Learn, Love, Grow by Eric Hepburn

Parker Palmer's Letter, Faithful Witness, and the Launch of this year's stewardship: the theme is Learn, Love, Grow — three words that describe what SGUUF does every week and three words that describe what we're asking of ourselves as a community this year.

Learn. Love. Grow. This service launched San Gabriel UU Fellowship's annual stewardship campaign, and the sermon takes its shape from Parker Palmer's letter to his granddaughter — the letter he is writing so that she can remember, in her twenties, who she was from her earliest days, and reclaim the gift of true self.

The Unfolding in Word reads the congregation's stewardship theme through that letter. Learn: Palmer's first act of love was paying attention — noticing the child who actually is, not the child you wish were there; being seen is what opens human beings to deep learning at every age. Love: not merely warmth, but attention committed back to the community — including the willingness, learned from Simone Weil, to produce one another's rights by accepting obligations, and to defend the space in which we experience our freedom together. Grow: preparing conditions and trusting what emerges, because we control our participation in the process, never the outcome.

The message also speaks honestly about congregational conflict — naming that a community can come through it healthier and stronger, that some paths diverge in the woods, and that everyone who walks in or out of the building deserves love and belonging, here or elsewhere. It closes with the stewardship turn: your pledge is not a purchase or a transaction. It is an act of trust in what is emerging here. Learn, love, grow — that's the letter. Your pledge is your signature upon it.

https://youtu.be/SGVluRAOKOk

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The Pulpiteer Podcast Transcript

Lightly edited for readability: transcription errors corrected, filler words reduced, punctuation repaired. Bracketed items are editorial.

[00:00:00] Eric Hepburn (host intro): Welcome to the thirty-first episode of the second season of The Pulpiteer. I'm your host, Eric Hepburn, and I'm glad to have you join us for today's episode. Today's episode is called "Learn, Love, Grow," and it is the launch of our annual stewardship campaign. Let's begin with our Voice of Wisdom, delivered by Kris Verdeyen.

A Voice of Wisdom — read by Kris Verdeyen

Let us enter a still place within, opening our hearts and minds to receive the Voice of Wisdom. After the words are spoken, we will breathe together in silence, preparing ourselves for the Word unfolding among us.

Today's Voice of Wisdom comes from Parker Palmer:

"If you doubt that we all arrive in this world with gifts, and as a gift, pay attention to an infant or a very young child. A few years ago, my daughter and her newborn child came to live with us for a while. Watching my granddaughter from her earliest days on earth, I was able, in my early fifties, to see something that had eluded me as a twenty-something parent: my granddaughter arrived in the world as this kind of person, rather than that, or that, or that. She did not show up as raw material to be shaped into whatever image the world might want her to take. She arrived with her own gifted form, with the shape of her own sacred soul. Biblical faith calls it the image of God in which we are all created. Thomas Merton calls it the true self. Quakers call it the inner light, or 'that of God' in every person. The humanist tradition calls it identity or integrity. No matter what you call it, it is a pearl of great price.

"In those early days of my granddaughter's life, I began observing the inclinations and proclivities that were planted in her at birth. I noticed, and I still notice, what she likes and dislikes, what she's drawn toward and repelled by, how she moves, what she does, what she says. I'm gathering my observations in a letter. When my granddaughter reaches her late teens or early twenties, I will make sure that my letter finds its way to her, with a preface something like this: 'Here's a sketch of what you were from your earliest days in the world. It is not a definitive picture — only you can draw that. But it was sketched by a person who loves you very much. Perhaps these notes will help you do sooner something your grandfather did only later: remember who you were when you first arrived, and reclaim the gift of true self.'"

The Sermon: Learn, Love, Grow — Eric Hepburn

From breath to word, from silence to speech — we enter the Unfolding in Word.

Learn. Love. Grow.

Parker Palmer watched his granddaughter and saw what he had missed as a young parent: that she arrived already shaped, already gifted, already herself. He's writing her a letter, to help her remember who she was before the world tried to tell her who it wanted her to be. That letter is an act of love — not an act of formation or indoctrination, but an act of faithful witness. He's saying: I saw you. Here's what I saw. Use it when you need it.

That's what this congregation is trying to be: a community that sees people as they arrive — not as raw material to be shaped.

Learn. Love. Grow.

Palmer's first act of love was paying attention. Not teaching. Not correcting. Noticing. Learning in a spiritual community starts the same way: we learn by paying attention to what's actually here — not just what we wish were here. Our Religious Exploration program, under Candice's leadership, is built on this principle: notice the child who actually is, not who you want them to be. Our kids don't need to be fixed. They need to be seen. That is what guides them into becoming their truest and best selves. Being seen is what opens human beings to deep learning, at every age. Learning is the foundation — and you simply can't love that which you have not noticed.

Love is an act of deep attention, as our friend Simone Weil shared with us a few months ago. You can't love what you haven't noticed, and you can't grow what you haven't seen.

Learn. Love. Grow.

Palmer doesn't just notice his granddaughter's gifts — he honors them. He writes them down. He commits them to writing, for her, for the time that is coming in her future when she will need those words to find herself. Love in a spiritual community is the same. It's not simply a feeling of warmth. It's committing what you've noticed back to the community. It's a willingness to share the deep attention that is love with one another — to be honest about what we see, to engage in loving-kindness that doesn't forgo honesty and integrity. That is how we deepen relationship with one another.

Two weeks ago, I preached: if you love someone, set them free. Today I want to add: you also invest yourselves — your noticing, your intention and attention — in the conditions that make freedom possible. What did we learn from Simone Weil? That we produce rights with our willingness to accept obligations. We create the space for one another's freedoms with what we are willing to defend — with our words, and our bodies, and our hearts, and our minds, and our guts. The space we are willing to defend, with each other and for each other, is the space in which we get to experience our freedom together. That willingness to accept obligation — freely, and for the freedom of others — is the deep thing that is meant by liberation. It is the thing that, when practiced, can make this place a sanctuary.

A sanctuary. What touched me about the video earlier was hearing someone say they found a place where they could be fully themselves. It's such a blessing and a tragedy at the same time, isn't it, folks? It's a tragedy that in the wide world of seven days a week, there might be only an hour and a half where you get to do that. That is a deep tragedy. But it is also a blessing — because, as the video also alluded to, some of what you might learn here about showing up as your deepest and truest self might start to bleed out into the rest of your life. It might change the way you manage your team at work, or the way you show up for your kid's soccer team, or your art class, or your book club. You might pick a book for your book group next time that talks about some of these things, so that wine and gossip turns into spiritual deepening and true companionship. It's infectious, folks — getting to be yourself. It's infectious in all the best ways.

Learn. Love. Grow.

Parker Palmer trusts that his granddaughter will know what to do with the letter when she's ready. He doesn't try to control the outcome. He prepares his gift, and leaves it for her. Growth in a spiritual community works the same way. We invest. We prepare conditions. We do the best we can. We live, we learn, we love, we grow alongside one another — and we leave conditions for something to emerge that is both bigger than and beyond us. It is, hopefully, more than we can control — and hopefully, in its creation, we've given up on the illusion that controlling it was ever going to be a good thing.

It's like the wildflowers and the weeds on the side of the road. I had a disagreement with my friend Christine here — I said, "well, the wildflowers are just another kind of weed," and she looked at me like: you're intentionally inverting my story. Yes, I was — but not out of unkindness. I was teaching a class before church today, and we were talking about the fact that humans make analytical categories as ways to understand the world. We develop mental models. We like to slice reality up into digestible chunks, because this pack of gray matter up here can't digest the whole world all at once. I'm going to go out on a limb and say nobody in here is under the illusion that they're secretly omniscient. Another friend in the class this morning shared that they realized, at some point, that they could think about things over and over and over — but at some point it was just the ouroboros: the snake chasing and eating its own tail. Thought can serve us. But the deeper you get into it, the more you start to realize it's also a self-referential system that can't get you where you need to go all by itself. Intellect alone is not enough.

So — we can slice the world up into bits. We can be Unitarians and say God is one. We can be atheists and say God is zero. We can be Confucians, or Taoists, who say that God is the ten thousand things. The Hindus say God is the million things. We could be indigenous practitioners who find gods in places all around the earth, of which there are millions. But none of these incisions cuts up God. They are ways of grappling with a reality bigger than us. And we are like that, too. We can cut ourselves up into different pieces to try to understand ourselves — but in the final analysis, we are one thing, and that thing is not independent from all the rest of it. I just don't exist independent of you all, or of my family. Or — if you'd like to be more scientific, technical, and weird about it — of all the gut-biome bacteria whose cells outnumber mine, and whose DNA does not match mine, but without whom I would cease to function in a matter of moments. Did you know there are more cells in your body that don't carry your DNA than do? Some people find that a disturbing fact. I think it's awesome.

Now, this isn't to say we don't have reasons for thinking of our body as ending at the edge of our epidermis. We have good reasons for that being a useful analytical category for how we live every day. And we have good reasons for understanding that it's also not the deepest truth of our existence.

Sorry — I think I was on "control" when I walked down some side path in the woods and fell into a rabbit hole. Why did I go down that rabbit hole? Because I was trying to get to the point that we trust the process. We control our participation in the process, but we don't get to control the outcome. And as much as I might like to, I don't get to control what Lauren's going to do later today. [to Lauren] I don't really want to control you — it's just— okay. Good. But that might change, right? It might change.

Fran made reference to some conflict that's been happening in our community. There are moments that happen that create crisis — that make you wish you could control what other people were doing, or make them wish they could control what you were doing. I got up here after I'd been in the pulpit for one year, and I said: the honeymoon's over; conflict will happen. And I got up here on Easter Sunday again this year — before the current conflict had happened — and I said it again. Some might say I was inviting doom by naming it out loud. What the last few weeks have reminded me is that knowing it's coming, and knowing it can be a place out of which we grow healthier and stronger, doesn't make the conflict any less— I mean, any more fun when it happens. It's still hard, and it's awful, and sometimes you can't find a way out of it where nobody gets hurt. And you can only control your part in it. You can only control how you show up — with your own humility, and your own empathy, and also your own willingness to set healthy boundaries and say: yes, I hear you, and I still don't agree.

So it is my hope that we will come out of this conflict healthier and stronger. That everyone who has suffered during it will find healing and strength. And — whether it is fate or some other thing that means some paths diverge in the woods, and people go their own way, and then they find something else and realize, "oh, this is where I was really meant to be" — I just hope that for everyone involved. I've preached about it up here: my goal is not to fill this room with people at any cost. I would rather have a congregation of five people in deep community, showing up, doing the spiritual work together, than a congregation of five hundred faking it. It's just not what I'm interested in doing with my energy and the time I have left. And that means that for everyone who walks into this building, and everyone who decides to walk out, my hopes for them don't change. My hope is still that they will find healing and love and belonging. And if this wasn't the place where they could find it, I deeply hope they find it elsewhere — because I think all of us deserve it. All of us are worthy of love. All of us are worthy of belonging. And we deserve to find communities and places where we can experience that love and that unconditional belonging. That is my hope for all of us — those present, and those absent.

We have to trust what emerges, because we can't control what it becomes. We can only create the conditions — and then trust the process.

This is the stewardship part. You ready?

Your pledge is not a purchase. It's not a transaction. Your pledge is an act of trust. It's an act of trust in this community — trust in what is emerging here, and trust that what you invest will grow into something worthy of the investment.

Learn. Love. Grow.

Parker Palmer is writing a letter to help his granddaughter remember who she was when she first arrived. This congregation is writing a similar letter — to ourselves, to our children, to the community we are becoming. That letter says: we saw what was possible here. We invested in it. We trusted it. And we set it free to become whatever it needed to become.

Learn. Love. Grow. That's the letter.

Your pledge is your signature upon it.

Amen.

[00:20:54] Eric Hepburn (host outro): Until next time — thank you for joining us on The Pulpiteer. If you enjoyed the podcast, you can help others find it by liking and subscribing. If you'd like to support the podcast directly, you can make a donation at sangabrieluu.org/give. If the podcast makes you feel like a remote member of our congregation, please consider making a pledge for the 2026–27 year by sending a pledge email to treasurer@sangabrieluu.org, including your good-faith promise of financial support. The Pulpiteer podcast is a production of the San Gabriel Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Georgetown, Texas. The podcast is hosted on Spotify, and theme music is by John Faber. Our live recording tech crew is Frank Sanders, Rob Berthold, Keith Hutchinson, and Andrea McDaniel. The podcast is produced and performed by Eric Hepburn. See you next time.