 What is the soul? There's not a common unitarian universalist definition of soul. A good number of unitarian universalists, including no doubt some folks at FUS, don't believe that such a thing as the soul exists. That's okay. The essential nature of our faith is pluralistic. If you don't find the term useful, I invite you to do some translating. We all do that all the time in UU congregations. This keeps us spiritually flexible and limber. I define the soul as the essence of who a person is. Their body, mind, and spirit uniquely packaged into a beautiful whole. So I am a unique combination of body, mind, and spirit. This combination is called Roger. I believe that this whole, my soul, came to be when I was born, and I believe that it will cease to be when I die. Well, there might be something, in fact, I know there'll be something left of what was Roger. At the least, my body will return to the planet, the solar system, the universe from which the elements of my body emerged. Maybe something else happens to my spirit. I don't know, actually don't much care. The big news for me is that at the moment of death, this particular combination of mind, body, and spirit will no longer be. Now, it may be strange to some of you that I include body in my definition of soul. That's not sort of the usual view in the West. Often the body is not included. I include body because I truly believe my body is part of the essence of who I am. Western spirituality has devalued and denigrated the body to the detriment of our bodies, especially black, brown, female, and trans bodies. This has also led us to denigrate things that we call bodies, that we associate with bodies, the earth, for example. All of this is why I believe in a soul that is embodied. I value the body as well as the mind and spirit. Well, there's a lot wrong with the world today, and there's a lot of soul sickness. Certainly after this ongoing challenge of global pandemic, the upheaval around race in our country, the insurrection and the ongoing efforts to destroy our democracy, a lot of us have weary and even sick souls. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote that the remedy of what ails the world is first soul, second soul, evermore soul. A lot of ailing souls mean an ailing world. Healthier souls mean a healthier world. So how do we help souls become healthier? How do we mend souls? Well, it's important to recognize that it is inherently difficult to make someone else's soul healthy. So the place to start is with the one soul each of us has at least some control over, that is namely our own soul. Each of us has work that we can and must do to tend our soul. Muhammad Gandhi summed this up in the context of British rule India, when he noted that home rule begins with self rule. To be successful, the work of freeing India from the British had to begin with each Indian tending to their own soul. That's where Gandhi began his work intending to his own soul. So the first step in tending to your soul is to know your soul. This takes time, intention, attention and practice. Good vehicles for knowing your soul include journaling, meditating, prayer, walking in nature, deep sharing with others about your spiritual journeys. This is why having a regular spiritual practice is helpful and there's not a one size fits all spiritual practice we should all do. Instead, find the practice that works for you, the practice that nourishes you, the practice that you actually want to do regularly and then do it regularly. I love Brian starting the service today with how he tends his soul in the same way that the characters in the movie soul tend their souls. By losing himself in playing music. In losing himself to the music, he finds his soul. Once you get in touch with your soul and hopefully keep in touch with your soul on a regular basis, then comes the next crucial step in tending the soul. Be yourself. So many of us waste too much of our lives trying to be what we aren't. More beautiful, more intelligent, more accomplished, more grounded or more whatever else we imagine to be a deficiency. This perhaps more than anything else is the recipe for soul sickness. Once you know who you are at the core, be that person, be that soul. Knowing your soul, being your soul, that's not the end of the journey though. There is one final crucial step and that is reaching out to other souls. Not to fix them, but to be with them, to journey with them, to accompany them and be accompanied by them and to help all souls flourish, especially souls which are devalued, marginalized and oppressed. I believe that every soul is sacred. Therefore every soul deserves the opportunity to flourish. Every soul has a basic right to food, shelter, healthcare, education, equality and love. Every soul deserves to be treated with dignity and to have the soul's inherent beauty recognized and celebrated and loved. Effective action to build a better world can only begin with tending our own souls, but that tending of our own soul is not the whole point. It is not enough, not nearly enough to tend our own soul and then watch or choose not to watch your family or your friends or your neighbors or strangers near and far suffer. Reaching out to other souls in need and building a better world, a fairer world is integral to the spiritual journey. A healthy and grounded soul helps enable us to do this work of justice. Emerson and many of our other transcendentalist spiritual ancestors like Margaret Fuller had a lot of wise things to say about the soul. There is a balance between the individual and the community in transcendentalism that often gets overlooked when the spiritual journey is misinterpreted to be only about the individual. This often happens especially when people misinterpret Emerson's idea of self-reliance. Part of the rap against Emerson and other transcendentalists is that they tended to hang out on the sidelines discussing and ruminating rather than rolling up their sleeves to do the work of justice. There is for example this great story about a Mrs. Brackett, a Bostonian abolitionist who told Emerson to his face in 1841 that she would rather hear that a friend died than became a transcendentalist. She said this because transcendentalists in her words are paralyzed and never do anything for humanity. Mrs. Brackett was particularly angered that most transcendentalists hadn't yet done much about slavery. A lot of them, including Emerson, were slow to take up the cause. Emerson was habitually slow to act for justice. He insisted always on taking lots of time to contemplate the issue and the various options for action. I will not move until I have the highest command, he declared. This is probably a good example of white supremacy culture, the need for perfection and avoidance of mistakes at all costs. Determining that slavery was an abomination that needed to be stopped probably didn't really need to take a couple years of reflection and rumination. Emerson did eventually get to action and once finally on board, he was not overly temperate either. In one famous speech in 1844, he said, if any cannot speak or cannot hear the words of freedom, let him go hence and creep into the grave the universe has no need of you. He also chose the 4th of July then and now of patriotic holiday as an occasion to make a major speech attacking slavery and the US government's support and tolerance of slavery. Following his fellow transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau's lead, he supported civil disobedience and also like Thoreau, he went further and came out strongly in support of John Brown's violent raid at Harper's Ferry during Brown's treason trial. The principal reason that most transcendentalists eventually belatedly worked against slavery and for other just causes was their passionate belief in the inherent dignity and worth of every soul. They believed that every soul needs to be freed from the constraints of convention, persecution and oppression so that every soul might flourish. Okay, so now I've talked a lot about a word that probably isn't comfortable for all of you. I'm going to use a term now that I think is probably not comfortable for most of you and that word is salvation. I can sense a lot of you shifting uncomfortably in your dining room or living room or kitchen or outdoor chairs as you hear me use this word. I like the word salvation. For me, it's not about what happens after I die. As I said earlier, I think the soul is no more after we die. Salvation for me is about our souls flourishing in the here and the now of this world. This is how we mend our soul and other souls. This is how we save souls. We tend our souls, we reach out to other souls, we support other souls, we connect with other souls, we work toward the health of all souls. Reverend Kelly and I shared a wonderful poem from Linda Underwood called All This Talk of Saving Souls Earlier This Year. I love this poem in the sentiment she has about saving souls and so I'm going to give her the last word in the reflection today. All this talk of saving souls. Souls weren't made to save like Sunday clothes that give out at the seams. They're made for wear. They come with lifetime guarantees. Don't save your soul. Pour it out like rain on cracked, parched earth. Give your soul away or pass it like a candle flame. Sing it out or laugh it up to the wind. Souls were made for hearing, breaking hearts. For puzzling dreams, remembering August flowers for getting hurts. These men who talk of saving souls, they have the look of bullies who blow out candles before you sing happy birthday and want the world to be in alphabetical order. I will spend my soul, playing it out like sticky string into the world so I can catch every last thing I touch.