The Flow of Abundance ©
Reverend Janet Parsons
Gloucester UU Church
October 16, 2022
These days, when I meditate, I most often find myself envisioning water; sunlight filtering down through water, the gentle waves rocking underwater plants and sand to and fro, the rhythmic curling and breaking of waves onto the beach. I invite you to just take a moment now and imagine that sense of being surrounded by warm, gently moving water, how it sounds, and how it feels on your body.
The eighth teaching of the Tao Te Ching tells us this:
“The highest good is like water,
nourishing life effortlessly,
flowing without prejudice
to the lowliest places.
It springs from all who nourish their community
with a benevolent heart as deep as an abyss,
who are incapable of lies and injustices,
who are rooted in the earth,
and whose natural rhythms of action
play midwife to the highest good
of each pregnant moment.”
Of the many things that separate us as Americans these days, perhaps one of the bedrock divisions is that of scarcity thinking vs. abundance thinking. It’s not so much about skin color, or religion, or political parties. Those are simply the manifestations of the different worldviews that people hold. People who succumb to scarcity thinking see life as a pie. Or perhaps a pizza.
If someone new comes along and asks for a piece, these people assume there will be less for them. This worldview sets up a dynamic of people trying to decide who deserves a piece of pie, who is worthy. This is nothing new in the human experience; we have been observing and participating in this way of seeing the world since the beginning of time. Everything becomes a pie and the fighting over the slices goes on and on: who can get into heaven, who can vote, who is worthy of playing a crystal flute.
I ask myself often if scarcity thinking emerges out of fear, or if fear emerges out of that sense of scarcity. It’s hard to say, really, something of a chicken and egg question, and perhaps it doesn’t matter. It’s an interesting question though: are we afraid of immigrants, for example, because their hair and skin and language are different? Or is it because we don’t want them helping themselves to our pie? Regardless, it’s a hard way to be in the world. Scarcity thinking is dry, and arid, and lifeless. Scarcity thinking stops the fundamental energy of life, the flow, like water, that can surround us all and nourish us.
Now let’s consider the worldview of abundance. This view of life tells us that there is enough: enough to share, enough space at the table. Once again, I find myself asking the question whether abundance is created out of love, or does love emerge out of a sense of abundance?
“The highest good is like water, nourishing life effortlessly…”
As I sometimes do, I looked up the roots of the word abundance, and found a surprise. Of course, it’s related to the word ‘abound’, and that comes from the Latin abundare, to overflow, to run over. ‘Undare’ in Latin means to rise in a wave. Let’s return to our mental images for just a second: imagine yourself standing on the beach, watching as wave after wave rolls in, crashes on the shore, and then pulls back to meet the next wave. Do you ever worry that it will stop?
That is abundance; that flow, that endless cycle of giving, spending, and regathering to give again.
In our second reading, Reverend Kendyl Gibbons described abundance in a different way: as the creative energy of love that flows around us and through us. But again, there is that word again: flow. Love, creativity, abundance, are active and present in the world. Our worldview – scarcity vs. abundance, causes us to make a choice of whether we will work to block the flow: to turn people away, to deny rights, to deny jobs and housing and education, or if we will serve as agents to keep that love and creative force (which some might call God) flowing everywhere. After all, waves are created by the flow of energy; in a circular motion, in and out, up and down.
The question before us, then, is how do we foster the flow, the waves, of love, or creative energy, or abundance?
Well, one way is through the creation of communities. Community is based on a sense of coming together, a sense that together we can accomplish so much more than we can as individuals. Community is an acknowledgement that we need one another in order to flourish, and that others are in need of us. We build schools for everyone to attend. We provide public safety, and roads, and libraries open to all. We build churches, synagogues, and mosques to have places to gather and grow and support one another. None of us could provide any of these things alone.
Community, then, is an investment. And investment in community, in any of its many forms, breeds a sense of abundance, for it fosters the flow of life and energy everywhere it touches. It builds trust that as we share what we have, others will share with us. Community is the belief that our strength lies in everyone flourishing together, sharing in the flow of abundance, and that if some are left behind, excluded, the energy flow, and all of us, are diminished.
As Universalists, we are called to be people of abundance. Our theology demands that of us. Our founders, including the founder of this congregation, the Reverend John Murray, preached a radical message about the vastness of the love of God. Universalism rejected the old view that God’s love was scarce, that it was stingy and conditional, that it came from a God that judged and punished, and excluded souls from participating in love for all eternity. The old Calvinists saw God’s love, and salvation, as a pie to be rationed, offered only to a few.
The Universalist God is a God of love, a God too good and too great to permit endless suffering for humans. This belief is the foundation for a theology of abundance: of abundant love, love that is extended to all beings in the universe.
We are called to be people of abundance, and this is demanding. We have been told that our work in the world is to embody this great love. We are called to act out of this wellspring of love to help to spread it, to enhance its flow through the world.
“The highest good springs from all who nourish their community…”
Today, we are all being asked to foster the flow of love, the highest good, to not let it be blocked within ourselves, to not hoard it or try to take possession of it, but to add our own energy and love and nurture and expand it. We are being asked take our places in this community and to share in this process of growing love and creative energy, and send it forth into the world.
To do this, we are being asked, as we do every year, to pledge, or to donate, to put a dollar amount on relationships, on love, and on community, and that is a very difficult thing to do. For most of us, this congregation means far more to us than we can afford to fully recognize. As part of this effort, to raise the funds needed to sustain this community, I am asking us all to do two things. The first is to think deeply about what this community means to you, and also what it means to have the voice of this liberal church active in the world. Which congregations are here to enhance life and abundance?
This week you will be receiving a letter that offers some of my own vision for the future of our congregation. You are being invited to chime in, to offer your thoughts and your visions. And so the second thing I am going to ask of you when your canvasser calls you, is to agree to sit down, and have a conversation. We’ve been able to have so few conversations in the past 2.5 years. We are long overdue. Please say yes.
I have so many hopes for us. I’d love us to grow our music program into something even more innovative and noteworthy. I’d like us to be known as a congregation that has a leadership role in music and the arts. I’d like us to have a wider presence in the community, with staffing to help us with outreach to engage more people. I’d like us to offer programming for children again. I want us to spend more time breaking bread together. I have many other hopes, but I’ll stop there, so that you can thoughtfully read the letter, and have some space to consider your own hopes and dreams for us. We want to hear them.
I’ll leave you this morning with the words of Parker Palmer:
“In the human world, abundance does not happen automatically. It is created when we have the sense to choose community, to come together to celebrate and share our common store. Whether the scarce resource is money or love or power… the true law of life is that we generate more of whatever seems scarce by trusting its supply and passing it around. Authentic abundance is not found in secured stockpiles of food or cash or influence or affection but in belonging to a community where we can give those goods to others who need them – and receive them from others when we are in need…. Community doesn’t just create abundance – community is abundance.”
I invite you this morning to always contribute to the abundance: be it with funds, or with time, or with your love for one another.
Blessed Be.
Amen.
