The Unitarian Universalist Congregation of the Palisades	UUCP P.O. Box 709 Englewood, NJ 07631 Phone: 201-568-5540

I’m supposed to speak to you about spirituality, but I don’t think of myself as a very spiritual person. Sure, I love a good spiritual hymn, and the quality is of our choir is one of the things that keeps me coming here, but…. When I think of spirituality I think of incense burning, chanting and praying. I recall when we returned from our first honeymoon of mountain biking in Nepal where we saw everything from solemn Hindu cremations to the sacred butter sculptures at a temple where the Buddha sacrificed his hand to feed a starving lion to a zany festival in which all the children chased a man in wild garb though the streets for hours, laughing and screaming as children everywhere do….beautiful rituals in a beautiful land, but so different from our experience that I could dismiss them as pagan, as primitive, as not connected to the life I live. We returned here to NJ and not much later attended a high Episcopal service, in which the priest burned incense and said solemn things—and it seemed to me little different in its essence from what I had seen on the far side of the world. To this agnostic, they all struck me rituals—sort of a magical thinking to invoke a higher power whose existence I still doubt… So, since I’m not that spiritual, I’m just going to take my five minutes of fame here and tell you about the hike that Martha and I did yesterday—when perhaps, I should have been working on what I was going to say. Mike Bellini had planned on leading the hike he auctioned off at the Service Auction last January up Schunemunk Mountain in Orange county….he cancelled it due to the wet weather and wet rocks, but my wife Martha is never one to let a little mud or wet rocks stand in the way of getting out—or rain, snow, sleet or the dark of night for that matter, but that’s another story. So we got up to Schunemunk at the crack of noon, drove by the parking lot as, surprise to me on this beautiful day, it was empty….up a thousand feet or so on a trail that was a streambed in only a few spots, and onto the capstone of the mountain, a conglomerate of stream tossed boulders cemented with a fine yellowish sandstone. Looking at this rock you can almost see it as the run-off of a long ago quite huge mountain range,. It looks like a streambed in California—big pebbles with sand filling the cracks in between—that was cemented together by some tremendous pressure….a vast geologic scale long ago. Anyway, after a hard fall on some surprisingly slippery rocks—surprising to me if not to Mike Bellini—and a stream crossing balanced on a very wet log—the sun came out as we got into the more open areas near the summit. Oaks give way to Pinion pines and it starts to feel more like a mountain in the American west with much of the walking was on open, exposed rock. To the north was the Central Valley, the Hudson, the long line of cliffs of the Gunks and, quite distinct and quite large in the distance, the Catskills. To the east the Hudson Highlands, slowly opening up as we climbed higher—the Hudson looks more like a lake, as it seems impossible it could cut thru the steep barrier of Storm King and Breakneck ridge…almost below us were the villages of Cornwall and Newburgh…..That’s when Martha shouted out ‘I am so lucky!’ and I thought ‘know that’s what I’m talking about!—that’s what I love of life, reveling in the glory of creation, (even if I don’t know all the details of how it was created). Is this spiritual? This reveling in beauty? My almost ritualistic pilgrimages to beautiful places, those with spacious views. Well—in answering that I had to do what my favorite atheist, Al Stawsky would to, and turn to Webster’s. Without getting too pedantic, spirituality is, of course the quality or state of being spiritual. Spiritual of course is ‘of, relating to or affecting the spirit’….Spirit comes from the Latin ‘spiritus’, literally breathe. Avoiding some of the meaning that I don’t think the program committee had in mind, such as the spirits I keep in my liquor cabinet, Spirit is the animating or vital principal held to give life to organisms. So I guess this love of the beauty of nature is spiritual for me—for it truly does let me feel alive, sense something that is far more Devine and special then I have words for. Because, a top that mountain, the wind blowing, all creation seemingly laid out before us, the age of a world that had time to grow a mountain big enough to have a stream that was strong enough it could produce rounded cobles 6 and even 8” in diameter for miles and miles….then cover them with enough sediment to crush them into stone, then erode it all away again… All that makes me feel truly alive. And being able to share it with my wife and with you all makes me feel much less alone in this great creation! Thank you…

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