Unitarian Universalist Rev. Joel Miller still remembers the \u201ccovenant\u201d of the Columbus, Ohio congregation in which he grew up.\u00a0 It began:<\/p>\n
“Love is the doctrine of this Church; the quest for truth a sacrament; and service is our prayer.\u00a0 We dwell together in peace, seek knowledge in freedom, and serve all people in fellowship…”<\/p>\n
These vows became his \u201cspiritual touchstone,\u201d the code he tried to live by.\u00a0 Most others in that congregation also walked their talk, so these words endured the \u201cacid tests\u201d of time.<\/p>\n
Touchstones and acid tests weren\u2019t just clich\u00e9s to Rev. Miller.\u00a0 Before becoming a UU minister, he was a jeweler, like his father and grandfather before him.\u00a0 In that role, he used an actual touchstone to do many acid tests.<\/p>\n
Jewelers\u00a0for over 2,000 years\u00a0have used an acid test to identify the type and quality of gold in a piece of jewelry. When a customer wants to know if an old family wedding ring is really gold, Miller did an acid test.<\/p>\n
Step one was rubbing the ring against a touchstone, a smooth, hard, rectangular rock.<\/p>\n
Step two, was making rubbings on that rock from three small sticks of gold–each stick containing a different and known quality of gold.<\/p>\n
Step three was to spread a drop of a special acid called Aqua Regia (nitric and hydrochloric acid) across all four rubbings.<\/p>\n
That acid dissolves all metals but gold, so the amount of gold left in each rubbing reveals the quantity and quality of the gold in it. Sometimes the ring\u2019s rubbing matched a pure gold stick; sometimes it matched a 14K-gold stick (58% gold); sometimes the acid made the ring\u2019s rubbing bubble-up fast, turn green, and disappear: showing that the ring was gold-plated and basically had no gold at all.<\/p>\n
This acid test became, for Miller, a metaphor for the way people treat each other in hard times.\u00a0 Some people\u2019s words and deeds don\u2019t match, revealing their claims to be false and empty\u2014to have no gold.\u00a0 His UU friends\u2019 behavior, in contrast, matched closely the words of this covenant. Encounters with them demonstrated to Miller over years of \u201cacid tests\u201d how golden those words were to them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Unitarian Universalist Rev. Joel Miller still remembers the \u201ccovenant\u201d of the Columbus, Ohio congregation in which he grew up.\u00a0 It began: “Love is the doctrine of this Church; the quest for truth a sacrament; and service is our prayer.\u00a0 We dwell together in peace, seek knowledge in freedom, and serve all people in fellowship…” These … Continue reading On Living Touchstones [#98]<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[177],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8124","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sedonauu.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8124","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sedonauu.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sedonauu.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sedonauu.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sedonauu.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8124"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/sedonauu.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8124\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8902,"href":"https:\/\/sedonauu.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8124\/revisions\/8902"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sedonauu.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8124"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sedonauu.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8124"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sedonauu.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8124"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}