This is the year I discovered tea. I have found an amazing website that not only sells every kind of regular tea you can imagine but blends that combine teas and spices and fruit flavors in a wild infinity of a smorgasbord of choice. Orange chocolate black tea, or green tea with hibiscus and apricot, you name it, they've got it. Of course I buy the samplers, who could resist?  I've tried hojicha with gunpowder, lapsang souchong with aniseed, cherry chamomile, and creamy vanilla thai chai. If you can imagine it, they've created it. Or if they haven't, they will custom blend it for you.

 

The dreadful thing is, amidst all this plenty, there are teas I can't stand. There's green tea that tastes like a mowed lawn, and tea that tastes like smoking a pipe. There's tea that smells like baked ham, and worst of all, tea with mint - spearmint, peppermint, all manner of mint!

 

So even among the bounteous bounty, I find myself making choices. This and not that. This, oh yes, but most definitely not that!  I find my favorites, my style, my range. It's narrower than I would have expected. When faced with infinity, one prunes.

 

Nature does the same. Richard Dawkins made an interesting point about how many potential arrangements of physical characteristics would lead to non-viable organisms. "Skulls around stomachs and not around brains" was my favorite, although "eyes in the soles of the feet" was also good. Life is so improbable. When faced with an infinity of options, nature prunes away the vast majority.

 

Similarly, Unitarian Universalists frolic among the infinity of spiritual paths, and spend a lifetime pruning away the paths that don't work for us. We read widely, we visit other faiths, and we quilt together a patchwork of ideas and images that resonate with us.

 

"We search for meaning, we search for belonging, and that means that we are all exploring God-territory. But that territory is so vast that you can go on forever and ever exploring one part of it and never meet other groups that explore other parts. There are certain crossroads where you choose to go in a certain direction. After that, you are not likely to reach the territory others are exploring who took a different turn."  So says David Steindl-Rast in "Belonging to the Universe."

 

But the beauty of being a Unitarian Universalist is that we find ourselves exploring territory adjacent to that being explored by the people sitting in our pew, or the neighboring pew. When we talk about our discoveries, a poem by Rumi, a Jewish prayer, a Hindu sculpture, our friends nod and share their own discoveries. The church is a gathering place to pool our resources. This year we are drawing on the Touchstone themes developed by a UU church in Denver, and they are full of suggestions that we can explore, and select for inclusion in our personal quilts.

 

I have a wonderful quote I think of often, and I can't remember who said it. It goes something like this - we are all going up the same mountain. There are many paths up the mountain, and we're riding different donkeys, each up our own path. But we are headed to the same place. I think Thich Nhat Hanh said it, or maybe Jack Kornfield. Now that I think of it, it might have been Jack quoting Thay. On the other hand, it surely sounds like something the Dalai Lama would say, doesn't it?  It's one of those ideas, that once you hear it, it's too perfect to forget. We're all on different donkeys, but we're climbing the same mountain.