Unitarian Universalist Meeting of South Berkshire

August 14, 2005

“Our Very Own UU Miracle – In New Jersey!”

Rev. Kathy Duhon

GRACE NOTE: “A Miracle of Encounter”

A Miracle of Encounter

I am going to tell you one of the stories of personal miracles that a woman related to Unitarian Universalist Dan Wakefield, which is recorded in a book of his about miracles. He took yoga from the woman, Danielle Levi Alvarez, in the Boston area, and he felt that she was such a natural, so graceful and at ease in her Kripalu style yoga, that he imagined she must have been born with healthy living habits. He was mistaken.

She wrote, “I was disillusioned, bored, teaching French at Boston College, smoking two packs of cigarettes a day, drinking too much. I wanted to die. I didn’t attempt suicide, but I thought about it.” She figured her kids still needed her and were her reason for living, but she was not happy with her marriage or her career.

A friend of hers visited the Kripalu Center in Lenox and wanted to give Danielle the present of a week there. When her friend mentioned that there was no wine, no coffee, and no smoking, she didn’t think she was interested. Her friend said to go for at least one day, and if she didn’t like it, to come home.

Danielle said she was scared, but she went. This was many years back. She thought the architecture was ugly, the discipleship feeling was weird, and the people smiled way too much. She was angry and began to criticize the staff for living in isolation and not helping politically to make the world a better place.

One of the women on staff answered her snide remarks, smiling, “I’m very impressed with your anger – it shows how much you care!” Danielle said, “That completely disarmed me.” When the woman explained, “Anger is energy waiting to be transformed”, something began to change for Danielle.

She began to notice that yoga in the morning gave her energy and she didn’t need the coffee. Her anger began to dissipate and she started feeling healthier. On the last day, she had an amazing experience during meditation. Her teacher was guiding the group to extend love to themselves. She wrote, “I felt a physical sensation in my chest, as if my heart were a nut that had just been cracked open by a nutcracker. There was a pain in my chest and a clear feeling of my heart being freed from a shell. I started crying, very softly. It seemed like time dilated – just a few minutes seemed like eternity. The moment was filled with space and time, and time stopped – there was no more time. When I heard the bell at the end of the meditation, I was somewhere else. It was very odd. It took me a while to get back to the room, to realize I was still on the floor. When I came back up, I felt different than I’d ever felt before. First I felt gratitude for my teacher; then I felt devotion and happiness, and a sense of having arrived – not being a seeker anymore. I was home.”

Of course, she had to go to her real home that day, and it was hard, but her encounter had changed everything in her life. Things felt fragile and she knew she had a responsibility to not break anything. She renewed her marriage and became a yoga instructor. She never drank coffee or smoked again. She got to know Thich Nhat Hanh and translated one of his books into French. When she left off her story, she was going to work with Jon Kabat-Zinn, teaching yoga and meditation to inner city African Americans and Latinos, to help with stress reduction.

A miracle? Danielle had an encounter with a healing place and with healing people, and she was able to open to the experience in such a way that she experienced what felt like a miracle of transformation in her life.

Our Very Own UU Miracle – In New Jersey!

Today I am going to talk about miracles, particularly a special one from the early days of Universalism. Unitarian Universalists believe different things about miracles, and in that way, we are like most people. Even folks from religious traditions who believe in Biblical miracles don’t always know how to interpret the claims of miracles that are purported to happen in our day, or at other times.

I was at a local clergy meeting this past week, in which we were invited to participate in a special celebration of the Housatonic River in September. Thankfully, we were not being asked to calm raging waves, as Jesus did. Religious leaders of all kinds will offer prayers and intentions of healing for the river at a site in the town of Housatonic. And the organizers of this “Housy Day” will take samples of the river before and after the ritual and send them to Dr. Hado Imoto for crystal photography to gauge the effect, if any, on the molecular structure of the water. So it felt like the clergy and the shamans are being tested on the effectiveness of our prayers and rituals, on our ability to create a miracle, or magic, or healing - we’re not sure what people will believe about this event.

We talked about all the possible interpretations of Housy Day prayers and it was clear that everyone in the room was a bit uncomfortable, and that we clergy from many different faith traditions were mostly “agnostic”, as one minister called it, about the idea of having a real effect on the water at that particular moment. We’d rather pray for the courage and strength to continue the work to clean up the river, and we never want to be seen as magicians. But, we also know that healing is a mystery, and we try to stay open to the mystery and miracle of life. “Where is your faith?” Jesus asked in the scripture today, and we ministers were asking that too. Is our faith in molecular differences or is it in the possibilities of calming and healing the world? What miracles do we believe possible? What miracles do we pray for? What miracles have we known?

At the very beginning of our time together as a congregation, a small group of us read and discussed the book by Unitarian Universalist Dan Wakefield, called Expect a Miracle: The Miraculous Things That Happen to Ordinary People, from which I adapted today’s ‘Grace Note’. The first words, just inside the jacket cover, are these: “There are only two ways to live your life,” wrote Albert Einstein. “One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as if everything is.” For Einstein and Wakefield, miracles abound.

Dan Wakefield himself tries to explain what he means by miracle, and how miracles happen. He says that grace – that awesome transformative power – is always present, but we have to be available to it. The power of miracle, then, comes from both outside and inside. Though the power for miracles may never be understood, and may initiate beyond us, in God or dharma, or the interdependent web, in a very practical sense, miracles are dependent upon our openness and our practice which unfolds our beings to the greater power. Helen Keller says, “When we do the best that we can, we never know what miracle is wrought in our life or in the life of another.”

Now I want to tell you about the Universalist miracle that happened in New Jersey. I visited the very spot of that miracle during my sabbatical, when I went on retreat at Murray Grove, in what is now Lanoka Harbor, New Jersey. In the mid-1700s that piece of land was in Good Luck, New Jersey, a name no longer in use. It was being farmed by Thomas Potter, a deeply religious man, on land that previously was owned by the Quaker William Penn. You can actually still see where his farmhouse used to be, although it is mostly woods there now, held in preservation. Thomas Potter was probably raised a Quaker and had associated with Baptists. They were probably the Rogerines, or Quaker Baptists, who were followers of John Rogers of Rhode Island, and who believed that all creation would be restored, or saved.

Potter had heard of the new idea of universalism, which said that predestination for damnation was not Biblical, that actually God did love everyone and intended to save the whole world. This was a radical belief, but Thomas Potter had probably heard it in his many talks with other religious folks, and confirmed it in his study of scripture, as read to him – he was illiterate. He was also considered a mystic.

In fact, Potter was so interested in religion and theology that he would invite visiting ministers and others to his home to talk about current issues and ideas. His wife wearied of hosting the discussions in her home, so in 1760 Thomas Potter built a meetinghouse, a little chapel on his farm. Some discussions happened there, but Potter was also probably the first person to believe the now famous saying, “If you build it, he will come; if you build it, they will come.” He built the chapel for a preacher of the universalist gospel to come and use, although he knew of no such minister, and for a congregation to be born to hear that message. I just wish someone had had the insight to build a chapel here in the South Berkshires waiting for a Universalist and Unitarian minister to come and start this fine congregation. Wouldn’t that have been grand?

For 10 years, no one came to be that universalist minister. Potter had faith that one would come, however, even if his neighbors were skeptical.

Across the ocean, in England and Ireland, a deeply religious young man, John Murray, was becoming a minister renowned for his preaching. He first was Anglican, then Methodist, and finally, was convinced of the theology of universalism. At that time, there was no Universalist religion, so he was dismissed from his Methodist pulpit. His wife and infant son died of illness around the same time, he was depressed, and he sank into debt so badly that he was jailed. He barely escaped from the debtors’ prison when a relative bailed him out, and he decided to make a fresh start in America.

Murray booked a passage to New York on the ship, “Hand in Hand”, determined never to preach again. The ship was diverted to Philadelphia, and was heading back up the Jersey shore when they were swept over a sandbar in a fog in Barnegat Bay, near Good Luck, New Jersey. They lightened the load to try to free the ship, Murray helping with off-loaded cargo. Then he was directed to Potter’s farm to find provisions for the crew.

And then the miracle happened. Thomas Potter had seen the ship floundering and immediately knew that God had sent him a minister. Potter greeted Murray immediately, without hesitation, saying, “I have longed to see you. I have been expecting you a long time!” Later he found out Murray’s ministerial background, but he had been sure, as soon as he saw the ship, that this was the universalist preacher, brought to him by providence, for his chapel. A miracle? Synchronicity?

Murray, of course, politely refused, explaining that he was no longer preaching, and anyway, he was not staying, but was on his way to New York, as soon as the wind allowed. Potter responded, “The wind will never change, sir, until you have delivered to us, in that meeting-house, a message from God.”

They agreed that if the boat was still stuck in the bay the following Sunday, Murray would preach, but if it were freed, he would depart. The ship was still there, of course. Here is what a plaque at Murray Grove says about that first universalist worship service: “Near this Spot first met Thomas Potter the Prophet and John Murray the Apostle of Universalism. The following Sunday, September 30, 1770 in Potter’s Meeting-House Murray first preached in America. The wilderness and the solitary place were glad for them.”

As soon as Murray finished preaching, a sailor ran up and said that the wind had turned and the ship was free. Murray did get on the ship for New York then, but he came back. He stayed in the area for several years, preaching universalism in Potter’s chapel and all around in the nearby towns. Eventually he left for Massachusetts, where he married Judith Sargent and was instrumental in gathering a Universalist congregation and organizing a new denomination, the Universalist Church of America.

Potter died during the American Revolution and left his land and chapel to John Murray. His will stipulated that it be open for use by all denominations. Murray never realized that this bequest existed, and eventually the chapel passed into the hands of the Methodist Church. It was torn down and rebuilt in 1841, and sits in a graveyard on land adjacent to the Murray Center. Thomas Potter is buried there. The chapel is mostly unused, and the Murray Grove Center holds the key, so I got to visit it. The chapel is very sweet and simple, and I could well imagine universalism first being preached in such a setting.

John Murray wrote about Thomas Potter extensively, including this description: “…He had unbounded benevolence, …was a friend to strangers…and a feeling, faithful man…whose hospitable doors were open to everyone, …and whose heart was devoted to God….” Of course, when these two amazing, faithful, loving men met up with each other, miracles would have to have happened.

Are miracles still happening today? Do people open their hearts and their lives to others in a way that also opens up a conduit to the greatest powers that are possible in the universe? Sometimes, surely. Yes, I believe miracles happen. One of them is happening right now – a miracle of universalism – of the universal longing for peace.

Yesterday in Crawford, Texas, over a thousand people gathered to support a grieving, angry mother of a soldier killed in Iraq, in her quest for peace. Cindy Sheehan loved her son Casey and has been camped out for a week near the President’s ranch because she wants to talk to the President and try to convince him to pull our military forces out of Iraq. She says, “If I can shorten the war by one minute and save one life, that would just give me so much comfort in my grief.”

One of my favorite wisdoms about miracles is that they are related to love. Willa Cather said, “Where there is great love there are always miracles.” May the miracle that one woman, whose great love has opened her life to the power for peace, indeed help to bring the killing to an end in Iraq, and be a force for creating peace in the whole wide world.