The Unfolding by Eric Hepburn
Updated: Sep 28
Origami as a metaphor for the role of spirit in bringing a just, sustainable world into being. When we are beginners we follow the patterns, learning the skills to be able to make the folds. We can't see what we're making. We have to trust that the origami master is giving us good instructions. I want to suggest that there is a metaphor here for the spiritual life, with one important caveat. The unfolding instructions can arrive from our experience of the still small voice, our surrender or our supplication to the divine, but our access to visualize the final product remains as obscure as an origami novice.
"You have access to the deepest wisdom you need within you."
This episode explores the life journey through the metaphor of origami. An artist starts with a single square. They fold and fold — never cutting, never tearing — until a flat sheet becomes something complex and organic. And then, if they wish, they can unfold it all the way back to a square. The shape is gone, but its story is still in the paper: an origami master can read the crisscrossing creases and tell you what was made there.
Every choice you make after a moment of real discernment is another fold. Most of the time we cannot see the shape we're making, and our own unfolded sheet looks like nothing but crossing lines.
Along the way: the Quaker Clearness Committee, which is not an advice circle — the others in the room may only ask open, honest questions, because the wisdom you need is already in you and what you lack is someone to hold the space while you find it. Eckhart Tolle on looking for truth elsewhere. And the four ashramas from Age-ing to Sage-ing, along with my quarrel with them: the framing is too ascetic. We have learned what the monastic life has to teach. What we need now are deeply spiritual householders.
I also say a word about what "worship" means, and why our inherited version of it may not have been healthy.
Our Great World House holds the ICE shooting of Wilber Rafael Garcés Pérez in North Austin, and the vigil at the site. Woody Hibbard reads the Voice of Wisdom, from Joseph Chilton Pearce. Recorded live at San Gabriel Unitarian Universalist Fellowship in Georgetown, Texas.
Full Pulpiteer Podcast Transcript
Eric Hepburn: Welcome to the ninth episode of the third 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 "The Unfolding." It explores our life journey through the metaphor of origami. We'll begin with a segment on the meaning of the word "worship," tied into current events. Then we'll have our Voice of Wisdom, read by Woody Hibbard.
On the word "worship," and the Great World House
Eric Hepburn: I'm Eric Hepburn. My pronouns are he/him. I'm honored to serve as your minister. Together we'll enter a time of word and silence, of song and spirit, as we shape this time of worship.
I had somebody ask me about that word recently.
Certainly the fact that we describe what we do here on Sunday mornings as worship is a holdover of the Christian heritage out of which Unitarian Universalism was born. And — like I'm going to preach about next week — every deeply true thing is surrounded by clusters of things that are almost true, but not quite right.
So I think a lot of us have been exposed to the idea of worship in ways that were maybe not so healthy. We were taught that what's holy is outside of us, and that we're supposed to put it on a pedestal, as if it were the golden calf of legend.
But that's not what we mean when we say worship. The roots of the word come from the idea of holding up that which is worthy of being held up. Just simply that.
So in this community, we hold up things like love, and pluralism, and compassion. We hold up things like social justice.
Last Sunday afternoon, on September 20th, an ICE officer shot 28-year-old Wilber Rafael Garcés Pérez in the torso while he was delivering for DoorDash in North Austin. He is an asylum seeker who entered through a parole program, and is married to a woman with legal status.
He was discharged from the hospital and returned to detention with the bullet still lodged in his back. His attorney says he received no pain medication and slept on the floor. He was moved at four a.m. to Pearsall, over a hundred miles away, and his name does not yet appear on ICE's online detainee locator. The ICE agent was not wearing a body camera.
Later that night, protesters at the scene were dispersed with tear gas and tackled to the ground by DPS agents.
Friday night, members of this congregation and the Singing Resistance Georgetown group that meets here went to the spot — where a man named Toast has been holding down a twenty-four-seven vigil since the incident happened, so that law enforcement doesn't tear down the memorial that protesters have erected to remember the many, like Wilber, that ICE has killed, injured, and separated from their families.
Please join me in a moment of silence, as we remember and recommit ourselves to the work of justice in this world, for all people.
Voice of Wisdom
Eric Hepburn: Our Voice of Wisdom reading this morning comes from Joseph Chilton Pearce. After these words are spoken, let us breathe together in silence until the ringing of the bell calls us onward, into the space where the Word unfolds among us.
Woody Hibbard:
We are the culmination of a huge evolutionary process. If we unfold and develop our potential, we open ourselves up to an incredible higher order of being. But if we continue to deny the real intelligence manifested through the heart and rely only on our intellect, evolution will fail in its task.
Unfolding in Word: The Unfolding
Eric Hepburn: Unfolding.
About two years ago, when I redid the generic script that I edit every week, I was trying to find some descriptive words that were true to what I think it is that I'm doing up here during this section of the service. Like — what am I doing?
And the word that came to me, the word that's written in that script, is unfolding. Unfolding in word.
That word has also made it into the title of the doctoral thesis I'm working on right now, which is called Stuck to Unfolding — moving from being stuck in our lives to unfolding. The subtitle is Everyday Spiritual Discernment. And because I'm in the middle of writing that project, I'm going to preach on things that are about what I'm writing about.
Because this process, for me — sitting up here after doing my meditation and my homework and my readings and my reflection — is an active unfolding with you. Of words. Sometimes sequences of words I've never thought before. Sometimes sequences of words that take me as much by surprise as they might take you.
Because this thing that we are doing, this life thing — and this small microcosm of that life thing that happens here every Sunday — is a collective thing.
This isn't me performing for you. This is me doing my homework, and then coming to sit here and look out at your faces, and try to really open myself up — spiritually, intellectually, emotionally, physically — and ask: what do you need today? How can I serve you? What is it that's on your mind or your heart that's yearning for some healing? What's going on with you that makes you feel invisible, misunderstood, unseen?
How can I unfold some words that make you remember that you're not really alone in this journey. That the hardships you face are hardships that are shared with others. That the lie of isolation is exactly that — a lie.
There is no such thing as a single life. Every life is deeply interconnected with all life. As Candice said: they begin that way, they're that way in the middle, and they're that way at the end. Deeply interconnected with all the other lives.
The paper remembers
When I wrote the description for this service, I used an origami metaphor. I'm not an origami master, so if I get something wrong about origami today, I hope you'll forgive me.
One of the things that occurred to me as I was reflecting on this is that "circle of life" means a lot of things — but it also means there is a trajectory to a full life that comes full circle.
An origami artist starts with a single piece of paper. They fold it into something complex. The one that always comes to mind for me, because I'm a sci-fi nerd, is the unicorn from Blade Runner that a young Edward James Olmos folded and left in strategic places during the movie.
You fold and fold. You never cut. You don't tear. You fold. And suddenly a square becomes this amazing, complex, organic shape.
And then, if you wish, you can begin unfolding that shape. You can unfold it until you have a square piece of paper again.
The story of the shape is still in the paper. Because an origami master could look at that piece of paper, see the pattern of folds, and see the shape that's no longer there.
I can't do that. But I'm told origami masters can look at a flat piece of paper, see the pattern of lines created by all those crisscrossing folds, and tell you what the person had made. I'm imagining that for most of you, that piece of paper would be as opaque as it is to me. You'd look at it and say: yep. That's been through something.
The Clearness Committee
So the first point I want to make about unfolding is that we don't do it alone. Or at least, when it's done well, it's not done alone.
There's a practice in the Quaker community called the Clearness Committee. It's one of the most inspiring discernment practices I've had the pleasure of researching.
It works like this. If I've got a struggle in my life, or a big decision, I gather a group of my fellows — people whose opinions I respect, or whose way of being in the world I respect — and I ask if they're willing to do a Clearness Committee with me. We set aside two or three hours, we sit in a room, and I share my question. My struggle.
Now, many of you are probably thinking what I thought when I first got into this: oh, it's an advice-giving circle.
It is absolutely not at all like an advice-giving circle. As a matter of fact, the rule for everybody else in the room is that all they can do is ask open-minded, open-hearted, open-ended questions, from a place of love and compassion for the person in struggle.
That's all they get to do. Ask open-hearted, open-minded questions from a place of true compassion and wishing the best for that person — relying on the fact that the wisdom that person needs is already there. It needs the safety of a good friend and a competent listener. Even better, several of them. To help that person bring out the wisdom that is already there.
You didn't gather this group because they're smarter or wiser than you and they need to tell you what to do with your life. You gathered them because you needed some trusted people to hold space while you unpack hard things and discover the wisdom that is already in you.
Every choice is a fold
Now, what the heck does that have to do with origami?
I think of it like this. The result of that Clearness Committee — or any other time when you stop and do a spiritual practice, or go for a run or a walk, or work out, or have a conversation with your spouse, or do whatever it is you do to get clear about what you're struggling with — every moment that you step out of that and make a choice in your life is like another fold.
And often, in our own lives, we can't see the shape of the thing that we're making. When we unfold our own sheet of paper, we can't make heads or tails of all the crisscrossing lines.
But the message I wanted to share with you today is that through earnest and honest learning to trust oneself — learning to have some spiritual practices, and to be in a community that helps you see that your own wisdom is trustworthy — there is a part of you, that deep wisdom part we're tapping into, that can visualize the thing, all folded up and then all unfolded.
Some of you who are scientific and materialist might say: well, I can think of this as follows. I know that consciousness only takes up ten or fifteen percent of our capacity, so that other eighty-five percent is unconscious and subconscious, and it's in the background doing math I can't do. Sure. That's a reasonable way to understand why you might have capacities you're not conscious of.
The more spiritually inclined of us might say that as spirit beings we're actually deeply interconnected to one another, and there's this thing we sometimes call Gaia, or God, or divinity. But there seems to be something true about the fact that sometimes things we need to know arrive ready-made, as transmissions from a loving and kind biosphere, or universe, or however —
I don't care what words you use to understand it or describe it. What I care about is you really realizing what this practice teaches: that you have access to the deepest wisdom you need within you, and that you have the capacity to develop processes that strengthen that wisdom muscle in your own life, so you can make the folds and the unfolds you need to make.
Taught to mistrust ourselves
I hope it's not just me. I was raised in a culture — or at least my little corner of it — that taught us we should mistrust ourselves.
Does that resonate with anybody? Was anybody else raised in a culture that mostly taught you to mistrust yourself?
The urges of your body are going to get you in trouble, so you'd better squash those down. Better not listen to those feelings or those impulses that make you want to go out and do certain things. They're going to lead you astray.
And like my caveat about worship this morning — a lot of us have been exposed to very unhealthy versions of the idea I'm sharing with you today. Which is: well, since you're not trustworthy, you'd better rely on some book, or some guru, or some scripture, or some priest to tell you what's what and let them choose for you.
Has anybody been exposed to this damaging version of how to find guidance and truth?
I like what Eckhart Tolle says. He says you are life and you are truth, and if you look for it elsewhere you'll be disappointed every time.
Now, does that mean ancient wisdom practices and scripture and all that other stuff is worthless? No. It's not worthless — if you use it as a tool to access your inner wisdom, it can be a wonderful, beautiful thing. And that works for some folks.
I did yoga this morning. It's one of my practices. It's a very old practice. I don't use it because it's old. I use it because it works for me.
Some people love doing the rosary. That really works for them — gets them into a meditative space where they can hear the still small voice within them that says: hey, that thing over there in your life that you're trying to ignore? That's the thing that needs unfolded next.
If you don't have a practice like that, or several of them, in your life — I'm urging you to find some.
The four ashramas
One of the books I was reading in preparation for today was Age-ing to Sage-ing, by Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi and Ronald S. Miller. They say this:
All the world's spiritual traditions hold up models of realized elders. There are the roshi in Zen Buddhism, the lama in Tibetan Buddhism, the sheikh in Islam, and the rebbe in Hasidic Judaism. Each tradition offers a set of practices, handed down through an unbroken lineage, that leads to self-knowledge. While acknowledging the validity of all these approaches, let's consider the Hindu tradition, with its notion of the four ashramas, or stages of life. The four ashramas in Hindu society provide a psychospiritual guide-map of the human life cycle, a developmental model that accounts for our changing psychological needs as we age within a context of lifelong spiritual development. According to this model, people have an important "job" in old age: self-realization and service to society. Indians think of life as a spiritual journey. They view the four stages, each spanning twenty-five years, as necessary way stations in the soul's unfoldment. In the student stage, Brahmacharya, young people acquire the intellectual, spiritual, and moral tools to prepare for adult life. In the householder stage, Grihasta, they marry, have children, take part in social affairs, and work hard to acquire wealth. When they enter the forest-dweller or Vanaprastha stage, people begin detaching from their families and social identities to devote more time to spiritual studies and meditation. In the final stage of renunciation, Sannyasa, they transcend all limited identification with family, religion, race, and nation. As wandering renunciates, they become citizens of the world, devoting their time to self-realization, spiritual instruction, and selfless service to society.
Now, for some reason, when I read that, it made me think of this origami idea again.
I don't think we start out tabula rasa — but for the purposes of stretching this metaphor, we'll say that at birth we're the plain sheet of paper, and our parents and life fold us. And at some point around midlife, we are a complex shape. So the journey of the second half of life becomes learning how to unfold all those folds, to become flat and open again.
Deeply spiritual householders
There's some language in there that I don't like.
I think it framed the third quarter and the fourth quarter of life a little too ascetically — this idea that you're going to totally withdraw from everything. That is a monastic ideal in many of the great world religions. But I think it's one of the things that was misguided, and that kept people feeling like wisdom is held only by others who have decided to do all this crazy stuff, and it's not accessible to me.
I don't have the luxury to stop being a householder. I don't have the luxury to go renounce all my possessions, because my sick mother needs help, or my aunt — because life keeps happening.
So I want to let go of the language that made you feel like: oh yeah, sure, if you choose this crazy rarefied path, then maybe you'll get to wisdom.
I think we are at a point in our own sociocultural and spiritual evolution where we are ready to have deeply spiritual householders. Where we don't need monastics. We've learned everything we can learn from the monastic lifestyle. What we need now is integration of those learnings into showing up every day — here, and in our own lives, with our families, with our colleagues, with our aging parents. With all of it. We need that wisdom here.
But it does still indicate to me that as we turn that corner of midlife, our job is more about unlearning and letting go than about learning. We've done the acquisitive part. We picked up some knowledge. We got some skills. Some of them served us well. Some of them we're starting to realize didn't serve us quite as well as we thought.
Sometimes we realize: I have some really bad life habits. Some really bad emotional habits, or mental habits, or embodied habits, that I keep living out every day. And now I'm starting to notice the damage they do.
I have watched in my own family what happens to people when they notice that and turn away.
It didn't end well. I've never seen it end well.
It makes me believe that it doesn't end well to turn from your life's work when you are invited into it. When you justify it by saying, well, that's just how I am.
I've seen too many people I love die miserable because of those three words. That's just how I am.
Never done
What I like about the Indian cycle is that it sets an expectation that you are never done learning and growing.
That's why I wrote those words into our chalice lighting — we all continue to grow, and mature, and deepen. And if we're not, we're not showing up. We're calcifying. We're hardening. We're crystallizing.
I don't want that kind of tomb for the beautiful life that you are.
I want you to find access to the wisdom that you are, through the beautiful life that you are. I want you to know that about yourself. I want you to feel that love for yourself, and that trust for yourself, and for your compatriots on this journey.
We are the culmination of a huge evolutionary process. If we unfold and develop our potential, we open ourselves up to an incredible higher order of being. But if we continue to deny the real intelligence manifested through the heart and rely only on our intellect, this evolution will fail in its task.
I'm inviting you to be the evolution you want to see in the world.
Don't turn away from your life's work when it knocks.
Amen.
Eric Hepburn: 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.
The Pulpiteer podcast is a production of the San Gabriel Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Georgetown, Texas. The podcast is hosted by Spotify, and theme music is by John Faber. Our live recording tech crew is Frank Sanders, Keith Hutchinson, Lance McCollum, and Matt Tardy. The podcast is produced and performed by Eric Hepburn.
See you next time.
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