The odd title for this sermon and the first half or so that explains the odd title were stolen from a sermon presented at the Big UU Church in Austin, not by the legendary minister there but by the ministerial intern, a very unusual and exceedingly cool person named Kathy Harrington. The story of her transition from Christian Science hairdresser to Unitarian minister is pretty miraculous in itself. More about that later. Here’s how she opened her sermon:

Presenting a sermon about miracles to Unitarian Universalists could be a rather risky proposition. I decided it would depend on whether an acceptable definition of “miracle” could be found. So, [I did] my homework. I looked in my Dictionary of Theological Terms and found “miracle” defined as “an event caused by a special divine action that does not follow the normal laws of nature.” Oops. That definitely won’t work for Unitarians. The Oxford Dictionary has a [similar] supernatural definition followed by a more acceptable one, “remarkable occurrence.” That’s more like it.

The goat story begins when Kathy agreed to facilitate a workshop on Death and Dying and invited her friend Cheryl, who suffers from an incurable, fatal disease, to come to Austin and help her.

Kathy said:

Cheryl is one of those special people to whom every day is a gift, and she sees miracles everywhere she goes because she extends pure unadulterated love to everyone that comes in contact with her. Cheryl made me realize that I [tend to get so overwhelmed by things I have to do that I forget] how to have fun! We laughed so much that our sides ached.

Cheryl and I decided to embark on an adventure in the Texas hill country. With map in hand, we headed out to find the “Willow City Loop” to see the wildflowers.

We took the cutoff toward Fredericksburg and enjoyed the beautiful fields and farms, when suddenly, as we passed a lovely country home with a slew of goats in the yard near the house, we noticed a goat straddled in the fork of a tree! I saw it first, and said, “Oh my goodness”, and as I drove past, Cheryl saw it, too. We were both stunned! A goat in a tree?!

"Darn! We should have stopped for a picture! No one will ever believe us.” I said, so we turned around and went back.

Well, by then the goats had headed toward the back of the property, and we had missed our chance.

“Well, shoot.” I said, “Let that be a lesson. We blew it. We should have seized the moment. Carpe diem, and all that.”

“But, it’s perfect, don’t you see?” Cheryl explained to me with that big glowing smile of hers. “We were given the gift of that insight because we missed the picture.” “Oh, all right.” I said, “Maybe it was a gift. Hmm, there’s gotta be a sermon in this somewhere.” It reminded me of Albert Einstein, who said, “There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle, and the other is as though everything is a miracle.” He makes it sound as though we have a choice. [hmmmmmm] When we got to Fredericksburg, we decided to have a late lunch and explore the shops. We wandered into a music store that had a unique clothing boutique in the back. Those frilly romantic clothes that look great on Cheryl, but would make me look like Big Bird in drag. The owner of the store was a perky attractive young woman, who looked fabulous in the clothes she was selling; she greeted us with a saccharin Southern drawl,

“Are you two having fun today?”

“We sure are!” I answered because Cheryl was way too busy shopping, “Why, we even saw a goat in a tree!”

“Well, y’all must have been driving in my neighborhood.” The young woman said, “The goats are always in the trees around my house.”

“What?” I protested, “Cheryl, did you hear what she said? That woman just reduced our “miracle” to an everyday common occurrence! Apparently, goats in trees are ho hum in Fredericksburg!”

Still curious about goats in trees, and not quite believing that woman, when I got home, I looked on the Internet and typed in “tree-climbing goats,” and guess what? GOATS CLIMB TREES.

Apparently, in Morocco, the goats like the fruit of the Argon tree and they get up as high as 20 feet in the trees to reach the fruit. The goats of Morocco are quite a tourist attraction. Someone ought to tell the folks in Fredericksburg that they’re missing the boat. I used to own goats, trees, too, and I can tell you I never saw a goat in a tree before. Who knew? .

So, that’s it! It’s really that simple. Miracles apparently happen all around us and we choose to see them as miracles or as just common ho hum occurrences. Have you ever noticed that whatever your [personal] focus is [suddenly becomes all you see?] For example, when I was pregnant it seemed as if the whole world was pregnant. Everywhere I looked there were pregnant women! And now I mostly just see women fanning themselves like mad, saying, “Is it hot in here, or is it just me?” Our perception is colored by what is in our minds. We create the world we live in.

As Emily Dickinson said, “the soul must stand ajar to allow the ecstatic experience.” Ajar. What does she mean exactly? Well, I looked it up. It means, “slightly open.” So I take that to mean to leave a little space in your day, in your mind, and don’t walk around so focused that you become blind to possibility, or at least the willingness to be surprised, or caught off guard by life’s miracles.

When I was living in Alaska, my oldest son, whose degree is in Biological Sciences, was always nagging me to go on a hike with him. He was the perfect guide, and I finally agreed to get out and see the Alaska wilderness, so I used the excuse to buy new hiking boots. So off we went and there I was bouncing through the woods like a kid with new PF flyers, when he said to me,

“Ma, you’re killing me. Slow down!”

I was so surprised because I thought he meant that he couldn’t keep up with me, his old mother, but then he said,

"Mom, slow down, you are missing everything!”

“What? What am I missing?” I grumbled.

“There.” He said, pointing first to broken twigs and leaves, the clues, and then hidden underneath the leaves, I saw the perfect tracks of a moose. And then he pointed out a spectacular rare flower blooming in solitary brilliance with rays of the sun beaming down on it.

The Buddha once said, “If we could see the miracle of a single flower clearly, our whole life would change.”

Early one morning, when the tide was out, he took me to the beach where we walked on rocks into Resurrection Bay, and he pointed out thousands of starfish clinging to the rocks under the water. I had never seen living starfish, and I never would have seen them either, because I seem to go bouncing through life with my head up and my eyes straight ahead. I was astounded at the brilliant and varied colors! Reds, blues, purples and yellows. It was truly remarkable. And it was a “miracle” I would have missed, had my son not been the one to yank my “soul ajar”. Just one of the millions of miracles of nature that most of us never see.

At this point, we diverge. Kathy Harrington discussed an Anne Lamott book; I’m hard after this miracle issue.

Many contemporary skeptics believe that most, if not all, the miracles in the Bible can be interpreted metaphorically. The loaves and fishes story, for example, has been interpreted as meaning there will always be sufficient spiritual food to sustain the believers—the word can be distributed to all who hunger for it, rather than the literal story of coming up with enough lunch to feed a crowd.

Many people think god no longer communicates with us through miraculous events as he/she supposedly did in biblical days. But if we take the second definition of miracle, a remarkable occurrence through which something is communicated, then a miracle may have actually happened to me. I received a very clear message, not by means of a burning bush, but through my lawn mower.

Here’s what happened. Years ago, when I lived in Longview, a very attractive lady and her son moved in next door to me. I didn’t like her. She obviously had a lot of money; she was doing extensive remodeling before she moved in. I also thought she was not paying enough attention to her little boy, whom I liked instantly. But mostly I didn’t like her because when she worked out in the yard, which she seemed to be doing constantly, she wore inappropriate clothing for our neighborhood. She wore a little bandeau top and short shorts. I viewed her choice of apparel as an act of aggression. When she was in her front yard, men up and down my street who had never worked in their yards in human memory suddenly appeared in shorts and coveralls, with hedge clippers in hand, also “working” in their yards.

Back then, I had a 5.5 acre piece of land that I mowed a few times each year. I loved mowing; it was almost a spiritual event for me. The time to mow came around. I sunburn easily, so I slathered on some kind of coconut-oil sunscreen, jumped on my John Deere tractor and took off. Each swath of the brush hog sent up a cloud of East Texas dust, much of which settled on my coconut-oil sunscreen where it stuck. As the day wore on, sweat and additional slatherings of coconut-oil sunscreen mixed with the dust to turn me into one hellacious-looking mess, plus I smelled like an earthy pina colada.

When I finally went home that afternoon, I decided that since I was already filthy, I’d mow my yards. Mowed the front and moved to the back. There she was, in her yard, dressed in her skimpy outfit, although she had accessorized it with garden gloves. I thought to myself, “humpf, that outfit is not even safe. She’s exposing herself to untold yard work injuries.”

Just then, for the first and only time this ever happened, the bag on my mower somehow blew open, grass clippings blew up in the air, hovered there momentarily, then landed on me, sticking to my sweaty, dirty, coconut-oil-smeared body making me look somewhat like a large, frightening, green sweet- gum ball.

I don’t know that I believe in god, but at that moment, I lifted my eyes to the sky and said, “Yes, well, thank you. Message received.” That was the last time I thought a judgmental thought about my new, sexy neighbor. We became great friends.

In preparing for this sermon, I asked Google, my new best friend, to show me quotations that mentioned miracles. Aside from “I believe in miracles, you sexy thing,” by the band Hot Chocolate, many of the quotes sounded like Kathy Harrington in Resurrection Bay, expressing the opinion that the true remarkable occurrences are really all around us and within us.

For example, a Buddhist philosopher said, “The true miracle is not walking on water or walking in air, but simply walking on this earth.” St. Augustine said, “Miracles are not contrary to nature, but only contrary to what we KNOW about nature.” There’s the somewhat cynical approach to the topic as expressed by Pablo Picasso who said, “Everything is a miracle. It is a miracle that one does not dissolve in one’s bath like a lump of sugar.” That’s always been a fear of mine. Robert Heinlein said, “The shamans are forever yakking about their snake oil miracles. I prefer the real McCoy, a pregnant woman. And St. Augustine again, “People travel to wonder at the height of mountains, at the huge waves of the sea, at the long courses of rivers, at the vast compass of the ocean, at the circular motion of the stars, . . . and they pass by themselves without wondering anything.” Ah, yes, what a piece of work is Man, marvelous in reason . . .

I think even the most scientific of us cannot help but view our world--- the fact that we are at just the right distance from the sun, with just the perfect combination of gases and pressures, elements and thermodynamics---as being, if not miraculous, then certainly a most “remarkable occurrence.” To paraphrase Einstein, the more I know about science, the more I believe in God.

Then there are people who believe that true miracles are not found in the material world, but in relationships—in the way that people interact with each other. Kathy Harrington discussed a Web site and a 3-volume book called A Course in Miracles, www.ACIM.org. I won’t go into the bizarre particulars of all that, but there were some parts of the Web site that made sense to me. One was a line that read, “relationships are the path [or as the Buddhists would say, ‘the raft’ that transports us] to inner peace or, another way of saying the “kingdom of God.” This is consistent with the sort of New Age interpretation of the words of Jesus, that when Jesus spoke of the kingdom of God, he didn’t mean a mythological reward up in the sky somewhere. He was talking about the state of self-actualization that we reach when we walk the walk so to speak, when we truly love and accept others, all others as ourselves. The “universal experience” is that everybody on the planet has relationships, whether we want them or not. Our parents, our siblings, our spouses, our co-workers, and our friends and neighbors, and even the strangers we meet in elevators, on the street, in passing cars. Everyone. Especially those people who push our buttons. These people, the book says, are our saviors. Because they have something to teach us. This, of course, is similar to the idea of reincarnation, that we are continually, in each of our lives, placed in various combinant relationships with the same souls until we learn to work things out and live in harmony with one another. Our improved interpersonal skills will enable us to be rewarded by a place in Nirvana.

Marianne Williamson has said, “Miracles occur naturally as expressions of love. The real miracle is the love that inspires them. In this sense everything that comes from love is a miracle.” If we truly achieve this, live a life that is selfless, characterized by love and acceptance of all people we encounter, especially those who push our buttons, those whom we hate, those who have hurt us, then we will have achieved the highest level of self-actualization, the kingdom or state of godliness, and that would certainly be a miraculous occurrence. By that interpretation, the life of Mother Teresa was the miracle, not the dubious fact that she may have healed someone. How sad that the beatification process doesn’t see it that way.

According to Deepak Chopra, “The possibility of stepping into a higher plane is quite real for everyone. It requires no force or effort or sacrifice. It involves little more than changing our ideas about what is normal.” Which brings us back to goats in trees - a remarkable occurrence for Kathy Harrington, but an everyday sight for the people of Fredericksburg.

I have a client, an ex-military logistics expert, who has included excerpts from his performance appraisals on his resume, and one line stood out for me when I first read it several years ago, “This man works miracles every day.” Wow, I thought. How cool that must be. I wanted to read more. One of his many accomplishments reads, “Directed all logistical operations to support more than 4,500 personnel and a 1,000-vehicle fleet; surpassed every defined standard and achieved the highest readiness ranking across all divisions.” To me, a person who is organizationally challenged, that does indeed seem like a miraculous achievement. To him, it was just a job.

When the teacher, Annie Sullivan, through sheer force of will, intelligence, ferocious tenacity, and training was able to actually communicate with the deaf, mute, blind, terrified, and angry Helen Keller, it was obvious to everyone, not just the playwright who chronicled the story, that Sullivan had indeed performed a miracle. Where was the Pope?

Patricia Neal, the actress said, “A strong positive attitude will create more miracles than any wonder drug.” I have another client, a little lady who stands under 5 feet tall who, like Scheherazade used her wits to survive an 18-year physically abusive marriage. Now free of her husband, she has a daughter with cancer, a grandchild with a serious mental and physical impairment, and she’s unemployed. Yet, she has an incredibly upbeat attitude, a generous spirit, a joy for life, a continual smile, and an unflappable belief that something wonderful is just about to happen in her life. How does she do that? To me, it seems miraculous. Perhaps it’s reminiscent of the survival strategy she honed during her marriage. She seems to have decided that in her world, an upbeat attitude, a positive outlook, an ebullient spirit, and laughter in spite of pain will be the norm, the everyday way things are. She has created for herself a wacky world of Wonderland where things are a little bit topsy turvy, where goats climb trees, where miracles are commonplace. If I choose to leave my soul ajar, I’m hoping I may be able to do that too.

Kathy Lansford (with portions in italics blatantly plagiarized from Kathy Harrington)
11/9/03