Last Sunday evening we held a peace vigil here at Unitarian House. More than 40 of us gathered in the dusk with candles symbolizing our personal dedication to peace. As we met at 7 pm we knew that all over our time zone many other groups of people were meeting and adding to the light of the almost full moon with their candles. When we recognized that we were taking up a “rolling wave” that had begun in New Zealand and travelled all the way west to us, and that as our own vigil finished and our candles were extinguished at 8 pm, thousands of others in the next time zone west would be lighting theirs, it was a moving reminder of the constant rotation of the planet, the earth forever turning.

And in the past few days we’ve been reminded of the lunar cycle, too, with that beautiful full moon mid-week, and then the yearly cycle which brought us on Thursday evening to the Spring Equinox, the time when all over the world, except very close to the poles, the sun rises due east and sets due west. Just for a moment, everything is poised and balanced – and then it’s gone again, so that now the moon is waning and Spring is already more than two days gone! The earth forever turning, never at rest! Celebrations and observances over almost before we can grasp them – no, we certainly can’t GRASP them; they slip right out of our reach.

But what doesn’t have to slip away from us is the wonder some of us felt during that candlelight vigil and which one member said sent shivers down her back, the knowledge that as we laid our candles down, others were taking theirs up. We can celebrate all the time that as one year is completed another begins, that although in one sense the future of the planet (that is, the human future) is almost totally uncertain, we can count on the return of the seasons, and that after this long cold winter some of us have already found the green shoots of growing things under the receding snow in our backyards. We don’t have to lose that sense of connection with all our fellow human beings which was so real to us for a few moments on Sunday night – but we may lose it (because it’s very fragile) unless we take every opportunity we can find of nurturing it. We need it more than ever with our world in a state of war.

One of the opportunities we can take is to acknowledge the existence and power of the intricate and intersecting small and large networks of people joining together in the free and responsible search for truth and meaning. An example of such network is the International Council of Unitarians and Universalists, ICUU, or ICU2 as it’s sometimes called. Today, March 23rd, has been designated as ICUU Sunday. Unitarian, Universalist and UU congregations, fellowships and groups around the world have been encouraged to celebrate the eighth anniversary of the founding of ICUU. I want to share a story told by the current President of ICUU, Jill McAllister. She writes:

I received an e-mail letter from the leader of a small but determined group of Unitarians in Lahore, Pakistan. Being a Unitarian in Pakistan requires a formidable amount of courage and dedication. Looked upon and treated with disdain and suspicion by both the majority Muslim community and the minority Christian community, even by their own families, these fellow religious liberals need as much moral and material support as we can give them. Yet they continually reach out to us, their Unitarian partners around the world, with words of encouragement and inspiration.

The letter described a local religious custom which observes a particular lunar holiday by praying for friends and loved ones far and near. And on a long list of friends and loved ones, I saw my own name, with the explanation that a certain individual in Pakistan was holding me in her heart and mind during this time.

I can't say that this is the first time I've been told someone is praying for me, but this was quite different for me: the sense that someone around the world with whom I have little in common except this liberal faith, was holding me up by name and sending me thanks, encouragement, and compassion. It was a humbling experience ...... This is, for me, one of the greatest benefits of the ICUU. We have come to know that we can rely on holding one another in heart and mind and spirit, even over long distances, and that these connections truly make a difference in our lives. Our global community grows in depth and strength through these bonds.

The ICUU has provided some resources for celebrating their anniversary, many of them taken from a collection of prayers and meditations called “One and Universal.” The prayer I’m going to share now is from a man whose name may be familiar to you – Norbert Capek, who was a Unitarian in the Czech Republic, and who is perhaps best known as the founder of the Flower Communion ceremony which we and many other congregations observe at the end of the congregational year. Here’s his prayer:

Let us renew our resolution, sincerely to be true brothers and sisters regardless of any kind of bar which estranges us from each other. In this holy resolve may we be strengthened, knowing that we are God's family; that one spirit, the spirit of love, unites us.

And in what I think is a remarkable synchronicity, here’s something else which came across my desk just on Thursday about Norbert Capek, and which I think is especially worth remembering in this time of renewed war in the world. It came from Unitarian Minister Barbara Child:

March 23 was Norbert Capek's last Sunday in the Prague pulpit before he was hauled off to Dachau [where he died in 1942]. That Sunday he preached against Hitler, knowing there were both Nazis and Jews in the pews. I find the steadfastness of his conscience and the congruity of his beliefs and action a powerful model.

And so do I.

We have so much to celebrate today, and our celebrations are one and universal: the dependable cycle of the seasons, the rolling wave of witness for peace around the world, the existence of caring networks such as the International Council of Unitarians and Universalists, and the heroism of people such as Norbert Capek. For all these good things and all these good people, may we be grateful, and may we be worthy of them.

Among the native peoples of our continent there are rich myths and customs associated with Spring. Here’s part of one native leader’s description of a particular tradition:

We will go to our gardens and bless them with cornmeal, and plant small crystals at the four directions and in the Center. After the garden has been blessed, we will go to the prayer feathers that serve as the boundary markers of our land, and there we will ask the power of Spring to bring a renewal and a reawakening of the power of protection that we prayed for when we set them out at the time of Winter Solstice.

At the end of the day we will have a feast, first preparing a Spirit plate and then placing it outside or burying it or placing it in the fire, so the spirits may partake of the essence of the food. As we come together to eat, we each share a bite of each food in celebration and thanksgiving for all our relations.

I doubt if many of us have prayer feathers marking the boundaries of our land, but some of us certainly try to walk around our gardens as soon as the snow retreats enough; some of us couldn’t quite wait and already stomped and trudged through deep snow in our high boots to visit each corner of the yard!

The human capacity for adapting traditions to present needs is remarkable, I think. It can be done with many observances. In one family I heard of, there’s a ceremony to mark the coming of Spring. Each person chooses a seed and blesses it with an ancient planting prayer. Then the family sit quietly and visualize their plants in full bloom. Next, they call on each of the elements necessary for the plants’ growth to be present. They place the seed in a pot of soil and pat down the earth, pour water on it, breathe on it to represent air and hold the pot over a candle or up to the sun to represent fire.

Let’s add another layer of meaning to this ceremony and engage in it now.

Close your eyes if it helps, and imagine a seed which represents the thing you most want to grow in yourself during this year — wisdom,or understanding, or patience, whatever you most need. ..........

Visualize that quality coming into full bloom in your life. ...........

Think of each of the elements necessary for the quality’s growth and call on it to be present with you ....... the support of others, perhaps, ..... knowledge ...... free time ...... whatever it will take to bring about the growth you want.

Imagine planting your seed in the soil it needs .... watering it ...... breathing its essence into your being ..... giving it the warmth of your commitment ......

And for our few moments of silent meditation, watch your seed grow. .........

Sara Teasdale’s poem is a sad and bleak one. The thought that we may destroy humanity by our actions is hard to hold in our minds, and yet always worth considering, I think, if it stirs us to action which can prevent such destruction. It may also stimulate us to affirm the enduring kind of hope which is, in someone else's words which have really resonated with me over many years now, "open to outcome but not attached to it".

The quality of hope is about as central to our Unitarian Universalist faith as you can get, and particularly to the Universalist strand of our heritage. You may recall the famous words of John Murray, who exhorted his colleagues to reassure people who were suffering under hellfire and damnation preaching. "Give them not hell, but hope and courage," he said. "Preach the kindness and everlasting love of God." Hope and courage; they were the cornerstones of Universalism in those early days and for long afterwards. I hope they've not entirely lost their importance to us. Hope and courage seem to me as linked as they were for John Murray. Where there is no hope, there can hardly be courage.

And the deepest hope, I believe, is that which is open to the improbable and unlikely, open to being surprised by joy, open to experiences never even imagined. This hope is as available to those of us who've been disappointed and discouraged over and over again as it is to those of us whose lives have been one good thing after another. It’s as available to us when we agonize over the war in Iraq as well as when we look to reconstruction after the war. This deep hope can be nurtured and sustained by a recognition that it’s not only the earth which is forever turning, but human affairs and outcomes. “As the World Turns,” nothing is ever settled or forever, and therefore so much is always possible.

When I was married the first time (and that time I was actually involved in the planning of the wedding ceremony!), I chose a hymn called "Lord of all hopefulness". My marriage didn't last for ever, but the words of that hymn strike me today as absolutely appropriate for the way I went into my marriage and for how each day of our lives can be. Here’s the first verse of that hymn, only changing "Lord" to “Spirit”.

Spirit of hopefulness, spirit of joy
Whose trust, ever childlike, no cares can destroy:
Be there at our waking, and give us, we pray,

Your hope in our hearts at the break of each day.

In tune with that hymn, and in counterpoint to Sara Teasdale’s bleak vision, poet and writer Wendell Berry considers humanity's future with hope in his poem called "A Vision." It's from his most recent collection, and I commend it to you today, as a closing reflection on the persistence of hope, and the preciousness of that persistence.

If we will have the wisdom to survive, to stand like slow-growing trees
On a ruined place, renewing, enriching it, if we will make our seasons welcome here,
Asking not too much of earth or heaven, then a long time after we are dead,
The lives our lives prepare will live here, their houses strongly placed
Upon the valley's sides, fields and gardens rich in the windows. The river will run
Clear, as we will never know it, and over it, bird song like a canopy.

Families will be singing in the fields. .... The abundance of this place,
The songs of its people and its birds will be health and wisdom and in-dwelling light.
This is no paradise or dream. Its hardship is its possibility.

May we be strong, hopeful and courageous, in the forever-turning hardships and possibilities of life.