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Eric Hepburn
April 29, 2012
Cutting-edge researchers in psychology and cognitive science increasingly refer to the “two selves” of our in-the-moment self and our reflecting or remembering self. We will explore this abstract dichotomy through the lens of my very personal struggle to find a meaningful relationship with humility.
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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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Luther Elmore
March 25, 2012
How Shall We Live? In the first half of the nineteenth century approximately one hundred utopian societies were established across the United States, several by Unitarians and Universalists. We will look at those UU utopian societies and see what lessons they offer us today.
Times of dramatic and rapid change often lead people to question all aspects of their lives. Such a time in the United States was in the early 19th century. As America entered the early 1800s the country began to take its first major steps toward an industrial society. People no longer stayed on the family farm. The first textile mills were established in New England. Improvements in transportation and printing came at a time when hundreds of thousands of new immigrants from Germany and Ireland flooded the country. The old, traditional patterns of life were altered and individuals looked for new ways to live. Some sought community in utopian societies. Over 100 such communities were established in the United States in the years prior to the Civil War. Some were religious, some were secular, some were entirely economic – all sought a better way of life. A few were established by our Unitarian and Universalist forefathers. Their search for a new life in the 1830s and 1840s still speaks to the way we choose to live our life today.
The most well known of these societies related to our UU ancestors was Brook Farm, established by Unitarian minister George Ripley. Ripley was a graduate of Harvard Divinity School and for 15 years the settled minister at Purchase Street Church in Boston. Increasingly attracted to Transcendentalism, in 1840 he attended a Christian Union Convention where participants were encouraged to follow the words of 2 Corinthians 6:17. “Wherefore come out from among them and be ye separate, saith the Lord.” Ripley envisioned a Transcendentalist “City of God” and plans for the community were made in the home of Ralph Waldo Emerson. The preamble to his “Articles of Agreement” state the lofty goals of Brook Farm:
To establish the external relations of life on a basis of wisdom and purity; to apply the principles of justice and love to our social organization In accordance with the laws of Divine Providence; to substitute a system of brotherly cooperation for one of selfish competition; to institute an attractive, efficient, and productive system of industry; to diminish the desire of excessive accumulation; to guarantee to each other forever the means of physical support and of spiritual progress; and thus to impart a greater freedom, simplicity, truthfulness, refinement and moral dignity to our mode of life…”
He organized a joint stock company, raised $11,000 in donations and pledges, bought a 200 acre farm eight miles from Boston in West Roxbury and called it “The Brook Farm Institute of Agriculture and Education.” In March of 1841 he gave his final sermon at the Purchase Street Church and he and his wife moved to Brook Farm. They were soon joined by 13 other adults and within a year the community had 70 residents.
Work was chosen and assigned based on personal affinity and skills. Since all were expected to work and all work was equally honored, all were paid the same. Farmers, carpenters, and laborers were paid the same as teachers, poets, and philosophers. Education, social class, age, and gender made no difference. This plot of land had previously been a dairy farm and the soil was rather poor. Nevertheless, they planted a garden. Nathaniel Hawthorne, one of the early residents, seems not to have enjoyed the blend of intellect and labor. He later wrote, “Mr. Ripley put a four-pronged instrument into my hands, which he gave me to understand was called a pitchfork; and he and Mr. Farley being armed with similar weapons we all three commenced a gallant attack upon a heap of manure.” They opened a school where students were taught history, philosophy, literature, music, Greek, Latin, and German. To achieve their goal of balancing manual labor and the intellect, students were required to work two hours a day. Some of Boston’s finest families sent their children there. The school would prove to be Brook Farm’s most successful undertaking.
The intellectual and social life at Brook Farm were stimulating. They had Elizabethan pageants, Shakesperian plays, concerts, operas, costume parties and dances. Works of Beethoven were played on the pianoforte; the choir sang the works of Mozart. The works of Dante were read in Italian. Literary societies and reading groups were popular. One resident later recalled that “the weeds were scratched out of the earth to the music of Tennyson and Browning.” At night Ripley led philosophical discussions, others led star gazing activities. Charles Dana led a group in translating difficult German texts. Many would close their day by joining hands in a circle and repeating “Truth to the cause of God and humanity.” Bronson Alcott and Charles Lane visited Brook Farm in the summer of 1843 and Lane critically wrote that he found “80 or 90 persons playing away their youth and day-time in a miserably joyous frivolous manner.”
From the beginning there had been a shortage of housing, so additional buildings were constructed, increasing their debt. Work also began on a 3 story high main building that would provide more living quarters, reading rooms, assembly hall, and central dining room.
Many of those who had given pledges of support were unable to fulfill their commitment. Struggling financially, in early 1844 the community was reorganized based on the communitarian socialist proposals of French utopian philosopher Charles Fourier. New workers joined Brook Farm, but many of the original Transcendentalist poets and writers left. Various industries were attempted. A sewing department made capes, caps, and collars for sale in Boston stores. Shoe making along with the manufacture of sashes, blinds, pewter lamps and pewter pots generated a little additional revenue. But not enough.
Criticism of Brook Farm began to circulate. Charles Fourier – the utopian writer – had believed that sex should follow the same patterns of work. That is, it should be based on attraction, alternation, and variety. Unfounded rumors of varied and alternating sexual partners began to be spread. Some parents withdrew their children from the school. Some parents opposed the equality or “leveling up” practiced at Brook Farm. One financial backer wrote to Ripley complaining about the presence of what he called “impure children” and called the social mixing of the children an “enormous evil.” In 1845 a student visited relatives in Boston where he was exposed to smallpox. Smallpox soon spread through the community and, although no one died, almost 1/3 of the population was quarantined. More students withdrew from school.
By 1846 about 65 residents and 12 students remained. In March the incomplete and uninsured main building caught fire and burned to the ground in two hours. Within a few months, 30 residents remained and virtually all of the students were gone. The following year bankruptcy proceedings were completed. Brook Farm was no more.
Ripley went to work for Horace Greeley and the New York Tribune. He later published a tremendously successful New American Cyclopedia and paid off all of the debts. Brook Farm lasted from 1841 until 1847, but Ripley’s dream of a Unitarian Transcendentalist utopia had failed.
Shortly after Brook Farm was founded, Adin Ballou established another utopian community, Hopedale. Ballou envisioned a pacifist cooperative community that would incorporate productive farming and industrial activities among a group of committed Christians. Ballou was almost 40 old when he began this enterprise, having served seven years as a Universalist minister and another eleven years in a Unitarian church. He had became a radical reformer, supporting the abolition of slavery, the temperance crusade against alcohol, equal rights for women, and pacifism. He believed in what was labeled “Practical Christianity,” a movement that supported Christian doctrine as closely related to the early, “primitive” church as possible.
In 1841 he organized and became president of “Fraternal Communion Number One,” a society dedicated to Christian living in a community setting. A joint stock company was organized at $50.00 per share, with the promise of a 4% annual return on the investment. The largest investors were Anna and Ebenezer Draper. With the money they raised, they purchased a 600 acre farm just west of Milford, Massachusetts and christened it Hopedale. Members of the Hopedale community agreed to a constitution that stated the following, “I believe in the religion of Jesus Christ as he taught and exemplified it according to the scripture of the New Testament.” They furthermore pledged that they would never assault, injure, slander, envy or hate any human or serve in the armed forces, use liquor, file a suit in court, or vote. Personally, they were committed to never indulge in covetousness, deceit, idleness, or have an unruly tongue. Thirty-two men and women signed this rather strict Christian pledge as they began their life at Hopedale.
In March 1842 twenty-eight individuals – about one-third of whom were children – occupied the Hopedale farm. All 28 moved into the old farm house. They were expected to work 60 hours a week during the summer months, 48 during the winter. And work they did. That first summer they planted 10 acres in potatoes and beans, 4 acres in corn, and 3 acres in other vegetables. They repaired the old buildings, erected a new one, and opened a school for the children. Every two weeks they printed a paper, “The Practical Christian.” They began manufacturing shoes and boots.
On Sundays they had morning and afternoon church services. On Tuesdays they had singing; on Thursdays they had religious discussions and on Saturdays they met to read and discuss public papers and periodicals. Thus, they practiced their Primitive Practical Christianity. Ballou would later write, “I…longed most ardently to see New Testament Christianity actualized.”
Within a few years Hopedale had grown to 170 people and annual business meetings reflected assets of over $50,000. But conflict had crept in. Many of the newer members did not have as firm a commitment to Practical Christianity as the original members. Divergent beliefs such as spiritualism, vegetarianism, and phrenology were practiced by some. Housing had always been inadequate and as new facilities were built, people argued about who would live where. The industries did not produce the revenue expected. As members withdrew, they were paid for their investment and labor, draining Hopedale of valuable financial resources. The end of Ballou’s Christian experiment came in 1856 when the Drapers, the largest investors, withdrew their financial support. The community could no longer be sustained and the Hopedale industries became private companies.
Ballou would write of his experiment. “It will go out to the world and down to coming generations…a laudable but ill-fated experiment entered upon and prosecuted, not to advance any selfish or unworthy interest or course, but rather to show the way of a better, truer life…”
In 1843 Bronson Alcott, the father of writer Louisa May Alcott, established a short-lived vegetarian community called Fruitlands. Prior to this community, Alcott had led a curious life, primarily fashioning himself as a philosopher, educator, and reformer. One historian claims that he was probably the closest personal friend to both Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Born in Connecticut in a large farming family, he had little formal education, but he loved learning.
After traveling to Virginia and failing to secure a job as a teacher, he returned to Connecticut and served as an innovation school master in two townships. He emphasized openness, respect, and self-expression, employing the Socratic method. Educational reformers helped him establish schools in Pennsylvania. Noted Unitarian minister Samuel Joseph May heard of Alcott and secured him a position in Boston. There, Alcott met May’s sister, Abigail, and in 1830 they married. He was attracted to the Unitarian faith of the Mays and for years attended William Ellery Channing’s Federal Street Church. But later, he drifted away from the church.
In 1836 he helped organized the Transcendentalist Club; the first meeting was held in his home. He even provided the name for the Transcendentalist paper, The Dial.
That same year he also published a very controversial book, Conversations on the Gospels. Included in these “Conversations” were discussions of human conception and birth. The book created a storm of protest and many parents withdrew their students from his school. Three years later, when he admitted a young black girl into the school, the remaining students withdrew and the school closed. To make ends meet, he became a day laborer and his wife and young daughters took in sewing. In the meantime, the Alcotts had become vegetarians.
Emerson paid for Alcott to take a trip to England where he met other innovative educators, including Charles Lane. Lane returned with Alcott to Boston and, along with Abigail’s brother Samuel, put up the money to buy a 90 acre farm 30 miles from Boston. During the early summer of 1843, the Alcotts – with their four daughters, age 2 to 12 – along with Lane and his son and five other adults moved to the farm, Fruitlands.
In spite of only having about ten apple trees, they expected to establish an orchard and grow their own food and live according to their radical vegetarian principles. This site had poor soil and was not suitable for a thriving farm. Nevertheless, they spent most of the summer plowing and planting. They planted corn, beans, potatoes, and carrots. They consumed no meat, eggs, milk, butter, coffee, tea, or molasses. The preferred diet was raw fruit and vegetables and water. Later, Alcott would ban the growing of food that grew downward. They felt animals should be as free as humans and so used no wool, honey, manure, or animal labor. In order to not be attracted by money, they tried to grow only as much as they could consume. They had little to worry about, because over production would not be a problem at Fruitlands. Neglecting their farm duties, Alcott and Lane traveled widely to Boston, New York, Rhode Island and Connecticut unsuccessfully recruiting additional members. As a result, when the grain needed to be harvested in the fall, Lane and Alcott were away and so Abigail and the girls led the harvest.
The few adults at Fruitlands were a motley crew. One resident insisted on wearing a long beard in an era when all men shaved. Another was a nudist, believing that clothing was spiritually restrictive. He agreed to practice his nudity only at night. One male believed that cursing and profane language elevated the spirit and regularly greeted people with “Good morning, damn you.” One resident – an elderly female – was caught by Lane eating a piece of fish. Defending herself she said, “I only took a little bit of the tail” to which Lane replied, “Yes, but the whole fish had to be tortured and killed.” She packed her bags and left.
By the fall, only the Alcotts and Lanes remained. When Samuel May refused to make an installment payment on the farm in January of 1844, everyone was forced to leave Fruitlands. Alcott’s dream of a radical vegetarian community was over. It had survived less than a year.
Pre-dating these three communities by a few years was the utopian settlemen Of Abner Kneeland, Salubria, Iowa. Kneeland was ordained as a Universalist minister in 1804 and for 25 years served churches in New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and New York. Throughout his ministry, he continued to shift his theological and societal beliefs and came to support the radical beliefs of socialist reformers Robert Owen and Francis Wright. He supported women’s rights, racial equality, divorce, birth control, and interracial marriage. Theologicallly, he drifted away from Christian doctrine and came to define himself as a pantheist. In 1830 he was declared out of fellowship with the Universalists and no longer recognized as a Universalist minister. He established the First Society of Free Enquirers, and preached to crowds of about 2,000 on Sundays. After 3 years, he was challenged by Universalist minister and editor Thomas Whittemore. In response, Kneeland wrote an article which was published in the “Boston Intelligencer.” Kneeland wrote: “Universalists believe in a god which I do not…Universalists believe in Christ, which I do not…Universalists believe in miracles, which I do not…Universalists believe in the resurrection of the dead… and eternal life, which I do not.” For those statements over a period of five years he underwent five trials for blasphemy. Ultimately, he was convicted and in June of 1838, at the age of 64, served 60 days in jail. Famously, he was the last man in this country jailed for blasphemy. While in jail, Kneeland made plans to move west and establish a new community of free thinkers. He sought a community where no one would be persecuted for their religious or social beliefs. He chose the newly opened territory of Iowa for his project of free thinkers. By the spring of 1839, less than a year after his release from jail, he was in Iowa. He purchased 230 acres, setting aside 80 acres for himself and offering the rest for sale. Friends and supporters bought 200 more acres. Ten other families soon joined him, “united in desire to free inquiry.” He advertised his new community of Salubria in the Boston Intelligencer, describing the new land in glowing terms. He built a large two-story house, the finest in the county. Now in his mid-60s, he had two more children by his fourth wife – the first three having died.
Although Kneeland was busy in his new, small community, new settlers did not arrive and the land did not sell. He had not taken into consideration the Panic of 1837 – a 7 year long depression – the worse that the United States had faced up to that time. If others had planned to move to Salubria, there was now no money. To make ends meet, Kneeland taught school, sold his livestock and his 200 books.
Local citizens had been tolerant of Kneeland and his free thinkers and a group of nearby Mormons. One local resident regarded the settlers at Salubria as a group of people who just read a lot of books. However, young men from the American Home Missionary Society invaded the area and reported there were a “considerable body of men here…who are in various degrees infected with infidelity.” Of course, they were referring to Kneeland and his free thinkers. As a reflection of their mindset, one Kneeland supported named his son Voltaire Paine Twombley.
Kneeland became active in local politics, was elected county chairman of the local Democratic party, but lost in a bid for the territorial legislature. In 1842, although Kneeland was not on the ticket for any office, the Democrats were attacked by their Whig opponents as the “”infidelity ticket.” The entire slate was defeated.
Two years later at the age of 70, Kneeland suffered a stroke and died. Some of his followers stayed and became absorbed in the area. But the free inquiry community of Salubria was over.
Utopia – “a place of ideal perfection, especially in laws, government, and social conditions.” Ultimately, these four communities tied to our UU forefathers failed. What had they sought? They sought communities of free thinkers, Transcendentalists, vegetarians, and practical Christians. They sought economic stability, religious freedom, and intentional communities of like minded individuals. They sought a better, more meaningful way of life. They sought to set an example for others to follow. Although their experiments in living failed, their quest still resounds with us today. The question remains, how shall we live?
On the one hand, I believe that Brook Farm reminds us to be open to our life- long search for truth and meaning – to associate with those who can give us inspiration, guidance, and encouragement. If we accept the principles of George Ripley’s “Articles of Agreement,” then we would strive to “diminish the desire of excessive accumulations.” Yes, we would learn the boundaries of “enoughness,” focus on what is truly important, and in the words of Ripley achieve “a greater freedom, simplicity, truthfulness, refinement, and moral dignity.” Adin Ballou teaches us to be true to our beliefs and to live life accordingly, wherever it may lead. Bronson Alcott should encourage us to live a life of simplicity, not only in our choices of what we eat, but in how we treat others, animals, and the environment. Abner Kneeland teaches us the value of freedom of speech and thought. For me he also gives encouragement to persevere, no matter what your age, circumstances, or obstacles. Shall we establish our own utopia? The First UU Utopia of Austin, Texas? After all, we have 132 acres of Hill Country land at U Bar U. Perhaps we can raise our own chickens and have farm fresh eggs. Perhaps we can have bee hives and have buckets of honey. We do have church members who can help us in those areas, you know. Perhaps we can raise goats and sell goat cheese to the finest restaurants in Austin. Or perhaps we have already addressed this issue. Our church mission statement states that “We gather in community to nourish souls, transform lives, and do justice.” We will most likely never establish a UU utopia, but perhaps, we can live out our mission, discover meaningful lives, do good works, and have a positive impact on those about us. That in itself would almost be a utopian community.
May it be so.
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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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Dick Pierce
March 11, 2012
Dick Pierce is a founding member of the Austin Permaculture Guild, a cofounder, with Brandi Clark of the very successful Austin Citizen Gardener program, and a passionate spokesman for the Environment, for “relocalizing” our food, business, jobs/careers, lives and priorities.
Each of us is doing what we can so that all human creatures – big and small, young and old, here and elsewhere – have enough nutritious food, shelter, clothing, and meaningful work to meet the minimum requirements for survival. Then, and only then, should we in the US and the developed world work toward “seconds” or “thirds” for ourselves.
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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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Chris Jimmerson
February 26, 2011
Both the Unitarians and the Universalists have a long history of prophetic ministry – speaking truth in the public square and, perhaps more importantly, taking action on social issues. From Michael Servetus espousing an early Unitarianism in the 16th century through the Prophetic Sisterhood of the late 19th and early 20th century, to the Unitarian Universalists (UUs) publishing the Pentagon Papers in the mid-20th century, UUs, though not always unified, have a long tradition of being at the forefront of social change and carrying our values into the world. Will we continue that tradition into the 21st Century and beyond?
How many Unitarian Universalists does it take to change a light bulb?
We’re not sure. The Lighting Technologies Study Team of the Clean Energy Options Working Group of the Green Our World Starting Here and Now Task Force of the Facilities and Grounds Committee hasn’t issued its report and recommendations yet.
You may have heard other variations on this or similar jokes, all on the theme that we UUs can sometimes seem to talk, study, argue, debate, disagree, discuss and “400 plus pages written report” things to death.
It’s not that doing our due diligence, making sure we understand the issues or working through our differing viewpoints isn’t a necessary part of it; it’s just that we (and pretty much all liberal religious groups) have been accused of getting so caught up in our mental gymnastics that we never actually end up doing much about whatever the issues might be. Those 400 plus pages can end up in a file somewhere.
But that’s certainly not always true and it never has been. Even before the merger of the Universalists and the Unitarians, the Us and the Us had often acted as prophetic liberal religions. As our Unitarian Universalist training curricula A People so Bold says it, prophetic religion is “religion that is on the cutting edge, reading the signs of its times, creating a just and loving community in its midst, and advocating passionately for a better world”.
In 16th century Europe, even the very idea of believing in a Unitary God was prophetic and could get you branded a heretic and burned at the stake. And don’t even try for universal salvation! They’d have just added more dry wood to the fire.
In America, early Unitarians and Universalists were among the first to work for improved education, provide charity for the poor, ordain female clergy, call for emancipation and work for women’s suffrage.
Later, after the merger in 1961, this prophetic spirit would continue, with UU participation in environmental issues and in the fight for racial justice, sexuality and gender equality, political and religious freedom.
To be sure, our efforts historically have never been perfect or unified – at no point have either of our Us ever managed to be in complete agreement about anything. However, there is little doubt that overall we have a history of being at the forefront of social issues.
Any yet, as I mentioned earlier, liberal religion can run the risk, sometimes, of intellectualizing more than engaging the core issues. Due at least in part to our roots in the Enlightenment, we tend to focus on the individual as rational and self-determining rather than place our “being” within our connections to others and the web of existence. We see the INDIVIDUAL bigots, the individual abusers, the individual classists and so on, but we don’t as often see the underlying societal structures that perpetuate the oppressive behavior. We focus on the individual victims and not entire cultures, races, classes and other groups that are being systematically subjected to injustice.
For example, let me share some questions I have been asking myself. In the past few years, how often have I given canned goods or the like to the food pantry or the homeless shelter but done little to speak out against the social conditions that force people to live on the streets and go hungry in the first place? I wonder — how many of us recycle, conserve and work to reduce our own environmental impact, yet remain largely silent as our government subsidizes businesses that do far more damage?
How often have we written checks or volunteered for the non-profit clinic, the shelter for battered women, the halfway house for recovering addicts or any other of a number of non-profit groups and then returned to the security of our own homes and lives without having to really consider –what is creating the need for these service agencies to begin with?
Now, I am going to pause for a moment of liberal religious guilt. OK, that’s long enough — because these acts of care and service really are vital and needed and wonderful and necessary and a part of creating the world we seek as UUs. But I believe there is another arena of action required if we hope to really make change. And that’s where living our prophetic religious tradition comes back in.
Will we really be “a people so bold”?
Will we volunteer at the immigrant assistance non-profit AND rally against the economic imperialism that is so often at the root of migration in the first place? Will we join forces with oppressed groups and their organizations to demand and work for change? Will we proclaim our liberal religious principles in the public square? We will do so even if it raises questions about our own middleclass privilege?
The President of our religious movement got himself arrested protesting an unjust immigration law in Arizona. Personally, I say, “more of that!” I believe there has never been a time that so cried out for us to assume the mantle of prophetic religion with renewed vigor and purpose.
Because we are losing our democracy.
Because we are killing our planet.
Before you diagnose me with “hyperbolic propensity syndrome”, allow me just a few minutes to explain why I do not think these are overly dramatic statements. Since the economic crash of 2008, economics professor Edward N. Wolf’s ongoing research revealed that wealth inequality in the United has actually increased even more sharply. The top 1% of wealth owners in the U.S. hold about 40% of all of our wealth; the top quintile hold almost 90%
Other research has found that wealth inequality is highly correlated with power inequality and political corruption. Further, such wealth inequality and corruption form an escalating cycle that threatens the viability of democratic government – wealth inequality begets corruption begets greater inequality begets greater corruption and on and on and on, until only the illusion of democracy remains.
In the U.S., fewer and fewer people own greater and greater percentages of corporate stocks, and corporations are amassing greater and greater power. After the recent Supreme Court decision allowing unlimited spending by corporations and other groups outside the political parties, spending by these groups totaled 135.3 million dollars in the 2010 elections – outside conservative groups spent 119.6 million, while outside liberal groups and unions spent 15.7 million.
Conservative politicians did somewhat better than did liberals, you might recall.
In reaction, democratic groups plan to try to match outside spending by conservatives in 2012. To do so, they too will rely on corporate wealth. By mid-February of this year, the presidential candidates and their Superpacs had already spent in excess of 69.6 million dollars. A recent study found that 30 of our largest companies now spend more on lobbying than they pay in federal taxes.
Wealth inequality begets corruption begets greater inequality. But you don’t have to take my word for it. Listen to what a Republican congressional staffer, who recently retired in disgust after almost 30 years has to say. Republican operative, Mike Lofgren states, quote — “Both parties are rotten – how could they not be, given the complete infestation of the political system by corporate money?… Both parties are captives to corporate loot.” End quote.
We are losing our democracy. Democracy is a core element of our religious principles — all that we as UUs value.
More and more, we face an Orwellian political system that promotes and affirms the inherent worth and dignity of the few over the many. We cannot hope for justice, equity and compassion if we allow our democratic process to be subverted in this way. There can be no peace, no liberty, no justice when such vast inequality is allowed to exist and increase.
But this unrestrained economic disparity of power is potentially even more destructive, even more threatening.
In their fascinating and sobering book, Moral Ground: Ethical Action for a Planet in Peril, editors Kathleen Dean Moore and Michael P. Nelson bring together essays written by people from throughout the world. With wisdom and expertise that varies from the scientific to the spiritual, they make a compelling case that any sense of ethics requires our immediate action on global climate change. They also paint a terrifying picture regarding the consequences of failing to act, such as:
Already, 40,000 people per week die of hunger-related illness worldwide. As global temperatures continue to rise, this is likely to get worse. 33 million acres of Canadian forest have died because it no longer gets cold enough in winter to kill the beetle that is killing the trees.
High-altitude glaciers that provide much of the drinking water in Asia, Latin America and the American West are disappearing. The U.S. Park Service estimates that by the year 2020, there will no longer be any glaciers in Glacier National Park.
The Great Barrier Reef may well be lifeless within two decades. Fifty percent of the world’s animals are in decline. One quarter of mammals face potential extinction, including elephants, humpback whales, gorillas, tigers and polar bears.
We have effectively ended the Holocene era of our planet, into which human civilization arose and during which countless life forms evolved and flourished. We have replaced it with an era of human-caused extinctions.
There is already no chance that we will leave to future generations, our children and grandchildren, a world as rich with life and possibility as the one we inherited.
We are quickly finding out that our 7th principle, that we affirm and promote respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part, goes much deeper and is much more sacred than we may have known – that our free and responsible search for truth and meaning can only exist within and through that web, not separately — not purely as individuals, but instead in communion with one another and with all that exists on this beautiful blue planet and beyond.
So, what more can we do? How do we sustain ourselves and have hope when the scientific predictions seem so huge, so overwhelming.
We can begin by realizing that the things I’ve mentioned that we are already doing are vital and must continue. The services and social action programs Unitarian Universalists are providing, both here in the U.S. and internationally are needed and wonderful. The actions of our congregations, as well as individual people within those congregations, to do what we can to conserve and protect our ecosystem are admirable. They are making a great difference in our world.
Today though, our world asks even more of us. Embracing again our movement as prophetic religion asks that we go even deeper — that we recognize that the corporatist undermining of western democracies and the escalating destruction of our planet’s sustainability are interrelated – that we name this malfeasance publicly and join with others to fight it. We must reaffirm the wisdom our UU sage, James Luther Adams, taught us about the “power of organization and the organization of power”.
Today, commercial, industrial and agricultural giants are producing more greenhouse emissions than all of the ecological conservation efforts of individual citizens combined can offset.
Today, industries so large that they are beyond our dissent, more powerful than most governments, are making decisions that will have tremendous effects on whether and what life survives on our planet in the future.
To have any meaningful influence will require that we engage with other religious groups and with secular and public policy organizations in ways that may have been uncomfortable to us in recent times. It will require that we engage with our more conservative friends in difficult but imaginative and necessary conversations. It will require that we find ways of harnessing the creativity and power of collective voices, making those voices heard, amplifying their strength.
I believe that we must walk a careful line, upholding the separation of church and state, yet realizing that our religious principles will be lived or not in the political arena.
As Sulak Sivaraska, cofounder of the International Association of Engaged Buddhists writes, “Politics without spirituality or ethics is blind. Spirituality without politics is simply inconsequential.”
Our Unitarian Universalist principles are calling us to the consequential. Our community’s values and mission compel us to act together out of compassion, out of love for one another and that sacred web of existence, with the courage to risk potential failure, despite the loss and the irreparable damage we witness. Climate change provides our greatest test so far of that compassion — of that love. It requires a people so bold.
Against all odds, we must still act. We must act to place love and community above market values and profit. We must proclaim our Unitarian Universalist beliefs beyond our church walls. We must act as if those values and principles — indeed the future of humanity and the beautiful world we inherited — depend upon it.
Because they do.
How many Unitarian Universalists does it take to change the world?
Every single last one of us, along with the many others who might join an invitation to reclaim paradise before it is lost, if only we were to engage with them. If only we were to be so bold.
May we be so. May we be that prophetic religion for our time.
Amen.
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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.
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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
February 12, 2012
Our fifth Principle talks about liberty and justice for all, with a goal of world community. How are we supposed to get this done?
How would you sit down to eat a car? Knife and fork? Hacksaw? Ketchup? Hot sauce? Would you circle the vehicle a couple of times, figuring out where to start? Would you drink a nice lemonade with the upholstery? What about the more metallic meals? White or red wine? That would probably depend on whether it was a meaty truck like a Dodge Ram or a fishier Plymouth Barracuda. Eating a car is something that would take commitment, time, planning. It would take a special mind to think of doing it.
Our sixth principle is like that. It says that we, as UUs, agree to affirm (say yes to,) and promote (try to get more people to say yes to) the goal of world community with peace, liberty and justice for all. That’s really big. It makes a person think the framers of the principles were getting tired at the end there, and that they just wrote one that was the equivalent of “well, we want the whole world to be okay, everything else plus that big freezer in the garage.” What do you do with a principle that large and unwieldy?
There is a funny short film on youtube with the title “The Man Who Ate a Car,” and it opens with him talking in his kitchen.
“A car is just the sum of its parts, and a lot of the parts aren’t that big, just a couple of inches across. 75% of the parts of an automobile are a couple of inches across and half an inch deep. That’s the size of an Oreo cookie. And the ones that are too big, you just machine down, smooth out.”
Most of us don’t have time, in the biggest part of our lifespan, to do much for the world. We are busy making a living, raising children, maintaining the relationships we choose, taking care of our health and strength or adjusting to its loss. It’s hard to find time and energy for leaving the world a better place. Ralph Waldo Emerson said a successful life was to leave the world ” a little bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition; to know that even one life has breathed easier because you live…” Many of us do that. I am beginning to know some of the stories of a good number of people in this room and I can tell you there are many people here who will leave the world a little better than they found it. Lives have breathed easier because you have lived. What will you be known for when you are gone?
Unitarians and Universalists have thrown their life energies in with the forces of change over the centuries. Many Unitarians and Universalists worked in the Abolitionist Movement to overthrow slavery. Many have worked in the Civil Rights struggle. Unitarian Horace Mann organized the public school system Universalist Clara Barton founded the Red Cross. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes was led by his liberal faith to a much more inclusive interpretation of the law. Thomas Starr King (after whom one of the UU seminaries, the one in Berkley, is named) was inspired to fight the California legislature for continued land rights of Mexicans. Jane Hull founded Hull House in Chicago, and began to professionalize social workers; moving caring for the poor from religious institutions that often pressured you to convert to get care, to non-religiously affiliated professionals. Roger Baldwin was led to establish the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). May Sarton wrote poetry inspiring her readers with truth and beauty.
Social action, politics and art are some ways we can make the world a better place. Most of us, in the ordinary course of our lives, are doing it by being loving family members, teaching our children strong values of usefulness, tolerance, open minded curiosity, kindness, knowledge, wisdom, and love. We teach the children in the church, we care for our grandchildren, we cook for people and visit them when they need company. We make the world a better place by being good friends, by trying to behave correctly and do the right things. Do those actions bring about world community with peace, liberty and justice for all? We can barely make justice within our own church, our own families. How can we heal the whole world?
This principle is over-large, and it sits there, parked in the driveway of every UU who is resolving to live the faith.
“This is a long term activity,” says the man who ate the car. “Look, it took five years. I ate my first two lug nuts on Dec 30, 1990 — finished the last piece of the clutch housing on Feb 14 1995.” Compared to a task with no beginning, no middle and no end, eating a car sounds almost easy.
World community, with peace, liberty and justice for all is too big a goal. When my goals are that big, I get overwhelmed. When a person is overwhelmed, they are stressed, crabby, emotionally less stable and sleepy. The principles certainly aren’t supposed to do that to us. When a rule is too hard to follow, it’s just begging to be ignored. When a goal is too big, it’s just begging to slide down the priority list behind every other thing in the world that can be accomplished.
Overwhelm burns us out. When we can’t get anywhere, when the things we do accomplish seem so insignificant compared to what we are supposed to be accomplishing that we feel they are nothing. We don’t want the sixth principle to make us feel that all our small efforts are insignificant. What I learned about setting goals is that you are supposed to make a goal from something you can control. Instead of saying “I’m going to be a catalyst for change like Barbara Jordan was!” you might say “I’m going to change one thing ——about myself—- this week.” That you can do, usually. Instead of saying, “My goal is to be a millionaire,” you make a goal of saving a certain amount of your income, or of living within your means day by day, or just or writing down what you spend. Goals should be measurable. Did I do it or not? They should be attainable. We can say that we have a goal to do some action every day to make the world a better place. Most of us, just by living the principles and trying to be good people, are doing that. We can take the red heart from our bulletin and write a kind and loving note to someone who wants to get married and can’t do it in TX yet. The notes will be delivered on Valentines Day to the people who are going to the office on Airport Rd. to ask for licenses. Or you can get some food after church and take it to the Pecan Area of Zilker park where the Occupy folks have invited us and others for a picnic.
One good purpose that can be served by an extra-large, unattainable goal, though, is that it is a measuring stick we can hold up to the various situations and decisions we face as we move through our lives. “Is this going to be more or less like world community?” You might ask yourself. “Will this make more peace, more liberty, more justice, or less?” A good large measuring stick can help as choices come up.
Let’s take that sixth principle little by little, and let’s take our time. Take a big important stand or do something small every day, or both. Just keep it in mind. Look at your home, your work, your church through its windshield. Machine those pieces down until they are the size of an Oreo cookie. Then make them part of supper.
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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
February 5, 2012
In the Christian scriptures is a story about Rabbi Jesus doing a miracle where 5,000 hungry people were fed. It began with a boy offering to share what he had. What kind of miracle was it? What is its message for us?
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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
January 29, 2012
The choir performs three of Kiya Heartwood’s choral works and Meg Barnhouse collaborates with readings. Science is showing us that we are all related to an African woman we call Mitochondrial Eve, and we can trace each person’s ancestry through their mother’s mitochondrial DNA, from mother to mother, all the way back to one of 26 “daughters of Eve.”
SERMON:
Music for the “Afri-Kin” service is called “A Balance of Earth and Sky,” composed by Kiya Heartwood (see program notes below)
I. Gloria (A Hymn to the Queen of Heaven)
This piece is honor of Mitochondrial or “African Eve”, our Homo sapiens common ancestor. Eve lived at least 200,000 years ago in East Africa and all humans are her descendants through their mitochondrial DNA (mt DNA). All humans share one common African ancestor and all women carry a strand of her DNA. This theory is supported in many books including Seven Daughters of Eve by Brian Sykes
II. Rivers of Grass
Homo sapiens descendants of Eve began migrating out of Africa to populate the rest of the world sometime between 95,000- 45,000 years ago. These daughters of Eve carry the gradual mutations necessary for survival in different climates and topography. These people moved on to new lands because of climate changes, floods, wars, droughts, and plain curiosity. We are all descended from these daughters of Mitochondrial Eve. We honor their perseverance and strength and we carry these traits into the next generations.
III. The Beauty Way.
This piece is based on a Navajo ceremonial chant that brings back balance and harmony into the celebrants’ lives. By honoring the connections to our common ancestors we remind ourselves that we are the sons and daughters of Eve and we are all related.
PROGRAM NOTES
“A Balance of Earth and Sky”
is three song cycle of praise and connection written by composer/singer songwriter Kiya Heartwood for mixed chorus and piano. This work was commissioned by the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Princeton’s Music Ministry for the UUCP choir in 2011.
“A Balance of Earth and Sky” is a musical ceremony for centering and balance.
The pieces include: “Gloria”, “Rivers of Grass” and “The Beauty Way”.
I. Gloria (A Hymn to the Queen of Heaven) …. Gloria
II. Rivers of Grass
I am grass like an ocean, rivers of mountains, choirs of stone. ( Begin again.)
I am wise as the raven, strong as the horses running for home. ( Begin again.) We dance down through the ages mother to mother, never alone. ( Begin again.)
Begin. begin again. Begin. Begin again. Begin again.
I am grass like an ocean, rivers of mountains, choirs of stone.
Rivers of mountains, choirs of stone.
Choirs of stone.
III. The Beauty Way (Based on the Navajo Beauty Way Ceremony)
Oh Beauty! Oh Beauty!
In beauty may I walk.
Through the returning season may I walk.
Grasshoppers at my feet. A sky of joyful birds.
On the trail of sacred pollen may I walk.
Beauty before me. Beauty behind me. Beauty above me.
Beauty all around.
In my youth may I walk.
In my age may I walk.
In beauty, it is finished.
In beauty, it is finished.
In beauty, we begin, again.
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Marisol Caballero
January 22, 2012
Marisol Caballero reflects on the symbolism of the Virgin of Guadalupe as a feminine image of the Divine. How may this “goddess”, native to the Americas, speak to us, as Unitarian Universalists, as well as unite diverse populations in compassion, perseverance, and justice?
When I was a very young infant, before I would fully focus on faces or follow sounds much, I am told that I would stare in the direction of a statue that my mother had on her dresser of the Virgin of Guadalupe. No matter where I was in the room, I would try to turn toward that statue. My mom tells me it was the weirdest thing and that visitors to our house would often comment on it, saying that it looked as if I was communicating with her in some way. This may be hyperbole, but it makes for a nice story. And, part of me likes to believe a little that I was born with a special affinity for the Lady, that she drew my eyes to her as she continues to draw my heart, and that a child development specialist can’t easily explain this story away. No, I don’t truly believe that a statue has super powers, nor am I a closet Catholic- in fact I was have been attending UU churches since age two, but there exists a subversive yet compassionate power in the story and symbolism of the Virgin of Guadalupe that transcends religion and that strengthens my faith.
It isn’t often that we hear about traditionally Catholic imagery from our Unitarian Universalist pulpits but as a Chicana from Texas, my cultural connection to her runs deep. Just like each of us, my personal and cultural history influences my worldview and my theology, but I choose to speak from this perspective not because I wish to exoticize my story and my ministry or to become a novelty act. I choose to share such cultural expressions because it is my authentic starting point. One of my professors at seminary, Dr. James Cone, used to remind us in class that, “to do theology, you have to start where you’re at. You must speak from your unique vantage point.”
The image and symbolism of the Virgin of Guadalupe has much to offer UU’s personally, of all backgrounds and genders, as we struggle to equalize the playing fields, seeking justice for the oppressed, and as we strive toward greater compassion in our daily lives, not to mention as we also endeavor to create a more multicultural Unitarian Univeraslism. But, before she can be understood as a universal emblem, the Virgin of Guadalupe must be understood, as her Mexican people know her.
As we learned in the story of her apparition to Juan Diego, the Virgin appeared in solidarity with the marginalized indigenous population. She chose Juan Diego, a poor Aztec, to carry her message. She spoke to him in his language, not the language of the oppressors, from which Christianity had been taught to the Indians. She had brown skin. She wore Aztec astrological imagery on her robe. She was one who they could identify with because she looked like them. She was one of them and still remains so. Most importantly, she does not allow the marginalized to feel inferior. She raises the self-worth of the Mexican people with a mother’s compassion and offers her protection in their struggle.
The Mexican people, and those of Mexican descent, are a mix of various indigenous, Spanish (and other European), and African people. They speak many native languages in addition to Spanish, and many Mexican-Americans (Chicanos) speak no Spanish at all. Before the legendary apparition of the Virgin of Guadalupe, most Christian conversions had been made at the end of a Spanish steel sword. Mary had the effect of uniting the old and the new. She was a fusion of the indigenous and of the oppressor, much like the blood running through the veins of those she calls her children. She offered a means by which her people could retain their cultural identity with pride- with respect to the need for self-preservation amidst a violent theocracy.
This Mary continues to be such a means of synthesis for Mexicans and those of Mexican descent today. She unifies us as a cultural icon, no matter our language, religion, dialect or gender. She is our common mother, our loving ancestor. She is called by many names, among them are: Mother of Mexico, Mother of the Americas, (Nuestra Senora de Guadalupe) Our Lady of Guadalupe, and my great-grandmother- the matriarch of our family- called her affectionately, mi morenita (my little dark-skinned lady). She remains a symbol of strength for her marginalized people for after all, even if her story is only a myth, it reminds us that we are worthy of unconditional love.
In our science-minded culture, we say things like “only a myth”, as if myths were powerless things, when we have learned that myths are, in fact, values and ideals in the embryonic stage. Religions and nations alike were built on myths. (Remember George Washington and the cherry tree?) But, the story of the Virgin of Guadalupe is a revolutionary myth in that it offers us a woman (and a woman of color, no less!) as our champion! Maria de Guadalupe offers us all another way to imagine God. She is a feminine alternative.
Many White feminists have historically rejected her image, misunderstanding her due to centuries of misogynistic false interpretations. She has been said to be the reason that so many women dislike themselves, since she has been lifted up as the ideal of womanhood while women are simultaneously told that her perfection is unattainable. She has been accused of keeping women meek and silently obedient, since her eyes are cast downward. She has also been misinterpreted as a proponent of joyfully bearing one’s suffering, regardless of the hardship it may cause us and those we love. Some school districts have even banned her image on t-shirts, claiming ties to gang violence.
Latinas, however, have long known that although for centuries many have tried to pervert the image of Guadalupe in an effort to keep us in a subjugated place, most of us never truly bought it. She is quite the opposite. She is our Rosie the Riveter. Instead of being an ideal of womanhood that is unachievable, we can emulate her willingness to stand up to power and demand that the oppressed be recognized. We view her downcast eyes as a representation of her gentle, loving spirit and she is not silenced easily- she persistently appeared to Juan Diego three times before the Bishop recognized him. She did not accept him backing down and inspired in him the courage to persevere. To Christian Latinas, she is more accessible than a Father God or His divine Son, Jesus.
Dolores Huerta, co-founder with Cesar Chavez of the United Farm Workers union, heroine of the Chicano Civil Rights Movement, and single mother of eleven, says, “I don’t think I could have survived without her. She is a symbol of faith, hope and leadership. She has been incorporated into everything we do,” she said, “If she’s not there, you notice her absence right away.” Mexicans and Chicanos have carried her image in just about every rally, march, picket, protest, and even battle for centuries. Anywhere there are people of Mexican decent advocating for social justice for their communities, chances are, the Virgin of Guadalupe’s image will be there as well. In fact, I was not at all shocked when, in some of the media coverage of the many nationwide protests of the hateful new Arizona immigration law, marchers have been carrying images and statues of her. No doubt the thought of a compassionate and persevering feminine representation of the divine is bringing strength to those in fear of what this law’s implementation may bring (or, has already brought) to their lives and to their families and communities.
In her essay, “Latinas and Religion: Subordination or State of Grace?”, Laura M. Padilla tells us that,
“The Virgin’s model allows us to discard the notion that we must accept our suffering with dignity, thus freeing us to turn our attention to how to alleviate that suffering, regardless of whether it consists of physical, emotional, economic, or spiritual abuseÉ [she] also turns from a top-down hierarchy where God speaks and we listen, to a model where we mutually communicate with compassionÉ [and] shows Latinas how to incorporate [our spirituality] into our lives in a holistic way that is not based on hierarchy, opposition, intolerance or superiority. Rather, she points us to a framework that incorporates the feminine, not to the exclusion of the masculine, but in balance with it.”
In the story, she chose to appear before a man, Juan Diego, demonstrating that although she is “divinely” feminine, she exists for men, as well. Men can also both be mothered by and guided by her, while also learning to emulate her maternal attributes of tender nurturance yet strong advocacy for one’s family. For Guadalupe, this family does not begin and end with bloodlines. Our family is made of up humanity, itself, for we are interconnected. The marginalized and the oppressor are both of her concern, as she reaches for the heart of the wealthy Bishop through the experience of the impoverished Juan Diego. Men may follow the example of her symbolism not only as the sons, husbands, fathers, and brothers of woman, but also as members of the human family who recognize that ignoring the suffering of others prohibits the privileged from realizing their full humanity.
In this way, the Virgin of Guadalupe has relevance and meaning not only for all genders, but I would argue, all people. In the way that the image and symbolism of the Virgin of Guadalupe transcends religion, language, gender, and national borders, she also transcends race. Just as she unites the diverse people of Mexican descent in a common cultural identity, so may she unite the world to a common cause of justice, of working to end all forms of oppression. Although she will always be the treasured product of the Mexican people, the strength of her symbolism has the potential to reach anyone looking for a loving yet righteously angry, gentle yet fierce, and patient yet persistent ally in the struggle.
As UU’s, so often we begin our prayers to “God of many names”. In the Virgin of Guadalupe, we recognize that one name for God is “Mother”. The feminine divine does exist in many traditions: Hindus have Kali, Lakshmi and others, Buddhists have Tara and Kwan Yin, and pagans may call her Gaea or Great Mother, to name just a few. The Virgin of Guadalupe is the manifestation of the feminine divine for this continent. She is our native goddess, Mother of the Americas, and offers the world her love, encouragement, and protection both to those who view her as a powerful symbol as well as to those who view her as a supernatural being with intercessory abilities.
Next time you see a candle, a keychain, a mural, or anything else that her ever-so-pervasive image adorns, see her for who she is to her people and who she can be for all- a powerful symbol of compassion, fortitude, and justice. Not a cultural cliche or tacky kitsch, but a reminder that we shall overcome, that Si Se Puede (Yes, it can be done), for she is Mary, Mary, Quite Revolutionary!
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Rev. Peter Morales
President of the Unitarian Universalist Association
January 15, 2012
Audio of this service does not include the music and some of the readings due to technical constraints. An unabridged video of the complete service can be purchased from our bookstore.
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Call to Celebration:
Rev. Bret Lortie, Minister, First UU Church of San Antonio
Chalice Lighting:
Reading:
Exerpt from The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan
Read by Rev. Kathleen Ellis, Co-Minister, Live Oak UU Church
O! You bad little thing! — said the woman, teasing her baby granddaughter. “Is Buddha teaching you to laugh for no reason?” As the baby continued to gurgle, the woman felt a deep wish stirring in hear heart. “Even if I could live forever,” she said to the baby, “I still don’t know which way I would teach you. I was once so free and innocent. I too laughed for no reason. But later I threw away my foolish innocence to protect myself. And then I taught my daughter, your mother, to shed her innocence so she would not be hurt as well. Little one, was this kind of thinking wrong?… ” The baby laughed, listening to her grandmother’s laments.
“O! O! you say you are laughing because you have already lived forever, over and over again? You say you are the Queen Mother of the Western Skies. now come back to give me the answer Good, good. I am listening . . . Thank you, little Queen. And you must teach my daughter this same lesson. How to lose your innocence but not your hope. How to laugh forever.”
Welcome:
Susan Thomson, President-Elect First UU Church of Austin
Greetings from the Austin Community:
State Representative Donna Howard
Reading:
Excerpt from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard
Read by Rev. Eliza Galaher, Wildflower UU Church
When the doctor took her bandages off and led her into the garden, the girl who was no longer blind saw “the tree with the lights in it.” It was for this tree I searched through the peach orchards of summer, in the forests of fall and down winter and spring for years. Then one day I was walking along Tinker Creek thinking of nothing at all and I saw the tree with the lights in it. I saw the backyard cedar where the mourning doves roost charged and transfigured, each cell buzzing with flame. I stood on the grass with the lights in it, grass that was wholly fire, utterly focused and utterly dreamed. It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance. The lights of the fire abated, but I’m still spending the power. Gradually the lights went out in the cedar, the colors died, the cells unflamed and disappeared. I was still ringing. I had my whole life been a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck. I have since only rarely seen the tree with the lights in it. The vision comes and goes, mostly goes, but I live for it, for the moment when the mountains open and a new light roars in spate through the crack, and the mountains slam.
Greetings from the Southwest UU Conference
Jennifer Nichols, District Director for Lifespan Faith Development
Charge to the Congregation
Andrea Lerner, DE Metro NY District
Reading:
Credo by Judith Roche
Read by Sharon Moore and Michael Kersey,
Co-Chairs of the Ministerial Search Committee
I believe in the cave paintings at Lascaux,
the beauty of the clavicle,
the journey of the salmon,
her leap up any barrier,
the scent of home waters
she finds through celestial navigation.
I believe in all the gods –
I just don’t like some of them.
I believe the war is always against the imagination,
is recurring, repetitive, and relentless.
I believe in fairies, elves, angels and bodisatvas,
Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy.
I have seen and heard ghosts.
I believe that Raven invented the Earth
And so did Coyote. In archeology
lie the clues. The threshold is numinous
and the way in is the way out.
I believe in the alphabets – all of them –
and the stories seeping from their letters.
I believe in dance as prayer, that the heart
beat invented rhythm and chant -.
or is it the other way around –
I believe in the wisdom of the body.
I believe that art saves lives
and love makes it worth living them.
And that could be the other way around, too.
Offering for the Unitarian Universalist Association
Laurel Amabile
Sermon:
Peter Morales, President, Unitarian Universalist Association
Act of Installation:
Susan Thomson, President-Elect
Charge to the Minister
Kiya Heartwood
Reading:
Fearing Paris by Marsha Truman Cooper
Read by Rev. Daniel O’Connell, Minister, First UU Church of Houston
Suppose that what you fear
could be trapped
and held in Paris.
Then you would have
the courage to go
everywhere in the world.
All the directions of the compass
open to you,
except the degrees east or west
of true north
that lead to Paris.
Still, you wouldn’t dare
put your toes
smack dab on the city limit line.
You’re not really willing
to stand on a mountainside,
miles away,
and watch the Paris lights
come up at night.
Just to be on the safe side
you decide to stay completely
out of France.
But then the danger
seems too close
even to those boundaries,
and you feel
the timid part of you
covering the whole globe again.
You need the kind of friend
who learns your secret and says,
“See Paris First.”
Reading:
We have not come to take prisoners by Hafiz
Read by Brian Ferguson, Minister, San Marcos UU Fellowship
We have not come here to take prisoners,
But to surrender ever more deeply
To freedom and joy.
We have not come into this exquisite world
To hold ourselves hostage from love.
Run my dear,
From anything
That may not strengthen
Your precious budding wings.
Run like hell my dear,
From anyone likely
To put a sharp knife
Into the sacred, tender vision
Of your beautiful heart.
We have a duty to befriend
Those aspects of obedience
That stand outside of our house
And shout to our reason
“O please, O please,
Come out and play.”
For we have not come here to take prisoners
Or to confine our wondrous spirits,
But to experience ever and ever more deeply
Our divine courage, freedom and
Light!
Benediction:
The Fountain by Denise Levertov
Read by Rev. Meg Barnhouse
Don’t say, don’t say there is no water
to solace the dryness at our hearts.
I have seen
the fountain springing out of the rock wall
and you drinking there. And I too
before your eyes
found footholds and climbed
to drink the cool water.
The woman of that place, shading her eyes,
frowned as she watched – but not because
she grudged the water,
only because she was waiting
to see we drank our fill and were
refreshed.
Don’t say, don’t say there is no water.
That fountain is there among its scalloped
green and gray stones,
it is still there and always there
with its quiet song and strange power
to spring in us,
up and out through the rock.
