Sunday, February 1, 2026
Reading and Sermon
Reading: Excerpt from a recent letter to Tanguay (the Zen practice group Rev. Vern is a student of)
By Rev. F. Vernon Wright V
Buddhist practice points to no-self and non-doing.
Though what this means cannot be spoken, it can be lived.
Everybody knows this, feels this when it is happening.
No self is involved when doing for the benefit of others.
No self interest. No credit claimed. No reward or thanks wanted.
No separate self really doing anything. It can be seen that nothing is done without everyone and everything being just this way.
You know—just sitting, wanting to relax, resting, taking a break, doing your thing….
And someone asks for help…
And letting go of you and wants and things…
There is this listening and
Before you know it what was asked for has been given and benefits are flowing.
That’s a taste of no-self non-doing.
With no-self not-doing, everything gets done.
Sermon: Resilient Together
By Rev. F. Vernon Wright V
Last month we took a long look at resistance. Again seemed that our nation truly conspired to make our theme more important! But here’s the thing, when you really start to consider what a community like Murray might be resisting, it begins to make us solidify our boundaries. There’s those who think like us and there’s those who don’t think like us. Sometimes it’s really important to think about what we are as well as who we aren’t. As our good friend Len Yutkins back there satirically suggests, there are many reasons not to be a UU.
Of course when you really look at Murray, another truth emerges. Guess what! We don’t all think exactly alike either. And beyond this, we find that Murrayites can also be, well …human– some of us under more pressure, some of us less so, and sometimes meeting together can be kind of anxious if we’re not careful. There’s always room for improvement! And then there’s the fact that when we look at our mission and all the things we do, we find that we are as dependent on what is happening outside our walls as we are inside our walls. Murray is more about doors than walls. A bigger truth starts to emerge: we are all in this together- all people around this entire earth and all of our different and sometimes opposing views of reality. If that’s the case, how do we better, perhaps more humbly interact with our wider community?
I read an article in the Atlantic called, “There’s is Word For What is Happening in Minneapolis” (https://www.theatlantic.com/books/2026/01/antidote-trump-look-to-the-dissidents/685822/), about how the protests in that city are different than say “No Kings” rallies, which, while are important for people who don’t like this administration, don’t do much to inspire people who did vote for Trump to change their minds. Minneapolis is starting to bring people out who maybe actually did vote for Trump in a way that goes beyond politics. It is just that way simple reality of “this is not the way we treat one another”! It is a kind of effective dissidence that is just “neighborism” or humanism- the kind that sparked the underground railroad or the hiding of Jews in WWII. This is kind of what I am driving at when we think of being resilient together- the theme we will continue to explore for the rest of the month.
Community resilience does indeed have to do with banding together for just basic human decency. Under this is the idea of interdependence, one of our newly minted covenant values in the UUA. Interdependence is the understanding that, in all of the Enlightenment’s, and Modernity’s necessary uplift of the individual, too much emphasis on the individual can be an acid that destroys the very soil, atmosphere, air and ocean all life including ours depends. And I’m not just thinking of our literal environment, but the metaphorical one; While we may be individuals, each of us needs loving hands to unconditionally hold our own, each of us needs basic support and nutrients, each of us depends on an intricate and fragile network of relationships and supports that goes into everything from the roads that lead to our homes, to the electricity we use, the libraries we visit, the social security paychecks we depend on, and the hospitals we need to visit when we are sick. Even in the most rustic hunter gatherer society, people take care of each other. In some ways the community is far more important than the individual. Without the web of interdependence, life would be pretty much impossible for we fragile relatively defenseless mammals.
But being resilient together goes deeper still- to even the Zen level. Over the week as I contemplated how we are resilient together, this writing from my Sensei, Tom Tanguay began to emerge. This idea of no self no doing began to emerge as an important concept that allows the universe to flow through us, in a much more effortless and creative way than we might imagine.
Here it is again: Buddhist practice points to no-self and non-doing…
You know—just sitting, wanting to relax, resting, taking a break, doing your thing….
And someone asks for help…
And letting go of you and wants and things…
There is this listening and
Before you know it what was asked for has been given and benefits are flowing.
That’s a taste of no-self non-doing.
With no-self not-doing, everything gets done.
Here’s what happened with no self and not doing. Last Tuesday I looked at my e-mail and our admin. Laura Alameda had forwarded me a message from the Attleboro Interfaith Collaborative requesting emergency space to provide a warming place for the homeless community the next day. Wednesday’s conditions were to go down to six degrees. A one day turn around is hard for a church like ours to do because doing something like this would at the very least require board approval. The request from the AAIC kind of overwhelmed me, until I started to consider, hang on, what am I actually doing here? Not much. I’m just communicating. So I notified the board right then, and by that very night night we had consensus and I was able to connect with the AAIC director Shir Lovett-Gras and let them know that we were indeed able to open our doors.
The next evening there I was talking with Pam Tarallo, the person directly in charge of the food and friends campaign, and providing warming space and coordinating the volunteers, so she could get the bins in. I’m showing her around so that she might get more aquatinted, and it turns out she had been raised at Murray and she knew things about the church that I didn’t even know.
Next, I found myself talking with these really cool volunteers from outside the community. They were these big strong manly men, from different communities, and as we talked we saw a common commitment and one guy invited me to attend a bible study with other pastors, the one I had heard about but had assumed that they just considered me to be to liberal to invite, but I had been wrong about that. You know no self, no doing… And then the clients came in off the bus and they were a wild and crazy looking bunch and one of them starts talking and from the things he starts saying I get this eerie sensation that I’m talking to living Christ itself…more no self, no doing except the universe pulsing through you and everything around you and oneness and light.
And the week went on from there, and I talked to so many people and I went into the hospital to see Dick Bonin recovering from an infection, and then I got to meet the new Rabbi at Agudas Achim, and she was a wonderful young woman who had done all kinds of peace and justice witness in Palestine and was a religious studies geek like me, and a poet too, and was raised in the woods near Amherst MA in a back to the earth Jewish reform movement. And right there and then we came up with at least three different ways Murray and Agudas could collaborate. Its amazing what happens when you get yourself, and what you think you are doing out of the way.
Even the fact that I’m talking to you at all from this pulpit, you know blah, blah, blah, is a case and point of no being no doing. I am here because you deem it fit to hold and fund the position of this office and I have this privilege to speak to you three weeks a month. Its about me, sure …but not really; its more about who we are together. And what do we do together? Well lots of things, and nothing, because there’s no real dividing line between one thing and the next and the pure grace of having this place called Murray in the first place. Murray has as much to do with those who have passed on, than with those who are alive. And there’s the future Murray to consider too. Murray is truly a crazy place, crazy good, crazy lovely, crazy holy- but not when it keeps to its own-self, and its own walls, but when it embraces no self and no doing and the world comes streaming in and becomes just a little transformed in the process.
Peace and wholeness everybody. True resilience requires more open doors than it does hardened walls. True resilience has much to do with our value of interdependence. True resilience is also that Zen concept of “no self” and “no doing”. May the generosity of the universe, together with this wider region flow through us and in us as not only focus on how we ourselves can be resilient, but as we consider how we can help this entire region become more resilient. Peace and wholeness to you!
