Scott Neely

“One who has entered the stream enters the flow of the dharma-nature.”(Hsuan Hua)

A meditation on the flow of our lives into one another, in celebration of the annual Gathering of Waters Service at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Spartanburg, SC. Offered on Sunday, September 17, 2017.

The meditation may be heard here:

An excerpt of the sermon transcript may be read here:

“Have you ever felt

in the flow of life,

in the flow of your life,

where everything moves in sequence,

when connections happen where they never should,

where people you have been thinking of appear around the corner

when they should never be there,

when what you need is right there, in your hand,

when life flows effortlessly

& you flow with it?

 

“This is an expansive feeling,

a dream-like but grounded feeling,

a silver ribbon in the sky

& you are a part of it.

 

“Breathe, and feel the fullness

of life

flow into you.

 

“Of course, it isn’t always this way.

Sometimes we feel

completely out of sync,

out of the flow,

disconnected from the world,

disconnected from ourselves,

nothing going our way,

at a loss of what to do

without the resources, internal or external,

to do what is needed, demanded, urgent,

 

“lost to ourselves,

lost,

out of the flow.

 

“We can feel it there

in its absence;

 

“we know what could be

but is not

 

“and that is a lonely, broken,

disconnected feeling,

acute,

acutely alone.

 

“Breathe:

I find in those moments

stopping to breathe may offer us

no answers,

but at least a connection back to ourselves.

When we are trying to live,

to find our lives,

breathing is a very good thing to do.

 

“Even if we feel distant from our own lives.

Just breathe…

 

“We flow,

not just in our own private lives,

but together,

we flow together:

 

“the intersection of lives

that should never connect

but do:

 

“We offer this to each other,

here, in this place,

moving through this place

on our life journeys—

 

“not perfectly,

not always smoothly,

often not consciously

 

“but pulling one another

deeper in,

into the flow

when we feel so far out of it.

 

“We flow into one another,

all of us, all of ourselves,

pulled in:

 

“our blessing and our decay,

our success and our failure,

our annoying habits and our genius,

our loves and our indifference

 

“all our deep, muddy, polluted

sacred flow:

 

“one great, luminous

silver ribbon

winding into the sky.

 

“Breathe once more together,

our breath, muddy & full of light,

our breath, so many streams

flowing into one another, moving, moving deeper, moving on–

 

“into a great

deep

beautiful

polluted

holy

all-embracing

current,

 

“a great silver ribbon,

the power of life

in its greatest depth.”

A meditation on the deep pattern of our lives, the spiral that transforms chaos, here and now, at the turning of the year.

A sermon for Samhain, for Halloween, for All Hallows and All Souls. Offered at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Spartanburg on October 29, 2017.

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At the conclusion of the service where this reflection was offered, a mathematician handed me the following note:

“Mathematically, chaos & cyclical motion of an orbit differ in only the slightest change of an input.

“The discipline is topological dynamics–

“A product is the beauty of the fractal.”

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The sermon may be heard here:

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From the sermon:

“This is the power of turning to face our life,

turning to consider with attention and care

our fears & doubts & joys, all of who we are

so that we do not ignore them

and are not controlled by them,

but so we turn with them

in a spiral,

 

entering with them

into the pattern of the year, the pattern of time and history,

turning in the spiral of our lives

consciously, wisely, realistically, generously,

 

to embrace life,

to embrace our life,

to embrace the lives of one another…

 

with the spiral of our lives

turning the darkness of an oppressive world

 

into a deeper pattern,

where fear can let go

into the stronger pattern of love

 

and remake the world

for ourselves and many, many more.

 

It is such generous, powerful work

to turn this way.”

 

Image: Painting meditation by Judy Allen, UUCS member, at “no words” gathering of Speaking Down Barriers.

“Hell is other people.” (Jean-Paul Sartre) Or, in the immortal words of Cheap Trick, “I want you to want me.”

A meditation on the ego–our egos–as a source of tyranny, or as a source of solidity, resiliency, solidarity, and strength. To be our true selves matters, for ourselves and for the world.

Offered on Sunday, September 3, at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Spartanburg, SC.

A recording of the reflection may be found here:

A transcript excerpt may be found here:

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That is the divine “I”,

the divine self,

the beautiful ego

 

speaking its true being

 

and by the very light of its brilliant existence

 

awakening us to our true being,

calling us to our true selves.

 

We have seen this week how much we need one another.

We hear the beauty and possibility of desire,

of longing to connect with one another,

in our songs.

 

And we see in our families, in our work, in our leaders, in our history,

how distorted and ravenous

the ego can become,

 

what an all-consuming tyrant

we can be—

 

individually, and as a nation.

 

Thich Nhat Hanh

discards doctrine

to call us to our true selves,

 

to manifest in this moment

the full beauty and wisdom

of just who we are.

 

And James Baldwin

who is just that beautiful, and wise, and brilliant

in the fullness of his being,

 

reveals the tyranny of our nation’s ravenous ego,

the endless and all-consuming narcissism of white supremacy,

 

by saying:

“I am a man. I don’t exist for you.

What is it about your own narcissism

that you needed to imagine me as something different for yourself?”

 

Stand in the fullness of your being,

in the beauty and wisdom

of your “I am,”

 

of your divinity,

 

Your light,

your desire,

your song

 

will illuminate the world

to who we truly

may be.

 

“We all fail in life…we always die too soon, or too late.” (Jean-Paul Sartre)

A meditation on failure. A meditation on existence. A meditation on our existence. A meditation on pushing beyond the limits of our work, to reveal the truth of ourselves. A meditation on the City of Light.

Offered at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Spartanburg, SC on August 27, 2017.

A recording of the sermon may be heard here:

An excerpt of the transcript may be found here:

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What this place represents,

what you have created here

and in which I join you

is a place trying so hard

to do what others literally—literally—believe cannot be done

 

that in the very failure to convince them

you witness to that for which

you are striving so hard:

 

a community of love, beyond belief.

 

And that is just the point:

It is not just a question of the work we accomplish in life,

but of the life our work creates in us.

 

Our work may finally be assessed as incomplete.

Some may one day call it unfinished, or a failure.

 

Nevertheless,

may it create in us

the very thing we so long

to achieve through all our labor.

 

Consider Sartre & de Beauvoir.

Their work,

each in their own ways,

was incomplete, and easily critiqued,

full of flaws,

by many measures, failure.

 

And yet their pursuit of their work

created of their lives

a witness—

for all of their flaws,

with perfect clarity,

they witness—

to freedom

and the commitment to matter in the world

and to each other.

 

We see in them what they tried so hard to write for others.

 

And Aquinas

who endeavored the Summa,

a complete compendium of faith and reason,

 

but who was stopped short

by a vision

beyond all words and images,

something he could not describe

even after the thousands of pages he had written,

 

the end of all his work

that somehow communicates

what all his ideas and words and work

had striven to say,

 

as if his very failure fulfilled

what he had striven so long

to accomplish:

 

a witness to a reality beyond human understanding.

 

And this is my hope for us, for the work we join in together here—

that we will attempt so much,

that we will risk so much,

that even in our failing,

 

all which we have striven to achieve

will be revealed in the way we live our lives.

 

We are certain to fail in a thousand ways,

to let one another down,

to misunderstand each other,

to offend where offense was not intended,

to come up short,

to overreach.

 

What we are attempting here

is too implausible

to all work out.

 

May we have the vision and the courage

the reason and the faith

to do it any way,

 

to strive,

to try and to fail,

 

but to work, together, over and over,

in the search for what is really true

in our lives

that no external authority can finally condemn.

 

In our incompleteness,

in whatever finally stops us,

 

may the world see clearly

exactly that for which we strove

with such brilliance.