What I have to tell you today is to feel your feelings. They are valid.

Listen to your body. I mentioned body scans last week, noticing how it feels to be in our bodies, where we find ease, tightness, heaviness, pain, stuckness. Notice that.

And notice your feelings too. Name them if you can: sadness, happiness, anger, fear, hope, loneliness, disgust, confusion. Notice them, name them. 

But also feel what your feelings feel like in your body. When you feel sadness, where do you feel it? Where is it in your body? What does it feel like? Is it hot, cold, tingly, heavy, staticky, buzzy? 

What would happen if you didn’t push it away or put it on the back burner? If you could just stay with it, listen to it? What might you learn from it?

The whole palette of feelings we experience tell us that we care. This is a huge gift. There’s a whole system in there to point out to us, hey, this matters. This is important.

Anger points to our experience of injustice. Loneliness points to our yearning for community. Confusion points to needing to slow down and understand something better, points to needing to give ourselves more time. Happiness points to resources.

What would happen if you listened to your feelings, if you really received their wisdom? Oh beloveds, our bodies are so wise. So clever. 

It’s also true that they can hold our trauma, that we can keep experiencing feelings related to past trauma instead of the present moment. This is because everything inside of us is trying to take care of us, even if it’s a big alarm still going off from decades ago. 

Author and trauma therapist Resmaa Menakem defines trauma as “a spontaneous protective mechanism used by the body to stop or thwart further (or future) potential damage.” He continues: “Trauma is not a flaw or weakness. It is a highly effective tool of safety and survival. Trauma is also not an event. Trauma is the body’s protective response to an event–or a series of events–that it perceives as potentially dangerous.”

If you are interested in this work, I suggest you read Menakem’s book My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies. We are a traumatized country, and it really shows this week. It played out in the election and in our response to the election. It played out in our bodies and in the bodies all across the country.

Don’t worry, I’m not going to stand here and give you hot takes about the election. If you want those, they’re everywhere this week, and most of them don’t feel useful to me. What does feel useful to me is these feelings we have and the invitation to, like water, find the shape of our healing.

bell hooks, in All About Love, wrote, “Rarely, if ever, are any of us healed in isolation. Healing is an act of communion.” We’re here because something inside us told us that we wanted to bring our hearts into community today, that something inside us could settle, could give and receive kindness, could return to what really matters. 

I invite you to take a moment and thank your body for getting you here, whether that means up and out of the house or joining us online. You listened to your body. You trusted that being together was better than being alone today.

We may not know exactly what comes next, but we do know that we can share our strength with one another. No one has to have it together all the time if we rely on one another. We can remind one another of what matters and ask one another, what does Love have to say about this? What do our values have to say about this? Love, values, those are our true nature. Like water we take many shapes, but when we act from Love we usually take the right step.

So rather than taking up the cause that your feelings direct you to alone, bring it back to community. Ask for help, for collaborators. Find the people who have always led there, which is to say those most closely impacted, and hear their wisdom and direction. 

Rather than picking up some marker to say, I’m one of the good ones, take a moment to feel your feelings, settle your body, and find your people. Do you remember the safety pin movement from eight years ago? It didn’t actually help anything. There are rumblings on the internet of wearing blue bracelets now in the same way, to signal some sort of easy solidarity. Far be it from me to tell anyone which jewelry to wear to express yourself, but more valuable than signaling to one another is actually becoming safe, in our own bodies and in our communities.

So we practice settling our bodies together and listening for their wisdom. We prepare ourselves to do hard things from Love instead of an unexamined fight brewing within us. We practice welcoming each other and listening to each other. We recommit to dismantling white supremacy culture and heteronormativity and patriarchy and ableism, all the way up and all the way down, in our own bodies and patterns, in our interpersonal relationships, in this congregation, in all of our communities, in our culture, in our laws, in our world, until we can call the whole thing Beloved Community.

We don’t know the way,
But we have faith that choosing each step in Love
Will lead us in the end to Beloved Community. 

May it be so, in our prayers and in our actions. Amen.

Photo by Shane Rounce on Unsplash

Pathways to Mending Our Hearts & Bodies

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I’m not asking you to tell on yourself, but raise your hand if you’ve met anyone recently who seemed to be holding a greater than usual amount of stress, anxiety, worry, despair.

Yeah, me too.

Some of it might be the election. A lot of people are reporting election-related stress. I’m not sure if it makes it easier or harder to remember that four years ago, we didn’t have the election settled until the following Saturday. It’s very possible that we won’t know the outcome right away.

So, what are we going to do? For the most part, we’ve done all we can to influence the election itself; the money donated, postcards mailed, door-knocking, phone banking or text banking. Whether it’s for candidates or for issues, the work of the election is mostly over.

The Peace of Wild Things

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

by Wendell Berry

It’s time to look for that wood drake and heron in the Wendell Berry poem above. Probably not literally looking for those exact birds, but I know that getting myself into nature is the best cure I have for taxing my life with forethought of grief. For me, I do enjoy watching the birds, but there’s something really wonderful about getting my body under some trees and feeling how much bigger they are than I am. One tree is good, but the woods are better.

Whatever comes, and my decades as a voter have taught me that every election is a mixed bag of results, we’ll need to live through it in our bodies.

A group of people in our congregation are meeting weekly to explore the practices in Resmaa Menakem’s book My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies. Menakem offers a method that he calls five anchors for meeting and moving through trauma. These can be useful in interpersonal conflict, but I also like them when I get that unsettled feeling in my body.

Anchor 1: Soothe yourself to quiet your mind, calm your heart, and settle your body.

Any of those settling techniques we talked about with the kids are a great way to do this, if you can, but if you’re about to have a fight with your coworker, maybe it’s not the best time to start humming or butterfly tapping. You’ll still need to breathe, of course, so begin by bringing some attention to your breath. Sit down, set down anything you’re holding, do whatever you need to do to take care of your body. Have a sip of water, take off your sweater if you’re feeling hot, or go to the bathroom to get a few minutes alone. Remind yourself that you’ve got this–you don’t have to react impulsively.

Anchor 2: Simply notice the sensations, vibrations, and emotions in your body instead of reacting to them.

What does it feel like to be in your body right now? How do your clothes feel against your skin? What does your breath feel like as it moves in and out of you? What is the temperature of the air? Inside your body, where do you feel tight? Where do you feel heavy? Where do you feel hot, or buzzy, or tingly? Do you have pain? Is there a part of your body that feels ease?

What emotions do you feel inside your body? What do they feel like? Don’t do anything about them, just notice them.

Anchor 3: Accept the discomfort–and notice when it changes–instead of trying to flee from it.

We’ve been trained for comfort. Given the option, most of us would rather be comfortable than uncomfortable. Our bodies are wired to keep us safe, and discomfort might make us nervous that we’re about to be in danger.

If you’re trying to tell whether you’re facing discomfort or danger, look around. Is there a physical threat? Usually not, but if there is, get out of there! Check in with your body again. Is there something dangerous happening inside your body? If you’re physically unwell, get medical attention. We’re not accepting actual danger here. Always take care of yourself.

But when there’s discomfort in you–when you feel sad or angry or ashamed or nervous–stay with that feeling. Maybe even accept that it’s trying to protect you from something, that whatever is happening now is reminding part of you of a thing that happened before. Accept this discomfort as a protective part of yourself and give yourself permission to be curious about it. As you observe it, it will change. Don’t hold tight to it, let it move through you.

Anchor 4: Stay present and in your body as you move through the unfolding experience, with all its ambiguity and uncertainty, and respond from the best parts of yourself.

This is where you actually deal with whatever sets off the unsettledness. Stay present as you have the hard conversation, or take in the news or lack of news. Don’t have an agenda for the moment. Stay present, respond from your own integrity as it feels relevant at this moment. If you lose track of the present moment, if you lose track of your own highest self, just come back as many times as it takes.

But wait–you’re not done yet!

Anchor 5: Safely discharge any energy that remains.

In the aftermath of this big stressful thing, you might still have a lot of energy coursing through your body. You need to let it go. Menakem recommends any form of continuous exercise, including walking, physical labor, whatever your body needs so long as it disperses energy and doesn’t hurt you or someone else.

Several months ago, I was on my couch with a friend and suddenly my dog was on alert. I heard my storm door open, and then the inner door opened. I hopped up, reminded myself that I was safe and in my own house, met the opening door to find my neighbor from two doors down trying to bring his groceries and a big bucket of kitty litter into my house. He realized he was in the wrong place, apologized, and went to the correct door. I closed my door, returned to the couch, and collapsed against my friend as laughter took over my body. The laughter was the energy dispersing.

I told you back in September that I have begun boxing, and this is why. Not to fight off intruders bearing kitty litter, but to have that energetic discharge. I have historically preferred energy-gathering sorts of movement like yoga, but I’m realizing that they don’t meet all my needs.

I feel better able to take on those middle anchors–noticing, accepting, and staying present–when I make those soothing and settling practices and energy-discharging practices part of my regular routine. Getting myself under the trees, if not with the wood drake and the heron, to settle myself; boxing to release the energy. And in the middle, paying closer attention to my body, accepting my feelings as what they are, and rolling with whatever comes.

What are you gonna do? What’s your plan? I hope you vote if you are eligible, of course, but how are you soothing yourself? Maybe you get under the trees, or watch nature videos, or pet your cat. Maybe you take a bath and eat some ice cream. Maybe you have some favorite movies cued up or books to read.

And how are you dispersing the energy that builds as you meet the moments one by one? Going for a run or a walk, having a dance party, playing a drum, finding some absolutely ridiculous nonsense comedy that makes you laugh beyond all reason?

Take care of yourself. It’s okay to turn off the TV or radio, to stop refreshing the news website. The news will still be there when you’re ready to come back to it. This too is an important part of soothing the body. You wouldn’t stand in front of an air conditioner when you’re cold or in front of the fire when you’re already hot–you don’t have to hold yourself in the way of that endless stream of news.

Take care of each other. I’d like you to make two phone calls this coming week. Usually when I tell you to make phone calls, it’s to your elected representatives on behalf of your beloveds; this time I’m asking you to check in with your beloveds in this election week. The first phone call is to someone who comes to you with their worries. Don’t wait for them to call you–just call them and tell them that you’re thinking of them. The second phone call is to the person who holds your worries, and it’s the same script–just call them and tell them that you’re thinking of them. If either phone call goes further, that’s great; stay in the present as you talk and listen. If you’re not sure who those people are for you, just reach out to two people you know. This is no time to try to go it alone, and simply reaching out helps us remember that we are social creatures meant for community.

Click to to see the sermon recording

Whatever comes, don’t skip your regular community events unless your group decides together to join a bigger event. Trust people with how you really are, with the intention of being honest, vulnerable, and kind. This is no week to skip your exercise class, your regular therapy appointment, your art group, your lunch bunch. These communities are essential and part of how you’ll stay grounded.

And we’re your community too. Whatever comes, we meet it together. We don’t wait until we’re perfect or the world is perfect to come into community. It’s an ongoing process of coming back to community and to our own highest selves, over and over, a practice rather than a product, staying present and grounded and real.

We’re facing a week of unknowns, but what I do know is that this is a community of care. I know that even when we love imperfectly, we remain committed to love in our practice and as our highest goal. Grounded in love, with love at our center, we will meet the moments as they come.

Photo by Tim Marshall on Unsplash

Chutes and Ladders for Universalists

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A sermon from the Reverend Rachael Hayes

Our opening hymn, We Are Climbing Jacob’s Ladder, is a spiritual, composed by enslaved Africans in the United States. It is a song of perseverance, of struggling toward a goal, the goal ultimately being liberation.

The spiritual references one particular scene from the book of Genesis, in which Jacob has a dream of a ladder set upon the earth and reaching up to heaven, with angels going up and down the ladder, and then God blesses Jacob, confirms his birthright, and promises to be with him every step of the way.

Jacob does not actually try to climb the ladder, but the image of the ladder connecting heaven and earth endures.

Inspired by the same Jacob story as the spiritual but in a different take, St. Benedict wrote about a ladder of humility, in which the more humble a monk becomes, the closer he gets to God. St. Benedict’s 6th century humility, in which one monk won’t look into another’s eyes is maybe not so useful to us as we affirm each other’s dignity and worthiness, but the idea of a humility that works for 21st century Unitarian Universalists is long overdue. 

How many of you have played Chutes and Ladders or Snakes and Ladders? I have to confess I mostly grew up with Candyland instead, which is a colors game instead of a numbers game, but it is also a game with a moving forward and being sent back mechanic, a game of pure chance and no strategy. 

Snakes and Ladders came from an Indian game called Gyan Chauper. Versions of Gyan Chauper have been played for thousands of years in India. Dice games like Gyan Chauper are even mentioned in the Rigveda, which make them over three thousand years old. Many of the religions and dharma traditions with an origin or strong presence in India, including Hindu, Jain, Buddhist, and Muslim traditions, have used the game as not only entertainment but as a game for teaching morals and virtues specific to their belief systems.

I’m going to focus on the Jain version today, not because it’s the oldest or because it’s somehow better than the others, but simply because it’s the most uniform. Hindu, Buddhist, and Muslim versions of Gyan Chauper vary significantly even within each tradition, but the Jain version has the same virtues and vices and ladders and snakes in the same places throughout 2500 years of game play.

Gyam Chauper on Wikipedia

It’s a meditation rather than a race, and it’s a game not of strategy but of karma. The player advances toward the final square, which represents moksha, liberation from the cycles of rebirth and all of the suffering involved in living. The soul (and here I’m talking about the larger belief system, not simply game play) progresses and sometimes regresses on this path to liberation, hence the ladders and snakes in the game.

The virtues in the Jain version of Gyan Chauper are Faith, Reliability, Generosity, Knowledge, and Asceticism. These are the ladders that will get you to a positive rebirth. There are only five of them, so you have to be pretty lucky to hit one out of those 84 squares.

The vices or evils that will slide you down a snake to a negative rebirth are Disobedience, Vanity, Vulgarity, Theft, Lying, Drunkenness, Debt, Murder, Rage, Greed, Pride, and Lust. There are more than twice as many evils ready to knock you back than ladders to get you ahead, but maybe that balances against the slower incremental progress of regular movement. 

Everything is moving all the time. Choosing not to play is actually choosing to stay where you are. We generate karma by trying to move forward, and it might get us a little bit further ahead or occasionally a lot, and sometimes in our trying to go forward we go backwards. Also, it may take millions of tries, but we will reach liberation. Maybe that’s why the first ladder is Faith.

So how did we get from this teaching tool of faith and morality to a mass-produced amusement for three- and four-year-olds? Colonialism, cultural appropriation, capitalism, the usual.

India was a British colony, and colonizers brought the game back to England, where it was altered to suit Victorian morals. The ladders stood on squares of penitence, kindness, pity, obedience, forgiveness, faith, truthfulness, and self-denial, which will bump you up 20 squares to finish the game immediately. The snakes’ heads rested on unpunctuality, covetousness, vanity, frivolity, dishonesty, quarrelsomeness, depravity, cruelty, slander, anger, selfishness, pride, and avarice. Did any of those chafe for anybody else? I feel like unpunctuality and quarrelsomeness alone would rule out a lot of us from ever reaching 100, to say nothing of how we rest with the virtues. These are the virtues and vices of the time, prioritizing souls that are industrious, agreeable, and selfless.

Eventually, the number of snakes and ladders became equal in the British version, reflecting that for every sin there is a chance at redemption. And then the virtues and vices were simply dropped as Victorian morality slid out of favor. In the twentieth century, after horrific wars and the end of the imperial age, the old morality no longer seemed to apply. So we get snakes and ladders that look like this one that we played today, simply snakes and ladders and counting.

What about Chutes and Ladders, the version I didn’t quite grow up with? Milton Bradley, and yes there really was a man named MIlton Bradley, produced a version that was explicitly for children. The illustrations on the board are of children, rather than adults, and you don’t have to read to understand what you’re playing. Instead of snakes, there are playground slides, because snakes are scary. And it actually looks like kid-sized karma rather than Victorian punishment and reward. The actions aren’t named but given cheerful pictures instead. Planting a garden leads up a ladder to a vase full of flowers. Rescuing a cat from a tree leads up a ladder to being friends with the cat. Climbing up high to sneak cookies that were put out of reach leads down a slide to both cookies and child falling to the kitchen floor. Writing on the wall with crayon slides you down to having to wash the crayon off the wall.

Chutes and Ladders never sat quite right with me, maybe because I was a stubborn kid (and still am deep inside) and thought that I was wiser than to eat a whole box of candy and make myself sick or to try to carry too many plates at once and wind up dropping them. I thought I should not face the consequences of these foolish actions that I only landed on by chance, not choice. 

I wish I could tell my preschool self that I still make these mistakes regardless of my intentions, really, although it looks more like having one more cup of coffee than makes me feel good or transporting pottery haphazardly because I’m in a rush. It looks like all the times I should have taken a little more care. That’s the moral system of Chutes and Ladders, the Milton Bradley version: we all need to be a little more careful, intentional, and forward-thinking. Sometimes the thing that didn’t seem like a big deal at the time winds up having a big benefit or resulting in a big crash. And it’s okay, because you can still get to 100 even after being sent back to the beginning. 

To deliver on my title, what would Chutes and Ladders for Universalists look like? And here I said Universalists, not Unitarians, because I think the old-school Unitarian version would look like having good character, maybe just an update of those Victorian morals we’ve already seen. Probably we would swap in “makes good coffee” and “thinks freely” and subtract a few of the morals that made us itch. My real question is what would Chutes and Ladders look like for Universalists? What does this game look like when heaven is not a goal, but a given? Does it happen on the board at all, or is this the board? Are we all walking it right now without knowing it?

I have one more ladder for you, a poem, this one by Kay Ryan.

Poem by Kay Ryan
by Kay Ryan

That poem says so much. It’s the lateral motion that’s hanging us up, not some game of up and down. It’s bumping into each other here, even with the best of intentions, not knowing where we went wrong, or at least not knowing until we’ve knocked our neighbor down. What if we could set the ladder down into the earth and aim it to heaven, to liberation, and work out some humility?

We’re not playing alone, of course, and it gets interesting when we put our ladders together. We can joust with them awkwardly, or we can prop our ladders against each other, even when we’re not sure where to aim. Two ladders can make a lean-to. Three ladders can make a scaffold. With enough of us and enough ingenuity, we can even figure out how to build ramps.

We can build more stable and inclusive structures of humility, where abundant welcome is the standard and collective liberation is the goal. I’m not talking about an afterlife heaven. As a 21st century Unitarian Universalist minister, afterlife heaven is not my concern. My concern is here and now.

Do all people have food, water, dignity, and love? As a Universalist, I’m saying that unless we’re all there together, it’s not actually heaven, or liberation, or beloved community.

So how are we going to build these scaffolds of humility, of freedom, of liberation? We take each other seriously. We listen to what our neighbors (and they are all neighbors) have to say, in their own words, in their truest emotions. We learn to see that we’re all in this thing together and until everyone’s free freedom doesn’t exist.

We build our scaffolds the best we can, trying to figure out the right place for each ladder, letting go of whose ladder is the longest, lightest, or most important. We will fall, we will disagree, and we’ll come back together in a new configuration. It’s a process. And when every need is met and every person is safe and loved, that is our heaven. The only real liberation is collective liberation. We only win together.

Banyan tree in Lahaina

Bringing Hell to Paradise

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150 years ago, on April 24, 1873, Sheriff William Owen Smith planted a banyan tree in the courthouse square of Lahaina, Maui. The tree was a gift from Protestant missionaries in India, and they sent it to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the first Protestant mission to Maui.

The tree was only eight feet tall when Smith planted it, but after 150 years of growth, it measures 60 feet in height and shades an area of a full city block, about two thirds of an acre. In addition to its original central trunk, it is supported by many additional trunks that have grown as aerial roots from its branches. It is the largest banyan tree in Hawai’i. It is the largest banyan tree in all of the United States of America.

During the Maui wildfires in August, the great banyan also burned along with so much else. Eighty percent of Lahaina burned in the fires. But the tree continued to stand as a symbol of hope for recovery. Arborists examined the tree and determined that there was still live tissue in the tree’s cambium, the layer beneath the bark. They began to care intensively for the tree, to water it, to compost and aerate the surrounding soil. Their efforts are paying off. New leaves have sprouted from the tree. All is not lost.

The banyan tree was sent to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the protestant missions to Maui. The Christianity that came to Hawaii in about 1820 comes from our family tree–specifically New England Congregationalism. The American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions sent twelve companies of Christian missionaries to Hawaii between 1820 and 1848. Queen Keōpūolani, the wife of the late King Kamehameha who had unified Hawaii with the help and gunpowder of British and American traders, invited the missionaries to come to Maui in 1823. Queen Keōpūolani converted and was baptized.

The missionaries stressed to their converts the importance of reading the bible, and to do so they translated it into Hawaiian language. The Hawaiian language had previously been unwritten, taught and transmitted orally. The missionaries taught the Hawaiian people their own language transliterated in the Latin alphabet so they could share the Bible with them. They formed schools for children, and school became compulsory, even for girls, something unheard of in the United States. Within a generation of the missionaries’ arrival, people who could not read were not allowed to get married.

The missionaries, whether from good intentions or not, reshaped Hawaiian culture. Hawaii went from a stop in the middle of the Pacific to a site of industrialization and globalization. Rev. Daniel Dole, son of a Congregationalist deacon, left New England in 1840 to serve as a missionary in Hawaii. His wife Emily Hoyt Ballard accompanied him. They founded a school for the children of the missionaries, where the instruction took place in English, not Hawaiian. Daniel Dole never learned Hawaiian in his lifetime.

In 1852, the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions stopped funding the Hawaiian missions, which meant that the missionaries had to self-fund or leave. King Kamehameha III didn’t want the missionaries to leave–they were part of this emerging new Hawaii–so he sold them land at incredibly low prices to get them to stay.

Daniel Dole’s son Sanford B. Dole was born in Oahu. After a short stint at Williams College and some legal work in Boston, he returned to Hawaii. He was twice elected to the legislature of the Hawaiian kingdom, took part in securing the 1887 Constitution that restricted voting rights to men of Hawaiian, European, or American descent and only permitted men of wealth to vote for elections to the House of Nobles, effectively concentrating power among the wealthy merchant class.

In 1889, a former Universalist minister, journalist, and politician from Maine, Rev. John L. Stevens was appointed by the US State Department to serve as minister to the Hawaiian kingdom. He arrived shortly after the 1887 Constitution had shifted the balance of power away from native Hawaiians to foreign businessmen. Even before he had arrived in Hawaii, he had written about the importance of the US securing ties with Hawaii, and then he was the one in place to make it happen. King Kalākaua died in 1891, which was a problem for the American businessmen and their political allies: his sister and heir, the ascendant Queen Liliʻuokalani was less inclined to go along with the Americans. She tried to reverse the damage inflicted to her people by the 1887 constitution, restore power to the monarchy, and restore the voting rights of Asians and lower income native Hawaiians. Stevens, as minister to Hawaii, could not support this and collaborated with those who overthrew Queen Liliʻuokalani in 1893.

And it’s into this Hawaii that James Dole arrives in 1899. James Dole, son of the minister of the Unitarian church in Jamaica Plain, Boston, arrived in Hawaii with a little over sixteen thousand dollars, which is roughly six hundred thousand dollars in today’s money. To begin with, he stayed with his cousin Sanford Dole, who had served as the president of Hawaii until the US annexed it and was serving in 1899 as the governor of Hawaii. James bought a 64-acre homestead in Oahu and experimented with a variety of crops before settling on pineapples.

James Dole began canning pineapple for export and grew and grew his empire. Dole now farms 109,000 acres on five continents. Farmers from tropical regions around the world lament the Dole corporation’s business practices–destroying ecosystems for exploitative and extractive agriculture, using dangerous pesticides, interrupting local foodways, leaving little in the way of crops for those who grew them, and maybe even supporting paramilitary forces.

The Maui wildfires were fed by two hundred years of colonialism, by the sugarcane and pineapple plantations and the loss of the native plants, by Europeans and US Americans deciding that we know better than the people who know a place intimately, by white supremacy hiding in religion paving the way for depriving people of their rights, by unsustainable tourism in an ecosystem on the edge, by real estate abuses. The settler colonialism that has harmed Hawaii is intimately connected, is the child and grandchild of the settler colonialism we still live with in Massachusetts.

What will it take for us to know the land as our source instead of a resource? What will we give up? Will we trust native Hawaiians when they ask us not to come to Hawaii as tourists? Will we begin to live from the relationships we build rather than the things (and places) we buy?

The great banyan, an Indian tree that took root in Maui, sent by one group of missionaries to honor another, simultaneously a symbol of enduring colonialism and enduring hope, might point the way. You see, the arborists caring for the banyan are not only caring for the banyan. The volunteer arborists who came together as the Lahaina Treescape Restoration Project met under the banyan about a week ago to survey the new growth. They also are caring for the native ulu, kukui nut, and Royal palm trees of Lahaina. Trees are essential for surviving the next fire. They hold water and moisture, and they slow the fire spread. The arborists are planting the next generations of native trees that will thrive in Lahaina’s hot sunshine and teaching others about the importance of restoring native plants after the fire.

After the fires, I will not romanticize the opportunity to plant drought-resistant native trees instead of invasive grasses, not after 98 people have died and more are still missing. But this is one more invitation to question the colonizer thinking that lives inside all of us, to say that manifest destiny must stop, to find the connections in our history and relationships and build forward with respect. We know too well that we cannot change the past, but we need not repeat it.

The following resources may help you find connections to change the future.

  • The National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition is a nonprofit composed of more than 80 organizations that are dedicated to healing Native American communities affected by Indian Boarding Schools in the United States.
  • LANDBACK is a movement that has existed for generations with a long legacy of organizing and sacrifice to get Indigenous Lands back into Indigenous hands.
  • MA Indigenous Agenda is working to support legislation currently before the Massachusetts State Legislature that will benefit Indigenous Peoples.

To view the sermon, please visit the recording on our YouTube page:

Congratulations to Reverend Rachael

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On Sunday, June 11 we celebrated Reverend Rachael’s acceptance to Full Fellowship as our Minister at the UUSA. Our adventure with Reverend Rachael began in the spring of 2019.

It didn’t take long after her visit for our congregation to vote YES!

And only four years and a global pandemic later…. we celebrated Reverend Rachael’s acceptance into Full Fellowship as Minister of our congregation!

Thanks to Sue Kelly, Anne Moore, Louise Grosslein, Lea Douville, and Jess Murphy for helping to organize the celebration. Also Pete Rogers, Fran Plumer, and Eric Murphy helped with parking. And a special thanks to Candi Talley for welcoming us to her lovely Stone House Farm.