How can we begin to dismantle racism in our hearts and minds? How can we dismantle it in the structures of our society? Are all humans racist when they are born? What transformations might we hope for?
OUT OF A MOUNTAIN OF DESPAIR, A STONE OF HOPE
There is a lot I don’t understand about racism. If I were to talk about all the things I don’t know, we would be here a lot longer than we want to be, so I will talk about some of the things I do know. I know that every group on earth is racist about some other group. Here is what they all say:” They are dirty and lazy. They don’t want to work. They are over emotional and their religion is strange. Their brains are smaller– they just can’t think the way we do, so they are better at hands-on work — as long as you tell them exactly what to do. They will hurt children and women.” That is the Japanese talking about Koreans, whom they traditionally have despised.
It’s the he Northern Italians talking about the Southern Italians, the people or Northern India talking about the Southern Tamil Indians. In Sri Lanka the Tamils hate the Singhalese. Moslems and Hindus slaughtered each other in 1947, as Pakistan and Bangladesh were being partitioned off from India. More than a million Hindus and Muslims were killed during the partition. Malaysians hate the Chinese. The Serbs hate the Croats. The Czechs hate the Slovaks. In Africa, the Hutus hate the Tutsis and slaughter each other. Right now the Tutsis are in power, but that will change, as it has before. In Nigeria the Hausa hate the Ibo. Sunni and Shiite Moslems war with one another in Iraq. In Syria, there are families and clans that hate each other. In Darfur, in the Sudan, the Arab-identifying Muslim nomadic Sudanese are slaughtering the non-Arab identifying Muslim sedentary Sudanese. The Israelis hate the Arabs. Will it always be this way? What has to change?
We try anti-racism training, with mixed results. We learn about the way we use language: we talk about darkness as evil and bad, we use the color black to symbolize negative things. “A black mood,” “a black-hearted person.” I was with a group of ministers doing an art project. We were making collages to symbolize our lives. One woman had colored an area of her page dark brown. She said, “This area symbolizes my depression. I learned in anti-racism training not to use black, so I’m using dark brown instead.” Bless our hearts.
To overcome racism, I have to learn to read another human’s face and watch their behavior before I can tell what kind of person they are. Their skin tone is one important thing about a person. Some people who go through anti-ism training say “I just don’t even see what people’s skin color is.” Well, you need to, because it’s an important part of who they are. One part. Like being gay, or being able-bodied, or being tall. One part of who you are. We want to work towards seeing one another as individual humans, reserved or out-going, structured or flexible, buoyant or grounded, excitable or calm. Those qualities come in all colors
That’s one thing we can do as individuals, and although it is arduous, it feels easier to me than dealing with institutional racism, which is one of the other things we have to fix. In his book Dismantling Racism, Joseph Barndt defines racism as “prejudice plus power.” Hispanics and Blacks have strained relations, Koreans and Blacks live in mutual mistrust in the cities of the Northeast. But none of those groups has the power to create a system that is the embodiment of those ideas. This is the point at which I can fall asleep if I want to. I don’t have to care about this. I have the luxury, being light-skinned, not to care or think about this. Not having to face it is one of the privileges I enjoy because of being white.
European Americans have most of the power in the economy and the government. We also have tremendous power in the schools and the service industries Barndt says our institutions are racist because the power behind them is White, and therefore they perpetuate white European values. . I don’t notice it, and I want to believe people who say “Aw, it’s not really that way.” None of the solutions we are currently trying seem to work well. There is some legislation that is working over time, but there are those working to dismantle that legislation as we speak. More long meetings where blacks and whites meet to talk don’t feel like a solution to me. I’ve been to enough of those. I have thought of an instant way to bring it into stark relief for myself and all of Austin. I believe with this plan institutionalized racism in our nation would be wiped out within years.
How would I do this? Imagine this solution: How about we pass legislation that would mandate that all children, in their tenth and eleventh years, do a two-year “exchange-student” program in other neighborhoods of their town. Your child might end up on a golf course or in a housing project. It would teach, enlighten, terrify and annoy all of us.
Be comforted in knowing that it won’t ever happen, but be aware of the feelings it brings up.
Do you think that would encourage the middle-class people of all to come up with housing improvements? Do you think that would encourage us to provide drug treatment for addicted mothers so their children would have a chance at life? And so their children wouldn’t make our lives hell during the time they were with us? I have to say I would in no way want that legislation passed, and the vehemence with which I do not want my children in a “bad neighborhood” tells me something important about the situation. This would counteract the anesthesia that we give ourselves so as not to notice the conditions spawned by institutional and cultural racism. That fantasy proposal woke me right up. I have privileges and so do my children that a non-white woman and her children do not have. I don’t have to worry about cashing a check. I don’t have to train my sons to be wary of officers of the law. There are so many things I don’t have to worry about since my sons have light skin.
None of us in here wants to be racist. We don’t like to think of ourselves that way. But most of us do participate unthinkingly in white privilege. This is not something to wallow in guilt about. Wallowing in guilt makes you stupid and drains your energy. You don’t think well. You don’t want to face the people who don’t have the privileges you do. White privilege is something to notice. This is not something non white people can or should have to help white people with. This is white people’s responsibility. In our UU churches, bless our hearts, it is not uncommon for the people of color who come in our doors to be approached about being on the anti-racism committee. It happens sometimes that when a black person joins the choir, suddenly the repertoire changes to include more gospel songs, even if that particular black person prefers Chopin or country.
Dr.. King said in his “I have a dream” speech “we shall hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope.” The racism in our world certainly could weigh on a person like a mountain of despair.
I have thought a lot about despair and hope. I’ve been wondering about that image of a stone of hope. It comes from the mountain of despair, so it’s made of the same stuff. How can that be?
The thing that despair and hope have in common is the vision of a better future. A necessary component of despair is knowing that things aren’t what they should be. To feel that, you need a vision of what things should be. Despair is when the vision of what should be combines with the weight of what is and threatens to overwhelm you. You can’t see how to get there. You can’t believe things will ever be better. Despair is giving up. The antedote to despair is that we just take a little piece of that mountain, and the piece we take is the vision of how things could be.
We all know that, if all you have is a sense of how things should be, you can be one miserable human being. In ancient Greek mythology, when Pandora opened the container and let all the evils fly out into the world, she slammed the lid shut with just one left inside. What was it? Hope. What was hope doing among the evils of the world? Hesiod said it was because hope is empty and no good, and it takes away people’s industriousness. Friedrich Nietzsche said ” Hope is the worst of evils, for it prolongs the torments of man.” Yes, hoping without action is foolish, if an action can be taken.
Rita Mae Brown says “Never hope more than you work.” That’s what those people in Ohio were doing. Hoping and working. That’s what the people who believed in Dr. King’s vision did. They held the vision and they worked. Maybe stone is just the right size for hope. Maybe the rest of what we work with is clarity, reason, facing the elements of our lives and those of others with open eyes.
Maybe stone is just the right material for hope. Dr. King did not say “Out of the mountain of despairs we mine a jewel of hope.” It is not something rare and precious we find within the despair, covered, held and hidden in there. Maybe stone is just the right value for hope. Stone is ancient, far more ancient than humanity, and it’s everywhere. It’s common. We can lose hope over and over and just pick up more anywhere. You can throw hope away in a fit of rage and loss of spirit, then just pick up another piece.
Maybe stone is just the right hardness for hope too. Hope has to be tough. One of my friends said at a twelve step meeting her sponsor handed her a stone and said, “Any time you feel like taking a drink, put this in your mouth. When it dissolves, go ahead and have a drink.”
We hold on to our hope. Find yours, and live with it in your pocket, in the palm of your hand. What do you hope for? Hope, and we do what we can do make things better The most important thing is that we do it together.
Our fifth principle talks about affirming and promoting the democratic process in our congregations. Does that mean every voice should be heard? How should it be heard?
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Conflict is part of a healthy system. We can’t agree about everything all the time. How do we voice disagreement without being disrespectful or unkind?
What is it about disagreeing that is so—-disagreeable? It all goes back to the families we grew up in.
In many families, disagreement is seen as an attack. Punishment comes down, if not directly, then indirectly, later. They WILL get you. Disagreeing is against the set of unspoken family rules everyone learns and abides by– until their teen years. This unwritten list of family truths and rules can be called the “family treaty.” To violate that “treaty” is to imperil the family’s sense of security and unity. Any violation of the treaty makes a family member fill up with formless dread and guilt. The treaty in most families says that there is only one way to do things—the right way. Other ways are wrong, and if you do things other ways you must be stupid— or dangerous. Most people comes into a marriage or a job or a church with an unquestioned certainty that the way their family did things is the standard way, and all other ways are somehow deviant.
Each family’s “treaty” is a powerful force in members’ behavior far into their adult lives. What things can you say? What things are unsayable? What can you notice? What are you not allowed to notice? Can you say “Mom’s passed out again” or do you have to say “Mom’s not feeling well this afternoon.” Can you say “Dad’s having an affair” or are you not allowed to notice? What emotions are you allowed to have? Some families only allow anger, and affection is seen as “not done.” Some familes are the opposite. Positive emotions are okay, but no one in the family is allowed to be angry. In some of those families, the anger turns inward and becomes toxic, turning into depression. Or you have to say “I’m not angry, I’m hurt,” I’m not angry, I’m just a little frustrated.”. You can tell when you have crossed the line and violated the treaty by the shocked silence that immediately falls. It is as if the brains of everyone around you have gone blank. People don’t always gasp, but they may as well….
Families have standard ways they handle money, discipline, anger, affection, conflict, power, loss, embarrassment. If you work on any church committees you have run across all different styles of working. We carry so much with us is from our raising.
Disagreeing is something almost always covered by the family treaty. Some people do it directly. “I don’t agree.” Some do it by sidestepping “Whatever…” Some do it sweetly. They smile and nod and then roll their eyes at the person next to them, or they talk to others about their opinion but not to you. Some families shame you when you disagree. “Well, that’s just foolish,” someone will say, to make you shut up and sit down. Or, “You don’t think THAT?” Like a person of your obvious caliber could never truly be proposing an idea so stupid and ill-conceived. They shame you into agreeing, or bludgeon you into it. In my family they would just talk at you and quote Bible verses until you were so stunned by the barrage of words that you would nod and agree to whatever it was just to get some rest.
Styles of disagreeing are something we learn from our growing-up time. Some of us are logical or distant or impassioned or we raise our voices or we call names like “illogical,” or “uninformed” or New-Agey” or “cold” or “rigid.” Some of us state our case mildly and expect others to read the passion betwen the lines. Others have fun with building dramatic noisy arguments that act like steamrollers, mowing down all opposition. Given that we are bound to meet all these people in our lives, how can we disagree passionately and calmly?
Keep breathing. Some of us forget to breathe when we are stressed, and we don’t think well without oxygen.
Acknowledge what kind of situation you’re in. You can say “Whew, this sure is a hot topic.” or “We sure are talking about some hard things.” This lets the other know that you aren’t dismissing the importance of your conversation, and that you know this is a big deal for them and a big deal for you.
Stay on the topic at hand. What question is on the table NOW. “If only’s” are non-productive. Saying “We wouldn’t even BE in this situation if you hadn’t..” is not productive. Bringing up other problems makes a conversation that might make things better less likely to happen.
A disagreement is not an attack. This is something that’s hard to remember. I know people who even get uncomfortable if they don’t like the same food or music as a friend. Many of us grew up in families where closeness meant sameness. As we become more differentiated ( a goal of growth and wisdom and therapy) we become more comfortable with differences.
If you find yourself thinking “You CAN’T see this any other way,” be quiet for a while until you can see how someone COULD see it another way.
Start from the position that there may be more than one way to do things. Be as specific and concrete in your comments as possible. Generalities don’t get you anywhere. Words like “Support,” “justice,” “love,” are very general. I’ve told some of you about the couple where the woman said she wanted a kiss when she and the man saw each other after work. “I DO kiss you!” he said.
“Not a peck on the cheek, I want a kiss on the lips”
“How long a kiss?” I asked.
“About—um—-five seconds long.”
“Can you do that for her?”
“Sure, I can do that. No problem!” Specifics get you places.
If you have a criticism, please try to have a good comment AND a constructive suggestion at the same time. This soup is wonderfully thick—it would suit me better if there were a little less salt.
Ask “What would happen if….?” This is a good queston for many situations. Teaching a child to tie her shoe: What would happen if you looped it this way and pulled? For teenagers: “What would happen if you came in the door and asked for the car as if you loved and respected me?” For spouses: “What would happen if we wrote down what we spend and told each other every time we charged something?”
Try to say your piece and then leave it alone. Some of us have the misplaced faith that saying something one more time will be the key….
Speak for yourself. Don’t say “Everybody in town laughs at you for being like this.”
Appreciate and applaud drama.
Ask questions.
Questions:
Tell me how you came to this position?
Help me understand more about it.
What appeals to you about this?
How does it feel to you?
What are the strengths of this position to you?
What does this touch in you?
What, if anything, do you feel uncomfortable with about this?
Here is what feels uncomfortable or disagreeable to me about what you think or what you believe. Can you help me with that?
When you find a certain person difficult, odds are that many people do. They have an abrasive style that puts off most people.
They rob your time and energy.
Their behavior is out of proportion to the problem.
Try to be direct with these people and not make excuses for their behavior or play games with it.
Remember our principles: each person has worth and dignity. We trust the democratic process. We support each other in their responsible search for truth and meaning, no matter how wrong they’re being.
You may want to try saying: “The Divinity in me salutes the Divinity in you.” or–“You may be one last spark we all need to light the whole world.”
The fourth in a sermon series on the seven UU Principles. We agree to affirm and promote “a free and responsible search for truth and meaning.” Some say that a search for truth is too private a focus for a person of faith, that the search needs instead to be for justice. Some say you can’t articulate the Truth anyway, and maybe there is no capital “T” Truth anyway.
Here we are at the season of holy days, when most religions originating in the northern hemisphere celebrate the return of the light. Hanukkah is the Jewish celebration of the light that burned in the temple longer than it could naturally have burned, a miracle of light in the darkness. Hinduism celebrates Diwali, the Pagans celebrate the Winter Solstice and Christianity celebrates the birth of the son at the same time that its Roman rulers were celebrating the birth of the sun. No one knows the historical truth of these stories, but we feel in our hearts that they have a different kind of truth, an inner truth that can teach us about ourselves, about how to live well, how to get along with the way the Universe seems to work, a truth of the spirit.
In the Hebrew and Christian scriptures, there are only two declarative sentences that are translated “God is….” God is love. God is light. For those of you who have an interest in how the Divine is spoken of in scriptures, I’ll go into this just for a moment more. It doesn’t merely say “the Divine is loving,” or “the Divine is like light.” It says “the Divine is love.” “The Divine is light.” That feels more cellular to me than descriptive. The Christian scriptures which talk about Rabbi Jesus as if he were a special part of the Divine call him the Word. The Greek in the NT translated this way is the Greek word logos. Logos is a concept whose many layers of meaning include not only “word,” but more on the order of “reason,” “structure,” “organizing principle.” Scholars think the author of this part of the scripture was educated in the Greek manner but was born a Jew. In the Jewish scriptures, the word is a creative force, especially the word of God. It’s how they described the creation of the skies, the oceans and the earth. In this religion, the creation wasn’t a birth from a great mother or a star, it was done by words. So when the gospel writer says “in the beginning was the word,” and implies that Rabbi Jesus and that word are the same, he is trying to communicate that he wants people to worship the reason of God, the Creative power of God, the underlying principles by which everything in the Universe is laid out. In this same gospel, the spirit of God is called the “Spirit of Truth.” I know, it’s quite unusual to hear a Unitarian minister speak about God, Rabbi Jesus, and the Spirit It’s Christmas.
In my opinion, when we talk about truth, “capital T Truth,” we are talking about something that has this kind of generative power. We find truth and it changes things. It’s not just something to which we assent by nodding our heads sagely or clapping our hands and rejoicing that we have another bit of knowledge to add to our cocktail party conversation or our discussions with friends. In the view of these scriptures, love, light, reason, and the truth of things are ways of describing the divine.
Because our fourth principle says that we agree to affirm and promote a free and responsible search for truth and meaning, I’m going to tell you something true about the Christmas story in the Gospel of Luke that you may not yet know. We’ll see how you feel about knowing it. We’ll see if it changes anything.
Did you know that a person steeped in Palestinian culture would understand the Christmas birth story very differently from the way I always have? I’m a bit chagrined to have found this out, and I’m wondering if I should keep quiet about it, because it will ruin a lovely story. You know how you hear the story of an event, a marriage, a journey and you think to yourself “That’s a great story. What really happened is more complicated, but if I say anything that will take away the sweet shape of its telling, that kicking punch line, the moving moral at the end.” The truth is still compelling to most of us, though. We want to know.
In churches all over the place the kids are dressed as shepherds, the angels have their wings on, the kids playing Mary and Joseph are ready, and this year’s baby Jesus has been chosen. The narrator tells the story about Joseph and Mary traveling from Galilee to Bethlehem for the census, and the couple goes from one inn to the next only to be told there is no room for them to stay. They end up in a stable with the animals, far from any other human contact, giving birth alone and far from home. Sermons are preached that go like this:
“Don’t be like the mean old inn-keeper who wouldn’t give Jesus a place. You make room in your life, your heart, etc. for the child.”
We do need to hear the message of making room in our lives for Spirit, and it’s a moving commentary about the comfortable and the safe people having a harder time making room for the Light than the outsiders and the lowly.
I started reading the lectures of Bible scholar Kenneth Bailey, an author and lecturer in Middle Eastern New Testament Studies. In addition to a doctorate in New Testament, he holds graduate degrees in Arabic language and literature as well as Systematic Theology. He spent forty years living and teaching New Testament in Egypt, Lebanon, Jerusalem and Cyprus. He is the author of books in English and in Arabic. He, in dialogue with Palestinian Christian Bible scholars, has illuminated the cultural context of the story behind our children’s pageants. Palestinian culture is much the same now as it was in the time of Jesus’ birth, so most Arab believers have always understood the nuances of the story.
The first thing you’ll want to know is that hospitality is the highest value of the Palestinian culture, and that has been so for thousands of years. Joseph returning to the city of his ancestors would never have stayed in a commercial inn, even if Bethlehem had been large enough to sustain one. He would have stayed with family. For a descendant of David to be turned away from staying with family in the City of David would have brought unthinkable shame on the whole town.
The word in the text translated as “inn” is the Greek word katalyma or kataluma. This is not a commercial building with rooms for travelers. When Luke meant to talk about a commercial inn, as in the parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37), he used the Greek pandocheion. Kataluma is a guest space, typically one of the two rooms of a common village home.
“A simple Palestinian village home in the time of King David up until the Second World War had two rooms – one for guests, one for the family. The family room had an area, usually about four feet lower, for the family donkey, the family cow, and two or three sheep. They are brought in last thing at night and taken out and tied up in the courtyard first thing in the morning.
Dr. Kenneth Bailey; Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes: Cultural Studies in the Gospels.
“The days came for her to be delivered” the Gospel writer says. Nothing in the text says Mary was in labor as they were looking for a place. Mary would have spent the last part of her pregnancy in the home of whatever cousins they were visiting. There wasn’t room in the guest room, so the baby was laid in one of the mangers dug into the stone floor of the family room or made of wood and stood up on the family room floor, surrounded by animals, aunties. uncles and cousins.
Bailey has written a children’s Christmas pageant, if telling a more culturally accurate story is important to you. In the old story we are told to make room for strangers, to make room for the Divine. We are told the Divine is an outsider, despised and rejected from the beginning. We should be ashamed of ourselves for being selfish and uncaring.
In the version that is congruent with Palestinian culture, though, it seems the Divine comes to birth when you have finally found your people, aunts, uncles, cousins, friends, animals, warm, noisy and crowded. There is no shame for me in the story, no scolding tale of humans failing yet again, just a family doing the best it can.
The stories we tell in our families and in our faith communities shape our experience. They signal to us who we are, where we come from, what we can expect. If I tell the story that I’m unlucky, I am more likely to notice the times when things don’t work out my way. If I grew up on the story that my people get their value from being smart, when I make a mistake or forget something, or when I fail, I feel cast out of the warm circle of belonging. If I go to a church where the story is told that a father killed his son so that the father could forgive us for our sins, and that this father loves me but would send me to eternal hellfire for making a mistake, I might feel like an overly soft parent if I don’t take my children’s mistakes out of their hide.
I like the story with less shame in it, with less loneliness surrounding the light at its birth. What changes might ripple out from the new story? I’m pondering this in my heart.
Some people who write about UUism say our principles are bland, or that they encourage us to be a private church where our search for truth is in danger of making us end up in a dusty room surrounded by books and CDs of spiritual teachings, improving ourselves and searching until we die, more wise but unworn by interaction with the world. I think if we just keep coming to church that won’t be a danger. Surrounded by folks who are in pain, in need, who are feeling hollow and restless or full and overflowing, surrounded by music and joy, as we find truth it will explode in us like a big packet of seeds, and some of them will begin to grow and make demands and create new shapes in our thinking and our doing. The magi, the wise men in the story teach us some things about how to do this. If this were my dream it would mean that you don’t search for truth alone, but in company. Sometimes you travel a long way. You orient yourself by the light you see and move toward it. Be prepared for trickery from the powers that be. They do not benefit from the truth. And you prepare yourself to find the truth by bringing your gifts to give to it. You don’t show up like a rude guest, empty handed. Bring the truth presents, because the truth cannot just be consumed, but you enter into a relationship with the truth that is ongoing.
One of the messages this season is that the truth is organic, personal, not just a concept that will help you win your next argument. It might change things, make demands, stir things up, ask things of you, send you on a quest, open you and scatter you like seeds.
Why has Unitarianism always been such a shy denomination? Why do we define ourselves so easily with what we don’t believe rather than what we do? What does Harvard have to do with our history? Who is William Ellery Channing? What is the Baltimore Sermon?
The opening scene in the birth of American Unitarianism as an organized denomination took place in 1805 in the halls of Harvard University.
I love reading church history. We need a Donimick Dunne to write about it for Vanity Fair magazine. There is intrigue and the clash of personalities, vanity and ambition, integrity and the clear sense that what is obvious to one group seems dangerously misguided to another.
In 1803 the man who had been Hollis Professor of Divinity died, leaving the post open. Ministers were trained by the Divinity professor. There was no Divinity School before this. Ministers were trained during their college years. Many went on for further study in Germany. At Harvard, the Hollis Professor of Divinity had been a moderate Calvinist. If it strikes you that you aren’t completely clear any more about what Calvinism is, I’m about to remind you. John Calvin, in the 1550’s, revived theological ideas of Augustine of Hippo, who was an Ethiopian Bishop of the Christian church in the early 400’s.
“TULIP” is the mnemonic device by which students remember the Calvinist precepts:
Total depravity of human nature: the belief that humans are basically bent, and we choose to do destructive things more easily than we choose to do good. No amount of peace education will take the warring out of us, no amount of coddling or challenging in school or at home will take the crime and stupidity out. Mostly we are inclined to choose selfishly, and it is mainly the fear of punishment that keeps us between the lines. This has been the most difficult of my Presbyterian beliefs to give up. I find it a moderately cheerful and relaxing doctrine. If we’re bent to the extent that it’s easier to choose to do destructive things than creative and live-giving things, we’re pretty amazing whether or not we’ve built hospitals or cured cancer. We’re doing well to have gone this long without knocking over a gas station, we’re doing amazingly well to be pretty good people most of the time. Now I try to believe in the basic goodness of people, but it opens one up to more episodes of disappointment.
Unconditional election of the saints: God, for his glory, chose some from the beginning of time to be saved. It follows logically that there are some who are chosen to be damned to eternal punishment. This is the “double predestination” that they somewhat sheepishly teach in Calvinist seminaries. Predestination does NOT mean that everything is foreordained by God, fated, only that the end of things is foreordained. Free will can operate in-between. Your end is the only thing that is predestined. Over the centuries, many Christians shrank from the harshness of this doctrine. After Augustine proposed it in the 5th century, a church council met to declare it “anathema” which is Greek for really really icky and not true.
Limited atonement: Also following logically from the election of some to be saved: that Jesus died, then for those who are chosen to be saved, and NOT for those who weren’t chosen.
“Irresistible grace of God.” If God chooses you to be among the elect, the saved, you will be, bec ause God’s will is always done. If you get saved, it is because you were one of the ones chosen. Don’t worry that you are getting saved all for nought, acting right even though you are doomed to damnation. If you are saved, you are one of the elect. If you refuse to believe, if you don’t act right, if you don’t believe, it is because God’s grace isn’t reaching out to you. If it were reaching out to you, you would “get it.” Since you don’t get it, it’s because, sadly, God doesn’t care whether you get it or not.
Perseverance of the saints: Once you’re saved, you’re always saved. You may struggle, but God will not let you go.
That is traditional Calvinism. There were a hundred years in New England where that was the only brand of Christianity taught by the churches. That is what counted as orthodoxy, right belief. The society in New England was fairly homogeneous. All the Quakers were in PA. The Baptists were in RI. There were Catholics, some Quakers, some Baptists, but most of the citizens of MA were Congregational Calvinist.
Every town had a church whose minister was paid with tax money. This was called the Standing Order, and it had been in effect since the Puritans. Attacked now and then as unfair, it had gone through several versions. By 1805, ministers were paid with tax dollars only if their church didn’t make its budget, and if you were a Quaker, a Baptist or a Catholic, you didn’t have to pay the tax. The Congregational ministers, by this time, were varied in their theology. Some were strict Calvinists, others were more moderate Calvinists. Some had become Liberals. Liberals did not believe or preach the doctrines of Calvinism. Some of them did not believe that humans were born in Sin. They had begun to believe that God had created human beings basically good. They did not see God as demanding blood to forgive sins. Jesus was a savior who saves by his teachings, and by awakening the mind and heart, not by his death on the cross. William Ellery Channing, whose face is on the front of your bulletin, likened the doctrine of the crucifixion as to having a gallows at the center of the Universe, and that the spirit of such a god, “whose very acts of pardon were written in such blood, was terror, not love.
Enter the Bad Guy. There was a Calvinist named Jedediah Morse, who had moved to MA. He was amazed that the Liberal s and Calvinists got along together there so well. He did not approve of this ease, and felt that ministers should be asked to take a stand, to be counted and categorized by where they stood on the TULIP principles. Morse began hinting that the Liberals were tainted with the “Unitarianism that was being preached in England.” Those Unitarians, most notably Joseph Priestly, a scientist and minister whose most well-known discovery was Oxygen) were preaching that Jesus was just a man, possessing no divinity at all. Dr. Morse was troubled that the lack of controversy came from differences not being voiced or pointed out. People were being too nice, and it was getting in the way of knowing who was who. Who could be trusted to preach correct doctrine and who could not.
Before the controversy of 1805, most Liberal preachers doubting Calvinist doctrines did not preach these Liberal thoughts from the pulpit. To avoid controversy and keep peace in the congregations, they did what many Liberal preachers do today. They just preached around the Calvinist doctrines, choosing to preach instead about social responsibility, ethical behavior, and the loving kindness of God. The ministers in MA, as a rule, got along peacefully and well together. At the ministerial association meetings, they avoided speaking of their Liberal beliefs. No one really stood up to be categorized as strict, moderate or liberal. The ministers in the associ ation were in the habit of pulpit exchanges. A minister would be in his own pulpit about half the time. The other half he would preach at other churches. This provided relief to the congregations, who got to hear other voices and other points of view. It also provided relief to the ministers, who had to write fewer sermons, since they could repeat their better ones when they visited another pulpit. The Standing Order of tax-supported worship and the pulpit exchanges were what gave what happened at Harvard the importance it had.
The Hollis professor who died and left his Chair vacant was a moderate and well respected Calvinist. These things were written about him at the time: “In him, never were orthodoxy and charity more closely aligned. and “He was desirous of correcting his own errors, and was willing that others should enjoy their sentiments. “That is the kind of man who can get along with both liberals and conservatives. Those people are hard to find, like a treasure when you come across them.”
Here’s where academic politics come into the story. The President of Harvard procrastinated in suggesting a candidate because the most obvious candidate was a Liberal Boston minister named Henry Ware, and the President was a Calvinist. He didn’t want the controversy. The President just never brought up the subject of a replacement at meetings of the Harvard Corporation, and for two years the post was left vacant. By 1805, a candidate had to be found soon. The Boston papers were making trouble, even intimating that the money in the endowment for the Hollis fellowship was being used for purposes other than that for which it was given. Then that President exited the fray by dying.
A professor. named Eliphalet Pearson took over the acting Presidency, and was widely understood to want the permanent job very badly. In the writing of people who knew him at the time, he was characterized as an “ultra-Liberal before the President’s death, and a staunch Calvinist after. Hm. Why the switch? Some thought he was playing a part for political expediency. He was disliked by the students as a bully, and he tended to alienate even those who agreed with him.
EP and five other men made up the Corporation that governed the university. There was one other staunch Calvinist, two liberals, and two moderates. One of tho se was Judge Oliver Wendell, a liberal whose daughter was married to the conservative Calvinist Abel Holmes. (She was the mother of Oliver Wendell Holmes.) The selection process began with each man in the Corporation writing down two names. The two Calvinists each wrote down names of two Calvinist candidates, the two Liberals each wrote down the names of two Liberal candidates, and the two Moderates each wrote down the names of one Calvinist candidate and one Liberal candidate. Within a few weeks the choice was narrowed to two: Jesse Appleton (a moderate Calvinist) and Henry Ware. The meetings were sour due to the personality clash between EP and Dr. John Eliot, a Liberal minister. It was said that EP’s personal attacks on Eliot were school boyish and mean.
Finally Judge Wendell proposed a compromise. How about Appleton for professor and Ware for President? No, they answered. HW was not suited for the position of President. How about Appleton for President and Ware for professor? NO from John Eliot, who was concerned that JA had an unpleasant and dissonant voice, unsuited to conducting public worship for the community, which as President he would have had to do. Appleton could have won in spite of Eliot’s no vote if EP, wanting the presidency for himself, had not voted against the compromise. Judge Wendell’s compromise failed. Finally, several months later, Henry Ware was elected by a margin of one vote. There was no candidate settled on for President.
The appointment then had to be okayed by the Board of Overseers of the Commonwealth of MA, made up of ministers and politicians. The Calvinists were understandably distressed that the professor of Divinity would not be orthodox. All the ministers that would come out of Harvard now would be taught by a a man they all thought of as a Unitarian.
The only point open for discussion was whether Ware fit the stipulations of the Hollis grant. Dr. Jedediah Morse, who was an ally of Eliphalet Pearson, saw this as an opportunity to show the people how sneaky and deceitful the Liberals were, not wanting to declare outright their position. Here was a chance to cross-examine and bring the Unitarianism to light. With 45 of the 47 members of the Board present, he attacked. What procedure had the Corporation followed to satisfy itself that Ware’s views were in accordance with the terms of Thomas Hollis’s gift. Hollis had written that the professor should be “a man of solid learning in divinity, of sound and orthodox principles. ORTHODOX, said Morse. SEE? This man doesn’t fit! He will not adhere to the Calvinist Westminster Confession. Hollis was not an Arminian (someone who believes that everyone can be saved) or a Unitarian, and he would NEVER have countenanced the election of a man who had departed from sound doctrine. The Liber als’ position was that Hollis, as a Baptist, had already departed from the Westminster Confession, whose doctrines the Baptists did not believe. Baptists believed in Jesus death being for everyone. Hollis himself had written that the only article of belief to be required of his professor should be that “the Bible was the only and most perfect rule for faith and practice, and that it should be interpreted “according to the best light that God shall give him. The election of Ware was no breach of trust, as Morse and Pearson were accusing, but was in keeping with Hollis’s intent. Ware was elected.
Within a matter of weeks, Morse had written and published a pamphlet complaining about the election of Ware. Then, months later, another Liberal was chosen for President. EP resigned and went to be head of Phillips Academy. Morse and Pearson founded Andover Theological Seminary, still turning out Calvinists today, and within three years, in response, Harvard Divinity School was founded.
The ministers in the Standing Order, at Morse’s urging, started organizing. Trinitarian orthodox congregations made their own associations, refusing to exchange pulpits with liberals, accusing them of “Unitarianism. Jedediah Morse in 1815, published a pamphlet called “American Unitarianism, accusing the Liberals of, well, believing what they actually did believe. The Standing Order broke down as the Congregational churches split into Orthodox Trinitarian and Liberal churches. The liberals increasingly felt pressure to defend themselves against charges of English Unitarianism, since they held a higher view of Jesus as savior than the English Unitarians. ” Unitarian did, however describe their view of the Oneness of God, and finally in 1819, in Baltimore, William Ellery Channing preached the sermon that was the manifesto of American Unitarianism. In it he asked why God would created us with free will and then punish us for using it. Why he, as a supposedly loving father, would choose some of his children to go to eternal damnation. Weren’t his listeners all better parents than that? Why should we be better parents than God?
Our task from the beginning has been to define ourselves other than as against Calvinism. We still struggle with that. Many UU’s are most comfortable saying what we DON’T believe. At the beginning of our movement, we were pushed into declaring ourselves, “outed” by the attacks of the opposition. We still have a legacy of hiding, not wanting to make a fuss, not wanting to be right out there with our faith.
Unitarian means we believe in the unity of God, that there is only one. Or, as some agnostic UU’s put it, “at MOST one God, and Universalist, meaning we believe everyone is saved. No one dies into eternal damnation. This, to me, is truly good news, and I would like to join William Ellery Channing in his passion to proclaim that truly good news.
It’s the simplest stitch of all. Tie a knot in one end of the thread, and slip the other end through the eye of a needle. Hold the fabric taut between your fingers, and pierce the fabric – not your fingers! – with the needle. Draw the thread up and through, and then, catch the fabric up on the tip of the needle, one, two, three, four times, and pull the thread through. Smooth it all out and there is your clear running stitch. It is the Paleolithic stitch that first pulled together two pieces of hide, two pieces of matted wool, two pieces of handspun cotton, or two pieces of the lightest woven silk to make something useful. Ecclesiates tells us there is a time to rend, and a time to sew. This is a time to at least consider sewing.
A few years back I offered to teach a group of Camp Fire kids how to sew some simple garments. Most of the parents agreed to help their kids, but one girl’s mom wasn’t able to help. No problem. Eleven-year-old Mary was well behaved and smart enough that I knew she would be fine just following along with me. I told her to show up with a couple of yards of fabric and we’d go from there. When they came to my house, instead of just dropping Mary off, the mom hung around to talk. I was polite, but turned my attention to the matter of fabric, choosing a pattern, etc. The fabric they brought was a sensible, solid blue. It was the blue of those coverall jumpsuits my great uncles used to wear when they worked on engines. And, given the navy pants and plain white blouse Mary was wearing, I guessed that vanity was discouraged in their home. But that blue fabric was just too ugly to mess with. Instead, I told Mary to dig through my stash of fabrics – that’s what it’s called – a “stash”. She found a nice piece of calico with a light blue background, sprigged with tiny white flowers. It would be perfect for her skirt.
Meanwhile, her mother was explaining why she would not be able to help us. You see, she explained, her mother had never taught her to sew, never wanted her to sew because her mother wanted her to be an engineer, or a scientist. She didn’t want her to be limited to girl’s work, or be tied down by domestic drudgery. I listened politely while quietly showing Mary how to find the fabric’s grain so the garment would hang right, and how to lay and pin the delicate tissue paper pattern correctly. I listened to the mom tell me that it was her mother’s insistence that she never learn to cook or sew because she presumed that she would be earning so much money that someone else would always be doing that work for her. So that is why she never learned to sew and why she got a professional degree… Finally, I’d had enough. I turned to Mary who was carefully pinning and cutting out the pieces, and said “If you think about it, sewing is really a type of construction based upon engineering. And it’s a bit tricky because you are working with a flexible material with the goal of covering a moving body. It takes a fair amount of math and planning, and you have to understand the properties of the material and how bodies move if you want to have something worth wearing. Badly sewn clothes are really quite uncomfortable.” Eventually the mom ran out of excuses and left us in peace.
Mary learned how to make a loose running stitch and pull the thread to gather up the fabric, how to fit differently sized pieces together, how to create a waistband tunnel to run elastic through, and how to hem the bottom evenly. Within a couple of hours she had finished a lovely three-tier skirt. She knew every thing about that garment. There was no mystery to it because she had sewn it herself. And, when she finally slipped it on to her delicate waist, she looked down at her work and did what any young girl would do – she twirled around to see the skirt flare out and swing around. It was a magical moment. Even if she never sews another thing in her entire life, she understands the basics and when she looks at the inside, the underside, the lining, or the back – she will see how something was put together.
I want you to do something here – just a moment. I want you to look at the inside of your sleeve, or the hem of your shirt or pants. Look at the threads holding that fabric in place. You will probably see an even line of stitching. Maybe there is a complex web of threads to bind the fabric and keep it from fraying. Maybe the thread is a contrasting color, or maybe it matches the fabric so well that you can barely see it on the right side of the garment.
Someone’s hands did that work. Every thing we are wearing was sewn by another human being. Every pillow case, sleeping bag, backpack, and tent was sewn by someone. Every sofa cushion, slip cover, and seat belt was guided through a sewing machine by a skilled worker. The suits the astronauts wore were assembled by expert seamstresses who had never sewn such a thing before, but they put their minds and machines to work, and sewed suits to protect fragile human bodies from the cold of space.
Even in this era of astonishing technology, there is still no machine where you stuff a bale of cotton in one end and remove a pair of pants from the other. We are still doing pretty much what our ancestors did – cutting a flat cloth into pieces, and sewing the pieces together to cover our shivering naked selves.
Maybe your mother sewed clothes for you when you were younger? If you came in with a tear on your sleeve or a rip in your britches, did your mom work some kind of mundane miracle of mending? Along with my 10″ chef’s knife and my pen, my sewing basket is one of my most powerful weapons against chaos. Like many women, I sewed clothes for my children when they were young simply because they were so beautiful and store bought clothes were so unimaginative. My kids got to pick out the fabrics so that instead of the same old football, soccer ball, baseball, or truck, my son’s pants had penguins and frogs and feathers and fish! Unless you look closely, you might not see the places where I’ve patched and repaired the rips and three-cornered tears where one of us snagged on a fence, or caught on a nail.
A woman I spoke with explained that when she is sewing a quilt it might mean assembling 35 blocks of pieced fabrics. She cuts, and stitches, and presses the same thing 35 times. It becomes a meditative time and as her hands work, her mind travels out into its quiet fascinating places. If it will be a gift, she might be thinking of the people who will receive the quilt. It’s impossible to put a prayer into every stitch, but she takes care to choose fabrics that will bring a smile to the person who snuggles under that quilt at night.
A man who quilts simply says “it’s my safe place”. His quilts are dazzlingly intricate – each one is made up of thousands of small pieces of bright cloth. He listens to audio books while he works and has listened to Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and other great writers whose books we all mean to get around to reading, if only we had the time. And while he listens, his hands cut, and piece, and pin and sew artwork of kaleidoscopic brilliance. This world would be a calmer place if all of us had such safe places for our creativity.
Choosing fabric takes practice and it requires a sort of Buddhist lack of attachment off-set by a hoarder’s mania. Choosing a color is only part of it. You also have to feel fabric to determine the quality, the drape, any stretch or texture to it. When we are searching for fabric, we move through the store shopping with our hands — touching, rubbing, tugging, and even just waving it to watch how it moves. It’s getting harder to find high quality fabrics so there is a certain amount of scowling when I shop. And the goddess will just laugh at you if you think that you simply MUST have a certain fabric because you will not find it. Or you will find the Perfect Fabric but not the Perfect Pattern. Or vice versa. We learn to buy up the fabric when we find it and then wait for the pattern to show up. Or vice versa. This is how fabric stashes grow rather large.
I was lucky to learn to sew from my mom – who taught me the 4-H correct way – and from my stepmother who taught me all the ways to adapt a pattern, be creative, and have fun. My mother’s fabulous dresses sewn from Indonesian batiks fit her beautifully because she sized them to her petite frame. My stepmother opened up her own business doing everything from simple alternations up to designing and sewing gorgeous wedding dresses. Both of them drew upon deep patience to teach me. And, while I don’t have the time to sew as much as I’d like, when I spread out the fabric and pick up my shears, I have them both, and all of my grandmothers, along with me for every stitch.
Another woman I know was like many of us – forced to learn sewing in school. Girls learned sewing, boys learned woodshop. You know — the natural order of things… But she resisted sewing and hated it for the sexist holdover it was! She made her damn skirt moaning and groaning the whole time and was done with it. But then… as an adult, one day she picked up a book on quilting and was stunned – it was the most beautiful thing she had seen. The book pulled her in and in time she taught herself everything about quilting from the ground up – how to use a sewing machine – how to BUY a sewing machine. She found delight in all the odd doo-dads that someone, some where (probably a woman, probably in a snit) had invented to solve a specific sewing problem. Did you know, there really is such a thing as a bodkin? It’s very useful when you’re turning something skinny inside out. A fat safety pin works well too. As my friend learned to make quilts, she developed a respect for the ingenuity and engineering that paved the way for her. She loves choosing the colors, and that moment when she drops in a little piece of lavender or orange and the whole thing turns spectacular. And, when she sews a quilt – she is verrry selective of who receives them. Each one is more than a blanket, it is a gift of her precious time.
Sewing these days is anachronistic. It takes patience to learn how to sew and practice to learn to sew well enough to make something you’d want to wear out in public. Why bother? Someone else can do it better, cheaper, faster. And they are probably happy to have the work. I mean, it’s not like we really have slavery any more. Those people are skilled laborers who get paid. Right? Well… I don’t want to depress you with details, but if you pay $5 for a tee shirt, you can be pretty sure that the person who sewed it did not even make fifty cents for their work. And even if you pay $50 for a shirt, you still can’t be sure that the person in Vietnam, or the North Marianas, or Nicaragua was paid a fair wage. If you are vigilant, you can research your clothing choices, but there’s not a lot of “fair trade” garments on the market right now. Unless you sew your own. When I wear something I’ve sewn, I know the only person who was unfairly compensated or exploited was ME!
So what else can you do? How can you stand in opposition to a global economy that treats workers and their products as disposable commodities? It’s unrealistic for all of us to learn to sew clothing. But here’s a suggestion – treat every piece of clothing you own as if it were hand made especially for you. It might not have been hand-stitched, but hands guided the fabric through the cutting, stitching, and pressing. When you put on your shirt, consider the hands that carefully spaced the buttons and made sure they were secure. Think of the hands that folded it and wrapped it up for you. Wear it well. If the button falls off, catch it quick and sew it back on. And, when it is worn beyond repair, snip off the buttons – they might come in handy some day — and use the fabric as a rag to wipe your windows clean. Do you have a garment you love but that doesn’t fit quite right? Take it to a local seamstress for alterations or repairs so that it fits you – as you are right now, not when you’ve lost or gained or have an interview. And, when you pay that person and you’ll keep a few dollars in our local economy.
And, here’s my last recommendation: If someone gives you something they sewed, please don’t say “Oh! It’s so pretty. I’ll save it for sometime special” and then never use it. That would be missing the point. Put it on! Spread it out! Let the baby spit up on it! Hang it up where you will grab for it when you are in a rush. Wrap yourself up in it! And then twirl around slowly and see if the love swirls about you.
I’m going to talk about the devil this morning. We don’t do that too often in the Unitarian Universalist Church. I’m also going to talk about Martha Stewart, because the holidays are here and we are going to be decorating and being with family and cooking and buying presents and traveling and it’s just a lot to deal with.
I’m fascinated by Martha Stewart. She was the idol of perfection for many straight women and gay men, and then she went to jail. I think she went to jail, not because she was a bad criminal, but because she was a woman with money and she was mean and arrogant. That’s just an opinion. Even the way she went to jail was perfect, though. She said “Enough delays, let’s just do it and get it over with,” and she went and held her head up and did some good for the other inmates and endured merciless mocking, and then went back to work cooking perfect things with her little house arrest bracelet on.
Long years ago, before I had children, I asked for her gardening book for Christmas, and I devoured it. The photographs of peonies and tomatoes were luminous. Even pictures of her garden in the winter, under snow, showed patterns of stone walls, brick walkways, hand built trellises, a gazebo, and an herb garden in a knot pattern. Month by month she instructed me about what to do, from starting seedlings to painting concrete urns. She taught me to prune trees and to make a poached pear dessert with the pears that came from my….. well, I didn’t actually do that. All I had in my garden were tomatoes, beans, and zinnias. I was a long way from pear trees. I wondered how she did it all. I felt clumsy and inadequate until I learned she sleeps four hours a night and has a staff of helpers standing by to follow her every instruction. The helpers even get into the pictures in the book once in a while.
I’m not here to trash Martha, I just want to look at how she affects some of us. I don’t know if there is an equivalent perfectly manly person. The guys on the Home and Garden and Do It Yourself networks might be close. Norm, on the Yankee Workshop, can use a miter saw, a router and a lathe. He can reproduce a 17th century French cupboard from looking at its photograph, but he’s a little goofy looking, and the way he says “remember, always wear eye protection is almost motherly. It makes me feel good. Back to Martha. Martha is fit and lovely and competent in all areas of making a home beautiful. She can make it perfect. And she will even step back from something she’s cooked or dipped in gold and make into a wreath and she will say, “Ah, that’s just perfect.”
Can I tell you the number of times I’ve stepped back from something I made and said “perfect” ? Zero. There is something in many of us that wants to be perfect. Some are more controlled by it than others. There are those who have it a 10 on a scale of 1 to 10 and those who only have it a 3 or a 6. It can fluctuate depending on our state of mind, tiredness, bank account, weight loss or gain, stress at work… It comes from the fear we all carry of not being good enough– that there is something secretly wrong with us that is not wrong with anyone else, a deficit we must cover and adjust for in all our interactions. The fear of not being good enough, the shame of feeling that you are lacking an important competency others naturally have can drive us to try to control everything around us, to make everything just right.
Perfectionism can work its destructive power on any of us. Some of us don’t have it in the areas of housekeeping or cooking or woodworking, but it affects us when it comes to our personal appearance, or the written work we turn out, or the way we handle our money.
Perfectionism can have a positive side. Good effects of perfectionism include high quality work, reliability, and attention to detail. Bad effects include stress and anxiety, along with an unwillingness to take on something you aren’t already good at. You lose your ability to take risks, to say something in a group that might add to the mix, but you don’t want to sound stupid. Being wrong is out of the question. A mistake would mean humiliation of an unbearable magnitude. Perfectionism can also lead to procrastination. You start a job late so when it’s done, you can believe that it would have been perfect, only you didn’t have enough time. Perfectionism can also lead us to be more critical of others than we should be. We expect perfection from them too, and we become superior or enraged when they don’t do things just right. In all its aspects, perfectionism leads to more fear and less love. We as spiritual folk are trying to go the other way: more love, less fear. More love, less fear in every aspect of our lives.
Martha makes some people feel clumsy and incompetent because they are comparing their insides to her outsides. We know how unruly, unkind, inadequate we are because we see ourselves inside and out. Someone who looks like they are doing it all right — mostly we only see their outside. We don’t know what goes on with them in private, or internally. We compare our insides to their outsides, and we come up short.
Martha Stewart is not the problem here, it’s the devil. Let me explain. “Satan” in the Hebrew means “the accuser.” When I say it’s the devil who is the problem I’m talking about that voice inside most of us that whispers “You are not quite adequate. You’re a weak specimen, a broken reed, a slight disappointment to your mother and father. You have a shameful laziness, and you might be a touch stupid.” Do you know that accusing voice? That is the voice that fuels the fires of perfectionism. Some perfectionists look driven and capable. Others don’t. Lots of people who are perfectionists have given up. They act like they don’t care about things, like they will never be any good. They feel discouraged and depressed. They have grown up on maxims like “A thing worth doing is worth doing well.” This is true, of course. It is a good thing to try to do things well. It is also true that “A thing worth doing is worth doing badly.”
Let me tell you about my mama’s violin. She practiced her violin every morning of the world. I always woke up to scratchy scales and finger exercises. She never got any better, really, but she sat in the back row of the Main Line Symphony and had a great time playing the music. It was worth doing for her. And worth doing badly. All-or-nothing thinking is one of the ways perfectionism damages us. Either we look fine or we’re a total slob, an unmade bed of a human being. Either we played our instrument at the top of our form and caught fire with inspiration or we bombed. Our home is in perfect order or it’s a wreck, either we had a calm, kind, and imaginative time with our families over the holidays or it was a disaster. There is little in between for a perfectionist.
I used to have a cartoon in my office with Glinda the good witch of the North, lying on her psychiatrist’s couch, and she’s saying “It got to be too much — You give someone a heart, you give someone else a brain, and people start calling at all hours. Finally I realized, ‘I don’t have to be everything to everyone. ” I can just be the ‘good-enough witch.'” One way to counter perfectionism is to have as your goal to be a good enough parent, a good enough spouse, a good enough worker, a good enough crusader for social justice. Be more compassionate toward yourself and others, more friendly.
What I want to say here this morning is that “the devil” is the spirit of fear that drives us into rigidity and anxiety, which saps our good will and clouds our compassion. The spirit of Love is where our allegiance lies as good people, spiritual people, people who want to make the world better place. Love is always in dialogue with fear in our souls and bodies and minds. So when perfectionism is sharpening its claws in you, take some deep breaths, stop comparing your insides to other people’s outsides, remind yourself to be a good enough witch, and wonder — what would this whole situation be like if I had more love.
How do you prepare for hard times? How do you protect your life against times when the rain dries up and the wind blows hard and everything is brittle and easily broken? When nourishment is hard to find and you aren’t sure you can face what’s coming next? If you are in that situation literally, what you need is to have a good deep well, a well that reaches way down to where there is nearly always water. In September we had a water ceremony, where we mingled our lives together by pouring water into the common bowls, talking about the places that fed our souls. Water is the basis for all life. Everything that breathes is largely made of water and needs water to live. The poet Bryon says: “Til taught by pain, [we] really know not what good water is worth.” Don Juan
Many of us are like that in our lives. Those things that sustain us – we don’t know what they are worth until we are in a dry spell. We need connections with people, friends, people who know not only our name but what moves us, what hurts us, what we love. Being here in this church community is a way of making connections, but Sunday morning is a time when having a conversation of any depth is hard. (Rabbi story)
One of the good opportunities here for building deep connections with people is our small group program – we call them Chalice Circles. In our Chalice Circles we talk together with 4-12 other people about big questions like “What is an example of grace in your life? When have you experienced a heartfelt truth, and how did it change your life? What about your daily work do you find nourishing?
What is the meaning of life? Why do we need religion? Why evil? How do we know what we know? How can we face death? Why do we suffer? What does it mean to be human?” The lessons have a structure for the purposes of sustainability and fairness. The format give us a way of structuring our interactions so that all of us, the quiet ones as well as the verbally quick, may be heard and made to feel a part of the whole. There is an opening reading. This is one from the lesson on Listening:
I like to talk with you.
I like the way I feel
when you are listening
as if we were exploring
something in ourselves:
The plunge into a silence
and how you come up with words
I tried to find:
The otherness about us which makes
conversation possible.
When I talk with you,
the give turns into take
and borrow into lend.
Now and then, a phrase from you
will kindle like a shooting star;
the mornings in you rouse me from a sleep.
I like the babble and the banter when I greet you
at the door,
and when the room is filled with guests,
your quiet look,
as if there were a secret between us
of which nobody knows.
– from Raymond Baughan
After the opening reading, everyone briefly checks in, saying a few words about how they are that week. Then a bowl is passed around with lots of slips of paper with readings on them having to do with the topic of that lesson: forgiveness, hands, failure, hope, patriotism, views of God. After they are read, there are a few questions posed in the lesson. Participants choose one question or a few questions and talk about them in a time of sharing. Everyone gets a chance to talk, and no one interrupts or talks back to you or even asks you a question. When you are through, they say “thank you.” That helps shy people feel safer sometimes. When everyone is through with what they wanted to say about the questions, there is a time of silence, where people just breathe together for a moment or two. Then the discussion starts, when you can comment on what someone said, ask questions, say what came to your mind as they were speaking. There is a covenant of respectful behavior that is followed. Each group works out a covenant of how they want to be together, so there is kindness in the discussion, support, so no one person dominates the group. A facilitator is there to remind people of that, to hold the covenants in mind like a container for the group. When the discussion is done, there is a check-out time. We usually say “How do you want us to hold you in mind this month?” It’s a way of getting to know and trust a few people you may never have otherwise had in your life. Another bonding experience is the service the covenant groups promise to perform together. One group I remember organized the library at the end of the hall, in room #6. Another group cleaned the kitchen together after their meetings.
In order not to form cliques, the groups hold an empty place in each circle to keep attention on the fact that there are always more people who may want to be there, and that the groups will grow and change. The chair is the stranger in our midst, the challenge of opening in hospitality, of not pulling the ladder up after you when you get up into the clubhouse.
Some of the groups will be long-lived and strong. Others will be short-lived. We would like to know what makes a group strong and fine. We read from other people’s experience that it is keeping the covenants. We will see from our own experience, though.
In the UU tradition, we believe in ongoing revelation. Everything that is knowable about the world, about the human being, about the truth, about the Spirit, about ourselves, about one another, is out there, still to be found out, still to be revealed. We believe that there is tremendous wisdom and beauty in the scriptures of the great religions of the world, but we believe the truth is still coming in, that it can evolve, that the story of each of our lives and the story of our lives together are as sacred as the story of the people of Israel or India. So the story of your life, the story of our lives together, is sacred scripture.
Dr. Thandeka, who teaches theology and culture at a UU seminary in Chicago called Meadville Lombard, says that it is in small groups that we practice the central ritual of our faith, the sacred act of being in right relationship with one another. She says that the power of people coming together to share their stories, to talk about ideas, to accomplish a service for others, that power is the central authority of our faith. I think that power is the water we use to quench our thirsty lives, and to quench the thirst in one another for being heard and known. In doing that, we help to put the world back together.
There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.
One of the things you will hear over and over again from this pulpit is that church is for proclaiming liberty to the captives and setting the prisoners free. One of the things that keeps us prisoner is the idea of perfection, specifically that there can be perfect relationships, that if mistakes have been made, a relationship is somehow compromised, scarred, less than it once could have been. Every heart to love will come but like a refugee. We seem to try everything else first. We are driven out of the land of perfection, so we tighten down and attempt to live in the land of control. We are driven from the land of control and we let go and live in the land of despair and cynicism. When finally we flee that land, we come to love. Or maybe our path is tracked through different lands, but we finally come to love. Then we leave again, or forget, but we come back, if we’re lucky and wise, over and over to our spirit’s home, which is love. How do we live with the cracks in our relationships? How do we live with the cracks in our experience of church? How do we live with the cracks in our own expectations of ourselves? One of the ways is by the practice of forgiveness.
If we do not practice forgiveness, our scars can wind around us like those monstrous vines in fairy tales, our resentments can hold us hostage. Oh we get to watch movies while we’re held hostage, though. The movie plays over and over, a bit different every time. We replay the wrongs done to us while waiting for an apology.
Booker T Washington, organizer and first president of Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, had a lifelong motto: “I shall allow no man to belittle my soul by making me hate him”
When I talk about wrongs done, some people will think about a fight they have had with a sibling or a friend, others will think of the boss who is making their lives hell and still others brace themselves, wondering if I am going to say they have to forgive and forget incest or other abuse. What I want to ask is that you listen this morning as you are able, take what speaks to you and let the rest go. You are the only one who can say where forgiveness is needed between you and another, between you and yourself, or between you and God. Some people live feeling that God hasn’t forgiven them, and some people live as if they have not forgiven God. Why do we need to talk about forgiveness? Forgiveness is related to both emotional, physical and institutional healing. Every religion of the world says it’s important. Feeling you have been wronged is not good for you. Holding on to impotent anger makes us cramped and closed. “Impotent anger” is anger that is not doing anything for you, anger that has no fruitful power. It may be a collection of small grudges and resentments or it may be rage, but if the anger is not bearing good fruit for you in terms of moving you out of hurtful situations, protecting you from hurtful people, energizing you to do what you can to make things better for yourself. We may talk more about anger another Sunday.
Forgiveness is difficult because when we are wronged, we stiffen into self-righteousness. Self-righteousness is dangerous, the root of almost all wicked behavior. Remember the movie we watch over and over while our resentments hold us hostage? In it, we articulately explain our point of view with just the right amount of calm and just the right edge. The end is the best part. At the end of the movie we watch over and over, the ones who wronged us slap their heads in enlightenment, in realization. They say. “How wrong I was!!! You were right and I was wrong. What can I do to make it up to you?” We exercise our arguments, we polish our grudges. We repeat them to ourselves; we can drop into the groove of recrimination and resentment at a moment’s notice; we can do it in our sleep. We lull ourselves with the recitation. The resentment can become part of who we are. Part of our personality’s clothing, our identity. It feels good to be a righteous victim. We go to friends and get as many people as we can to hear our story. It is soul satisfying to hear them say “Oh NO she did not say that!”
There is nothing wrong with this if we do it in good faith. We are trying to validate our perceptions “Would this make you mad? Is this person being a jerk or is it me?” I have to say there is a lot to learn about yourself from watching to whom you go to tell your story. Some people are going to be on your side no matter what. Others will tell you if you are being a jerk. We go to the people we think will tell us what we are ready to hear. Many people are completely justified in feeling like a righteous victim. It’s an archetypal role, an ancient one, and it may be appropriate for a time, but we have to watch out for it, as we do all well-defined roles, that we do not start sleep-walking, letting it make our choices for us. Forgiving requires a willingness to look at the harm being done to you by not beginning to forgive, looking at the stiffening righteousness. The harm is that you are stuck. You are also stuck to the person at whom you are angry. You cannot go anywhere without dragging them along with you. The harm is that you feel that other people might hurt you the same way. You become braced, ready to be hurt, to be left, to be abandoned, to be betrayed. You don’t have to look at yourself, if you are a victim of mean parents or two timing lovers. You get to be the right one. Being RIGHT is a BIG part of not wanting to forgive. You can be right, absolutely. And still be hurt by harboring anger against the person who hurt you. The Course in Miracles, which some of you have studied, says “You can be right or you can be happy.”
One way to let go of someone and get your strength back is the resentment prayer. Ask for/wish for them everything you want for yourself. You don’t have to mean it. Try it for fourteen days straight. It’s amazingly powerful magic, and I’m not sure exactly how it works. Clarissa Pinkola Estes: “Forgiveness seems unrealistic because we think of it as a one-time act that had to be completed in one sitting. Forgiveness has many layers, many seasons. It is not all or nothing, if you can do a 95% forgiveness, you are a saint. 75% is wonderful. 60% is fine. Keep working/playing with it. The important things are to BEGIN and to CONTINUE. There is a healer inside who will help you if you get out of the way. For some, temperamentally, this is easy. For some it is harder. You are not a saint if it’s easy, not a bad person if it’s not easy. You are who you are and you do it the way you do it. All in due time.” Forgiveness also does NOT mean to overlook something, to pretend the thing didn’t happen. Estes talks about the stages of forgiveness.
1. TO FOREGO: to leave it alone. Take a break from thinking about it for awhile Get your strength back.
2. TO FORBEAR: Containment. Don’t act Keep your self-protective vigilance. Have patience. Practice generosity. Ask what would happen if there were grace in this situation.
3. TO FORGET: Refuse to dwell on it, Consciously release it. Some people are wary of this step, and make definitions of forgetting for themselves that include bearing the wrong in mind. At the Israeli Holocaust Memorial, they say forgive, but never forget, because if you forget it could happen again. Only you can be the judge of whether the wrong that was done to you is something you can afford to forget. If not, ask yourself how you can bear it in mind without it continually poisoning you.
4. TO FORGIVE: Regard the other individual indulgently. Give compassionate aid to that person. Make a ritual to mark the event.
Several years ago I read a book called “Lovingkindness,” which expands on many of the things about which the Dalai Lama writes. The author says the first step in forgiving is to direct compassion and love toward yourself.
Say:
May I be free from danger.
May I be physically happy
May I be mentally happy
May I have ease of well-being.
Do that for three weeks, then say it about someone you like, about a neutral person, THEN about the one who wronged you. If you can’t, go back to sending lovingkindness to yourself.
Is a Bold Hamster “Great” or Just What is “Greatness”?
Sometimes things just work out. Take this sermon, for instance. When I was asked to do this service, I quickly decided to talk about a topic that I have been fascinated with for a long time: what does it mean to be great? I was on the phone with Sally Scott and she asked me if I could do this date or that date, and we settled on February 22nd. I thought nothing special about it at the time.
However, forty-five years ago I would have instantly made the connection between February 22nd and George Washington’s birthday, because his birthday was a school holiday. In fact, back in those days we also got February 12th off from school because it was Abraham Lincoln’s birthday. Of course, as it turns out, Charles Darwin’s birthday is also February 12th, and the same year as Lincoln. But while they named a city after Darwin in Australia, there’s no way in America – except maybe for a few isolated Royal Blue areas – that we’d get Darwin’s birthday off from school.
We just marked the 200th anniversary of both Lincoln’s and Darwin’s birthdays. Washington would have been 277 today – a number of no special significance since it doesn’t have any “zeros” in it. Nonetheless, there is an interesting mathematical fact about Washington’s birth year of 1732. Put a decimal after the “1” and you have the square root of three – 1.732. Really. See, you never know what you are going to learn at a Unitarian church. I don’t know if this numeric coincidence portended greatness for Washington – perhaps a numerologist could tell us – but he certainly demonstrated greatness during his lifetime. As did both Darwin and Lincoln.
Like I said, sometimes things just work out.
The word great, like the words love and God, is subject to many meanings and often fierce debate. I’m beginning to believe I am an intellectual masochist because I keep picking sermon topics that are impossible to fully discuss in a 20 – okay 25 – minute sermon. So let’s narrow our theme today. When I’m talking about greatness, I do not in any way mean famous. Famous and greatness are two totally different concepts and the cult of celebrity often worships people who are decidedly not very great, but whom we hoist onto pedestals made of fluff, and which are either unsteady and fragile or else we – and I mean American society – are shallow and fickle. But really, what are the odds of that being true about America?
And I don’t have the time to explore the really wonderful topic of the “greatness” of villains, for example Lord Voldemort, who J. K Rowling tells us over and over in her Harry Potter books, has done great things – terrible to be sure – but great nonetheless. So for purposes of my sermon, I assume that we would all agree that Lord Voldemort – and the real characters of history like him – do not deserve to be judged as having greatness. And based on her many interviews and pod casts, I think J. K. herself would approve.
Instead, I am going to use William Shakespeare’s famous quote about greatness from his play Twelfth Night as a template to discuss what it means to be great and how we judge greatness. And although there are many who could serve as examples, including many women, African-Americans, and others, because the powers that be handed it to me on a silver platter, I am going to be a bit of a Taoist and go with the flow by talking about each element of Shakespeare’s quote using Washington, Darwin, and Lincoln as examples.
In Twelfth Night the comedic plot begins when Malvolio, Countess Olivia’s priggish steward, comes upon a letter that the merrymakers in the play have left for him to find. The letter is a fake anonymous love letter that Malvolio believes is from Olivia. The writer of the letter suggests that Malvolio can become “great” by doing certain things, each of which is more absurd than the last. Never questioning the authenticity or the origin of the letter, Malvolio proceeds to carry out the ridiculous tasks, until Olivia thinks her steward has gone mad and has him locked up.
Contained in the letter, which Malvolio reads aloud, is the famous quote about greatness: “Be not afraid of greatness: some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.” Although Malvolio says these lines, he is reading from the letter, and audiences both then and now immediately recognize that the term “greatness” has very little to do with Malvolio, who is ambitious, pretentious, and has an ego that far outstrips his qualities as a person. He is blinded by pride, and is a ripe target for the prank being played upon him. He is so out of it that he cannot see just how far from reality his own self-musings have taken him.
I suppose that the ability to recognize one’s own folly is a necessary antecedent to being great. Which would lead one to conclude that people who think they are great very often are not. We have all known a super-confident person of whom we cannot understand where that confidence came from. Humility seems to be one of the hallmarks of greatness, but I’m getting a little ahead of myself. I’d like to take a look at each of the elements of Shakespeare’s quote and see what we can glean from them.
The first part of the quote asserts that “some are born great.” This is one of the ultimate nature over nurture claims. The implication is that there are certain inherent qualities to being great and that they are manifest in the person from birth. But is it true? If we were in any mainstream Christian church today, the overwhelming answer would be yes, for there can be no better example in Western culture of someone who is believed to be born great than Jesus of Nazareth. When you are born god incarnate, that would seem to coincide with the notion of born greatness. I suppose that would apply to some other religious figures from other religious traditions as well.
But what about everybody else. Are any of them – us – born great? Well, the answer, of course, depends on what we mean by “great”, but overall, I tend to think the answer is a qualified yes. I tend to think that some people are simply born with certain talents, attributes, personality styles, et cetera, that put them ahead of the curve, so to speak, when it comes to doing great things and eventually, being thought of as having attained greatness. Of course, simply having those talents, attributes, personality styles, et cetera, is not a guarantee that they will be translated into greatness. In fact, like so many things, there are probably tons of false positives out there; that is, people who were born with the qualities, but never lived up to them, or worse, betrayed them in a hurtful or harmful way.
And in the category of things working out, I would suggest that if we are going to agree with Shakespeare that some are born great, then George Washington is one of those of whom we might say he was born great. I don’t intend to go into any history lessons here, so you can all relax. But listen to this. In an essay called “The Greatness of Washington,” Christopher Flannery says: “What Shakespeare is to poetry, Mozart to music, or Babe Ruth to baseball, George Washington is to life itself.” Now that is quite saying something. Flannery continues: “This is by no means to say that [Washington] was flawless any more than Babe Ruth was a perfect baseball player or Mozart a perfect musician. It is merely to say that, if he had not lived, such greatness could hardly have been believed possible.” Here we have the description of a man who was born to greatness and who, through his actions, character, and decisions, upheld his end of the bargain. And consider the words of Thomas Jefferson from today’s reading. Now, you’re supposed to say nice things at somebody’s funeral, but what Jefferson has to say is itself extraordinary and his reference to “nature and fortune” points to somebody who was born for greatness. But for me the coup de grace on the issue is the story of Washington and the cherry tree.
Mason Locke Weems wrote a biography of Washington shortly after Washington died and recounted the tale that as a lad, Washington got a new hatchet, and proceeded to test it by chopping down a cherry tree. When Washington’s father saw the tree, he asked George if he knew anything about it. George is reputed to have said: “I cannot tell a lie, Pa; you know I can’t tell a lie. I did cut it with my hatchet.”
Now in recent decades, there has been much ado about humanizing Washington, indeed, all the founders of our country, and in so doing, demythologizing both the men and their accomplishments. And in this regard, it is pretty clear that the truth of the cherry tree tale lies somewhere between Santa Clause and the Lock Ness Monster. And although Washington gave all the credit to his mother, the point is that Weems was trying to tell everybody that Washington was an extraordinary man, whose greatness was manifest when he was a boy, and thus is an example for us of one who was born great – not perfect – but great. And at that level, it doesn’t matter if the story is true or not.
The next part of Shakespeare’s quote is that “some achieve greatness.” The achievement of greatness suggests hard work, dedication, and the accomplishment of something that is unexpected, or at least something that was not evident or obvious in the person. And I think the unexpected part is important because it means going beyond who we (or others) think we are and making choices that expand rather than contract our embrace of the world at every level and in a good way. Let me explain.
We human beings use the power of flight as a metaphor for freedom. But when a bird flies, it is doing something that is as natural to it as walking is to us. We can marvel at the grace, speed, and power of a bird in flight, but we would never say that a bird has attained greatness simply because it can fly. It is expected that a bird can fly. I feel the same way about people and their abilities.
If you are six-foot-ten and can dunk, does that make you great? I don’t think so. You have great physical prowess and we will admire you for it, perhaps, but I would never say that you had achieved greatness just because you could dunk. Similarly, we admire and perhaps envy really intelligent people because of their brain power. But are those people great just because they can figure out Sudoku with relative ease. Again I say no. And I suggest the same thing even applies to the gods we worship. Simply because a god is powerful and can kill us, or in the case of Yahweh, destroy towns or even the whole world, I don’t think that god is automatically great. Powerful, yes. Scary, yes. But partaking of greatness? I don’t think so. At least not because of this.
Truth is, there is an important difference between something being great and something having a quality of greatness. I had been thinking for some time about this and it finally hit me: great is measured; greatness is judged or bestowed. I’ll say that again: great is measured; greatness is judged or bestowed. This may be obvious to some of you, but it was an interesting revelation to me. The Great Wall of China is great because it is huge and they say it can even been seen from space. But the greatness of the Chinese people who built that wall and their culture, now that is something that must be judged and ultimately bestowed. Barry Bonds’ record of 762 home runs is great; whether we would say that Bonds himself embodies greatness in the world of baseball is something that is being debated and will be decided by the judgment of history.
Which takes me full circle: achieving greatness means doing something worthy and that is unexpected of you, because if it was expected, it might be great in some measurable way, like a falcon that can dive at 278 miles per hour, but greatness, true greatness takes something more, something beyond what is expected, something that encompasses more than just ourselves, and something that others deem to be admirable, good, helpful, and perhaps even amazing.
With this in mind, I’d like to take just a minute to talk about Charles Darwin. Darwin was a reclusive man who spent almost his entire lifetime coming up with his theory of evolution by natural selection. His great-great-grandson, Chris Darwin, lives in Australia and was quoted in last Saturday’s edition of The Age as saying that “[Charles] never did an honest day’s work in his life.” What did he do? An almost preacher, Darwin spent all his time observing and collecting beetles and other critters and thinking about the origins of life on Earth. He spent many years ruminating about his already formed theory of evolution through natural selection, and it was only when he learned that somebody else – Alfred Russel Wallace – had come to the same conclusions that he published his Origin of Species.
Darwin was not the first to say that life had evolved. His own grandfather had come to that conclusion. Nor was he the first to claim to know the mechanism for speciation. Lamarck had put forward a theory of how one species morphed into another, famously stating that the giraffe evolved its long neck by stretching for leaves up in the trees, and then passing on the gain; but he got it wrong. Darwin, however, got both evolution and its mechanism right.
These were huge ideas that encompassed the entirety of life on Earth. And Darwin published and stood behind them at a time when doing so went against the great weight of society and culture – like so many who we call great, he courageously broke the mold. As Chris Darwin says, “Every age suppresses the unthinkable; Darwin expressed it.” And it is something Darwin was vilified for then and continues to be vilified for by some today. And it is for these reasons, and the fact that his theories, as they have been developed over the last century and a half, form the very foundation of modern biology, that he achieved the greatness that has been bestowed upon him.
The last part of Shakespeare’s quote is: “some have greatness thrust upon them.” And here I guess, I would have to quarrel a little bit with Shakespeare, although in matters of English usage, that’s probably a dangerous thing. While not as poetic, I would rather the quote had said “some have the opportunity for greatness thrust upon them.” Because I don’t think greatness can be thrust upon anybody. It is something that is earned – even if one is otherwise born for greatness – and not something that can be thrust upon one for the obvious reason that the thrust could just as easily cause the person to fail. What’s really going on here is that some are placed by fate, chance, destiny, or choice, in a position where the circumstances are so extraordinary, that if the person can handle them, can successfully weather the storm, and perhaps even achieve great things, then that person will be judged to be great.
Having greatness thrust upon one can, of course, be applied to Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln ascended to the presidency after the ruinous Buchanan administration, and at the onset of the Civil War. He was literally thrust into a position of power just as the country was violently breaking apart and for four years had the weight of the fate of the nation on his shoulders. He issued the Emancipation Proclamation and is credited with ending slavery and saving the Union.
In a recent poll of historians conducted by C-SPAN, Lincoln just topped Washington as the best president of the United States, while Buchanan was dead last and is, in every respect, somebody who the world tried its best to thrust greatness upon, but who failed miserably. In many ways it is no accident that Buchanan, the worst president, and Lincoln, voted the best, came back-to-back during the tumultuous years heading up to and including the Civil War.
Well, that takes care of Shakespeare’s quote – or does it? Because you may recall that the full quote starts out: “Be not afraid of greatness.” What are we to make of this? In my last few minutes I want to talk about this part of the quote because I think, frankly, it is the most important part of all.
The first question to ask is why would anybody be afraid of greatness? I mean, you’d think that being great would be, well, great. But, I think the answer is pretty obvious, actually. Consider the men and women whom you think have attained greatness, however measured and by whatever means. I would bet that the person lived large, with courage, took risks, assumed great responsibility beyond him or herself, and was original in thought and deed to the point of breaking the mold of society and culture. In all events, I would bet, they went beyond what was expected of them and reached out beyond themselves to impact the world for the better. Finally, I’d bet that many of them, at least, exhibited one more characteristic – a willingness to leave the pack behind, to take the lonely path, and often to create something for others, something that they themselves did not or could not share in but which they protected for the benefit of others – people we often call heroes.
And here, finally, is where we get to talk about hamsters. I’ll bet you were wondering about that. Being a bold hamster takes courage, you see, because while there may be food just around the corner, there could also be a snake or a large bird. And if I were a hamster, it would be difficult to be bold, difficult to take those steps or take those positions or take those stands that place one at risk, especially on behalf of others or an important idea. But that’s what great people do. That’s what makes them great. Now people aren’t hamsters, but I think the point of the analogy holds. And so we might ask ourselves, are we like the bold hamster, venturing forth despite the risk, or are we somebody who Shakespeare was talking to, somebody who holds back because of the fear that we are going to be the bold hamster who is soon lunch?
These are among the most serious issues we face in how we live our lives, despite my somewhat tongue-in-cheek analogy. Let’s face it: it is not likely that any of us are going to attain the greatness of the historical figures I talked about – or could have talked about – today. But so what? I believe there is a bit of bold hamster in all of us, enough at least that we can see the path. But I suspect most of us anyway also have a bit of that fear of greatness, of taking the next step along that very path that might lead to greatness – the greatness each of us is capable of achieving.
Part of the purpose of this church and our religion is to help us to grow beyond our comfort zones, to embrace more than what is in our little world, and to think seriously about the gods whom we serve and how well we serve them. I think we can all walk the path of greatness because we can all do something that is unexpected of us, that breaks our own mold, if not that of culture and society, is larger than we are, and reaches beyond ourselves to impact the world for the better.
And if that’s true, then how do we know if we are on the right track? I offer two observations. The first is pretty simple. One measure of how big we are on the inside is just how far and how large our embrace is on the outside. The larger the scope of our embrace outside – be it family, community, country, or cosmos – then the bigger we are on the inside and the higher the likelihood of greatness. But always remember, greatness is not something that we ourselves decide. Greatness is judged and bestowed by others. So here is the second test.
In the Wizard of Oz, after gifting the Tin Woodsman with a new heart, the wizard cautions him by saying: “And remember, my sentimental friend, that a heart is not judged by how much you love, but by how much you are loved by others.” It’s the same with greatness, for greatness, like the heart, is not measured by the great things you have done, but by how much honest admiration and respect you are afforded by others, especially those who know you or who you have touched.
Martin Luther – the guy who started the Protestant Reformation – thought that the Epistle of James did not belong in the Bible because James teaches that “faith without works is dead,” whereas Luther believed that it is only by grace that people are saved by God. I’m on James’ side on this one. We are all given gifts by nature, we all have our dreams, our passions and our hopes for our lives and for the lives of our children, family, friends and others. Without action, without works, those gifts are wasted and our dreams and hopes nothing more than electrical impulses in our brains that will one day be silent and lost as a grain of sand upon an endless beach.
Let our greatness be to live fully and fearlessly, to use our gifts in the service of our best and most illuminating gods, and to embrace as much of life outside ourselves as we can, and like Lamarck’s famous giraffe, stretch our reach to encompass ever more, until we surprise even ourselves. And then let them judge how we have lived – those who have known us and those who we have touched – and they will nod a knowing nod and smile a knowing smile for greatness.
Presented February 22, 2009
First Unitarian Universalist Church of Austin
Revised for Print
Copyright 2009 by Jim Checkley.
And just because I know you’re dying to know, George W. Bush was 36th, or sixth from the bottom, just edging out Millard Fillmore and a touch behind John Tyler.
Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button above.
Video clips at Ustream
PRAYER:
(Ask veterans to stand, thank them.)
We pray for the bodies, minds and spirits of our soldiers on active duty now, that they may return home and may get the care they need.
And we remind ourselves – because we too easily forget – of the gratitude we owe to all veterans, past, present and future, for being willing to play that game of Russian Roulette we call military service. Any of them could have been sent into combat, and any of them could have been maimed or killed. No one else in our country is asked to offer that degree of sacrifice on behalf of political and military ambitions soldiers never fully understand, even as they are being shot at.
We pray, as people have prayed throughout history, for a time when soldiers and wars will not be necessary. But we don’t live in that world. And so we pray for the safety of our soldiers, and offer our heartfelt gratitude to all our veterans for their service.
Amen.
SERMON: The Audacity of Hope
Part A: Excited utterances
Tuesday’s presidential election was both a historic and exciting election. I want to talk about it, to look into this winning message of hope and change that carried Barack Obama to such a stunning victory of more than a two-to-one electoral vote. I want to wonder what it would take to make his hopes real, and whether it’s realistic to believe such change is possible.
But first, I just want to share, even to wallow in, some of the many excited utterances of this week. Here’s one:
“Tuesday, Nov. 4, 2008, is a date that will live in fame (the opposite of infamy) forever. If the election of our first African-American president didn’t stir you, if it didn’t leave you teary-eyed and proud of your country, there’s something wrong with you.” Those words came from the Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman in a column he wrote for the New York Times two days ago, and they are a measure of the excitement that many people in our country and around the world feel this week.
Just consider the biography of the man we’ve elected President, against the whole history of the United States of America, and ask if it feels like you must be dreaming:
His father was born and raised in a small village in Kenya. He grew up herding goats, went to school in a tin-roof shack. His father – our new President’s grandfather — was a cook, a domestic servant to the British.
But as Obama tells the story, “My grandfather had larger dreams for his son. Through hard work and perseverance my father got a scholarship to study in a magical place, America, that shone as a beacon of freedom and opportunity to so many who had come before.
“My parents imagined me going to the best schools in the land, even though they weren’t rich, because in a generous America you don’t have to be rich to achieve your potential.
“I have brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, uncles and cousins, of every race and every hue, scattered across three continents, and for as long as I live, I will never forget that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible.”
This is as perfect a Horatio Alger American Dream story as anyone is ever likely to have: the hard-working and determined person who succeeds despite overwhelming odds simply through what Martin Luther King called the content of his character. This is the American dream: from poor, powerless boy – or girl! – to the White House. He’s right: his story wouldn’t be possible in no other country on Earth.
Here are some more excited utterances, from this morning’s paper:
Maureen Dowd writes:
“I grew up in the nation’s capital, but I’ve never seen blacks and whites here intermingling as they have this week. Everywhere I go, some white person is asking some black person how they feel. I saw one white customer quiz his black waitress at length at a chic soul food restaurant downtown, over deviled eggs and fried chicken livers, about whether she cried when Barack Obama won. She said she did, and he said he wept like a baby.” (Maureen Dowd, “The Tracks of Our Tears,” 9 November 2008, The New York Times)
And Frank Rich writes with his edge, but also with some good insights:
“On the morning after a black man won the White House, America’s tears of catharsis gave way to unadulterated joy. Dawn also brought the realization that we were at last emerging from an abusive relationship with our country’s 21st-century leaders. The festive scenes of liberation that Dick Cheney had once imagined for Iraq were finally taking place – in cities all over America.
“For eight years, we’ve been told by those in power that we are small, bigoted and stupid – easily divided and easily frightened. This was the toxic catechism of Bush-Rove politics. It was the soiled banner picked up by the sad McCain campaign, and it was often abetted by an amen corner in the dominant news media. We heard this slander of America so often that we all started to believe it, liberals most certainly included.
“So let’s be blunt. Almost every assumption about America that was taken as a given by our political culture on Tuesday morning was proved wrong by Tuesday night.” (Frank Rich, It Still Felt Good the Morning After, 9 November 2008, The NY Times)
Warm and hopeful messages came from countries all over the world, too many to read here. But I don’t want to leave our ministerial intern Brian Ferguson’s home country out, so here’s another excited utterance from Scotland’s First Minister Alex Salmond. He sent a message to Mr. Obama, in which he said, “It ushers in a new era of hope for the United States and its role in the world. This was a victory for optimism over pessimism, for hope over fear.” There’s that word, Hope.
Here’s how Obama put it Tuesday night at the start of his speech as the new President-elect of the United States of America:
“If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible, who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time, who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer.
“It’s the answer that led those who’ve been told for so long by so many to be cynical and fearful and doubtful about what we can achieve to put their hands on the arc of history and bend it once more toward the hope of a better day.
“Tonight we proved once more that the true strength of our nation comes not from the might of our arms or the scale of our wealth, but from the enduring power of our ideals: democracy, liberty, opportunity and unyielding hope.”
My God – how long has it been since we have turned for a poetic and inspiring reading to one of our Presidents? Barack Obama may go down as one of the greatest orators in U.S. history. But it wasn’t just the excitement of election night that lifted him to that kind of eloquence. Here are just a few famous words he wrote about hope four years ago:
“Hope — Hope in the face of difficulty. Hope in the face of uncertainty. The audacity of hope!”
Those words came from his 2004 speech at the Democratic Convention, the speech that made him an instant national political figure – and helped get him a $2 million deal for three books. And that magical phrase, “The audacity of hope,” was the title of his best-selling 2006 book. But he got the message from his minister of twenty years, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright. It was a sentiment that resonated with his whole life experience. It is that audacious hope with which he wants to infect us, all of us.
Part B: the Manger of Hope
I like etymology, the origin of word meanings, so I looked these two words up. An archaic meaning of Hope is “to have trust, confidence”.
And to be audacious means “to dare” – to dare something that others lack the hope, confidence and courage to dare.
But there’s something special about a message of hope. In his first book, Dreams from my Father, he wrote some very telling and very poignant words about it, reflecting on the powerful emotional effect that his first visit to Jeremiah Wright’s church more than twenty years ago had on him. The preacher, choir and congregation had taken up the word “Hope” in chants and shouts, and it had a transformative effect on a young Barack Obama:
“In that single [word] ‘hope’ I imagined the stories of ordinary black people merging with the stories of David and Goliath, Moses and Pharaoh, the Christians in the lion’s den, Ezekiel’s field of dry bones. Those stories – of survival, and freedom, and hope – became our story, my story. Our trials and triumphs became at once unique and universal, black and more than black;…” He also compared them to the hopeful songs that slaves used to sing at night around the fire. Obama’s sentiments of hope have profoundly religious roots.
Voices of hope don’t come from the same place as voices of privilege, power and entitlement. Voices of hope are usually pretty powerless. I think this voice of hope that President-elect Obama has made his centerpiece could only come from someone outside the circles of those accustomed to privilege. Those who already own the country don’t need hope. They just need more power, more protection from those who have been disempowered, a few more politicians in their pockets, to pass a few more laws in their favor – which they don’t seem to have much trouble getting from either political party.
This is not to say that Barack Obama is powerless, without privileges, or even that he’s just an ordinary guy. He’s not. He is very, very bright and focused – remember that he has an undergraduate degree from Columbia University, graduated from Harvard Law School as president of the Harvard Law Review, and taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago. I’m not sure we could over-state just how bright, focused and privileged our 44th President is.
But his privilege was earned, not bestowed. It came from his own achievements, not from his family or their entitlements. Our current president also attended elite schools. But he didn’t get into any of them on his own merit, and he did poorly at all of them. George W. Bush was pushed to the top by the financial and political ties of his family, in spite of his unimpressive personal achievements. Barack Obama rose to the top because of his personal achievements, but in spite of the complete lack of wealth or political power of anyone in his family.
As the son of a goat-herder from Kenya and a poor woman from Kansas, both dead now, Obama inherited both the right and the need to hope.
Here’s another kind of metaphor. Think of the different view of food that you can get from a gourmet, and from a man who has been hungry and poor for a long time. The gourmet can tutor you on the nuances of fine sauces and rare wines. She knows more about the subtle flavors of the most exquisite foods than anybody. But in some deeper ways, the hungry man can tell you even more important things about food, because he knows what he needs in order to live, and how much he needs it. That’s like the difference between the voice of power and privilege, and the voice of hope, too.
But Obama is hoping for something very different from Jesse Jackson and other civil rights activists of the 1970s. Here’s a line from his justly famous speech on race back on March 18th:
“…we’ve heard the implication that my candidacy is somehow an exercise in affirmative action; that it’s based solely on the desire of wide-eyed liberals to purchase racial reconciliation on the cheap.”
Those are strong words! Obama is not an affirmative action candidate, nor a token played in the disingenuous game of racial reconciliation.
Some have talked about how he stands on the shoulders of people like Jesse Jackson and the civil rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s, and there is certainly something absolutely true about that. But he also represents a profoundly different political ideology than the talk about race or sex thirty years ago. Then, liberals would often favor someone simply because they were black or female. Had Jesse Jackson been elected, we all knew that he would make a point of choosing black people for his key positions, as we expected that Geraldine Ferraro would have chosen women if she had been elected Vice President, using their political power to reward Their Kind with entitlements. But that’s just reverse racism and sexism, and morally it is no better than the original versions that have done so much damage.
Both Hillary Rodham Clinton and Sarah Palin continued to play on that reverse sexism this year in their very different campaigns, and many women were willing to vote for them largely because they were women, especially in the case of Hillary. As women, they belonged to a majority containing slightly more than half of the voting population and over half the general population.
But Obama had to be, and was, far more pragmatic. As the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas, raised by a white grandmother in Hawaii, rising high into the intellectual and political elite through his own exceptional gifts – he didn’t belong to any majorities. Kenyans aren’t a majority in America, nor people born to parents of two different races, nor Hawaiians. The only majority Obama could appeal to was the majority of Americans. And as he said throughout his speeches over the past four years, he wasn’t appealing to red states or blue states, but to the United States. He wasn’t appealing to black America or white America, or to liberal America or conservative America, but just to the United States of America.
Think of it: a message of hope, spoken to and on behalf of the majority of our citizens, regardless of their political party, race or sex: that is a definition of post-partisan politics, which will be revolutionary if he means it and can pull it off.
If Obama is telling the truth, he is bringing a peaceful, profound, revolution. He says he’s looking for more than just a change of parties in the White House. Obama’s message isn’t about black empowerment. It’s about American empowerment, and human empowerment. This seemed to be the singular voice he brought, a voice that could have come only from outside all the majority groups.
Part C: My Own Audacious Hopes
We don’t know what kind of a president Barack Obama will make. If he plays the race card as Jesse Jackson did, he may become no more than a sensationalist President, notable only because he was black and brilliant, rather than becoming a truly sensational President because he was one of our very best.
I want to share some of my own audacious hopes for the next four years with you. You won’t agree with all of them, but you don’t come here only to have your biases confirmed, but also to hear things that might irritate you enough to make you think about your biases, and be more clear about why you’re going to stick with them, or change them.
I hope this wasn’t just a victory for the Democratic party, because the Democratic Party can not save us. I hope we won’t see four or eight more years of tit for tat, of vengeance on Republicans, and of liberal pork-barrel politics operating at the same low level as the Republican pork-barrel politics of the past eight years.
I hope I don’t like all of Obama’s appointments, and hope neither the Democrats nor the Republicans like them all either.
This has already started, as some prominent liberal voices have spoken out. Rabbi Michael Lerner, founder of Tikkun magazine and a longtime progressive activist, railed against Rahm Emanual as Obama’s choice for Chief of Staff, characterizing him as a right-wing Zionist ideologue. And Ralph Nader wasted no time saying that Obama is already too beholden to giant corporations for us to hope for any significant change. But if Obama is serious about post-partisan politics, then he will appoint a fair number of brilliant Republicans to key posts – people who won’t always agree with him, but who will be open and informed enough in their criticism to keep the possibility of meaningful change alive – and I hope he does that.
I hope he truly puts together a post-partisan cabinet that might help move us all beyond the partisan politics that have proven to be so petty and immature for the past few decades.
I don’t know what that would look like. I don’t even know what it should look like, because in politics as in all other areas, I can’t see very far beyond my own biases, and my biases aren’t good enough. We need to empower meaningful dialogue between many different biases if this is to become – as Obama has also promised – a government of the people, by the people and for the people. I hope he can empower meaningful and influential dialogue between whose biases go beyond mine, no matter how much in love with my own biases I can be.
So I hope we are all surprised and educated in the coming years, to find a president who actually keeps some of his major campaign promises, and moves our country ahead into brave new places it has never been before.
PART D. A Reality Check
Now, does any of this hope for radical change really make any real-world sense? Or is it just that it’s Sunday, so we huddle together in church to be anesthetized with swell-sounding bromides of neither depth nor breadth, to numb us until we can get outside in the actual world again? That sort of thing does happen, as you know. Are we just kidding ourselves, like a herd of little Pollyannas, or can such radical, hopeful, change really happen?
Well, several things suggest that it can. Proposition 8 in California, forbidding the marriage of gay people, won only by a slim margin. That was the one dramatic setback for many people. But let’s back off and see this through a longer lens. In the past eight years, the percentage of people who voted against the rights of gays to marry in California decreased from 61% to 52%. In four more years, it is almost certain to be the minority view. Massachusetts has already extended the right of marriage to all people. New York recognizes those marriages as legal, and soon Connecticut will join them. And on another front, in all three states where regressive abortion propositions were on the ballot, they failed. As I think we’ll see in the coming years, the coming defeat of racial and sexual regression will also be a significant defeat for conservative Christianity – normative Christianity – which has supported them. Christine Wicker, author of The Fall of the Evangelical Nation, has an essay from 6 November on the Huffington Post in which she talks about “the Jesus that lost this election,” and it is the angry, bigoted, hateful Jesus who many of us have learned to accept as the normative Jesus over the past couple decades (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/christine-wicker/the-victorious-jesus_b_141701.html). Twenty years ago, all of this would have been as unbelievable as a black president, but it’s happening, and the momentum seems both clear and strong.
Two days ago, a man named Benedict Carey reported on the op-ed pages of the New York Times about a study showing that mutual trust between members of different races can catch on just as quickly, and spread just as fast, as suspicion and hatred can, and that mutual trust, once developed, travels like what he called a benign virus through an entire peer group. Radical change is possible, and it is happening. The fact that this report – which doesn’t contain much more than common sense to anyone who has made friends in racially mixed places – only came out this week rather than years ago is a sign of the role our media have played in helping to keep us at one another’s throats. Perhaps even the media can return to the days when they were actually the Fourth Estate, and took it as a sacred mission to keep us informed and educated. (A version of this article appeared in print on November 7, 2008, on page A20 of the New York edition.)
Paul Krugman the economist also wrote on Friday, quoting Franklin Delano Roosevelt who said, “We have always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals; we know now that it is bad economics.”
“And right now,” he says, “happens to be one of those times when the converse is also true, and good morals are good economics. Helping the neediest in a time of crisis, through expanded health and unemployment benefits, is the morally right thing to do; it’s also a far more effective form of economic stimulus than cutting the capital gains tax. Providing aid to beleaguered state and local governments, so that they can sustain essential public services, is important for those who depend on those services; it’s also a way to avoid job losses and limit the depth of the economy’s slump.
“So,” Krugman concludes, “a new New Deal isn’t just economically possible, it’s exactly what the economy needs.” (A version of this article appeared in print on November 7, 2008, on page A35 of the New York edition.)
I agree with our next President, that if we do this right, we have a righteous wind at our backs and that we stand on the crossroads of history. But the final quote this morning will come from Barack Obama, as he reveals what is at the core of his whole vision, the spirit that he actually says he will serve:
“In the end, then,” he says, “what is called for is nothing more, and nothing less, than what all the world’s great religions demand – that we do unto others as we would have them do unto us. Let us be our brother’s keeper, Scripture tells us. Let us be our sister’s keeper. Let us find that common stake we all have in one another, and let our politics reflect that spirit as well.” (from the 18 March speech on race).
I don’t always know what to say when politicians talk politics, but I hope many of these audacious dreams come true. I hope we here can find ways to move beyond both partisan and Unitarian biases to become agents of change in the broader kind of coalition that now calls us out.
And finally, I hope that if the new President of the United States asks us if we can grow beyond mere politics and ground our behavior instead in the highest teachings of the world’s great religions – to do unto others only as we would have them do unto us – I hope if he asks us whether we can do that, that as individuals and as a nation, we are able to rise up and shout YES WE CAN!
Through the pale sunlight once more gravely speak,
Tell me again, while the last leaves are falling:
“Dear child, what has been once so interwoven
Cannot be raveled, nor the gift ungiven.”
Now the dead move through all of us still glowing,
Mother and child, lover and lover mated,
Are wound and bound together and enflowing.
What has been plaited cannot be unplaited –
Only the strands grow richer with each loss
And memory makes kings and queens of us.
Dark into light, light into darkness, spin.
When all the birds have flown to some real haven,
We who find shelter in the warmth within,
Listen, and feel now new-cherished, new-forgiven,
As the lost human voices speak through us and blend
Our complex love, our mourning without end.
Prayer
At this time of year nature and our mythology remind us of the cycles of life and death. Our environment seems less abundant as trees and plants prepare for winter. Many cultures in our world claim that the veil between the living and dead is thinner at this time of year.
For those of us coping with loss of friends and loved ones, that thinness feels vast – and thin. Vast because our relationship with those who have died has forever changed. Yet thin because our memory of the dead can keep them close and vital to us.
The cherished memories of our loved ones who came before remind us of the love they gave us and our love for them. We are reminded by them that how we live today matters not just to those with us today but the future generations to come.
As those who came before influence us then we will in turn influence those to come. If we influence others is not our choice, how we influence them is. Our time in this life is limited but what we choose to give to others can be abundant.
May our love and concern for others guide us in preserving the memories and values of those who came before – and may we pass on to those who come after the highest values and spirit that enriched our own lives.
Amen
Today’s reading
is a poem entitled Message in Colors
by Spanish Poet Julie Sopetran.
Here, in an impressionistic and sensory fashion, the writer tries to convey to us the kind of nostalgia that is a spiritual celebration on the Day of the Dead in Mexico.
Lit candles. Faces. Memories
and an entrance that’s a rainbow: protection for the place
It is the decomposition of matter, transformed into art.
It is the final curtain awoken from death.
Yes. An eternal dream of uncorrupt flowers and of celebration.
It is death’s lament, fading away
and it is also the respect made as tribute.
Who could have imagined so much beauty on a tomb?
Mole. Glass of water. Incense. Salt. Prayers.
Firecrackers. Fruits. Bread. Music.
Ballads, Poems. Romantic songs.
History praised. Creativity expressed
in its most raw form…
And they are laments in purple, white, blue, and pink.
It is a blow from grace so heightened as artificial fire
that reveals the soul’s presence in the darkness.
Something like the flowering of martyrdom in flames.
An arrangement for the dead
or the posthumous splendor of what one thinks is on the other side;
In that place everything is possible
grief battles with life and life wins,
it is once again for a little while, happiness, playful tradition
which overcomes reality.
It was before these ornate gravesites, when I knew
that in that place, as in my heart,
those that have departed return every year to remind us of their love.
And that only LOVE can save us.
Sermon: What the dead can tell us about coming alive
Today, in the sanctuary we are blessed by these beautiful Altars that were created for our Dia de los Muertos or Day of the Dead celebrations here at the church last night. Thank you to all of you who created them. Amidst this explosion of color I am feeling rather drab in my dark suit with only my red tie looking like it belongs up here with all these colors.
This time of year feels really busy. We just had Halloween on Friday and this weekend we also have the Day of the Dead celebrations. The election on Tuesday means that we are only three days away from the beginning of the 2012 Presidential Election campaign. The church year is in full swing with lots of exciting activities happening here most days of the week. The relaxed days of summer seems a distant memory as Thanksgiving plans are starting to coalesce and Christmas is looming just around the corner. Thank goodness for that extra hour we gained with the clocks going back last night, we need all the time we can get. Yet time is a quantity we only have a finite amount of. Our own health concerns or those around us are a constant reminder that we are creatures of finite lives. We are particularly sensitive to these issues at this time of year since in many cultures this is a time where we do honor and celebrate the dead. The Mexican holiday of Day of the Dead is one such tradition.
When I first came to the United States and encountered the Day of the Dead celebration, I naively thought it was just the Mexican version of Halloween. The proliferation of skeletons in various active poses and sugar skulls seemed to suggest a similar emphasis on the fearful and otherworldly aspects of Halloween. My assumption of any similarity with Halloween was mistaken. Day of the Dead focuses on bringing family and friends together to remember and honor those close to us who have died.
In the poem, Ron read earlier we heard about the atmosphere, beauty, and celebratory nature of the Day of the Dead tradition as families gather at gravesites or in homes with altars similar to what we have here. The altars contain mementoes and other objects such as flowers, food, and drink. The intent is to encourage visits from the souls of the dead so they can hear the prayers, music, and stories told in their honor. The commemoration of the dead has warm and pleasant overtones for the participants. In the words from the poem “grief battles with life and life wins, it is once again for a little while, happiness and playful tradition which overcomes reality.” The reality is death but for a brief period through community celebration then grief is transcended. This festive interaction between the living and the dead in a social ritual helps the living to remember how enriched they were by the lives of those no longer alive.
Our Halloween celebration is also based on the idea of the dead being able to visit us at this time of year. The difference is the dead are seen as threatening to the living therefore the tradition of wearing costumes to scare off the dead spirits. What different approaches to the dead, one celebrating them, the other being fearful of them? Halloween has no religious significance for us today but the Day of the Dead has its roots in two religious traditions.
The Day of the Dead celebration – and it is a celebration – has its roots back hundreds of years to the indigenous groups in Mexico. These groups honored their ancestors through gifts and stories. After the Spanish Conquests of Mexico, the Christian missionaries saw these celebrations as sacrilegious and tried to banish the ritual. The Spanish had a fearful attitude towards the dead due to the devastation of the great plagues that killed one third of the population in Europe during the late Middle Ages. After many years of unsuccessfully trying to end the practice, the Spanish Christians then decided to assimilate the celebration. They moved the indigenous celebration from August to coincide with All Soul’s day which is today November 2nd. All Soul’s Day is a Roman Catholic commemoration of the dead so there is a tenuous connection of honoring the dead.
Christianity like other religions has been very effective co-opting indigenous holidays and making them Christian holidays. The birth of Jesus on December 25th is widely recognized to be the co-opting of a Roman Solar holiday not the actual birth of Jesus. The seeming coincidences of Day of the Dead and All Souls Day are not “God working anonymously” as some would claim but the appropriation of a less powerful group’s tradition by a more powerful group. Interestingly, the Day of the Dead celebration as practiced by most people today has little connection to the actual rituals of the Christian tradition and strong connections to the original ideas of the indigenous, pre-Christian tradition.
Sadly, like so many religious practices there has been some co-option of this holiday by that most dominant of all our present religions – consumerism. The commercialization of holidays such as Christmas, Halloween, and Day of the Dead often take the important symbols of a religion and trivialize them as nothing more than products to be sold. This may explain why on my first encounter with Day of the Dead I could not see a distinction from the overt commercialization of Halloween. In the tradition of the Day of the Dead, the significance of the skeletons and sugar skulls are their material symbolism. The skeletons are symbols for the dead family members, not to be feared, but to be loved and invited to join the celebration of their own lives. The specific activity that a skeleton is engaged in is usually the favorite activity of the deceased person being honored.
The desire to have some physical connection to a dead relative or friend is something I suspect many of us can relate to. Many of us have physical keepsakes that remind us of those special to us. The other important aspect of the Day of the Dead celebration is the idea of the gifts the living could give to the dead to bring us closer to their spirit and help bring their spirit more fully into our lives. Of course in Liberal Religion we need to do some translation to bring the idea into our context but I think this is a potentially rich way of thinking for us. What gifts can we give of ourselves today that would honor and bring us closer to departed family and friends? Can we live our lives to honor those who through their love, values, and support made us who we are today? Being a Liberal Religion each of us needs to explore those questions ourselves but perhaps hearing my own struggles with these questions might help you.
I mentioned earlier that this tie may be the only item belonging to me that belongs with these altars. I was referencing the red color in contrast with the dark, austere colors of my suit. Remember we Unitarian Universalists are religiously descended from the Puritans who were not famed for their bold color sense. This tie also belongs on these altars for the symbolism it means to me. I was given this tie twenty-two years ago for my brother’s wedding by my father. It was his tie and he gave it to me as a family gift. My father died unexpectedly in January of this year. Like many of us here who have experienced the loss of someone close to us and perhaps especially a parent whom we’re close to, it is a disorienting experience. A seemingly ever-present pillar of your life is removed. It is painful and destabilizing. This tie for me is an important connection to the memory of my dad.
My dad was an honest, hard working, and plain talking person. He was bright and inquisitive but not college educated and liked people to speak in plain language grounded in what he called the real world. I remind myself to keep my words honest, respectful, and accessible. My dad always loved a good argument and would often disagree with me just for the discussion. Family discussions around the dinner table had always been a huge part of my family culture for as long as I can remember. I believe the constant questioning and discussions in my family home set me on my long and winding path to finding a home in Unitarian Universalism. When I question with honesty, sincerity, respect, and clarity then I believe I am closer to the spirit of my dad while serving important religious values.
Davidson in a sermon a few weeks ago gave a wonderful example of living life as if all the great people of history were watching – living under the gaze of eternity I think he called it. As daunting as that sounds it does seem to be powerful guidance for living a good life. I also think it is in keeping with this spirit of Liberal Religion to consider some of the people who are watching us to be our dead relatives and friends who we most admired and were influential on us. When we invoke the memory of them to guide or motivate us in our lives then we are invoking their spirit and by doing so we are honoring them. I believe this is what May Sarton was saying in the earlier poem:
“Now the dead move through all of us still glowing,
As the lost human voices speak through us and blend
Our complex love, our mourning without end.”
We are engaging with both the inspiration and the sadness of those important people who are no longer with us physically. At the heart of grief and mourning is the struggle we have dealing with multiple emotions simultaneously: the joy that person brought to us in our lives and the sadness at their absence, the anger at what is seemingly unresolved and fear of how we can live life without them. Our mourning does not end since we are reminded of them as they continue to influence us through their example.
As part of the Day of the Dead celebration many Mexican families tell stories about the dead person each year to keep their memory and influence alive. I think there is great value in this. In our religion the memorial services fill this formal role on a one time basis shortly after their death. We do not have a religious tradition of regularly telling a person’s story. What I wanted to do for my dad became clear to me when I was clearing through photographs when preparing to move here from San Francisco in June.
I was looking at some photographs and I found one of my dad when he was two years old and a photograph of when I was last with him just over a year ago. I looked at him in both photographs and thought what really connects these two completely different people – the fresh-faced two year old boy in 1932 and the haggard face seventy-five years later which showed the years of discomforting illness. What became clear to me is that it is the stories, experiences, and relationships connecting the people in the two photographs. I realized that I knew only a small portion of those stories. The father-son relationship, though intimate and important, is a limited lens through which to view any person.
Being a father myself, I’m acutely aware of the narrow view my five-year old daughter has of me – I’m a mode of transportation and a rather large climbing frame but primarily I’m the authority figure who denies her all things fun. Don’t believe her when she says I denied her any candy on Halloween. I think I allowed her one piece. To broaden my own view of my father I’ve undertaken a project to write his eulogy not from my own perspective or people I know well but from those who I do not know well and had a relationship with my dad very different from me. His friends when he was in the Air Force as a young man, the people who were his apprentices at work, and his brother in Canada who knew him during his early years. This will help me get a fuller perspective beyond just his later life as a father and perhaps gain insights into why he was the person he was.
When a person dies we can often freeze our relationship with them at the time of their death and not remember the changes that occurred in the relationship over the course of their life. I believe that we can continue to change our relationship even with those who are dead by getting a fuller understanding of who they were. As long as they are alive there is often that vain hope that they may still change to become the person we want them to be. Seventy-six years wasn’t enough perhaps the seventy-seventh year of their life will be the one they make the change I desire of them. Ah the eternal hopeful human spirit especially when it is about someone else changing and not ourselves.
When a person dies we give up any hope of them changing but if we choose we can change our own beliefs of that person. Perhaps what we wanted them to change was just not that important and we focus on those more important eternal attributes of the person that are important to us – their love for us despite our imperfections, their confidence in us despite our own doubts, or their friendship despite our sometimes feeling unworthy of it. The death of someone allows us to reframe what we remember about their life – for good and for bad – and perhaps allows us to see the essence of the person beyond the often trivial disagreements that are so much part of our everyday lives.
Despite the inevitability of death for all of us, it is not a subject that is discussed much in our society. There is often avoidance until it is thrust upon on us through our own loss. Many people, religious and non-religious, often turn to religion or religious leaders for guidance at this time. Religion is where we try to find some meaning and comfort about death. Different religions have different ideas about what happens to us when we die. Many propose some form of existence beyond this life, a hope that we will be reunited in some form with those who died before us. I understand the desire for this but to me what happens beyond death is a mystery – and perhaps it is good that it is a mystery. This allows grief-stricken people to find hope in different ways during difficult times. I have seen the solace and strength that friends of mine have gained from believing they would be reunited with a deceased child or young spouse in the future. This is not a denial of death but a belief in something beyond death. I personally struggle to share their beliefs but I cannot be certain what happens after death and at times even feel a little envious of the comfort these beliefs give them.
What I can be certain of is that death is a transformational experience for those close to the deceased. Our lives are changed as we are reminded of our own mortality. We are finite beings with a limited time in this life and it matters what we do with our life. I have heard the Spanish expression Manana described as meaning something might get done tomorrow, or maybe next week, or maybe next month. I heard someone being asked if we had any equivalent of that expression in Scotland and he replied that we had no word to convey that sense of urgency. Urgency is not a good way of determining what is important. Our lives seem to be surrounded by urgency. Urgency of creating Halloween costumes, making Thanksgiving plans, buying Christmas presents and even writing sermons. While death gives us a finite time we should react to this restriction by prioritizing what really is important.
Manana can be thought of as something never being started because of procrastination, alternatively it can mean something will never be completed because it transcends our timeframe. I suspect what is really most important is not what we get done before we die but those projects that we begin that will transcend our deaths. For example the work we do in community to address the social ills such as poverty, violence, hunger, racism, and sexism. This work to heal our world will not be completed in my life time – improved I hope but not completed. By building institutions such as this church with our time and money we hope this work and the promotion of our religious values to others will continue after we are gone. This is legacy work since it transcends our own life span.
I talked earlier about how a focus of Day of the Dead was the gifts whose purpose was to bring the spirit of the dead closer to us. Our legacy is the reverse of this, what will we dedicate ourselves to now that will be a gift to others when we are dead? Our time in this life is finite but our legacy and what we choose it to be is not. How we preserve the memory and values of those who came before us and pass on our values and spirit to others are perhaps the most important questions we will address in our lives. By acknowledging the reality of death and the losses we have in common we may find what is most meaningful in our life and worth passing on to future generations. And when we do that we are honoring the full human experience and celebrating life’s longing for itself.
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Sopetran, Julie, Message in Colors from the book Mexico City, Mixquic & Morelos – Through the Eyes of the Soul, Day of the Dead in Mexico. http://library.thinkquest.org/trio/TTQ03066/poems_english.html#message URL accessed on October 30th, 2008.
Sewell, Marilyn ed. Cries of the Spirit (Boston, Ma: Beacon Press, 1991) p.131
Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be significant, formidable, powerful? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small doesn’t serve the world. There’s nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We were born to manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.
– Nelson Mandela, 1994 Inaugural Speech – words adapted from Marianne Williamson
SERMON: How You Should Vote
So many conservative preachers have been telling their people how to vote for so long that I began to wonder if I was being derelict in my duty. After all, we’re trying to do honest religion here. And surely honest religion also has some light to shed on the upcoming election.
So that’s what I want to do this morning. I want to bring this election – and I mean this presidential election – home to you in a way that might make it more clear just how you should vote on November 4th.
It’s a complex subject, and I first need to sketch a much bigger picture before I can then bring this election – or any- important election – into it.
Many of you know the story about two wolves that comes from our Native American tradition. A young boy who was the strongest and most popular boy in the tribe went to see his grandfather for some wisdom. He was strong and clever enough to take whatever he wanted from others, and one voice within him said he should do it. On the other hand, he felt it wasn’t fair, taking things from others that they needed, just because he could get away with it. His grandfather nodded, and said yes, he had the same two voices within him. He thought of them as two wolves. One always urged him to take what he could get away with, to use his advantages over others to his own advantage, not theirs. The other wolf always wanted him to be decent, compassionate, someone who was a blessing to all around him rather than just to himself.
I want to talk about these two wolves this morning, because they are in all of us. We are not all the strongest, cleverest and most popular, but we have other advantages. Maybe we have more education than the majority of others, or we attended elite schools, and both expect and know that just the fact that we attended an elite school will open doors for us that aren’t opened for others, and we like it. It seems only fair. Or perhaps we’ve made or inherited more money than most others – I’m convinced that the ability to make money is a gift that a few have but most don’t – and righteously cling to the advantages and security that brings. Or we’re more attractive than most, and have learned how to use that to our advantage. But let’s not get so fuzzy that we fail to see the obvious. And what’s obvious is that, while we have lots of individual traits that give us an advantage over others, the differences that really make the most difference in the world have always been differences in power: the ability to get and keep power.
The wolf with power has a different view of power and its privileges than the wolves without power have, and a different plan for How Things Should Work. I’m going to call this Plan A, or Plan Alpha, for it is the scheme of things as designed by the Alpha males and females.
The other wolf favors Plan Beta, or Plan B. It’s about weaker, squishier things, like empathy, compassion, reciprocity, caring almost as much for others as for ourselves, and so on. It is certainly the weaker wolf.
Plan B serves the people who aren’t an alpha. They are, in every species, the overwhelming majority, yet throughout history they have almost always been successfully subdued, disempowered and ruled by the alphas. It may seem amazing that so few can rule over so many for so long – but it looks like Nature’s Way. And in fact, we have millions of years of history showing that is Nature’s Way. Alphas have always written the rules for their groups – in dolphins, dogs, elephants and apes, including human apes.
The strongest take what they want, the weaker submit as they must, or they will be put in their place through violence or threats of violence. You can see it in a hundred nature films, or read about it in the daily news.
In at least two species, the art of politics has developed as a more subtle and effective expression and transmission of power. I’ve brought you some descriptions from a well-known book on politics. They are pretty blunt, but see if you can’t recognize them:
“… politics is all about getting and keeping power, by the few over the many, and by any means necessary. Alpha males form alliances with influential males and females – or subordinate males form coalitions to overpower the alpha male, and then consolidate their power by forming alliances with influential females. Males seldom maintain the alpha rank for more than four years.” Then there’s another round of opportunistic alliances and vicious fighting to crown a new leader – or as we call them, elections.
The two mottoes of politics are “One good turn deserves another,” and “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.” (Frans de Waal, Chimpanzee Politics, p. 202)
And political alliances are not personal, but functional – not with friends, but with those who can, at the moment, be useful. Yesterday’s enemy may be today’s ally, and we may attack today’s friend tomorrow.
Staying on top is a balancing act between forcefully asserting dominance, keeping supporters happy, and avoiding mass revolt. (Frans de Waal, Our Inner Ape, p. 43)
As I said, that’s a little blunt, but most of us would say yes, that’s our species, and it is. However, most of these observations came from a book called Chimpanzee Politics, written in 1982 and now a minor classic. The author, who has spent his life studying apes, was describing chimpanzees. And he says humans and chimpanzees are the only two species who do politics this way.
So you can understand why Newt Gingrich put the book Chimpanzee Politics on the recommended reading list for freshmen representatives, back in 1994. (Frans de Waal, The Ape and the Sushi Master, p. 307)
It’s another way of saying our political style evolved by three million years ago, and perhaps the only major way in which our species has advanced beyond chimpanzees since then is through our invention of money, media and lobbyists. Not everyone would consider that an advance.
Why seek power? In any species, why seek power? It’s not for the sake of power, but for the entitlement that power brings – entitlement to food, mates and pretty much whatever else the top dogs want.
The alpha male chimpanzees, who do about 95% of the breeding in their troops, would think our alpha males have a severe testosterone deficiency, but we know that isn’t always true either. There are stories going all the way back to George Washington, saying he was father of this country in more ways than one – though you only have to turn on the news to see that we do have some modern politicians trying to uphold that ancient tradition.
The observation that Rank Hath Its Privileges didn’t originate with our species. Thousands of species had been playing that out for tens of millions of years before we came along. And maybe if chimpanzees had invented boats or learned to ride horses and make really destructive weapons, they would have invented the idea of empire.
I don’t have to sketch out any more of this. You all know this movie because we’re in it. You can even take a half hour drive and go up the dominance alphabet from omega to alpha here in Austin just by starting out east of I-35 and driving west.
Power and Privilege for the Alphas and Obedience for the masses are the holy trinity of Plan A in thousands of species, always underwritten by violence and threats of violence. The benefits of Plan A are very appealing, at least if you’re up near the top of the alphabet.
In Plan B, the Betas, Gammas, Deltas on down the dominance alphabet are also concerned primarily with their own interests, and the political structure that would serve them best. Of course, they are the vast majority. But they have been subjugated and ruled in almost every species for tens of millions of years. They are the underdogs.
Plan B is certainly the weaker and less likely plan. And not surprisingly, most of those in favor of Plan B are those without much power or wealth.
Yet as powerful as the history and logic of Plan Alpha are, Plan B has also had many profound and enduring champions, including the key prophets and sages of almost every religion and philosophy in human history.
For starters, just think of the words “Do unto others as you would have them to unto you.” It’s called the Golden Rule because you can find a version of it in almost every religion. It is saying that the only Alpha people God recognizes are the moral Alpha people who show more empathy, compassion and courage than most around them – not those with more money or power. Jesus was even clear that those who get their rewards here will not get them in heaven, where things run according to God’s values.
The Plan B sentiments may be terribly unlikely, but they are among the most famous and endearing teachings of almost every religion on earth.
The Tao te Ching of Lao Tzu, written five centuries before Jesus lived, is so explicit it sounds like an op-ed piece from yesterday’s news. It says, “When rich speculators prosper while farmers lose their land; when government officials spend money on weapons instead of cures; when the upper class is extravagant and irresponsible while the poor have nowhere to turn – all this is robbery and chaos. It is not in keeping with the Tao.” (#53, Stephen Mitchell translation)
A quick Google search will show you unambiguous quotations supporting Plan B from Bahá’í, Buddhism, Christianity, Confucianism, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, Native American Spirituality, Shinto, Sikhism, Sufism, Taoism, and dozens of others. All the religions seem to agree that the fundamental law that helps us become most fully human is reciprocity: not doing things to others that we wouldn’t want them to do to us. Most people would see this as the polar opposite of Plan Alpha, Nature’s Plan that has dominated biological evolution forever.
These two plans, these two wolves, are the diametrically opposed philosophies of life that have polarized us throughout human history. Even in this country, they go all the way back to our founding fathers.
Alexander Hamilton declared that the people are “a great beast” that must be tamed. Rebellious and independent farmers had to be taught, sometimes by force, that the ideals of the revolutionary pamphlets were not to be taken too seriously. (Noam Chomsky, Profits Over People, p. 46).
Or as John Jay, the first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, put it, “The people who own the country ought to govern it.” (Chomsky, 46) Others among the founding fathers agreed wholeheartedly. The primary responsibility of government is “to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority,” said James Madison. (Chomsky, 47) Those “without property, or the hope of acquiring it, cannot be expected to sympathize sufficiently with its rights,” Madison explained. His solution was to keep political power in the hands of those who “come from and represent the wealth of the nation,” the “more capable set of men.” (Chomsky, 48) That’s Nature’s Way, expressed in a language of our species.
Now let’s bring the picture into a little sharper focus. Here’s where the differences between the Alpha and Beta plans shape and misshape our nation today.
Plan A: For Plan Alpha, if privilege and empowerment rightfully belong only to the winners, to those with a lot of money and power – as Mother Nature seems to say it does – then if you are poor or powerless, it’s probably because you deserve to be. You lack discipline, haven’t worked as hard or as smart as the Alphas. You don’t deserve things like health care or a good education if you can’t afford them, because health care and education are commodities like other commodities, and you’re being not only out of line but also selfish pretending you have a right to things you can’t pay for.
By the same logic, worker unions are against Nature’s Plan – Plan A. It doesn’t matter that there are twenty to forty times more non-Alphas. They don’t have, haven’t earned or bought effective power, and this is about power and its privileges. Asking the powerful to share their money – through higher taxes and fewer privileges – just to keep the weak alive, or even to strengthen them so they might actually become able to threaten the privileged position to which the Alphas feel entitled – well, as you can hear, it’s unnatural and immoral. And if God is the voice of the natural and moral order, then God is also against it.
The free market also has a moral imperative, because it enables those with power to keep it. It isn’t a fair fight, but it’s not supposed to be. The fight’s over. It’s about maintaining privilege. Even chimpanzees know that.
Plan B. Plan B people see these things very differently. They want to measure society by different currencies – by compassion, empathy, empowerment of the many rather than what they see as the unholy trinity of power and privilege for the few and fearful obedience for the rest.
They look at data saying that 18,000 Americans die every year because of inadequate health care, and they see health care as protection, just as police and fire protection, food safety, and adequately tested drugs are protection of our citizens. And this changes it from a mere individual commodity to part of the moral mission of government, part of the compassion we owe one another, even to what God demands of us.
(NOTE: I’m grateful to George Lakoff for the understanding of healthcare as protection rather than commodity. See his book The Political Mind.)
If they’re Christian, they may quote Jesus’ saying “Whatever you do to the least of these, you do to me,” then connect it not only to the 18,000 of us dying each year, but also to the more than 40 million of us without health care, and they say “Jesus would hate this.”
They can see worker unions in the same way, as necessary protection of the weaker many against the powerful few, who seem so easily tempted to a kind of greed that Plan B folks see as selfish and brutal.
The “free market” looks very different, too. For one thing, it isn’t free. Without government protection, our lawmakers have allowed or encouraged rapacious people to rob us of well over a trillion dollars, while making huge personal profits. Bloomberg News columnist Jonathan Weil figures that since the start of fiscal year 2004, the once Mighty Five of Wall Street – Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Merrill-Lynch, Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns – lost around $83 billion in stock market value. But they reported employee compensation of around $239 billion. In other words, the engineers who dug this disastrous hole paid themselves almost three dollars for every dollar they lost. To the Betas, this looks like socialism for the rich and a vicious kind of capitalism for the rest of us. (Taken from “For Whom the Bailout Tolls,” Saturday 25 October 2008, by Michael Winship, Truthout/Perspective.)
This latest trillion-dollar bailout will cost every U.S. household close to $9,000. (As calculated by the Internet investigative newsroom ProPublica.org) It has transferred the private debt of a few to all of us by making us pay for it with our taxes.
“The ‘free market’ doesn’t free us from government; it just gives us unaccountable government without a moral mission.” (George Lakoff, The Political Mind, p. 63)
You could say this is just a reminder of the real-world power of the Alpha Plan, and that the rest of us need to grow up and accept our natural place. But to the majority of humans, even if they are afraid to speak up, it just sounds greedy and brutal, lacking even the most basic compassion all of our religions have always taught.
This brings me to the coming election. As citizens, we need to practice speaking up. Voting is practice in speaking up. It’s not much, and it’s certainly not enough, but it’s practice.
Here’s one more fact that can be seen in at least a couple ways. Three years ago, the ratio of lobbyists to lawmakers in Washington D.C. was 65:1. I couldn’t find more recent statistics online, though did find one other seeker making the same complaint. While that can sound hopelessly lopsided, there’s another way to see it. It is also saying that elected politicians’ inclinations to serve the majority of people who elected them may be so deep and strong that it can take up to sixty-five times as much energy to persuade them to betray us. Though here in Texas, the ratio of lobbyists to lawmakers is only 8:1, so the lawmakers in Washington can also just look like higher-priced rentals.
I began with a story of the two wolves, but I didn’t finish it. The boy was frustrated by his grandfather’s admission that he too had always had these two wolves fighting to control his soul. “But grandfather,” he finally said, “which wolf wins?” His grandfather looked deep into his eyes – one of those looks that can connect two souls – and said, “The one that I feed, grandson, the one that I feed.”
Voting is throwing food to these wolves. Plan A has been and will probably always be the dominant plan for almost every animal species on earth. And as much as prophets like Jesus, Mohammad, Lao Tzu and the rest preach about Plan B as the highest human path, or as Jesus’ definition of the kingdom of God, I don’t know that Plan B has ever defined a U.S. government, though some have been much closer to it than others.
There has probably never been a presidential candidate who was a pure example of either Plan Alpha or Plan Beta. All are mixtures; there are no unadulterated angels or demons here. But they all lean more toward one than the other, and the direction of their leaning is important.
I started to tell you how you should vote, and I want to finish that. To me as a minister, voting is above all else a spiritual activity, where we can speak up for our deepest and most cherished values and beliefs. When we vote, we are standing before our God, before all that is holy to us.
When you stand before that little touch-screen voting machine, I want you to know that you are not alone. There are two wolves there with you, each singing “Stand by Me”. Don’t try to face them alone. Take with you the image of those whose love has meant the most of you, those for whom you have the deepest respect. Take the spiritual teachings that have most deeply touched your soul. Take the mental image of all the people in your whole life who expected only the very best from you, and who knew you were capable of it. Look at them, and let them look you straight in the eye – that look that connects your souls. Then, in front of that audience, push only the buttons that you can be most proud to have pushed.
Let us trust in the Holy Spirit. That Holy Spirit within that implores us to seek life, truth and wholeness – let us trust that spirit.
When the voices within or around us say to do something wrong because everybody’s doing it and we can get away with it, let us answer that we can not get away with it, because the angels of our better nature are watching, and because we know better.
When we are in a moral dilemma and are urged to take the path of least resistance, let us remember that in the mor world and the world of character, resistance builds strength.
When tempted to cheat on life, or on those we love, let us remember that you can’t score points by cheating in life and love, because there is a spirit within us that knows better, and it may not give our soul back to us until we make it right.
And all of this is good news – the good news that we are more decent, more loving and more just than we often believe.
The saving truth is that we are being watched by something we can trust, and that something is the person we are meant to become. The person we are meant to become is inviting us into a larger life, a more healing truth, and a better world. That invitation may be our salvation. Let us take it.
Amen.
SERMON: The Holy Heretical Spirit
This morning, I’d like to talk about the meaning of life, honest religion, God, Jesus, the Bible, salvation, the Army, amoeba, the Holy Spirit, the Tao te Ching, the Marine Corps, and playing hide-and-seek. I’ll try to be brief.
I’m doing a series of sermons this fall on the three most significant Unitarian thinkers and preachers of the past 200 years. Almost everyone here will feel a deep kinship with them at that level, I think, whether you care about Unitarians or not.
Mostly today I want to talk about Ralph Waldo Emerson, easily the best known of the people we claim, rightly or wrongly, as Unitarian. He spoke to the general audience of inquiring liberal minds who wanted to know how to think about Jesus, God, the Bible, religion and salvation in the 19th century.
He also has a connection to this church. In 1892, the first incarnation of this church was founded by a student of Emerson’s. And when the church reformed in the 1950s, Rev. Wheelock’s granddaughter Emily Howson was a member, and donated the seed money to let us build our social hall, which is named after her.
We need to see this complex man Emerson against the background of his even more complex times, for they were times that shaped our world today in many ways.
When the seven-member graduating class of Harvard Divinity School invited Emerson to speak in 1838, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, two of our country’s founding fathers, had been dead for 12 years, both dying on the 4th of July 1826, 50 years after they had signed our Declaration of Independence.
The scientific revolution was under way, and already threatening a view of the world that Christians had held for about 1800 years. Many people still believed the world was only six thousand years old, created by God in six days, and that – as Thomas Jefferson had also believed – no species had ever become extinct. But by 1803 – the year Emerson was born – a brilliant French paleontologist had assembled the skeletons of 23 extinct species of animals, and that collection had toured all over Europe, and then through the U.S. with P.T. Barnum’s circuses.
And two geologists had shown that the world was much, much older than six thousand years. Millions and millions of years, they thought, which we now believe to be billions of years. The most influential of these geologists, Charles Lyell, had just published his first volume eight years before Emerson’s address, and among the many who read it and had their worldview forever changed by it was a young naturalist named Charles Darwin. Darwin had the second volume shipped to him while he was on his voyage aboard The Beagle, where he made his detailed observations on the Galapagos Islands that led to the publication of his book Origin of the Species, 21 years after Emerson’s address.
This was the broader stage on which Emerson spoke on that hot July day. What were we to make of religion, or of Jesus, God, and all the stories in the Bible? Where were we to stand? Where was the new truth that could set us free and make us come more alive? These were Emerson’s questions, and they’re still our questions today, 170 years later.
The Unitarians of the 1830s – including William Ellery Channing, whom I talked about last month – still believed in a supernatural religion, a supernatural God and the literalness of the biblical miracles. Emerson didn’t. He took all of this psychologically. He saw religion as the development of our innate senses of the good, the true and the beautiful, and said that these senses were like a divine presence within us, or that we were all a part of God.
This is a lot like the Hindu notion that our individual soul, or atman, is part of the universal soul, or Brahman, and within a few years, the Bhagavad Gita would be the favorite religious scripture of both Emerson and his younger friend, Henry David Thoreau.
The way Emerson saw it, salvation would mean getting in touch with these deep sensitivities we have, and living out of them – living lives of truth, justice and compassion. Heaven and hell are here and now for Emerson, not elsewhere and later.
While his attacks were against Christianity, their arguments work against every Western religion. The capacity for a noble, even a holy life is born within us. It’s part of human nature, not something put in from elsewhere. That’s shown by the fact that we know the difference between good and evil, kindness and cruelty, truth and pretense, and we are, at our best, drawn to the better options. This shows the presence within us of what theologians like to call God. Emerson put it this way: “The notion of God is the individual’s own soul carried out to perfection (Gary Dorrien, The Making of American Liberal Theology: Imagining Progressive Religion, 1805 – 1900 [Westminster John Knox Press, 2001], p. 61).” “The highest revelation is that God is in every [one of us].” (Gary Dorrien, The Making of American Liberal Theology: Imagining Progressive Religion, 1805 – 1900 [Westminster John Knox Press, 2001]), p. 62)
But if that’s so, then what’s the use of figures like Jesus, Mohammad or Allah, or books like the Bible or the Koran? Well for Emerson, when these people or books can show us some wisdom that helps us come more alive, then they’re useful and probably even true for us for now. But not because Jesus or a holy scripture said them – only because these figures or books happened, in this case, to say something that also seems to be true.
It’s like saying that science books are only correct if what they say happens to be true – but it’s not true just because a science book says so. The books can be wrong. So can the prophets, so can all holy scriptures. And the way we check it out is in the real world, with our own mind and in our own heart.
In intellectual terms, what Emerson did was to convert theology into a kind of depth psychology. Religion is about our becoming all that we can be. All religions are about being all that we can be – it’s such a timeless religious truth, it’s really a pity that some advertising agency stole it for the Army. People like Jesus are examples of what all of us can become: they’re examples of our deepest human nature, not exceptions to it. Emerson said that Jesus was true to what is in you and me, and that if we are compassionate and just, then to that extent we are God. The gods are our best traits, writ large. We are the projector, they are the screen.
These were the sorts of things he said in that commencement address to the students, faculty and guest ministers at Harvard Divinity School when he was just 35 years old. He was attacked viciously for his remarks – especially by the Unitarians. The Unitarian paper called The Christian Examiner said that Emerson’s Divinity School address contained “neither good divinity nor good sense (Gary Dorrien, The Making of American Liberal Theology: Imagining Progressive Religion, 1805 – 1900 [Westminster John Knox Press, 2001], p. 75).” And a man named Andrews Norton, who was regarded as the most liberal Unitarian scholar alive at the time, said Emerson’s beliefs threatened civilization itself (Gary Dorrien, The Making of American Liberal Theology: Imagining Progressive Religion, 1805 – 1900 [Westminster John Knox Press, 2001], p. 75).
His address made him an outsider to the Unitarians. They denounced him, and closed ranks against him (Gary Dorrien, The Making of American Liberal Theology: Imagining Progressive Religion, 1805 – 1900 [Westminster John Knox Press, 2001], p. 74). It also set off a firestorm that lasted for decades. It was almost thirty years before he was invited to speak at Harvard again.
He was ordained and served as a Unitarian minister for about three years, but it didn’t agree with him, and he resigned from it. After that, he liked to say things like “Unitarianism is corpse-cold.”
He was a scathing critic of all the religion of his time. He said, “I think no [one] can go with his thoughts about him into one of our churches, without feeling, that what hold the public worship had on [people] is gone, or going.”
He puzzled over people who went to church, and said “It is already beginning to indicate character and religion to withdraw from the religious meetings. I have heard a devout person, who prized the Sabbath, say in bitterness of heart, ‘On Sundays, it seems wicked to go to church.'” (In fact, that person was him. It was something he wrote to his wife.)
Emerson’s vision carried him far beyond the boundaries not only of Christianity, but of theism and all religions. He had faith that we had a divine impulse within us that we could trust. He saw all gods and religions as projections of our own sense of being part of something larger than ourselves. Not all teachings of religions or about gods are good, of course. Some are foolish, or evil. But he trusted that we could generally tell the difference.
You can think of the Bible’s command, for example, that disobedient teen-agers or women who were not virgins when they married should be stoned to death.
You may have seen the YouTube videos of women being stoned to death by Muslim clerics, or read about fundamentalist cults in our country today where disobedient children were beaten to death. Jon Krakauer, the author of the book and movie Into the Wild, also wrote a powerful expose of fundamentalist Mormons called Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith (on which I preached here a few years ago), in which he recounted the story of a Mormon father murdering his daughter because she was disobedient. That father later died in a Mexican prison for other violent crimes he believed God commanded him to commit. I happen to know one of that man’s daughters, a sister of the girl who was murdered. She lives in Austin. These things aren’t just happening “elsewhere” – they’re right here among us, too.
All of these punitive teachings, Emerson believed, are evil. And I agree with him. There is nothing about any real God in any of them. And we can all see this. When we’re being honest with ourselves, we can and should trust our own heads and hearts more than we trust theologians, preachers, churches or scriptures.
All of this means that the role of churches and preachers is to offer us insights, stories and teachings that can help us become more alive and whole. And the churches and preachers are to be judged by how well they do that. If they don’t, we need to keep looking for a church and minister who meet our own deepest needs, which may not be quite the same as those of the person in the next row.
You have to take the best urgings of your head and heart seriously – what Abraham Lincoln called the angels of our better nature. Then you have to find people, places and experiences that also take you seriously – where you don’t have to check your head or your heart at the door. But don’t think the real authority lies with a church or a bible or a god. All those, including the gods, are human creations. The best of them are good, in the same way the best philosophies, psychologies or literature are. But the fundamental revelation for Emerson was that we already have the spirit – a spirit that even transcends God – within us, and need to live out of that.
The Unitarians and others of the day called all this The Transcendentalist Revolt. Do you see how radical it is? Whether or not Emerson can be seen as a Unitarian – and the leading Unitarians of his time denied that he could be – he was definitely a religious liberal, and a courageous preacher of honest religion.
But honest religion is a style, not a position. When it becomes a position, a belief, a creed or orthodoxy, we need to hold lightly to it. Yesterday’s beliefs and other people’s creeds may not do it. Second-hand religion isn’t likely to give us a first-hand life. The spirit that honestly seeks truth can’t be fenced in. “Time makes ancient good uncouth,” as the poet says (James Russell Lowell) – not just out of date, but uncouth.
The movement Emerson started was called Transcendentalism. And for the Transcendentalists, time made the ancient teachings about Jesus, God and the Bible uncouth. Uncouth, because they no longer led reasonable and informed minds to truth that helped them come alive, no longer led to truth that could heal them or their world and help make them more authentic and whole.
When we look back to people like Ralph Waldo Emerson, it’s not too important to focus on their beliefs, because those may be out of date by now. But it is important to look back to that spirit that drove them beyond the comfort zone of those around them. St. Paul once said that “The letter kills, but the spirit gives life” (II Cor. 3:6), and this is what I think he was getting at. The spirit always moves on beyond all creeds and orthodoxies, beyond the beliefs of any person or any time and place.
This life-giving spirit is called many things. One name for it is the spirit of life; another is the spirit of heresy. People engaging in honest religion were, are and always will be heretics. Now don’t get queasy; that’s a good thing. The word heretic comes from a Greek verb meaning “to choose.” Heretics are those who choose when some small orthodoxy declares the choices closed because they – only they – have found the truth. So yet another name for the spirit of honest religion, the spirit of heresy, is the Holy Spirit. It is the Holy Spirit that may never be fenced in, the Holy Spirit that is larger than all creeds, all gods, and all religions. Emerson believed it is within us all, and I think he was right.
It’s that sense of being really alive that we’ve all felt. It drives us to seek more life, and to shun things that don’t give us life. And as Emerson saw and said, it is bigger than all our religions.
You can see this spirit at every level of life. It is what makes plants turn toward the sun. It is what makes kittens, puppies and children run toward things that welcome them and run away from things that frighten them. I once saw an amoeba through a microscope, and even it was moving into the open places, moving toward food, and moving away from impurities or negative things in its environment. That’s the same spirit of life we call the Holy Spirit, operating even in puppies, plants, and amoeba.
There is a famous passage from the ancient Chinese classic the Tao te Ching that says it this way:
The Tao is like a well:
used but never used up.
It is like the eternal void:
filled with infinite possibilities.
It is hidden but always present.
I don’t know who gave birth to it.
It is older than God.
And the reason it’s older than God is because it’s part of life, and part of us. It’s the energy that helps us come more alive. We want to be a part of that Tao, that way, to let it help us get around impurities and obstacles in our own lives. In our Western religions where time has indeed made much of their ancient good uncouth, many of the obstacles today are the very creeds and orthodoxies which theologians, priests and churches have frozen into little outdated idols. And the Holy Spirit hates those little linguistic idols, so it keeps bringing us these heretics, these prophets of honest religion, who will let the questions more profound than answers challenge and shatter those answers when they can no longer help us come alive.
Ralph Waldo Emerson was one of the servants of those questions more profound than answers, a servant of that spirit of life. I used the Army’s slogan earlier about being all that you can be. So I want to use the slogan from another branch of the service to close, so they won’t feel slighted. And that’s to say that this ancient and holy spirit, like a Marine Corps recruiter, is looking for a few good men and women – or a lot of them. It’s looking for us. And this is a kind of hide-and-seek where the best part of the game is definitely being found.
