Finding My Spirituality
A Sermon given at the Cambria Unitarian Universalist Church on February 22, 2026. More to come.
Good morning, friends ……
Here we are today in this beautiful sanctuary, its four walls temporarily safeguarding us from the ordeals and uncertainty of the world outside. A room that resembles rooms we were born in with three physical dimensions. I spent most of my life comfortably living in these dimensions of length, height and width while neglecting the spiritual dimension that seemed available and important to other people. I didn’t see it and didn’t feel I needed it.
Blessed with peace in my life, particularly since saying goodbye to corporate work, I never saw what I might find of benefit in such a dimension. Having said that, the closer I’ve come to the UUC Cambria and the people here I’ve come to know during the last year, the more I wanted to understand spirituality with the hope of finding something that might elevate me.
No matter how staid my viewpoint was, I thought I should try to branch out.
I want to start today, then, by relating a sense of my love affair with the farm Carol and I built just east of Cambria. Thirty-two acres of work and challenges filled our lives for 24 years. Turning that magic plot of land into a pretty good business helped me tune out the mundane politics and constant exhaustion of my corporate career and began a still unseen crusade to find spirituality.
On the farm a year ago, it wouldn’t have been possible for me to imagine I’d be with you today. Go to Slide 2 – the farm.
The long road started the first morning on our farm in April, 200I. I stepped outside onto the front porch with coffee to find sun glistening off webs covering dozens of holes in the small grassy area next to our shabby house. It needed tons of work like paint and stunk from mouse droppings, nearby orange trees were full of weeds and wanted water, and I had spent the night worrying about a long list of unknowns. We’d taken a big risk, but Carol and I made that decision to do this together.
Every day after that was spent outdoors surrounded by symbiosis with much to learn and understand. As our UU Values suggest, honoring the interdependent web of all existence. And each year following that first day I anxiously awaited the adult ‘wolf spiders’ annual fall trek down the hill to Santa Rosa Creek. Those tarantulas had patiently grown in the web holes by keeping insects down through the spring and summer.
I slowly came to understand how every plant, animal, bacterium, even viruses fill a niche in nature. So do we. The many of you I can already call friends (look around room). Like those tarantulas, we each have a role in this world. I found mine.
So, Carol and I moved to town last May. I remember well that first day in our new house. Surrounded by cardboard boxes, I asked myself why I gave up a lifestyle I loved to be boxed in again. One thing this last year has taught me, then, is that my farm lifestyle had indeed boxed me in, in important ways. Age had gnawed away at strength and vision, so farming had again become a management job like the one I happily left 25 years earlier. Finding an answer to my question sent me on what I will talk about today. But searching for why I left the farm also left me with a strong sense of fortitude. Carol and I had continued what our forefathers endured to get us to where we are and …. then, we adapted as our world changed. Back to Slide 1 - Oranges I wanted to put recent history on the table and tie it into some UU values prior to unapologetically kicking off this presentation on finding my spirituality by stating that science guided every decision I’ve made during a long slog to get here. Early on I learned science comes with a toolbox. An important tool in that toolkit is that I became a skeptic. I am only happy with facts as true once they have been tested and justified by reason. So, I stand here today one of eight billion sentient animals. I share 99.9 % of my DNA with every one of you. Each of us must also walk around in the utter mental isolation of this thing we call our body. Fortunately, our ancestors gave us this wonderful while capricious tool of language to communicate. Using it, I will try to share my experience with the spirituality, we hear about a lot during UUCC services. While I spent eight decades steering clear of the need for a spiritual realm, I’ve always tried my best to be honest and treat everyone around me fairly and without prejudice. That just came with this package (raise arms). Much of my guidance in life has come from a main tenant of science – testing obvious explanations to see if they can hold water. Since moving to town, I discovered UUCC and found you welcoming (hands out to crowd). It might be hard to understand how attractive that’s been to a man who has spent much of his life doing everything on my own. I want to particularly call out that I’ve felt a great deal of like-mindedness and brotherhood with the gentlemen I’ve come to know attending the men’s group. Similar points of view and broad-mindedness fills every discussion. It’s also important that the people I’ve met here aren’t taken aback that I don’t believe in a God or any form of transcendentalism. Recent experience with Cambria’s UUC has elevated me out of settled ways of thinking and led me to question why I never felt the need for a spiritual marrow. I began to search to fill this emptiness. Early in the hunt, Diane DiMarco and I discussed UUCC membership. She gave me the UU Pocket guide (hold it up). I read as much as I could tolerate. I use harsh words because there wasn’t much in here to appeal to someone like me. It was way too religious and faith based. Short articles by people with similar perspectives that contained little logic. It was more about belief than the ideas we often hear about here on Sunday and lacked the depth that was my focus in pursuing spiritualism. On the other hand, I felt the sheet of UU Values we used at the Congregational Circle three Sundays ago was a much better resource for me (hold it up). It used phrases like we honor; we celebrate; we adapt; we cultivate; and we declare as opposed to “Principles and Sources of our Faith”. Actions that made sense to me and brought other words into my wheelhouse. As essential as that is, it doesn’t go far enough to take me down a path toward a spirituality that fit me. Spiritual research on my own began to look like I was caught in an endless maze before it led me to books by a Brit, Paul Heelas (hellos), an Oxford educated sociologist and anthropologist at the University of Lancaster. Reading his work instantly opened my mind. He is known for his roles in two theological societies, and he is on the board of “open theology”. A quote from the preface of one of his books, Spiritualities of Life, published in 2010, particularly grabbed my attention. “I was extremely fortunate to be born in 1946,” Heelas started. “This meant I have witnessed, and in some measure experienced, the unfolding of the spiritualities of life from the time I came of age during that great ‘inner era’ known as the sixties. My awareness of what has come to be called the ‘New Age’ (came) while studying at Oxford …” It turns out that “New Age’ is now history, and Heelas uses this book to bring out and discuss thinking that developed since. The book goes on to discuss changes over the last sixty years in the concept of spirituality before I found the thing that caught my eye. He writes, “Surprisingly, a recent survey finds that 37% of the recent British sample agree with the statement, ‘I believe that God is something within each person, rather than something out there’… He then says, “Whatever might be made of this – and some will express disbelief – the finding serves to direct attention to the inner forms of the sacred. More specifically, it directs attention to looking for spirituality within life. Not the life of a transcendent theistic God, but life embedded in the here and now. A life, it can be said, which can only make a ‘true’ difference when it is experienced by the self. And a life which is very much to do with free expression, and thus development, of what it is to be ‘truly’ human.” This statement was exactly what I had been after. Like Heelas, I was born in 1946 and found the rest of his narrative and treatment of spirituality parallel and profoundly impactful on undeveloped thoughts. I’ll use a couple of relevant quotes to kick off the way in which my thinking moved on. “There’s only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that’s your own self.” This is from Aldous Huxley’s 1944 novel, Time must have a stop. “Like the ocean is your god self. It remains forever undefiled. And like the ether, it lifts but the winged. Even the sun is your god self; it knows not the ways of the mole nor seeks the holes of the serpent. But your god self dwells not alone in your being … He who defines his conduct by ethics imprisons his song bird in a cage.” Kahlil Gibran. I feel it will help to go back to the beginning of my experience with organized religion. Why I had such a bad taste in my mouth about anything religious for a good part of my life. When I was twelve, my folks began to take me, my brother and sister to church. I soon felt swallowed into a program intended to magically lead me onto the straight and narrow in what the faithful thought I should believe. There were great expectations of young people. It put a kid like me – I was accustomed to thinking for myself – on edge. I found what I heard and was asked to do distasteful, often ugly. For instance, a bunch of us young men were assembled after Sunday’s services and driven by an elder to member houses. I was required to knock on doors and ask for money. How embarrassing! The elder, of course stayed in the car. Many people never came to the door. The ones that did often weren’t happy. I don’t remember the concept of spirituality being mentioned. The little I remember was old stories of hardship and the devotion of the church founders. Nonetheless the point was clear. There was an obligation to believe and follow the ‘righteous’ path. Only faith! Whatever that meant to a 12-year-old boy at the time, it was too over the top for me. At the time the kid I was felt that he wasn’t a good person. None of what I heard led me to a safe harbor – anything with comfort or that aroused me. Two other episodes during the formative years were also critical to this account. Both only were successful only because I leaned into others. Years after my church experience, I was an uncertain and confused eighteen-year-old high school graduate lacking the maturity needed to struggle through my first big decision – how to step into the next phase of life. My teenage years seemed rough like many friends. I don’t remember many positive experiences and didn’t get the support I needed at home. I later inflexibly concluded that booze had trumped the love at home and my folks church thing had something to do with trying to deal with it. At eighteen, however, with my body still learning to deal with dopamine, serotonin and cortisol changes, I was faced with a choice. Getting a job like my buddies or trying college without much of an idea what that meant. My afterschool parttime job had evolved, and I could have sold shoes as a fulltime job. To aggravate the situation, my best friend, Tom, immediately went to work at a lumber yard, bought a new truck, and moved into an apartment with his girlfriend. My grades in high school were more than good enough, but my main outside school activity was to hang with the guys, bullshit, smoke cigarettes, and try to find some beer. I had applied to the local college that had just changed its name from Orange State College to Cal State, Fullerton, and was accepted. I didn’t have much of a clue what I wanted to do. I finally settled on giving college a try and continuing to work parttime. Ambition and direction were completely missing. Today I can say with certainty that the intervening sixty plus years proved memorable thanks to two special people that came into my life and helped me find my way. Dr. Don Shields, my freshman chemistry instructor, and, later, my wife, Carol. I still clearly remember a day in the middle of first semester sitting in a class of several hundred other freshmen in the big lecture hall that was used for 101 classes. Don asked a lot of questions and usually looked for raised hands. A shy kid, I sat in the middle of the hall so I could see and hear well but never raised my hand. This time he looked my way and pointed. “Mike, how do you get water out of acetic acid?” he asked. I remember stammering a bit before admitting I didn’t know. He impatiently said, “Add acetic anhydride.” I sat there embarrassed, mostly wondering how the hell he knew my name. As bad as that moment had seemed, he soon took me under his wing. To keep a long story brief, today I give Don 99.9 % credit for the success I’ve had as a chemist and, more generally, a scientist. He was hard on me, while supportive, and set standards. Carol gets credit for so many things, particularly helping the naïve young man I was understand what it means to be a man. This is a more fundamental story, but years after Don got me going in science, I went to work for a big company and spotted her in the lab next door the first day. I soon learned that there was much more there than a beautiful woman and she’s been with me since. Switch to Slide 3 – Grandson in a tree. Thinking of my grandsons, then, it became clear to me that the things that keep our universe from becoming an chaotic mess, the laws of gravity, conservation of energy and thermodynamics, are the same no matter where we look. Mankind has been following physics for a few thousand years and more carefully since Newton published his book, Principia in 1687. Modern science continues to build on the principles he articulated, but even Einstein’s theories, now a century old, didn’t move the bar very far into virgin territory. The speed of light remains constant – as fast as anything can travel – and the position of a specific electron in everything from the current that runs our appliances to molecules we manipulate to make new drugs remains uncertain. So why would this be important to me? Looking out at your faces, my guess is most of you believe you have a soul. A seat of affections, that goes beyond day-to-day activities and ultimately solidifies the good people you are. A curse of human consciousness, then, is knowing that someday my life will end. Considering this, I like to remember my life is part of nature’s many bundled cycles. The picture of my grandson reminds me of where we start. In another cycle, the atmosphere’s oxygen sustains me while the carbon dioxide I exhale helps keep plants photosynthetic cycle going by coupling with the sun’s energy to renew their life. In nature’s cycle dead leaves blow to the ground in the fall’s cold wind to become mulch. Spring’s warmth and rain follow. The mulch retains water and liberates nutrients to work with the plant’s photosynthesis and a host of microbes so that plants can use that carbon dioxide I exhaled to grow and produce flowers to begin the cycle again. Every day, I watch nature’s parade as my grandchildren grow and flourish. I delight in knowing that the stuff I’m made of will eventually be returned to our world’s environment, from where it came. I take solace that at least some of those atoms and molecules that gave me life will be passed on to new lifeforms. Those atoms, indeed, everything, no matter how small, is part of this vastness surrounding us. So, I’ve found the essence of my soul and a meaning for spirituality – that missing dimension – in the rhythm and wonder of this universe we are part of. Let me explain. First, there is the community I find with the people in this room and the other people I’ve come to know well. Then, there are the eight billion other people out there. And all the other species of animals that share the wonderful temperate climate our earth provides. More so, plants that purify the atmosphere and provide food, aerobic bacteria that see to it that we stay healthy, anerobic bacteria that take care of all the waste …. I even appreciate those stinging jellyfish that so terrify me when I snorkel in Hawaii. I could go on, but I’d like to shift gears with a related story to end. Switch to picture of Galelio. A few thousand years ago a group of my ancestors were resting on a hillside waiting for the sun to rise while making up yarns about those twinkling lights in the night sky. They didn’t know that a man would come along named Galileo Galilei, a true polymath. Many years in the future he would use his fascination with optical magnification to study the heavens and change history. I wonder if even he could believe the perspective today, 480 years after this Renaissance man died. I find it truly amazing what we’ve learned. Switch to slide of a galaxy. Our Milky Way Galaxy alone is a collection of 300 billion stars that gravity long ago pulled together, and, in many cases, their planetary systems. My head tries to explode when I consider the Milky Way is but one galaxy in the heavens containing more galaxies than the Milky Way has stars. Such thinking always exhausts me as if I was trying to run a marathon at 20,000 ft. Other odds and ends stored in my brain then remind me that our closest neighbor, the star Proxima Centauri, is more than four light years away. That’s roughly 40 trillion earth miles. Switch to slide of the gaseous universe. After that, I get more comfort knowing that much of the stuff out there has been around for about 13 billion years, as far as we can tell. And all those physical properties; gravity, energy and thermodynamics behave just like they did in the beginning. This leaves me with the belief that some big change in my grandson’s lifetimes is impossible. This last story brings me to something I just added because of the Cambria Lions Student Speaker Event I attended a couple of weeks ago. Four wonderful young people from Coast Union High School gave talks about Student Mental Health. The winner goes onto a regional competition in March. Each speaker spent time talking about the impact of mental health concerns on their community, students, as well as the issues they faced. Switch to slide of grandsons in hammock. My talk today has been about something important to me. These students inched my thinking a little more toward the impact of what’s going on in our country now; what has previously happened to immigrant communities; and the historical impact of tragedies like Japanese detention camps, restricting Native Americans to reservations, slavery, and more in American history. The abuse our government has chosen to inflict makes me wonder. Historians generally acknowledge that the great thinkers of Athens 2500 years ago stimulated a turning point in mankind’s history. Some of us had by then begun to value personal wellbeing alongside the struggle for survival. Today, we can look back over the 2500 years since those Greeks – all the technological change, so much more conflict, but small steps like the United Nations – again recent history makes me wonder about the future for the young. Has the stagnation in the way governments now deal with citizens led us to the time for another turning point? Maybe a major inflection point? Maybe even the need to change the paragon of democratic virtue, the U.S. representative system. This spirituality I now pay attention to begs me to get involved in positive ways beyond being satisfied that my life has followed nature’s cycles. I can ask myself what small steps can I take to better our world? For my grandsons. For those student speakers who will soon inherit our world. For everyone. I believe becoming part of the empathy and open-mindedness of this UUCC community was a step in the process of making this happen. So, I finish my words today by leaving you one more quote from Edgar Allan Poe. “Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things that escape those who only dream by night.” Thank you for listening. May this Sanctuary continue to be the setting of peace, friendship and the betterment of the world.