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Rev. Meg Barnhouse

September 23, 2012

Years ago, Berkeley professor Robert Bellah wrote about the beliefs at the center of U.S. culture. These stories and symbols are a mixture of Puritanism, positive thinking, “the American Dream,” and capitalism. With the upcoming election, we can see all of this is high dudgeon.

The Presidential election is coming up fast, and one of the big kerfuffels during the conventions was that the Democrats took God language out of their platform and then put it back in. Why would you have to say something about God in your political platform? Why does every speech have to end with “God bless you and God bless America?” It’s because there is an American religion that has little to do with any church in particular. It has strong beliefs that you will hear described over and over. It requires that they be spoken of in broad sweeping language that sounds vaguely Biblical, but is not really Biblical. In fact, some of the tenets of this American religion are almost opposite to Biblical teachings.

UC Berkeley Sociologist Robert Bellah wrote an article back in the sixties, nearly fifty years ago, that gave language to something many people noticed but hadn’t studied. He called it “American Civil Religion,” and it described a system of beliefs, looking and acting like a religion, underlying the American cultural intersection of religion, culture, identity and politics. Those descriptions were rooted in Rousseau and deToqueville, but Bellah laid it out in a way that helped people see more clearly what has been happening in this country. American Civil Religion is made up of collectively believed stories that are deeply and sentimentally held that shape our identity as a culture. These myths orient us in the world and give us an understanding of ourselves in the history of the world. In election years they provide images for political rhetoric and they guide a majority of voters in choosing candidates. When you say something that contradicts these myths, you know you have breached some kind of deep societal taboo. You are met with hurt and outrage.

There is no church or institution involved in civil religion. It’s in the air we breathe. Some Protestant churches feed it by having the American flag in their sanctuaries, by praying for the government in their communal prayers, by teaching their folks that the elected officials are there because God put them in office. The culture feeds it with rituals and celebrations around the Fourth of July, Memorial Day, Veterans Day and Inaugurals. These are the holy days of the American religion.

What is expected of us as Americans? Honesty, sacrifice, hard work, and loyalty to the tenets of the American Way. The chief of these tenets is that anyone can make it in the USA with a little luck and a lot of hard work. We are a God-fearing people, like the Founders of this nation. We are champions of religions liberty, a nation that God has mandated to carry out a special mission in the world. We have a classless society. Capitalism is God’s favorite economic plan. Anyone can strike it rich. Our way of life is the best. America is God’s chosen and blessed nation. Please look at the picture on the front of your bulletin. Imagine Jesus holding any other flag, the flag of India or Mexico, Sweden or Nepal. Intellectually, I think most Christian people would say Jesus loves all the little children, not just the Christian ones. But in American Civil Religion, the USA is the favorite, and Christianity is tolerated as long as it doesn’t contradict the American Way. Another such tenet is that we have a God-given responsibility in the world because we’ve been blessed. There is no reason for Anti-American sentiment except jealousy of how blessed we are. The President’s authority is from God. There can be no morality without religion – moral principles are based on scripture.

Another largely unspoken tenet of American Civil religion is from the Puritans. Wealth and power are seen as a sign of God’s blessing, so the wealthy are not just lucky in business or birth, not just hard-working or smart, but blessed by God – favored. The corollary, which is completely opposite to the Christianity of Rabbi Jesus, is that the poor are somehow un-blessed and un-favored. America’s wealth and power are the divinely given resources for carrying out this important task. It will be interesting to see how this view shifts as it sinks in to the collective consciousness that the vast oil resources are sitting underneath Muslim countries. Are they the blessed ones now? Do they now have a mandate to win the world for their way of life?

One reason why the Occupy Movement is irritating to people, eating at us with the 1% language, is that it is contradicting the American Way by forcing people to see that a large number of people aren’t making it. Corporations are being subsidized and banks are being bailed out, and whether that should happen or shouldn’t, people are feeling resentful. Anyone should be able to make it here, and when the curtain is pulled back for a moment, it causes dismay and unrest. When a candidate is out of touch with those average people and our average lives, they lose points. Harking back to a safer candidate to talk about, remember when we were told that George HW Bush had no idea how to be in a grocery store? He appeared to be amazed by the scanners at the cash registers. That story has turned out not to be true, but it made him lose points, because we want our leaders to be regular people. Of course, we also don’t.

Civil religion will be preached in every speech this year. Some will describe the view of justice which is based more on the principles of English Puritanism than the Bible. “If you don’t work, you don’t eat,” “God helps those who help themselves.” That’s Ben Franklin, not the Bible, but most Americans don’t know it. You may hear some justice talk, and some peace talk. Studies show that most Americans say they want a just society, and 90 percent of us say we wish there were fewer hungry people in the world. Religious tolerance is always a waffle-y area, though. It’s not a Biblical or a Christian value, you know. It was a value upon which this nation was founded.

Most of them will stick to saying that our way is the best way, that other people would be better off if they did things our way, that our system works best. No one could be elected who pointed out the wrongs we have done in the world, that Denmark rates highest in citizen happiness, that the French have internet that is way faster than ours, that German phones have 300 hours of battery life (at least that’s what a German guy told me) They won’t make it if they say that some people can’t make it in America no matter how hard they work, that some people just need help and can’t contribute, like the 2/3 of welfare recipients who are children, that freedom of religion in the US should also include the option of freedom from religion, and that teen pregnancy rates are low in countries where sex education is comprehensive in the schools. Those truths would be death to a candidate because they violate the tenets of American civil religion.

I’m talking to you about this topic because Unitarian Universalism values clarity and consciousness. We have a deeply rooted faith in the democratic process, and knowing what’s going on, in my opinion, makes our engagement with that process more fruitful. Let’s be on the lookout for American civil religion this year, in all its forms, as American values and the American self-understanding meets the political process. God bless us all, and God bless the USA.

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse

June 17, 2012

In Sue Monk Kidd’s The Secret Life of Bees, the beekeeper tells her apprentice “the world is really one big bee yard, and the same rules work fine in both places: Don’t be afraid, as no life-loving bee wants to sting you. Still, don’t be an idiot; wear long sleeves and long pants. Don’t swat. Don’t even think about swatting.” Here’s how we’re going to keep making honey over the summer…

In an article in Paste magazine by Kay Gibbons, one of my favorite Southern writers, she said this: Being a white Southern writer “is a hazardous inheritance that too often reassures us that the world is listening with intent and need for our messages, when it should be our reminder that we’re generally hollering entertainment from the bottom of a well, and getting it right requires sending up water, some force of living that people can use to treat one another better.” I’m going to try to send up some water today that people can use to treat one another better. (Feb/March 2006, Paste : Signs of life in music, film and culture p. 74) My text is from another Southern writer, Sue Monk Kidd, from her book “The Secret Life of Bees.”

It’s 1964 in the South. A sixteen year old white girl named Lily runs away from her abusive father accompanied by Rosaleen, a black woman who helped Lily’s father raise her from the age of four after Lily’s mother was shot — maybe by Lily, maybe by the father. One of the only things Lily has of her mother’s is a piece of paper with a picture of a black Madonna on it. The words “Tiburon, South Carolina” are printed on the paper, so Lily and Rosaleen head for Tiburon. There they find out that the picture is a label from a jar of honey made by a beekeeper named August, who lives in a pink house with her sisters, May and June. The sisters take in the runaways.

Lily is talking:

“I hadn’t been out to the hives before, so to start off [August] gave me a lesson in what she called ‘bee yard etiquette.’ She reminded me that the world was really one big bee yard, and the same rules worked fine in both places: Don’t be afraid, as no life-loving bee wants to sting you. Still, don’t be an idiot; wear long sleeves and long pants. Don’t swat. Don’t even think about swatting. If you feel angry, whistle. Anger agitates, while whistling melts a bee’s temper. Act like you know what you’re doing, even if you don’t. Above all, send the bees love. Every little thing wants to be loved.” [p. 92]

I think of the church as a hive sometimes. We have all kinds of work to do to make the honey of spiritual growth, intellectual exploration and right relationship. Compassion, love, challenge, clarity. Those things are so sweet, and they take so much effort. In a hive of bees, everyone has a job. Wax making, honey production, the gathering of nectar which pollinates our crops and flowers, the queen who lays all the eggs. There are even nurse bees who feed the babies.

There is a beekeeping project in inner city Chicago. One visitor wrote this: “I stood just a few feet from the hives as the young men jiggled the bees from the supers and extracted the honey. The air around me sizzled. I stood as still as I could, willing myself not to flinch….

Terror and awe were one as I stood in the eye of the swarm, perfectly still. The term “ecstasy” makes some uneasy because of hallucinogenic and sexual connotations. But its root word exstasis means to stand out of yourself. When the air sizzled, it was easy to forget myself, to slip out of my own worries and to realize that I was a small, vulnerable part of something much larger than myself.

It was relief, if only for a few moments. It was like remembering to inhale deeply after a series of shallow breaths. After being so focused on the bees, I could see everything else more clearly. Is this part of the gift the bees give to their keepers Ñ an opportunity to come out of themselves, to turn away from what they’ve done and to remember what they could be? To be, if nothing else, ecstatic.

As I watched the beekeepers work, they would periodically break off small bits of honeycomb that grew along the rims of the supers. After checking for bees, they’d suck they honey from the comb. ‘We do this for energy,’ Micheal Thompson said, ‘But we also do it to remember why we are here.’ I’d read in The Secret Life of Bees that I should continually send love toward the bees and exorcise their own fears. I tried to do these things, but still, I got stung. …

…When I was sitting on the concrete jotting down notes, a bee landed on my knee and dug in.

‘It hurts,’ I said, cringing, as a beekeeper gently brushed the dying bee off of my leg. ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘We try to avoid it.’ ” Jenny Schroedel “Eye of the Swarm “Boundless “Webzine

No one can be in community for long without doing the work, tasting the sweetness, and feeling the sting. I used to be scared of bees. I almost jumped out of a moving car when I was a child because of a bee on the window. I still remember a black buzzing splotch on the window, feeling the terror rise, grabbing the door handle in a panic, just wanting to get away from that buzzing threat. How a sting could have been worse than hitting the pavement at 60 mph, I don’t know. That’s not how panic thinks.

The dread of being stung and outrage at having been stung can make us flail around in community when flailing around is the worst choice we could make. August the beekeeper said “: Don’t be afraid, as no life-loving bee wants to sting you. Still, don’t be an idiot; wear long sleeves and long pants. Don’t swat. Don’t even think about swatting. If you feel angry, whistle. Anger agitates, while whistling melts a bee’s temper. Act like you know what you’re doing, even if you don’t. Above all, send the bees love. Every little thing wants to be loved.”

Don’t be afraid. Most people don’t want to sting you. Some do sting, because they weren’t thinking, or because they were moving too fast, or because they were in pain, or scared. Still, don’t be an idiot. Know that people will sometimes sting, so protect yourself reasonably. If someone is always getting on your last nerve, perhaps it’s because you are wearing your last nerve a little too close to the surface. Wear long sleeves and long pants. Wear a hat. Don’t swat.

Here’s what I take “don’t swat” to mean. If you are in a situation where things are getting scary, try to stand still. Imagine that everyone involved thinks they are doing the right thing, that they have good intentions, or that they soon will. Don’t strike out at one another.

On a web site called “What everyone needs to know about bee stings,” I read: “Bee stings are a normal part of life in the country and a normal part of working with bees. Many people enjoy bees and consider the occasional sting to be the price we pay for the pleasure of their company, for having them pollinate our food crops and for providing us with honey.” This is true about community too. In one that is a good fit for us, the occasional sting is the price we pay for the pleasure of one another’s company.

“Removing the stinger as quickly as possible reduces the amount of the venom injected and reduces the effects.” Yes. When we hold onto the stinger, when we re play the incident in our mind, it gives it more time to inject venom into your system. I can’t think of one healthy reason to let that happen. “Stay calm. Most of the ill effects from normal stinging incidents come from panic in the person being stung and bystanders. Panic and anxiety multiplies the pain, and can result in serious secondary accidents. Panic by the person stung or those around him/her can produce a systemic reaction in itself.” Yes again. Most ill effects of someone saying something hurtful to us or leaving us out of something or ignoring us come from the thoughts we have about what happened. If we can stay calm and interpret what happened in its best possible light, less harm will be done to everyone involved.

This church has been through a lot of change in the past three years. There was pain and sorrow, anger, nobility, difficult conversations, change, joy, renewal…. You all are an amazing group of people, not only surviving but now thriving and moving into the future with hope and peace. That takes intention and hard work, and it demands a lot from everyone. I know you are proud of this congregation. I hope you will keep your heads as you move into the next chapter of your story. It is becoming a good story to tell already, and I imagine it will continue to be. Your job is to stay hospitable to all of the people who want to come be part of what this group is all about. If you feel angry, whistle. And send out love, because every little thing wants to be loved.

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse

June 10, 2012

It is often said that our nation’s ethics derive from the Ten Commandments of Moses. If you look closely at them, though, they don’t reflect American values very well at all. Solon the Athenian was born around 638 B.C.E. In 594 B.C.E he was elected to create a constitution for Athens, in the process becoming the founder of Western democracy and an early proponent of equal rights for all citizens.

Call to worship:

Spirit of life, be present with us this hour. Join us today as we gather in a wider search for truth and purpose. In this quest, may we greet one another with open hearts and minds; may we inspire each other to consider new questions and seek deeper meaning; and may we cultivate wisdom and compassion. Let all who enter this sanctuary see a welcome face, hear a kind word, and find comfort in this community. And may all that is done and said here today be in service to love and justice.

Source: 1997 UUMA Worship Materials Collection

Reading:

Morning Poem

by Mary Oliver

Every morning

the world

is created.

Under the orange

sticks of the sun

the heaped

ashes of the night

turn into leaves again

and fasten themselves to the high branches —

and the ponds appear

like black cloth

on which are painted islands

of summer lilies.

If it is your nature

to be happy

you will swim away along the soft trails

for hours, your imagination

alighting everywhere.

And if your spirit

carries within it

the thorn

that is heavier than lead —

if it’s all you can do

to keep on trudging —

there is still

somewhere deep within you

a beast shouting that the earth

is exactly what it wanted —

each pond with its blazing lilies

is a prayer heard and answered

lavishly,

every morning,

whether or not

you have ever dared to be happy,

whether or not

you have ever dared to pray.

With the election coming up, I know the Christian Right is going to be more in our faces than it is normally, talking about this being a Christian nation, telling us that the framers of the Constitution built it on the morality of the Ten Commandments. I thought you should have some good information about the Ten Commandments. I’ve noticed that we have a big granite monument to the Ten Commandments on the Capitol grounds, and I read about the Supreme Court’s decision in 2005 that this was not unconstitutional. I wonder if the people who fought so hard for that decision could in fact recite all ten.

On his pseudo news show “The Colbert Report,” Steven Colbert, who is from SC, interviewed congressman Lynn Westmoreland of Georgia, who was fighting hard for a display in the House and in the Senate.

“You co-sponsored a bill requiring the display of the Ten Commandments in the House of Representatives and the Senate. Why was that important to you?” “Well, the Ten Commandments is -is not a bad thing , uh, for people to understand and respect.”

“I’m with you,” Colbert responds as the congressman goes on, “Where better place would you have something like that than a judicial building or courthouse?”

“That’s a good question, Colbert says. Can you think of any better building to have the Ten Commandments in than in a public building?”

“No. I think if we were totally without them we may lose a sense of our direction.”

“What are the ten commandments?”

“What are all of them?”

“Yes.”

“You want me to name them?”

“Yes, that’s it.”

“Let’s see, don’t murder. Don’t lie, don’t steal-uhhhhhhhhhhhhhh– I can’t name them all.”

In the faith story of the Jews, Christians and Muslims, the Ten Commandments were given to Moses in the Sinai desert; In the Hebrew they are called Aseret ha-Dvar”m, best translated: “the ten statements.” The story is found in both Deuteronomy (5:6-21) and Exodus (20:3-16) The Hebrew people followed Moses out of Egypt and they traveled through the Sinai Peninsula to the land of Canaan, which was promised to them by God. After about three months they came to Mount Horeb, also called Mount Sinai. God told Moses to come up the mountain alone, that he would speak with Moses in a voice the people could hear so they would always trust Moses to lead them. The people were told to wash their clothes, to have a consecration ceremony, to abstain from sex, and they were not allowed to go up the mountain. Moses went up the mountain to talk to God. Smoke came on the mountain, like the smoke from a furnace, because Adonai (one of the Hebrew ways of naming God) descended on the mountain in fire, and there was the sound like a trumpet that grew louder and louder. On the mountain, God gave Moses the Ten Commandments, and many more commandments the people were to follow. According to the Talmud, there are 613 laws the Jews must follow. When public reciting of the ten was giving them more weight with the Jewish people than the other 593 commandments, the recitation was discontinued.

It took Moses so long to come down from the mountain that the people grew restless, and Aaron, Moses’ brother, was pressured to make some gods who would go with them to the Promised Land. He asked for all their gold earrings and bracelets; he melted them down and made a statue of a golden calf. The people celebrated with dancing, shouting and revelry. “Revelry’ is Bible translator language for wild partying. Moses heard the noise. The text says it sounded like war. Have you ever been to a party that sounded like a war?

He came down with the tablets, which were carved on both sides (rabbinic tradition holds that they magically had writing that went all the way through, yet read correctly on both sides. The “O” shaped letters still had the circle of stone hanging in the hole, floating there without connection to the surrounding stone.) Moses saw what the people were doing, and became angry and broke the tablets into pieces. He ground up the gold statue, spread it on their water and made the people drink it. Then he went back up the mountain and got two more tablets inscribed by God. Swedenborgian teaching says that the first tablets had the higher law on them, but when the people proved themselves less than highly evolved, the second tablets had a lower form of the law on them.

Here are the ten:

1. You shall have no other gods before me.

2. You shall make no graven image.

3. Do not take the Lord’s name in vain.

4. Observe the Sabbath day and keep it holy.

5. Honor your father and your mother.

6. Do not kill.

7. Do not commit adultery.

8. Do not steal.

9. Do not bear false witness (do not lie).

10. Do not wish for your neighbor’s wife, nor his donkey, nor anything that is his.

These are time-honored precepts, and they encapsulate more than one ancient culture’s wisdom about how to live a good life. In fact, they borrow heavily, verbatim in parts, from the code of Hammurabi, whose tablets we have in the British Museum. I remember, in seminary, being taken aback to realize how much of Mosaic Law was taken directly from Hammurabi, which argued against it being given directly from God to Moses. Once your mind can let go of literalism, though, you can see that these laws are a good way for a new society to be structured, especially one made up of people who had been slaves, used to being told what to do for four hundred years.

Did we start putting monuments in court houses and capitol buildings in the eighteenth century? The nineteenth century? No. They were a Hollywood marketing scheme. Cecil B DeMille had a movie coming out called “The Ten Commandments.” He heard about a judge in MN who wanted to send framed copies of the Ten Commandments to courthouses all over the nation to stop the moral decline he saw. A Christian organization, the Fraternal Order of Eagles, was helping with the funding.

Eager for publicity, DeMille contacted the judge and suggested that they replace the framed certificates with bronze tablets, but the judge said no way. Moses’ tablets were in granite, so bronze wouldn’t do So, with DeMille’s backing, around 150 granite tablets were made and distributed across the country, with Charlton Heston and Yul Brynner dedicating a few of them in person. After the movie, the Order of Eagles kept giving out the monuments, the last one in 1985. Our monument is one of those made to publicize the movie.

Many courthouses in Utah have chosen to take down their displays because a religious organization called Summum wanted to erect monuments of Summum’s precepts next to the Ten Commandments. The cases were won on the grounds that Summum’s right to freedom of speech was denied and the governments had engaged in discrimination. Instead of allowing Summum to erect its monument, the local governments chose to remove their Ten Commandments.

I can’t resist telling you that Summum is a religion and a philosophy that began in 1975 as a result of a fellow named Claude “Corky” Nowell’s encounter with beings he describes as “Summa Individuals.” I will attempt to speak of this faith with respect, but it challenges my ideals. I hope to become a better person as I live on. Summum’s faith story says these beings presented Nowell with concepts regarding the nature of creation, concepts which are continually re-introduced to humankind by advanced beings who work along the pathways of creation. As a result of his experience, Nowell founded Summum in order to share what he received with others. In 1980, as a reflection of his new found path, he changed his name to Summum Bonum Amen Ra, but apparently he just goes by Corky Ra. Here is what the sign would have said: “The grand principle of creation is: ‘Nothing and possibility come in and out of bond infinite times in a finite moment.'”

Are the Ten Commandments at the foundation of our morality? Well, we teach our children not to lie, cheat, or steal, but we also teach freedom of religion, which goes against “Thou shalt have no other Gods before me,” and our whole advertizing industry is built on coveting, or wishing for, what our neighbors have. . A capitalist, consumer driven, democratic culture is antithetical to the holiness codes of the Hebrew Scriptures. This is why there is such tension between people with the values of our culture and fundamentalists of the Abrahamic faiths (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) who want to base a culture on the Commandments. Democracy was unknown in Moses’ time. We believe in religious freedom, free speech, and the rights of the individual, disestablishment of a state religion. All of those go against the Ten Commandments, and all were insisted upon by the framers of the Constitution.

Historian Richard Carrier suggests that, if we are looking for the foundation of our democracy we look to the ethical precepts of Solon the Athenian. Solon was born, we believe, around 638 B.C.E., and lived until approximately 558. He was elected to create a constitution for Athens in 594 B.C.E. Solon is the founder of Western democracy and the first man in history to articulate ideas of equal rights for all. Solon was the first man in Western history to publicly record a civil constitution in writing Solon advocated not only the right but even the duty of every citizen to bear arms in the defense of the state, set up laws defending the principles and importance of private property, state encouragement of economic trades and crafts, and a strong middle class. Those ideals lie at the heart of American culture, but none of them is found in the Law of Moses. Do you wonder why those who follow the Bible deeply feel themselves at cross-purposes with American culture?

Diogenes listed the Ten Commandments of Solon (Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, 1.60):

1. Trust good character more than promises.

2. Do not speak falsely.

3. Do good things.

4. Do not be hasty in making friends, but do not abandon them once made.

5. Learn to obey before you command.

6. When giving advice, do not recommend what is most pleasing, but what is most useful.

7. Make reason your supreme commander.

8. Do not associate with people who do bad things.

9. Honor the gods.

10. Have regard for your parents.

What would your ten be? What are bottom line rules for you? Do they come from experience, from Stephen Covey’s “Seven Habits of Highly Effective People,” from scripture, from habit? I like Solon’s, but for me, I would add “Don’t be boring.” How about you?

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse

June 3, 2012

Carl Jung spoke of the “shadow side” of personalities and concepts. In the shadow are all of the elements we would rather not acknowledge. If we believe that pride makes us bad, our pride will be in the shadow side of our personality. If we believe that leisure is lazy, our resting self will be in the despised and hidden shadow. There is much value to be gained by being aware of one’s shadow side.

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse

May 13, 2012

Mama had a particular view of the world, shaped by her strong Christian faith, her love for children, her growing up as a missionary kid in India. Spiders in the house’s windows? No problem. Twelve cats? Fine. Missing a tithe payment to the church? Very Dangerous!

Reading: Joy in Ordinary Time

My Mama was a second grade teacher at the Gladwyne Elementary School in the rich suburbs of Philadelphia. She loved the children, but she was shy with the parents, who were financiers, pro ball players and attorneys, members of the Junior League, cricket clubs, fox- hunting clubs. For Christmas she would get amazing presents. One year she got a bottle of Joy perfume, then 150 dollars an ounce. I don’t know that she ever wore it. She was keeping it for a special occasion. She kept it so long that it finally evaporated.

About other things she was more openhanded. We had grandfather’s china and silver, which she often used. “That’s what they are meant for, to be used, she said. no sense in saving them. you’d never see them at all that way.”

That openhandedness didn’t extend to her own person. She wore sensible clothes, comfortable shoes, white cotton underwear. She had grown up the child of missionaries, and, whether she wanted it or not, that background was deep in her. She looked respectable and kind. She was cute and cheerful and funny.

Joy perfume didn’t fit who she seemed to be. A daughter never sees all the sides of her mother, though. It makes me smile to think that she harbored a hope that there would come an occasion where it could be her, where she might walk into a room smelling rich and sophisticated, cherished and valued, where it would be just the thing for her to wear. She let my sister and me smell it whenever we wanted to. The bottle sat like an honored but intimidating guest on her dresser. Whenever we smelled it we marveled at how much it had cost. I don’t remember it ever occurring to me to wear it.

I want to let his lesson deep into me. Celebrate the body, the trooper of a body that carries you through life, that pleasures you and lets you dance. Celebrate your body now, before you have lost the weight, before you get your muscle definition, before you feel justified by the harsh eyes of your expectations.

Celebrate being alive, drawing breath, celebrate that you are achingly sad today and that it will pass. It is good to be able to feel feelings. Celebrate that there was a love so big and good that it hurts to lose it. That there was a time so sweet that you ache, remembering. Celebrate those things. Honor the flowering of the tomato plants, the opening of the day lilies, the lemon smell of magnolias. Honor the ache of your heart and the tears falling. Life is mostly ordinary time. Ordinary time, shot through with light and pain and love. Lavish joy on ordinary time. Hope is a wonderful thing, but not if it makes you put off splashing yourself with Joy.

Sermon: What I Learned From My Mother

Happy Mother’s Day. I want to talk to you this morning about my mother, Katherine Pressly Hamilton. She grew up in India until the age of 16. Missionary kid. Her parents were missionaries to the Hindus and Muslims who at that time lived mixed together in and around the town of Lahore, now in Pakistan. When she got to high school she hung out with the other international students, as she didn’t fit with the boys and girls who were raised in the States. When I knew her, she remembered a little Hindi, a little Urdu from those years. I heard it when we were washing dishes; she would sing hymns in Urdu. One year in seminary I invited an Ethiopian student and a Pakistani student named Sam home for Thanksgiving and he cried when she spoke to him. He said she had such a village accent it made him terribly homesick. The Ethiopian Marxist priest from Moscow we had invited converted to Capitalism while playing Monopoly, but that’s another story.

When they were children they would come from India on the boat for furlough. Grandfather would preach and the children would sing. They had a good sense of mischief, and they would change the words to: “Please pass the beer.” Their parents’ Hindi and Urdu wasn’t good enough to catch it. Mama said her aunts would always cry when the children got off the boat. It wasn’t until she was grown that one of them finally told her it was because the children all looked so pitiful in their clothes that had come from the “missionary barrel.” The kids didn’t know the clothes were ten years out of style and that not everyone wore things with some little stain or tear. Whenever something I had on had a little spot on the front or had a safety pin holding up the hem or needed ironing, she would always say “Just throw back your shoulders, smile big and no one will notice.” Mama was a believer in smiling. She preferred to stay happy. Part of how she stayed happy was to see things in the most positive possible way. “The say I had you children was the happiest of my life. Every minute of it was wonderful. Wonderful. “Willfully positive” is how I would describe the style she taught me. Even about her marriage. She and my father didn’t live together from the time I was three years old. They stayed married, though. She would say, “Your father is a difficult man. But I love him.” Then I found a survey in a Readers Digest she had left lying on the floor in her bathroom. One question asked “If you had it to do over again, would you get married?” She had checked. “No” I was shocked. He came to supper every night and stayed the evening before going home to his apartment in town. Children get used to how their family does things. If I had thought about it I wouldn’t have been shocked, I just didn’t really have to think about it because she threw her shoulders back and smiled. We all did. Smiled and didn’t think about it. She smiled big about teaching second grade. She said she loved it. Loved it.

She never complained, and she told funny stories at the dinner table about what happened with the children. She had to have a nap when she came home. I used to tease her about that until one day when I was fourteen I went with her to class and came home exhausted after a day of trying to keep up with 24 8 year olds. I had to take a BIG nap. She would tell elephant jokes and knock-knock jokes and we would groan. When we were camping she would lay out the plastic plates, which were in four bright colors, saying, “Purple, green, yellow, red.” “Ma, we know our colors, we’re not in second grade.” She took us camping for six weeks at a time and smiled. Three teenage girls in a VW camper: my sister, me and a friend. I learned adventuring from her. She would just go without a plan, without a clue as to what was going to happen. My little sister and I alternated being able to take a friend with us. We would get an NEA chartered red-eye to Europe and drive our white VW camper bus all over, finding campsites at night. We girls would set up the tent and sleep in it, and she would sleep in the camper. Whenever we got to a campsite she would look for boys for us. The way you find boys is by looking for pup tents. We would drive around until we spotted one with an empty site next door, and then we’d set up in the empty spot. She would put on a pot of spaghetti and then go next door and knock, and ask if we could run a line for laundry from our site to theirs, and by the way, would they like to join us for supper? We’d get out the guitar and sing after supper and flirt and have a wonderful time. If there weren’t any boys we’d have belching contests. Mama was a lady in so many ways, she taught me to drive with admonitions to drive gracefully, moving my hands over the steering wheel with wrists held limply, but she could win any belching contest. I’ve done my best to learn that from her too. Be a lady when you need to be, but don’t take it camping. She always paid a tithe, a tenth of her salary to the church. One summer we broke down crossing the Mohave Desert. The car cost a couple of hundred dollars to repair. “I know God was joking with me,” she said. That was exactly what my tithe was, and I held it back this month because of our trip. He was telling me not to do that.”

She was virtuous in her schedule. She woke up every morning at 5 and prayed until 6. It’s what she did instead of confronting us when she was worried. So she prayed until 6 and then practiced her violin. She wasn’t very good, but she played in the Main Line symphony in the back row. And she kept it up. She practiced. She taught me that a thing worth doing is worth doing badly if it gives you joy. She kept smiling when she got a lump in her breast. First she tried to not confront it. I’m sure she prayed. The lump didn’t go away. She waited a year to go to the doctor. He performed a mastectomy and radiation. Then another mastectomy. She was in and out of the hospital for the next five years. We kept hearing the cancer was gone and then it would come back. I learned not to hope. She always did, though. She said, “Meggie, everything that happens to me is good, because God is good.” I remember arguing with her one time about that, and then deciding that someone’s faith was more important to them in a situation like that than arguing the truth of what they believed. If believing that was comforting to her, then I needed to support her in it. It had already done its harm – kept her from going to the doctor early enough. Let her enjoy its benefits.

She also went to faith healers. They said she wasn’t healed because there was an un-confessed sin in her life. This saintly childlike woman searched her soul for what the sin might be. It infuriated me that she was loving and believing in a god who would sit up with arms crossed and say “I could heal you but I’m not going to because you have an un-confessed sin in your life and I’m not even going to tell you what that is.” That helped make me a Unitarian Universalist, because it was one of the many things that made no sense, and that wasn’t even their worst offense.

Mama was excruciatingly honest in most things. Once we drove all the way out of a drive-in movie because she had paid the under-twelve price for my sister, who had just turned twelve. I came home from school one day to find her crying at the kitchen table. She was feeling horrible because a postcard had come for me and she had read it.

Her cancer made her honest about the rest. She was in Kings Mountain with her sister and her mother, and her mother gave her some advice and she responded, disagreeing. Her mother sighed in a martyred tone, “How sharper then a serpent’s tooth is an ungrateful child.” Mama spoke sharply to her mother for the first time and said “Mother, I am NOT your child. I am forty six years old. ” When she was telling me this story she teared up and said, Meggie, I know I have treated you like a child and you’re not one, and I apologize. Well, I was about 21 and I thought I WASN’T a child at that point, so I said something gracious like “Oh, Mom, you’ve never really done that…. but she wasn’t finished. She said “If I had it all to do over again, I believe I’d say “no” to you less when you were little. We said “no, no” all the time. I remembered that when I was raising my boys.

Mama never did tell the truth, though, about dying. She was always claiming that she was really healed this time. Her faith won out over her experience and common sense. She didn’t talk about dying until right at the end. She called where I was in seminary and said “I think the Lord is taking me. ” A kind student drove me the hour and a half home and I got to sleep by her sofa through that last night. She would drift and we would call her name, and she’d say “Just a minute, I’ll be right back.” She died the next morning early. I value all the things I learned from her. I value choosing to be positive. I value music and laughter and wanting to make a difference in people’s lives. I’m glad for what I learned to do from watching her do it and what I learned NOT to do from watching her do it. My values are different from hers, but I carry her with me. I know you all carry your mothers too.

It is my hope that, on this Mothers’ Day, we can all bless our mothers for what they have given us and let go of the things they tried to give us that aren’t workable in our lives. May we forgive them their faults, if we can afford to. May we understand that we don’t have to become just like them if we think about it and live with intention.

It is my hope that those of us who are parents can remember that we have given our children many treasures, and that we also have given them things they will let go of as unworkable for them, and that is how it should be.

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse

April 15, 2012

Our seventh principle is that we affirm and promote “Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.”… What does it mean to respect that web, to be a part of it?

Mary Oliver wrote:

Who made the world?

Who made the swan, and the black bear?

Who made the grasshopper?

This grasshopper, I mean-

the one who has flung herself out of the grass,

the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,

who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-

who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.

Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.

Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.

I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.

I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down

into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,

how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,

which is what I have been doing all day.

Tell me, what else should I have done?

Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?

Tell me, what is it you plan to do

with your one wild and precious life?

Since I started preaching here, I’ve been doing a series on our seven UU Principles. Today we are on the seventh and last one, which urges us to promote respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part. There is a description of a web in the Hindu scriptures:

Far away in the heavenly abode of the Great God Indra, there is a wonderful net … stretches out indefinitely in all directions. In accordance with the extravagant tastes of deities, the artificer has hung a single glittering jewel at the net’s every node, and since the net itself is infinite in dimension, the jewels are infinite in number. There hang the jewels, glittering like starts of the first magnitude, a wonderful sight to behold. If we now arbitrarily select one of these jewels for inspection and look closely at it, we will discover that in its polished surface there are reflected all the other jewels in the net, infinite in number. Not only that, but each of the jewels reflected in this one jewel is also reflecting all the other jewels, so the process of reflection is infinite.

Our seventh principle calls us to act as if we are all connected. We are told by all religion that what affects one affects us all. The truth expressed by mystics of every religion is that your life and mine are part of a whole, and our dogs’ and cats’ lives, and the dolphins and the birds and insects, and the life of the trees you see out these windows.

As we walk our seventh principle, we try to be aware that we are in the web, that our carbon footprint is a matter of importance to our walking in faith. For many among us, this sense that we are connected leads to recycling as much as we can, or to swearing off Styrofoam, to building greener homes and churches. For many it leads to asking questions about ethical eating: we may try to buy products from chickens who are not treated cruelly– some don’t eat meat at all. Can we get through life without killing? My friend Ben lives in California. He is a vegan, which means he eats no meat or animal products like eggs or milk. He won’t wear leather shoes. He rides his bike everywhere. He dresses in organic cotton. I would admire him more if he weren’t so self-righteous and evangelical about his lifestyle, but every movement has fundamentalists. Even Ben, though, has to live with insects being killed so the soybeans and wheat and cotton and cherry trees can grow. How do we make our peace with this? A UU entomology professor at the University of Wyoming named Jeffrey Lockwood has written a book called Grasshopper Dreaming. Because he spends time with his students studying the grasshoppers on the ranges of Wyoming in order to discern how better to control their population, i.e. kill them, he has complicated philosophical thoughts about his work. The book is subtitled “Reflections on Loving and Killing.”

Apparently many of his peers take grasshoppers to a lab, spray them with something, and if they die, that’s a successful experiment. He felt called to go to where they live, kneel on the rocky scrub and watch them with the idea that if he got to know the grasshoppers it would make him better able to do his job. He found out enough about them so that, since 1990, he has been able to control the grasshopper population on the grasslands with 90% fewer pesticides, and safer ones.

Watching the hundreds of hours of video they took of the grasshoppers over a summer, the first thing that struck him was how much time the grasshoppers spent doing nothing. Previous theories had supposed that they were in the sun heating up, or in the shade cooling off. Not really. As it turns out they were just doing nothing.

If you use a human filter to interpret their behavior, it makes no sense. They have a high mortality rate: 2 percent a day. They spend only 3 minutes of each hour eating, and are not much interested in reproduction. This is despite their high mortality rate – 2 percent daily – which in the human world might result in a desperate competition for survival.

Lockwood writes, “If we humans were short of resources, we would surely battle for our share. We’d scurry about attempting to vanquish competitors, hoard supplies, mate feverishly, and well, do much of what we seem to do in the modern world. But grasshoppers aren’t humans.” He says the idea of competition for survival is an assumption that is inherent to much ecology and evolution. Yet the grasshoppers sit around. Maybe they are praying for world peace.

When a scientist is allowed to slow down, when that scientist has a philosophical bent, he or she may come up with surprising and helpful shifts in perspective. We’re all familiar with the way the museums of natural history had to rearrange their exhibits of lions when some finally took the risk and the time to actually observe pride behavior. Because of the way American society was structured, with the male going out of the house to work to bring home the bacon, the exhibits had been arranged to show the male lion going out hunting, then bringing back the kill for his family. In real lion life, it’s the females who hunt and bring back the kill. All of the tableaus had to be rearranged. Archeologists used to look at a structure in Crete that contained a small room with an observation hole, so someone could look in, a table freestanding in the middle of the room, with runnels at the end of it as if to catch blood. It was obvious to them that this was a chamber of sacrifice. When more female architects entered the field and looked at the same room, it was obvious to them that this was a room where a mother went to give birth.

We bring our experiences to our interpretations of the things we see. We are all blind to our own blind spots, so you can’t just say “I won’t have any blind spots.” It’s difficult to learn about other people. Mostly just watching, observing, hanging out, talking to different people who think differently – those are methods for overcoming our blindness. Seeing ourselves as the center of the universe is a pretty common blind spot. Michael Pollan wrote a book subtitled “A plants-eye view of the world” (The Botany of Desire) He talks about the onset of agriculture, and how we think of ourselves, central, in charge, as having domesticated plants and animals. This, he says, “leaves the erroneous impression that we’re in charge. We automatically think of domestication as something we do to other species, but it makes just as much sense to think of it as something certain plants and animals have done to us, a clever evolutionary strategy for advancing their own interests.” So one way of describing the introduction of agriculture ten thousand years ago is that some plants “refined their basic put-the-animals-to-work (by sticking to their coats) strategy to take advantage of one particular animal that had evolved not only to move freely around the earth, but to think and trade complicated thoughts. These plants hit on a remarkably clever strategy: getting us to move and think for them. Now came edible grasses (such as wheat and corn)that incited humans to cut down vast forests and make more room for them; flowers whose beauty would transfix whole cultures; plants so compelling and useful and tasty they would inspire human beings to seed, transport, [and] extol … them…. It makes just as much sense to think of agriculture as something the grasses did to people as a way to conquer the trees.”

Lockwood is constantly living in the tension between getting to know these beings intimately and understanding that he is getting to know them in order to kill them. He says he goes away from his students in the field to pray. He talks about his four year old son not understanding pronouns yet, communicating a very spiritual and connected stance in the world by saying “My blanket who I sleep with,” and “the tree who I am looking at.” Philosopher Martin Buber talked about having an “I-Thou” relationship with everything and everyone, which would make a better world than an “I-it” relationship. My spell-check for this sermon didn’t want me to say “the predators who…” or “the chickens who.” It wanted me to say “the predators that.” So Lockwood goes to pray, having developed an “I-thou” relationship with the grasshoppers. He hopes that he can find a way for the killing to be less thoughtless, less destructive. He and his students noticed over the years how widely the grasshoppers wander within the range of their territory. They noticed that they are cannibals; they eat their dead. So he began experimenting with applying the neurotoxins in narrow stripes across the rangeland, instead of blanketing the whole area. In these stripes, the grasshoppers would die, then grasshoppers from the non-treated areas would come eat them, and die. The natural predators who helped keep the grasshopper population down would be left alive in the non-treated strips. Then he switched to less dangerous growth-inhibiting chemicals rather than neuro-toxins, applying them in the same narrow strips. They worked just as well, and more safely for the environment as a whole, including the cattle and the humans who use the rangelands. He admits that he values human lives and human purposes more than grasshopper lives and purposes. He reminds us that the interdependent web of life is predatory. Species eat other species and plants to live. It is natural for us to value our species more highly than others. All life kills in order to live. That’s the way nature is. It’s not smart to be too squeamish to be part of nature. Living is muddy, and we just have to do our best. It does not pay to feel too righteous. May we feel alive instead.

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Meg Barnhouse

April 8, 2012

“Quartet For the End of Time,” premiered in Stalag VIII-A in Gorlitz, Germany (currently Zgorzelec, Poland) on Jan. 15, 1941, to an audience of about four hundred fellow prisoners of war and prison guards. Composer Olivier Messiaen, an inmate of the camp, later recalled of the occasion, “Never was I listened to with such rapt attention and comprehension.” The story of this music is an inspirational example of freedom and beauty rising in the midst of death and destruction, a fitting story for Easter Sunday.

Messiaen quartet:

clarinet: Vanguel Tangarov

violin: Beth Blackerby

cello: Sara Nelson

piano: Bryan Uecker

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse

April, 1, 2012

What do UU jokes tell us about ourselves? How true are they? Some sting: a UU family moves into a new neighborhood. Their little girl finds a new playmate, and they are happily getting to know each other. One day, the playmate says, “We’re Episcopalians, what are you?” The UU child thinks for a minute and says, “I’m not sure, but I think we’re League of Women Voters.” Let’s laugh and think together!

In honor of April Fool’s Day I’ve been reading UU jokes. I have to say some of them sting. Like this one:

Q: What do you get when you cross a Unitarian with a Jehovah’s Witness?

A: Someone who goes around knocking on doors for no apparent reason.

I would have a reason, and I know a lot of you would too. I would want to say “Did you know there is a faith community that doesn’t believe God would send anyone to hell? That there is a tiny bit of the Divine in everyone? That everything is connected, really, everything is one, and what I call God is the connection between one thing and another – that which connects us all, the one soul of all things. I believe that the Bible has some sacred things in it, and so does the Koran and the Vedas and the poetry of Mary Oliver and the lyrics of Townes Van Zandt. We’re here on this earth to learn to love and be loved, and appreciate the earth and the sky and the stars and try to alleviate suffering when we can and add to the joy in the world when we can do that. And that you don’t have to believe things that don’t make sense to you, and that you can believe in God or not, but definitely you should not believe in a God who doesn’t believe in you. And that is just what I believe. What do you believe?

This next one stung too:

A UU family moves into a new neighborhood. Their little girl finds a new playmate, and they are happily getting to know each other. One day, the playmate says, “We’re Episcopalians, what are you?”

The UU child thinks for a minute and says, “I’m not sure, but I think we’re League of Women Voters.”

In this Religious Education program, we’re going to try to teach the kids what it means to be Unitarian Universalist. That this is not a “non-denominational” church. UUism is a denomination with roots in the early church. It is not a church where “you can believe anything you want.” You can’t believe that one skin tone or sexual preference is better or more blessed than another. You can’t believe in hell. You can’t believe that if you’re rich and healthy it means that God loves you more than other people. You can’t believe that it doesn’t matter how we treat immigrants. Well, what you can’t believe and be a UU is another sermon.

We don’t have a creed to recite, though, that is true. That is the main factor making UU confusing to people. In Of Human Bondage, Somerset Maugham said: “A Unitarian very earnestly disbelieves in almost everything that anybody else believes, and he has a very lively sustaining faith in he doesn’t quite know what.”

I just don’t recognize that description of Unitarian Universalists. You know, with the hectic flow of life, we sometimes don’t take the time to think about what it is we believe. It is easier, sometimes, to say what we don’t believe. This winter Cyndi Stein kindly offered a ten-week Wednesday night class called “Building Your Own Theology.” The students in that class are given the opportunity and the language to begin to carve out a statement of what they believe. Some of you know a lot about what you believe. For some it’s all about energy and thought and love, for some it’s about believing in a loving God, and for others it’s about doing your best to live ethically with the support of your community. For many of us, a big part of it is about the democratic process, making sure people are heard, making sure everyone has a chance to say their say, making sure the loudest don’t obliterate the quieter souls, talking until the sense of the group is heard. That’s difficult! Democracy is a demanding spiritual path. It’s much easier to shame people into shutting up, to disapprove of them until they subside, to talk over them or accept their silent offer to stay out of the discussion. It’s hard to slow down a process enough to hear the voices that don’t agree with the majority. It’s a big temptation to ride roughshod over objections and pretend that the sense of the group is unanimous. But Democracy is another sermon.

It feels to some people that the UUs believe nothing because most of our talk of believing is done one on one, or in smaller groups. I think part of why we like discussion so much is that we get to feel the presence of people who agree with us. Maybe that explains the old one about the Unitarian Universalist who died, and was off on the great journey. He came to a crossroad in the lane, with three directional signs. One said, “This way to Heaven.” Another said, “This way to Hell.” And the third said, “This way to a discussion about Heaven and Hell.” Of course the Unitarian Universalist went to the discussion. Conversation is one of our sacraments, along with child dedication, marriage, memorial services, coming of age, doing community service and drinking coffee.

In the UU church you don’t get to feel the presence of like-minded people in the experience of a whole congregation reciting a creed together It’s in discussion. that you get to hear people who agree with your views, seeing the heads nodding as you say something can be very validating, if you have felt like a Lone Ranger before that. I like that, but it can be confusing to new folks. One year, a professor of Religion at Wofford College forwarded me a paper one of his students had written. This student came to the service here and enjoyed it, but he said:

“The service was very different than any service I had ever experienced before, mostly because of the absence of any particular deity or central text. Instead, the sources for inspirational readings or authority seem to come from great thinkers or writers in world history, such as Rilke, Thoreau, Dickinson, Martin Luther King, Jr, and even occasionally the Christian Bible. The ideals were somewhat hard for me to wrap my mind around since there was no unifying feature other than feelings of love and acceptance.”

There is this joke:

A visitor to a Unitarian Universalist church sat through the sermon with growing incredulity at the heretical ideas being spouted. After the sermon a UU asked the visitor, “So how did you like it?”

“I can’t believe half the things that minister said!” sputtered the visitor in outrage.

“Oh, good — then you’ll fit right in!”

At the end of the paper the student writes:

“The church celebrates its diversity and the love and bond between its members is cultivated through the services and rituals of the church. Although it is an extremely interesting experience, I felt it difficult to understand what holds the members together religiously, but I appreciated the chance to fit the service into my own religious beliefs and personal spiritual context. The feelings of the members of the church are best expressed in the Affirmation. “Love is the spirit of this church, and service is its law. To dwell together in peace, to seek the truth in love, and to help one another, this is our great covenant.””

We do like to support one another’s responsible search for truth and meaning. That’s one of our principles.

Why did the Unitarian-Universalist cross the road? To support the chicken in its search for its own path.

Our principles come closest to unifying us. Only a black-belt UU can recite all seven, but most of us know the first one: “to affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of every person.” That’s a hard one, because we have to feel our way into whether we need to see as worthy everything about a person or just maybe that teensy spark of the Divine that is in each person. We can have people who seem as rigid and judgmental as the Pharisees themselves about being sensitive in our language and affirming of differences. That leads to the light bulb joke:

How many Unitarian Universalists does it take to change a light bulb?

Three – one to write a solemn statement which will affirm the following:

1. This light bulb is natural, a part of the universe, and evolved over many years by small steps.

2. There must be no discrimination against dark bulbs in any form, and means must be found for all “dark” bulbs to take their place alongside light bulbs on a basis of equality.

3. We affirm the right of all bulbs to screw into the sockets of their choice regardless of the bulb’s illumination preference.

4. UUs seek for each light bulb the fullest opportunity to develop itself to its full electrical potential.

Two to write this one:

We chose not to make a statement either in favor of or against the light bulb. However, if you have found in your own journey that light bulbs work for you, that is fine. You are invited to write a poem or compose a modern dance about your personal relationship with your light bulb and present it next month at our annual l light bulb Sunday service in which we will explore a number of light bulb traditions, including incandescent, fluorescent, three -way, long-life, and tinted, all of which are equally valid paths to luminescence.

Other UU jokes poke fun at the Biblical illiteracy of some church members. Too true. We’re trying to fix that. Two UUs are having a conversation about it:

UU#1: “UUs don’t know enough about the Bible.

UU#2: “Some of us are self-taught, and know a lot. Like me”

UU#1: “Oh, yeah? I’ll bet you five bucks you can’t recite the Lord’s Prayer.”

UU#2: “You’re on. Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep, if I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.”

UU#1: “All right, I was wrong, you’re right — you win.”

In The Big Book of Jewish Humor, the authors (Novak and Waldoks) quoted Martin Grotjahn who suggested that part of what Jewish humor is about is telling enemies, “You do not need to attack us. We can do that ourselves – and even better.” Let’s end by singing another ancient folk song together – this one was recorded by a group called the Limelighters. “Zen Gospel Singing.”

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse

March 18, 2012

The Spring Equinox is coming, when the day and night are the same length. It’s a good time to talk about balance, about living gracefully. Do we want to grow deep roots that can hold us steady while all around us things are pushing us one way, then the other? Do we want to learn to be light-footed so we can, as the Zen teacher says, “play ball on running water?” What would good balance look like?

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse

March 3, 2012

Purim is the Jewish festival celebrating a time long ago when the Jews were saved from destruction by the brave Queen Esther. What’s the story? Get ready to boo the bad guy.

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse

February 19, 2012

Susan B. Anthony was a Unitarian during the days of fighting for abolition and women’s suffrage. She was fierce and complicated, and her life is an inspiration.

Happy Susan B Anthony’s Birthday!

February 15

1820 – 1906

Susan B Anthony is surely in the pantheon of Unitarian and Universalist saints. Her father signed the book of the Rochester Unitarian Church, and the family attended there. Susan was persecuted, ridiculed and jailed, and she worked tirelessly for the rights of the powerless. She was intelligent, persistent, tireless, fierce and serene. Everything we admire. In our free faith tradition, one of the sources we draw from is “Words and deeds of prophetic women and men which challenge us to confront powers and structures of evil with justice, compassion, and the transforming power of love; ” I want to say we should all be like Susan B, but she had some things going for her that were powerful in her development and in her staying strong throughout her life. Some of us have those things and some don’t.

She worked first for the temperance movement. Drunkenness was an enormous problem in those days. Per capita consumption of alcohol was over seven gal. per capita. You have to keep in mind that most women didn’t drink at all then, most slaves didn’t drink, and no children were drunks, to speak of…. yet they were counted in that statistic. After Prohibition, by the way, that consumption went way down, and it is just now reaching seven gallons again after sixty years, but men and women of all colors drink now. I think most children still do not. Part of the problem with men drinking that much was not that it was immoral or icky to drink, but that the laws made males owners of all property in a marriage. They also owned the children, and always would get custody in a divorce. They also owned their wives and received any money their wives made.

If they were “bad to drink,” as we said in the South, they would drink up their paycheck and their wives paycheck. If they were the kind of drunk that would come home violent, they would hurt their wives and their kids and not much could be done about it at all. Beating your wife was not a crime in those days. All of the issues Anthony worked for flowed from her temperance work, as she campaigned for equal pay for equal work, for the right of women and African Americans to vote, for women to be able to get a divorce if she were abused, for women to have a chance at custody of her children, and for wives to be able to own property and keep their paychecks.

Susan Brownell Anthony was born in 1820. She didn’t like “Brownell” so she just always used “B.” She grew up in New York state in the midst of a Quaker family. One of the elements in her life that allowed her to be a confident crusader was that her father believed in her, loved her, and made sure she was educated at the same level as the males in the family. Having Daniel Anthony as the head of her household, growing up, gave her the experience of how much good a good man could do. Quakers believed that men and women were equal, that they thought and spoke and led equally well. Women helped run the meetings, and women had a say in all decisions.

Daniel Anthony sent his children to the town school until the school teacher refused to teach Susan long division. The thought at the time was that girls should be taught to read well enough to read their Bibles and taught enough arithmetic to count their egg money. Anthony brought the children home, started a school in his house and hired a teacher. When you are told, growing up, that you are smart and capable, when you are loved and admired by those who are in charge of you, it is much easier for you to be able to be smart and strong as an adult. Daniel Anthony believed in the work Susan was doing, and he supported her financially and emotionally. Her family helped her all her life, supplementing the fees she was paid as a lecturer and an organizer. When she was 20, Susan took a job teaching school from a fellow who had done poorly in the job. He had been paid $10.00 a week. She was paid $2.50.

Five years later, when she was 25, the family moved to Rochester, where they joined the Unitarian Church. When you join a Unitarian church you meet people who change your life. Rochester was a hotbed of abolitionist activity. The family befriended anti-slavery activists and former slaves. Susan was horrified to hear stories of the brutality and heartbreaking conditions of the lives of slaves, and she became more and more of an activist. Her family’s farm became more and more a center of anti-slavery activity. She grew more and more radical, along with her father and their friends. She was asked to be a paid abolitionist organizer, renting halls, hiring speakers, and publicizing meetings. She began speaking some herself, and she was good at it. She also liked it. You don’t have to do everything you’re good at, but if you’re good at it and you like it too, it’s pretty clear this is something you should do.

Susan spoke at a teacher’s convention, arguing, as a teacher, that both girls and boys should be taught, and that they should be taught together in the same room, that they could learn equally well, at equal speeds. She said there was not that much difference in their brains. It was thought by some in her day that women only had a certain amount of energy, and if they thought too hard and used their brains too much it would wither their reproductive parts. Clergy preached against the great social evil of educating boys and girls together. They said it would upset the balance of nature. What’s next, teaching our dogs and cats to read? When you study history you see that conservative religious voices, over and over, mouth what sounds from here like the most ridiculous claptrap. Those are the same voices now raised against same-sex marriage, saying “What’s next, we should be able to marry our dogs?” Liberal clergy from that time sound very much like voices from our time.

In the division that always, always happens when working for change, there were people saying “Don’t scare folks off by wanting everything all at once. Be reasonable.”

Susan B said “Shall I tell a man whose house in on fire to give a moderate alarm? Shall he moderately rescue his wife from a ravisher? Shall a mother moderately pull her baby from the fire it has fallen into?

In 1848, when she was 28 years old, the first Women’s Rights Convention was held in Seneca Falls, NY. She didn’t go. Local media had called it a hen convention, attended by cranks, hermaphrodites and atheists. Susan was shocked to find out that her father and lots of their friends supported the cause of women’s rights. They talked about that alongside the abolition of slavery Susan heard of the brilliant Mrs. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and hoped to meet her one day. When they did meet, they liked each other thoroughly and instantly. They were friends with Amelia Bloomer, who campaigned for more comfortable and sensible clothes for women. She wore an outfit that was called by her name. All three women wore those clothes for a couple of years, but they stopped when they realized it was keeping people from hearing anything they had to say. Clergy called the outfits devilish, and the press mocked them as women dressed like men.

It was not only women who were fighting against the destructive effects of alcoholism and addiction on families, who all went down together if the man of the family went down. The Sons of Temperance was a powerful political organization. Women were not allowed to join. There was a group called the Daughters of Temperance, an auxiliary group. Separate and unequal. Susan was a member of that group, one of their successful organizers and fund raisers. They elected her to represent them at a big conference in Albany NY in 1852. When she rose to make a point during a discussion, a buzz of outrage swept the hall. “The sisters,” shouted the chairman, “were not invited to speak, but to listen and learn!” Susan swept out of the room, followed by a few other women. Some other women stayed behind, disapproving. A few called the women who left “bold, meddlesome disturbers.” That very night Susan rented a hall and called her own meeting where women could speak. The room was cold and badly lit, and the stovepipe broke in the middle of Susan’s speech, but those who attended were energized and inspired. They decided to form a statewide convention. Susan was elected to head up that effort. She wrote hundreds of letters. Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote speeches for her, and over five hundred women came to the conference they organized. “You stir up Susan,” Henry Stanton told Elizabeth, “and she stirs up the world.”

Their partnership lasted their whole lives, over fifty more years. Susan had more mobility, since she wasn’t caring for a household and children. Sometimes she would watch Stanton’s children while Stanton wrote her speeches. They always, no matter what they were writing and speaking about, spoke about the right of women to vote. They figured that would take care of both temperance and slavery. The women would vote correctly and abolish all evils. Susan and Elizabeth encouraged one another, kept one another radical. Her friendship with Elizabeth is the second element in her life that enabled her to be who she was. Without that partnership, as without the love and support of her family, Susan’s story would probably have been a very different one.

After organizing this convention where five hundred women attended, Susan and Elizabeth were invited to the next Sons of Temperance convention. When they arrived they found that they would not even now be allowed to speak. Clergy men stood up and protested that they would not sit with these females. Anthony and Amelia Bloomer refused to leave. One delegate shouted that they were not women, but some hybrid species, half woman half man. Another man said that they had no business disrupting temperance meetings with their dreadful doctrines of women’s rights, divorce and atheism. Anthony held a petition with ten thousand signatures she had gathered. Within minutes the two women had been thrown out, bodily.

As she lectured and traveled, some newspapers would attack her personally, calling her repulsive and ugly, saying that she was laboring under strong feelings of hatred towards men. She must have been neglected by men, and she was jealous. The third time Anthony and Stanton were rejected by the main temperance group, they disengaged from that group for the next 20 years. “We have other, bigger fish to fry,” said Stanton serenely. They began working on securing property rights for women. If women could own things, they could be free of abusive marriages. Maybe also if they had money, the legislature would listen to them better. They worked on that for the next eight years, until 1860. Anthony went door to door and town to town, gathering signatures on petitions, enduring snowstorms and ridicule, sleeping in cold farm houses and inns, going before the state legislatures everywhere she went. In 1860 the NY legislature passed the married women’s property act, enabling married women to own property, keep her own wages, not subject to the control or interference of her husband, enter into contracts, and have shared custody of her children. Many other states followed suit, changing the lives of millions of women.

Some of the suffragists, in years to come, were embarrassed by the radical things Susan B Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton did. ECS wrote “The Women’s Bible,” mercilessly asking questions about the portrayal of women in the Bible, questions that would offend and upset most people even in this day and age. Harriet Beecher Stowe refused to write for Anthony’s newspaper, The Revolution, unless she named it something less aggressive.

Anthony rode stagecoaches, delivered speeches, and endured hardships until late in her 70’s. Until her father’s death, she had his full support. Until Stanton’s death, that partnership and support sustained her. She never married, never had children. Women’s rights, abolition, temperance, these were her passions and her life’s work.

She didn’t live to see women get the vote, in 1920. She did vote, though. In the 1872 election she voted illegally, she and a few other women. She was arrested, tried, and convicted. She was hoping to appeal, as the judge wouldn’t let the jury speak, and he instructed them to find her guilty. Her fine was 100 dollars. She told him, “You have trampled underfoot every vital principle of our government. My natural rights, my political rights, my civil rights, my judicial rights are all alike ignored. I will not pay a penny of your unjust fine.” As he shouted for her to be quiet and sit down, she kept talking. “I shall urgently and persistently continue to urge all women to the practical recognition of the old revolutionary maxim that ÔResistance to tyranny is obedience to God.'”

We can learn how to make social change from Susan B: Five easy steps:

1. Trust yourself. What feels wrong to you is probably wrong.

2. Get mad. Anger is a good fuel for action. Try to get mad at the right person or the right institution, as Aristotle said. “It is easy to fly into a passion – anybody can do that. But to be angry with the right person and to the right extent and at the right time and with the right object and in the right way – that is not easy, and it is not everyone who can do it.”

3. Work to change things. Don’t just complain. Find out how to change things and start trying.

4. Lean on a friend. Have relationships, partnerships in making change.

5. Know how things work. Here is how they work: First they ignore you, then they ridicule you. Then they fight you, then they agree. Later, they say they agreed with you all along. If you know how it works, when they call you a man hater or ugly or repulsive or they say you’re not patriotic or ask what’s next, I’m going to marry my dog? You can know they have been doing it this way forever. Keep fighting.