For weeks before this past year’s General Assembly, (where important decisions for our denomination are made by delegates from our congregations) The UUA board had been having special meetings, as had our executive for the UU Minister’s Association in preparation for what they knew would be a powerfully explosive issue. You see, while the country was calling for a boycott of Arizona after the passage of SB1070, (that law that required anyone who looked like they might not be a citizen to show their ID at any time), our own 2012 Assembly was scheduled to be held in Phoenix. The minister’s chat was abuzz for weeks before our annual meeting. Should we boycott, knowing we would forfeit over 600,000 in hotel cancellation fees? Many said yes, and even started passing the hat to make up to defray the cost of moving the assembly. DRUUM issued a statement which expressed concerns about the safety of our members who would be subject to racial profiling under this law, and LUUNA also issued a statement concerned that our Latino/a members would experience harassment by local law enforcement.
I was a supporter of the boycott, but the words of Rev. Susan Fredrick-Gray changed my mind. She is the minister of the church in Phoenix, Arizona and she and her congregation had been working with the local grass roots immigrant rights group Puente. She said that though the boycott might make us feel good for a moment now, this was not what our brothers and sisters in Arizona most directly affected by the laws wanted. They wanted us to come and stand by them, to come march, to come and witness. The discussion was passionate and emotions ran high. It was hard to know whether conscience called us to witness for justice. But you know what was absolutely clear? That our mandate here was justice, and that this law, SB1070 and the anti-immigrant sentiment behind it are unjust and immoral, and that we as UUs must stand against it as strongly as we can. Ultimately the Assembly voted to hold the assembly in Phoenix as planned, but to fundamentally change the nature of that assembly. We voted to advice the UUA board to hold a justice-oriented “General Assembly in Phoenix in 2012 with a business agenda limited to the minimum allowed by the bylaws. We asked the UUA administration to work with leaders in Arizona UU congregations to establish an Arizona immigration ministry; asked the board to work in accountable relationships with DRUUMM, LUUNA, ARE, Equual Access, TRUUST, and other stakeholders to maximize the safety of historically marginalized groups going to Phoenix; called on the UUA board to direct economic transactions during the 2012 General Assembly towards partners and allies; and called on the board to provide resources to build the capacity of UUs to stand in opposition to systemic racism.”
So really, when it came time to vote for the new Study Action Issue, the issue that we as an association of congregations would commit to studying and putting into action over the next 4 years, when it came time to decide which of the 6 issues folks around the country had put before the assembly, it seemed right that we would chose “Immigration as a moral issue.” There was a feeling of unity growing among us. We had heard our brothers and sisters speak about their pain in Arizona and around the country, and our hearts were turned.
So here we are, back in Pennsylvania, where Immigration is not in the forefront of local politics. Here in this congregation the other current issue “Ethical Eating” has been a powerful source of reflection and action for us together. I invite us, starting here and now, to join in solidarity with our sister congregation in Phoenix, with all our brothers and sisters around the country, around the world, and let our work begin in our own hearts.
Way back in my first year in Seminary, on my first election day in California, there was an issue on the ballot called proposition 187, which would make sure that undocumented immigrants could not receive medical care, or public education or other social services. The proposition was titled “Save our State” and the argument was that we could save 3 million dollars a year if we didn’t provide such services to undocumented immigrants. The language of the proposition was fiery: “The People of California find and declare as follows: That they have suffered and are suffering economic hardship caused by the presence of illegal aliens in this state. That they have suffered and are suffering personal injury and damage caused by the criminal conduct of illegal aliens in this state. That they have a right to the protection of their government from any person or persons entering this country unlawfully.”
I was, at that time, enrolled in a class called “Basic Buddhist Meditation” taught by a Theravadan Monk. One of my classmates brought to our seminar this seemingly complex issue. Our teacher Bhanti said- it’s simple. It’s a matter of compassion.” He had long been trying to explain to us the importance of compassion in Buddhist teaching, explaining that in Buddhist practice the goal is to let go of all things except compassion and equanimity, that we hold on to compassion right up to the moment of enlightenment. There was a stunned silence in the classroom as he reduced months of fiery politicking in the media to just one concept – compassion. Would it be more compassionate to provide medical assistance to a sick or injured person, or to deny it?
The Hebrew Scriptures also offer us a clear response to this tangled issue. The book of Leviticus, the one with all the laws, says: (Leviticus 19:33-34 ESV ) “When a stranger sojourns with you in your land, you shall not do him wrong. You shall treat the stranger who sojourns with you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt"
What I think is important in this passage, is that you shall love the stranger as yourself. First of all, notice that it says we shall LOVE the stranger. Today’s rhetoric around undocumented immigrants is so rarely loving. And we shall love them as ourselves, yet laws like SB1070 create a separate class of human beings, somehow less human than those who are citizens of this country. As if basic human rights do not need to be applied to all humans; the right of mother and child to be together. The right to due process. The right to a speedy trial. But the Hebrew scriptures are clear – though this law recognizes the difference between stranger and native, and it acknowledges that the stranger is at risk when sojourning among us, it is clear that there is to be no difference in treatment. Why? Because we were strangers in the land of Egypt. Or, for any of us living in America who are not first nations people, we were strangers in this land. If we ourselves were not born in a different country, our parents or grandparents or great grandparents were. The scriptures call on our empathic imagination to remember that we have been strangers, and so ask us to treat the stranger as ourselves.
Now I know the call to pure compassion is always simplistic. We all fear, and rightly so, that if we pour ourselves out in utter compassion, we will use ourselves up, there will be nothing left to give. So one school of thought on immigration reform is that we need, literally, better boundaries. We need walls, barbed wire and an armed citizenry to defend our boundaries. Lets look again at that preamble to prop 187: “The People of California find and declare as follows: That they have suffered and are suffering economic hardship caused by the presence of illegal aliens in this state.” The perception is that undocumented immigrants drain our resources. But a study by the tax lawyer journal from the American Bar Association argues that the undocumented immigrants pay more in taxes than they receive in social services. A 2005 New York Times article showed, for example that they pay about $7 billion annual to social security, with no hope of ever receiving a social security check.
Now look at the second sentence of prop 187 “That they have suffered and are suffering personal injury and damage caused by the criminal conduct of illegal aliens in this state. That they have a right to the protection of their government from any person or persons entering this country unlawfully.” We have a right to be protected from undocumented immigrants. Why do I need protection exactly? It is hard to gather conclusive data about the relationship of immigration and crime, but a number of studies, including one by the immigration Policy Center, based on U.S. Census Bureau data showed there was no increase in crime in relationship to undocumented immigrants, and a study by the public Policy Institute of California showed that cities with more immigrants have lower crime rates than comparable cities.
So the contention that we need protection from undocumented immigrants does not seem to be based on facts, it seems to be based on irrational fear. And that fear is not only directed at folks who are undocumented, but folks who LOOK or SEEM like they might be immigrants. That seems like racism pure and simple to me. Whenever we create a second class of humans, we are building oppressive structures. We cannot allow our immigration policy to be based on fear and xenophobia. It must be based in the reality of our shared lives together. This is where, since our very beginnings 400 years ago, the Unitarians come in. We bring the light of reason. The Study Action issue process starts with study. We begin with open minds to ask the basic questions about immigration: Who are the immigrants in our communities? What underlying factors contribute to global migration? And where are we complicit or accountable in these factors? We start our journey by asking questions, by paying attention, by inviting this issue into our “free and responsible search for truth and meaning.”
There are a lot of assumptions and half truths and downright lies out there in this debate about immigration. For example, the claim of prop 187 that undocumented immigrants costs us 3 million dollars a year in social services, when studies show this is simply not true. As a people of faith who believe in the inherent worth and dignity of every person (not just of American Citizens) it to me that Unitarian Universalists are called to stand up for an immigration policy that is based on reason and facts, rather than fear.
We must also insist that our immigration policies and practices are based on compassion and not hate. UUs, along with other activists around the country, plead the case of Marlen Moreno, the woman we met in our opening reading. She is mother of 2 children, one of who is only 10 months old. She is married to a legal resident, and came to the US with her parents when she was only 13 – undocumented. For this, she went to jail for 4 months. ‘Detained” they call it. At our recent Movie night we watched a fictional movie called “the Visitor” in which the hero is “detained” while awaiting deportation. A voice near me said in the dark “what? You can’t walk in there to visit like that with only one security check!” and I remembered one of our member’s brothers, who was “detained” without any charge for 4 ½ months while awaiting deportation. Those being detained have no idea how long they will be incarcerated, are denied even basic information about the status of their case, are separated from family who face significant obstacles and sometimes expense to stay connected with them. Family visits are limited to one adult at a time, can last no longer than ½ hour and are conducted through a glass partition, using wall phones. She told me later that: “The truth is, contrary to the movie where the professor and the mom had nothing else to do but to visit the young man, most families do not visit inmates in detention because of the 1/2 hour restriction. How many people can afford to take a whole day off for a 1/2 hour visit? Processing visitors takes anywhere from 20 minutes to 1 hour, assuming you know to arrive an hour before "the count" when all visits are interrupted for 1 to 1-1/2 hours for the officers to account for all inmates. Young children do not visit.” Her brother is now in Hong Kong, they told him one morning he was leaving that very day. Marlen Moreno was just days away from being taken away from her family, deported, but activists phoned, faxed, called the press, and were able to delay her deportation for a year. Still her future is uncertain. When reason and compassion are applied to the way our system treats undocumented immigrants like criminals, how can they be justified? It can’t really be to save the taxpayers money; Atlanta news station WSB-TV reported that the annual cost to taxpayers just to detain and deport immigrants adds up to $2.6 billion.
While in jail for her civil disobedience in protest of SB1070, UU Rev. Wendy von Zirpolo reported: “While inside the Maricopa Jail garage, I saw a young Latino man dragged past me and behind some vans, calling out ‘I am not resisting arrest. I am not resisting arrest.’ When I saw him again, perhaps only ten minutes later, it was clear he had been beaten. Beaten badly.” Whatever concerns we may have about the economic impact of immigration policy on this country, the act of separating mother and child, the act of beating a prisoner, these are not compassionate acts, and they are not necessary in order to uphold the laws of this country. I call for a reform of our laws to make them just and compassionate, and reform of the ways we implement these laws, that they be carried out in just and compassionate ways.
Last July, about 100 UU ministers and lay-people, along with president Peter Morales, flew from around the country to be part of the non-violent civil disobedience in response to SB1070. Of the 83 protesters who were arrested that day, 26 were UUs, including President Morales. Our UU protesters were wearing those saffron yellow t-shirts with big hearts reading “standing on the side of love.” Rev. Paul Langston Daily, one of the ministers participating in the march wrote later in his blog: “At lunch today, a colleague told us she overheard some people saying “Hey, look over there, it’s the Love people”.
We are called by these 2 pillars of our heritage- by reason and by love. With reason we will ask the questions that so urgently need to be asked, with reason we will seek truth and justice. With love, with compassion we will act, affirming the inherent worth and dignity of all people. Will you accept this call? Will you take up the rights of the stranger in our land, as we have stood for civil rights so many times before? Lets reach out to our brothers and sisters around the country, around the world letting reason and love change this broken system to one of compassion and justice.
Resources:
http://www.uuworld.org/news/articles/165916.shtml
http://www.foodincmovie.com/about-the-film.php
http://www.tcworkerscenter.org/2011/01/workers-center-works-overtime-to-uncover-problematic-j-1-visa-program-in-local-economy/
J. Lipman, Francine, J. (Spring 2006). Taxing Undocumented Immigrants: Separate, Unequal and Without Representation. The Tax Lawyer. lso published in Harvard Latino Law Review, Spring 2006. Harvard.edu
Eduardo Porter (April 5, 2005). "Illegal Immigrants Are Bolstering Social Security With Billions". New York Times.
Eunice Moscoso (2007-02-27). "Study: Immigrants don't raise U.S. crime rate". Arizona Daily Star.
“Crime, Corrections and California: what does Immigration Have to Do with it” PPIC California Counts: Population Trends and Profiles V. 9 Number 3 Feb 2008 by Kristin F. Butcher, Anne Morrison Piehl.
Immigration as a Moral Issue (Congregational Study/ Action Issue for 2010-2014)
The Cost Of Illegal Immigration By Justin Farmer Posted: 12:16 pm EDT May 10, 2010
http://www.uuworld.org/news/articles/165916.shtml
http://www.uuworld.org/news/articles/167428.shtml “'Justice' General Assembly to be held in Phoenix: Days and nights of work result in a plan most can endorse” By Jane Greer 6.28.10 UU World
http://www.tcworkerscenter.org/2011/01/workers-center-works-overtime-to-uncover-problematic-j-1-visa-program-in-local-economy/
J. Lipman, Francine, J. (Spring 2006). Taxing Undocumented Immigrants: Separate, Unequal and Without Representation. The Tax Lawyer. Also published in Harvard Latino Law Review, Spring 2006. Harvard.edu
Eduardo Porter (April 5, 2005). "Illegal Immigrants Are Bolstering Social Security With Billions". New York Times.
Eunice Moscoso (2007-02-27). "Study: Immigrants don't raise U.S. crime rate". Arizona Daily Star.
“Crime, Corrections and California: what does Immigration Have to Do with it” PPIC California Counts: Population Trends and Profiles V. 9 Number 3 Feb 2008 by Kristin F. Butcher, Anne Morrison Piehl.
Immigration as a Moral Issue (Congregational Study/ Action Issue for 2010-2014)
The Cost Of Illegal Immigration By Justin Farmer Posted: 12:16 pm EDT May 10, 2010
http://www.standingonthesideoflove.org/blog/trials-begin-for-15-clergy-and-leaders-arrested-in-july-29th-sb-1070-protests-in-phoenix/
Thursday, March 24, 2011
Friday, February 18, 2011
Our Forefather, Joseph Priestley (February 6, 2011)
Lesson for all Ages
One of the sources of our UU tradition is the wisdom of science, so
Today instead of a story we are going to do a science experiment
(light candle)
Can anyone tell me what will happen if I put this on the candle?
(put it out with candle snuffer we use to extinguish our chalice)
Why?
A candle needs oxygen to burn.
(relight candle, then put candle under jar until it goes out)
Who else needs oxygen? (we do)
How about a plant, does a plant need oxygen?
What do you think would happen if we put a plant in here?
(add plant, relight candle, put jar over both)
How’s the plant doing? Okay, keep an eye on it while we talk
Now when Joseph priestly was a little boy, people didn’t know about air. They just thought that between you and me was emptiness.
But then they made really good scales, and could see that a jar of air weighted more than a jar of nothing. But still they didn’t know what air was made of, and they didn’t know there was more than one kind of gas.
By doing this experiment, Priestly (who was a UU minister by the way, as well as an amateur scientist) Priestly showed that there is more than one kind of air- the kind that a fire needs to burn and the kind a plant needs to stay alive.
By the way, how is our plant doing?
Priestly found that not only would a plant do fine for 2 weeks even after a flame had burned away all the oxygen, but he also found that if you put a flame back in there 2 weeks later it would burn again, just like the first time!
But this is church, not science class, so what wisdom can we learn from this experiment?
That plants and animals need each other. We depend on each other; together we create the air that we breathe with nitrogen, oxygen, argon, carbon dioxide and some other gasses too.
It helps show is that we part of an interdependent web of life with all other living things.
Sermon
Joseph Priestly is almost the archetypal Unitarian. He was a heretic of the first order. He loved science, he loved dialogue and debate, the free exchange of ideas. He believed the religious system was filled with errors, and that the political system would benefit from a good revolution or 2. He spoke his mind no matter what the cost.
First, I want to tell you about Priestly the scientist- because that is what he is most famous for. Ironically, he was a minister and a school teacher when he made his most important discoveries. He had grown up in a family of religious dissenters from the Church of England, but he was a dissenter among dissenters, and was denied membership in the Independent church his family went to because of his heretical ideas. But he grew up to be a minister anyway, preaching at a congregation of about 60 people, just about the size of this congregation, and supplemented his income by starting his own school of 20 boys where he published his first book “Rudiments of English Grammar.” His grammar book helped get him a job at a bigger, more prestigious Dissenting school called the Warrington Academy. Somehow between preaching and teaching, he found time for his hobby- science. In particular he had the passion of his day for electricity and what was then called “Natural philosophy.” Electricity was in those days new and cutting edge. He bought the latest electricity gear for his lab, and after some work in the field, decided to write the first ever popular history of electricity. It was to be in English instead of Latin as was the usual language for books about science, so that the field of electricity would become more accessible to everyone. He headed to London to meet the leading thinkers in the field in hopes they would give him what he needed to write his book.
It was through his connections at the Warrington academy that he was Introduced to the Royal Society, and to Benjamin Franklin. In those days, the leading “electricians” hung out in the London Coffee House and called themselves “The Honest Whigs.” Their conversations swung from libertarian politics to the need for a “rational Christianity,” to theories of electricity liberally interspersed with wine and cheese and apple-puffs. The Honest Whigs were not only happy to welcome into their midst, loaning him the books and pamphlets he needed about the history of the study of electricity, and giving him information about their own studies on the subject, but they also encouraged him in his own research.
Priestly threw himself into this writing and research. In 1767 he published “The History and Present State of Electricity, with Original Experiments” which became the standard text on the subject and solidified his relationship to the scientific community. It was in this book that the story of Ben Franklin’s famous experiment with the kite and the key was first published. The book also contained some of Priestley’s own work and even a section called “A description of the most entertaining experiments performed by electricity.” His goal was not to set himself up as the keeper of secret specialized knowledge, but to encourage everyone to think and learn and experiment in the new and exciting arena of electricity.
That same year Joseph, his wife Mary and their 4 year old daughter Sally moved to Warrington where he got a new job as minister at the Mill-Hill Chapel. Though this was a bigger congregation, priestly still had plenty of time for his experiments. It was here that he made his most popular discovery, enabled through the serendipity that the temporary house he moved into while his new home was being renovated was right next to the Jakes and Nell brewery. He noticed that the fermenting vats gave off what he called “fixed” air, now called carbon dioxide, which had been discovered only 12 years before, and his neighbors humored him by letting him do experiments with the air over their vats. The discovery of soda water did not even take any fancy equipment, as it seems Priestley was able to carbonate regular water by pouring it back and forth from one cup to another. Now there was such a thing as sparkling water back then, it was mineral water taken from certain springs. It was a rare thing that had to be found and could not be made. Had priestly kept his knowledge to himself and sold it to industry, he could have been a wealthy man – think about today’s lucrative soda market. But Priestly believed in sharing information freely, and printed a pamphlet right away on how to do it yourself.
This happy discovery set Priestly on a new path- studying the chemistry of air and gas. His most important discoveries were yet to come. The first was the experiment I shared with the children earlier today- though I left out one of the main actors. Mice. Many a mouse met his or her demise in Priestley’s experiments both in electricity and in chemistry. Apparently priestly had been trapping mice in jars since he was a boy, and had noticed that they died pretty quickly if he sealed the jar. In 1771, he decided to compare the fate of a plant trapped in a jar. It amazed him that the sprig of mint he trapped fared so much better than the mice and frogs. Moreover, he found that if he put a mouse into a jar in which a flame had burned out, that the mouse would die at once. So he repeated the experiment with the flame and the mint, the experiment we did this morning with the children. In 1772 he introduced a mouse to the experiment, putting the mouse in the “restored air” and found that, as he described in his own words in a letter to Benjamin Franklin “The same mouse also that lived so well in the restored air, was barely recoverable after being not more than one second in the other. I have also had another instance of a mouse living 14 minutes, without being at all hurt, in little more than two ounce measures of another quantity of noxious air in which a plant had grown.” (p. 78)
This simple experiment was a major breakthrough. It changed not only how we thought we knew about air, but also what we thought we knew about the relationship between plants and people. Franklin wrote back to Priestly saying “I hope this will give some check to the rage of destroying trees that grow near houses, which has accompanied our late improvements in gardening, from an opinion of their being unwholesome. “ (p. 82) Writer Steven Johnson in his book “The Invention of Air” postulates that this discovery was one of the foundations on which eco-system science was built. For this discovery Priestly was awarded the Copley Medal by the Royal Society. Priestly kept experimenting with what as then called “Subtle fluids” which we now call gases, and was the first to identify 10 of them, one of them Oxygen.
This was the enlightenment, a time when new ways of thinking, new fields of knowledge were opening like scenic vistas to the thinkers of the day. Writes Priestley’s biographer “There were literally dozens of paradigm shifts in distinct fields during Priestley’s lifetime, watershed moments of sudden progress where new rules and frameworks of understanding emerged. Priestly alone was a transformative figure in four of them: chemistry, electricity, politics, and faith.” Schoolchildren still learn of the role his good friend Ben Franklin played in the American Revolution, and Franklin was eventually exiled from London in 1775 for his pro-revolutionary views. Priestly had also written a few pamphlets over the years against “forg[ing] chains for America” (p. 129); he became one of the leading supporters of American Independence in England, and his views were know in widening circles. Samuel Johnson, a pamphleteer against colonial freedom, is said to have commented: “Ah, Priestly. An evil man, Sir. His work unsettles everything.” (p. 129). But because during this time his patron was a Lord Shelburne, (in exchange for which Priestley was tutoring Shelburne’s 2 sons and maintaining his library), he seems to have kept his political views quiet during those years, grumbling to friends instead of continuing his stream of pamphlets. Eventually his political reputation caused Priestley to loose this sponsorship, as Shelburne had political aspirations. The loss of the sponsorship was a crushing financial blow, but Priestly met a new group of Enlightenment thinkers and captains of fledgling industrial society. They were called the Lunar Society, (or “the lunatics”) and many of them were willing to become Priestley’s “subscribers” and had instruments custom made for him.
Despite all the cool new gear, in this period Priestley turned his reformer’s gaze to religion. He and his friend Rev. Theophilus Lindsey founded the first Unitarian church in 1774. Priestley put forth in his book “History of the Corruptions of Christianity” the theory that since the first days of Christianity the religion had become corrupted in numerous ways. The idea of the divinity of Christ was one such “corruption” He traced the history of this thinking and found that in the very early church God occupied a higher position than his son, and it wasn’t until the last 3rd century that divinity was bestowed on Jesus. (Robinson p 22-23) He was on the cutting edge of heresy with the idea that Jesus was completely human. Priestly wrote that there was “no trace of the apostles having ever regarded their master in this high light” and also that “It cannot be said that anything is ascribed to him that a mere man (aided, as he himself says he was, by the power of God his Father) was not equal to.”) (quoted in Robinson p. 23)
In “The Corruptions” Priestly pulled apart every kind of miraculous or magical aspect of Christian theology, including the existence of the holy spirit, the trinity, predestination, the Eucharist, and the deification of saints. But Priestly understood himself to be a faithful Christian, faithful to Christianity in its pure form as it was originally practiced. He writes “this historical method will be found to be one of the most satisfactory modes of argumentation, in order to prove that what I object to is really a corruption of genuine Christianity, and no part of the original scheme” (p. 156). For Priestly, doing a historical analysis of Christianity and stripping away the miraculous and the magical, was part of the radical reform through which new paradigms had been born in the scientific and political worlds. His religious ideas were very influential to Thomas Jefferson who wrote in a letter to John Adams “I have read his Corruptions of Christianity, and Early Opinions of Jesus over and over again; and I rest on them…as the basis of my own faith.” Then as now presidential candidates were scrutinized for their beliefs, and Priestley’s work enabled Jefferson responded “I am a Christian, in the only sense in which he wished anyone to be: sincerely attached to his doctrines in preference to all others, ascribing himself every human excellence and believe he never claimed any other.” (p. 156)
Other folks were not so sympathetic. Archdeacon Samuel Horsley called Priestley’s writing an “extraordinary attempt…to unsettle the faith, and break up the constitution of every ecclesiastical establishment” (p. 158). Even his scientist friends could not all follow him into his religious dissent.
Priestly preached a sermon in 1785 called “The Importance and Extent of Free Inquiry” which included in it this metaphor “We are, as it were, laying gunpowder, grain by grain, under the old building of error and superstition, which a single spark may hereafter inflame, so as to produce an instantaneous explosion; in consequence of which that edifice, the erection of which has been the work of ages, may be overturned in a moment, and so effectually as that the same foundation can never be built upon again.” (p. 159) This sermon earned him the nickname of “gunpowder Joe,” but it was his political views that really got him into trouble.
Among the liberal thinkers Priestly hung out with, now calling themselves the “Constitutional Society” there was support of the French Revolution. It seemed a logical next step in political reform after the American Revolution so successfully had put in place a constitutional democracy. The opposition was the “Church and King” movement. They opposed the American Revolution, the French Revolution and they opposed reformation of the Church of England. They put an add in the Birmingham paper in response to one by the Constitution Society saying that “Whatever the modern republicans may imagine, or the regicidal propounders of the rights of men design, let us convince them there is enough loyalty in the majority of the inhabitants of this country to support and defend their King.” (p. 163) A mob formed the night of that event, and angered to find that the Constitutional Society had gone home 3 hours early, they burned down the New Meeting House, including a bonfire of books and pews on the front steps. They then burned down the Old Meetinghouse. Samuel Ryland, A friend of Priestly went to his home to warn him about the mob, and Priestly fled to his Ryland’s house. It was a good thing too, because they burned Priestley’s home and lab to the ground, destroying all his equipment and his library. Ryland and others had lost their homes as well. Priestly tried to live under the radar in England for a while, serving as a minister in London, but he was shunned by most of the members of the Royal Society for his religious and political views. When the French legislative assembly made him an honorary citizen in 1792, the public ire was re-awakened, and spewed forth in pamphlets and cartoons. Eventually Priestley followed his son Joseph Jr. to America where he was building a new settlement in Northumberland Pennsylvania.
His supporters in America welcomed him with open arms, and he was offered a position a the University of Pennsylvania in their Chemistry department, but Priestly chose the family life in Northumberland, and preached to the church there, and in Philadelphia whenever he could make the multiple day journey. Sadly his wife and son Harry died in the same year before their new home was even guilt. And before long Priestly was in trouble again. Old friend like John Adams began to distance themselves from his radical fiery sermons (much as presidential candidates today have had to do). Priestly was disillusioned with the way the principles of the revolution been implemented in a government that was not always true to its principles, more like the Monarchy against which they had rebelled. Members of the Adam’s administration wanted to have Priestley prosecuted under the Alien and Sedition Acts, the passage of which was in fact one of those acts which Priestly felt to violate the constitution of this young land.
He published a volume in 1799 called “Letters to the Inhabitants of Northumberland and its Neighborhood,” his last major work, in which he wrote “To find in America the same maxims of government, and the same proceedings, from which many of us fled form Europe, and to be reproached as disturbers of government there, and chiefly because we did what the court of England will never forgive in favor of liberty here, is, we own, a great disappointment to us, especially as we cannot now return.” (p. 195-6) Thomas Jefferson, still a great friend and admirer of Priestly wrote that the essays were “the most precious gifts that can be made to us… From the Porcupines of our country you will receive no thanks: but the great mass of our nation will edify and thank you.” (p. 196) and in fact when Jefferson became president Priestly wrote “for the first time in my life (and I shall soon enter my 70th year) I find myself in any degree of favor of the governor of the country in which I have lived, and I hope I shall die in the same pleasing situation.” (p. 200) And so he did, writing and editing in his very last days.
So what can we take from this story, the life of one of our founding fathers, a father of both modern chemistry, and of our Unitarian faith tradition. Certainly we can admire his capacity to help birth new paradigms, and to stand behind them even when it cost him dearly. We can, with Priestly, strip away those parts of religious tradition, even our own, that contradict what we know of this world, what we know of truth. But I think today what I want to lift up is that even a minister can be a scientist, and even a schoolteacher can make a difference in the world of politics. In this age of profound separation of fields, of increasing specialization, none of us should be afraid to stick a candle under a jar to see what happens, nor should we hesitate to study religious history to see what new things we can learn, nor should we be afraid to stand up for our political principles. We can see, as Priestly did, as so many of the great figures of the enlightenment did, that all this knowledge informs other knowledge, much as a plant restores air for the flame. It is in the intersection, the cooperation of all these things that a new paradigm is born.
Resources:
Steven Johnson, The Invention of Air: A Story of Science, Faith Revolution and the Birth of America. New York: Riverhead Books, 2008.
David Robinson. The Unitarians and the Universalists. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1985.
One of the sources of our UU tradition is the wisdom of science, so
Today instead of a story we are going to do a science experiment
(light candle)
Can anyone tell me what will happen if I put this on the candle?
(put it out with candle snuffer we use to extinguish our chalice)
Why?
A candle needs oxygen to burn.
(relight candle, then put candle under jar until it goes out)
Who else needs oxygen? (we do)
How about a plant, does a plant need oxygen?
What do you think would happen if we put a plant in here?
(add plant, relight candle, put jar over both)
How’s the plant doing? Okay, keep an eye on it while we talk
Now when Joseph priestly was a little boy, people didn’t know about air. They just thought that between you and me was emptiness.
But then they made really good scales, and could see that a jar of air weighted more than a jar of nothing. But still they didn’t know what air was made of, and they didn’t know there was more than one kind of gas.
By doing this experiment, Priestly (who was a UU minister by the way, as well as an amateur scientist) Priestly showed that there is more than one kind of air- the kind that a fire needs to burn and the kind a plant needs to stay alive.
By the way, how is our plant doing?
Priestly found that not only would a plant do fine for 2 weeks even after a flame had burned away all the oxygen, but he also found that if you put a flame back in there 2 weeks later it would burn again, just like the first time!
But this is church, not science class, so what wisdom can we learn from this experiment?
That plants and animals need each other. We depend on each other; together we create the air that we breathe with nitrogen, oxygen, argon, carbon dioxide and some other gasses too.
It helps show is that we part of an interdependent web of life with all other living things.
Sermon
Joseph Priestly is almost the archetypal Unitarian. He was a heretic of the first order. He loved science, he loved dialogue and debate, the free exchange of ideas. He believed the religious system was filled with errors, and that the political system would benefit from a good revolution or 2. He spoke his mind no matter what the cost.
First, I want to tell you about Priestly the scientist- because that is what he is most famous for. Ironically, he was a minister and a school teacher when he made his most important discoveries. He had grown up in a family of religious dissenters from the Church of England, but he was a dissenter among dissenters, and was denied membership in the Independent church his family went to because of his heretical ideas. But he grew up to be a minister anyway, preaching at a congregation of about 60 people, just about the size of this congregation, and supplemented his income by starting his own school of 20 boys where he published his first book “Rudiments of English Grammar.” His grammar book helped get him a job at a bigger, more prestigious Dissenting school called the Warrington Academy. Somehow between preaching and teaching, he found time for his hobby- science. In particular he had the passion of his day for electricity and what was then called “Natural philosophy.” Electricity was in those days new and cutting edge. He bought the latest electricity gear for his lab, and after some work in the field, decided to write the first ever popular history of electricity. It was to be in English instead of Latin as was the usual language for books about science, so that the field of electricity would become more accessible to everyone. He headed to London to meet the leading thinkers in the field in hopes they would give him what he needed to write his book.
It was through his connections at the Warrington academy that he was Introduced to the Royal Society, and to Benjamin Franklin. In those days, the leading “electricians” hung out in the London Coffee House and called themselves “The Honest Whigs.” Their conversations swung from libertarian politics to the need for a “rational Christianity,” to theories of electricity liberally interspersed with wine and cheese and apple-puffs. The Honest Whigs were not only happy to welcome into their midst, loaning him the books and pamphlets he needed about the history of the study of electricity, and giving him information about their own studies on the subject, but they also encouraged him in his own research.
Priestly threw himself into this writing and research. In 1767 he published “The History and Present State of Electricity, with Original Experiments” which became the standard text on the subject and solidified his relationship to the scientific community. It was in this book that the story of Ben Franklin’s famous experiment with the kite and the key was first published. The book also contained some of Priestley’s own work and even a section called “A description of the most entertaining experiments performed by electricity.” His goal was not to set himself up as the keeper of secret specialized knowledge, but to encourage everyone to think and learn and experiment in the new and exciting arena of electricity.
That same year Joseph, his wife Mary and their 4 year old daughter Sally moved to Warrington where he got a new job as minister at the Mill-Hill Chapel. Though this was a bigger congregation, priestly still had plenty of time for his experiments. It was here that he made his most popular discovery, enabled through the serendipity that the temporary house he moved into while his new home was being renovated was right next to the Jakes and Nell brewery. He noticed that the fermenting vats gave off what he called “fixed” air, now called carbon dioxide, which had been discovered only 12 years before, and his neighbors humored him by letting him do experiments with the air over their vats. The discovery of soda water did not even take any fancy equipment, as it seems Priestley was able to carbonate regular water by pouring it back and forth from one cup to another. Now there was such a thing as sparkling water back then, it was mineral water taken from certain springs. It was a rare thing that had to be found and could not be made. Had priestly kept his knowledge to himself and sold it to industry, he could have been a wealthy man – think about today’s lucrative soda market. But Priestly believed in sharing information freely, and printed a pamphlet right away on how to do it yourself.
This happy discovery set Priestly on a new path- studying the chemistry of air and gas. His most important discoveries were yet to come. The first was the experiment I shared with the children earlier today- though I left out one of the main actors. Mice. Many a mouse met his or her demise in Priestley’s experiments both in electricity and in chemistry. Apparently priestly had been trapping mice in jars since he was a boy, and had noticed that they died pretty quickly if he sealed the jar. In 1771, he decided to compare the fate of a plant trapped in a jar. It amazed him that the sprig of mint he trapped fared so much better than the mice and frogs. Moreover, he found that if he put a mouse into a jar in which a flame had burned out, that the mouse would die at once. So he repeated the experiment with the flame and the mint, the experiment we did this morning with the children. In 1772 he introduced a mouse to the experiment, putting the mouse in the “restored air” and found that, as he described in his own words in a letter to Benjamin Franklin “The same mouse also that lived so well in the restored air, was barely recoverable after being not more than one second in the other. I have also had another instance of a mouse living 14 minutes, without being at all hurt, in little more than two ounce measures of another quantity of noxious air in which a plant had grown.” (p. 78)
This simple experiment was a major breakthrough. It changed not only how we thought we knew about air, but also what we thought we knew about the relationship between plants and people. Franklin wrote back to Priestly saying “I hope this will give some check to the rage of destroying trees that grow near houses, which has accompanied our late improvements in gardening, from an opinion of their being unwholesome. “ (p. 82) Writer Steven Johnson in his book “The Invention of Air” postulates that this discovery was one of the foundations on which eco-system science was built. For this discovery Priestly was awarded the Copley Medal by the Royal Society. Priestly kept experimenting with what as then called “Subtle fluids” which we now call gases, and was the first to identify 10 of them, one of them Oxygen.
This was the enlightenment, a time when new ways of thinking, new fields of knowledge were opening like scenic vistas to the thinkers of the day. Writes Priestley’s biographer “There were literally dozens of paradigm shifts in distinct fields during Priestley’s lifetime, watershed moments of sudden progress where new rules and frameworks of understanding emerged. Priestly alone was a transformative figure in four of them: chemistry, electricity, politics, and faith.” Schoolchildren still learn of the role his good friend Ben Franklin played in the American Revolution, and Franklin was eventually exiled from London in 1775 for his pro-revolutionary views. Priestly had also written a few pamphlets over the years against “forg[ing] chains for America” (p. 129); he became one of the leading supporters of American Independence in England, and his views were know in widening circles. Samuel Johnson, a pamphleteer against colonial freedom, is said to have commented: “Ah, Priestly. An evil man, Sir. His work unsettles everything.” (p. 129). But because during this time his patron was a Lord Shelburne, (in exchange for which Priestley was tutoring Shelburne’s 2 sons and maintaining his library), he seems to have kept his political views quiet during those years, grumbling to friends instead of continuing his stream of pamphlets. Eventually his political reputation caused Priestley to loose this sponsorship, as Shelburne had political aspirations. The loss of the sponsorship was a crushing financial blow, but Priestly met a new group of Enlightenment thinkers and captains of fledgling industrial society. They were called the Lunar Society, (or “the lunatics”) and many of them were willing to become Priestley’s “subscribers” and had instruments custom made for him.
Despite all the cool new gear, in this period Priestley turned his reformer’s gaze to religion. He and his friend Rev. Theophilus Lindsey founded the first Unitarian church in 1774. Priestley put forth in his book “History of the Corruptions of Christianity” the theory that since the first days of Christianity the religion had become corrupted in numerous ways. The idea of the divinity of Christ was one such “corruption” He traced the history of this thinking and found that in the very early church God occupied a higher position than his son, and it wasn’t until the last 3rd century that divinity was bestowed on Jesus. (Robinson p 22-23) He was on the cutting edge of heresy with the idea that Jesus was completely human. Priestly wrote that there was “no trace of the apostles having ever regarded their master in this high light” and also that “It cannot be said that anything is ascribed to him that a mere man (aided, as he himself says he was, by the power of God his Father) was not equal to.”) (quoted in Robinson p. 23)
In “The Corruptions” Priestly pulled apart every kind of miraculous or magical aspect of Christian theology, including the existence of the holy spirit, the trinity, predestination, the Eucharist, and the deification of saints. But Priestly understood himself to be a faithful Christian, faithful to Christianity in its pure form as it was originally practiced. He writes “this historical method will be found to be one of the most satisfactory modes of argumentation, in order to prove that what I object to is really a corruption of genuine Christianity, and no part of the original scheme” (p. 156). For Priestly, doing a historical analysis of Christianity and stripping away the miraculous and the magical, was part of the radical reform through which new paradigms had been born in the scientific and political worlds. His religious ideas were very influential to Thomas Jefferson who wrote in a letter to John Adams “I have read his Corruptions of Christianity, and Early Opinions of Jesus over and over again; and I rest on them…as the basis of my own faith.” Then as now presidential candidates were scrutinized for their beliefs, and Priestley’s work enabled Jefferson responded “I am a Christian, in the only sense in which he wished anyone to be: sincerely attached to his doctrines in preference to all others, ascribing himself every human excellence and believe he never claimed any other.” (p. 156)
Other folks were not so sympathetic. Archdeacon Samuel Horsley called Priestley’s writing an “extraordinary attempt…to unsettle the faith, and break up the constitution of every ecclesiastical establishment” (p. 158). Even his scientist friends could not all follow him into his religious dissent.
Priestly preached a sermon in 1785 called “The Importance and Extent of Free Inquiry” which included in it this metaphor “We are, as it were, laying gunpowder, grain by grain, under the old building of error and superstition, which a single spark may hereafter inflame, so as to produce an instantaneous explosion; in consequence of which that edifice, the erection of which has been the work of ages, may be overturned in a moment, and so effectually as that the same foundation can never be built upon again.” (p. 159) This sermon earned him the nickname of “gunpowder Joe,” but it was his political views that really got him into trouble.
Among the liberal thinkers Priestly hung out with, now calling themselves the “Constitutional Society” there was support of the French Revolution. It seemed a logical next step in political reform after the American Revolution so successfully had put in place a constitutional democracy. The opposition was the “Church and King” movement. They opposed the American Revolution, the French Revolution and they opposed reformation of the Church of England. They put an add in the Birmingham paper in response to one by the Constitution Society saying that “Whatever the modern republicans may imagine, or the regicidal propounders of the rights of men design, let us convince them there is enough loyalty in the majority of the inhabitants of this country to support and defend their King.” (p. 163) A mob formed the night of that event, and angered to find that the Constitutional Society had gone home 3 hours early, they burned down the New Meeting House, including a bonfire of books and pews on the front steps. They then burned down the Old Meetinghouse. Samuel Ryland, A friend of Priestly went to his home to warn him about the mob, and Priestly fled to his Ryland’s house. It was a good thing too, because they burned Priestley’s home and lab to the ground, destroying all his equipment and his library. Ryland and others had lost their homes as well. Priestly tried to live under the radar in England for a while, serving as a minister in London, but he was shunned by most of the members of the Royal Society for his religious and political views. When the French legislative assembly made him an honorary citizen in 1792, the public ire was re-awakened, and spewed forth in pamphlets and cartoons. Eventually Priestley followed his son Joseph Jr. to America where he was building a new settlement in Northumberland Pennsylvania.
His supporters in America welcomed him with open arms, and he was offered a position a the University of Pennsylvania in their Chemistry department, but Priestly chose the family life in Northumberland, and preached to the church there, and in Philadelphia whenever he could make the multiple day journey. Sadly his wife and son Harry died in the same year before their new home was even guilt. And before long Priestly was in trouble again. Old friend like John Adams began to distance themselves from his radical fiery sermons (much as presidential candidates today have had to do). Priestly was disillusioned with the way the principles of the revolution been implemented in a government that was not always true to its principles, more like the Monarchy against which they had rebelled. Members of the Adam’s administration wanted to have Priestley prosecuted under the Alien and Sedition Acts, the passage of which was in fact one of those acts which Priestly felt to violate the constitution of this young land.
He published a volume in 1799 called “Letters to the Inhabitants of Northumberland and its Neighborhood,” his last major work, in which he wrote “To find in America the same maxims of government, and the same proceedings, from which many of us fled form Europe, and to be reproached as disturbers of government there, and chiefly because we did what the court of England will never forgive in favor of liberty here, is, we own, a great disappointment to us, especially as we cannot now return.” (p. 195-6) Thomas Jefferson, still a great friend and admirer of Priestly wrote that the essays were “the most precious gifts that can be made to us… From the Porcupines of our country you will receive no thanks: but the great mass of our nation will edify and thank you.” (p. 196) and in fact when Jefferson became president Priestly wrote “for the first time in my life (and I shall soon enter my 70th year) I find myself in any degree of favor of the governor of the country in which I have lived, and I hope I shall die in the same pleasing situation.” (p. 200) And so he did, writing and editing in his very last days.
So what can we take from this story, the life of one of our founding fathers, a father of both modern chemistry, and of our Unitarian faith tradition. Certainly we can admire his capacity to help birth new paradigms, and to stand behind them even when it cost him dearly. We can, with Priestly, strip away those parts of religious tradition, even our own, that contradict what we know of this world, what we know of truth. But I think today what I want to lift up is that even a minister can be a scientist, and even a schoolteacher can make a difference in the world of politics. In this age of profound separation of fields, of increasing specialization, none of us should be afraid to stick a candle under a jar to see what happens, nor should we hesitate to study religious history to see what new things we can learn, nor should we be afraid to stand up for our political principles. We can see, as Priestly did, as so many of the great figures of the enlightenment did, that all this knowledge informs other knowledge, much as a plant restores air for the flame. It is in the intersection, the cooperation of all these things that a new paradigm is born.
Resources:
Steven Johnson, The Invention of Air: A Story of Science, Faith Revolution and the Birth of America. New York: Riverhead Books, 2008.
David Robinson. The Unitarians and the Universalists. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1985.
Friday, January 21, 2011
Where do we Go From Here: Martin Luther King’s Vision for the Future (January 16, 2011)
When I was a little girl growing up in a UU church, our minister often talked about Jesus in the context of 3 other heroes- Mahatma Gandhi, Susan B Anthony and Martin Luther King. So I knew at a young age that King was an important role model, was someone who lived a life of integrity, a life that today as when I was a child, reflects a vision of a more just and peaceful world. Our own Beacon Press has begun publishing a series of books from the Martin Luther King Archives -- some unpublished works, some which have been out of print for many years -- including his last book “Where do we Go From Here: Chaos or Community.” which has something to teach us about that vision, about our way into the future.
King wrote this book after more than a decade of action had brought into being important pieces of legislation, like the voter rights act, and the civil rights act, yet at this time the non-violent tactics of the civil rights movement were being questioned for those who felt that no progress could be made without violence. In the same year that the voter rights act was finally passed, just 3 months later 6 days of riots tore apart the Watts neighborhood in Los Angeles- 34 people had been killed, thousands were injured or arrested. It seems the Watts riots of 1965 weight heavily on King’s mind as he wrote this book in 1967.
While acknowledging the tremendous strides for civil rights made in his lifetime, King felt strongly that there was more work to be done, and that all of us whether black or white, rich or poor were called to help create a more just world. In many ways the situation King describes is not very different from where we are today. The landmark legislation that broke down segregation and ended legalized discrimination has been passed, but creating a truly equal world for folks of all colors has yet to be achieved. Changing laws is not enough to change our culture, nor to change the hearts of all Americans.
Because, dear friends, though 40 years have passed injustice is not only a fact of King’s time, but of our own. King reminds us of many of the inequities our country faced in the late 1960s: the racial gaps in housing, education, jobs and poverty. He points out that in his time half of all Negros lived in substandard housing, had half the income of their white brethren, had twice the infant mortality. Those of us who gathered this past Tuesday to discuss King’s writing wondered how those statistics might be different today. It took a little digging, but I found some numbers that were really informative.
A 2009 Urban league report shows “that Blacks remain twice as likely to be unemployed, three times more likely to live in poverty and more than six times as likely to be imprisoned compared with whites.”
In education, for example, the progress has been substantial. In 1968, 70% of African Americans were high school drop-outs. Now, the figure is closer to 20% and there has been over a 300% improvement in the rate of African Americans who attend college But a significant gap persists. Barely half of African-American, Latino, and Native American students graduate from high school, with African American students graduating at 54%, Latinos at 56%, Native Americans at 51% and their white counterparts at 77%. WE have also seen progress in higher education. Fifty-five percent of African-American high school seniors go on to college these days, compared to 45 percent in 1970. But only 43 percent of African-Americans who enter college graduate – 20 percent lower than the rate for whites.
So though there have been significant strides, there is a long way to go. In the elementary schools only 12 percent of black fourth-grade boys are proficient in reading, compared with 38 percent of white boys, and only 12 percent of black eighth-grade boys are proficient in math, compared with 44 percent of white boys. Could this difference be explained by the economic circumstances of the students? It seems not, as poor white boys do just as well as African-American boys who do not live in poverty, (this was measured by whether they qualify for subsidized school lunches.)
A really heartbreaking gap is in infant health and mortality. Dr. Michael Lu, a UCLA Associate Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology and Public Health reported that African-American children are twice as likely as white children to be born at a low birth-weight, twice as likely to be born premature and more likely to die in infancy. African-American women are three to four more times likely to die in childbirth as white women. Again, income was factored in, and race alone seemed to have a significant impact on health.
King noticed how in his time folks in predominately black and poor urban areas had to pay more and travel farther for basic goods. Just last year community organizers in East Palo Alto finally achieved a victory; they now have a grocery store into their community after a decades long struggle from 1974 to 2009, when no grocery store could be convinced to locate in their city. Imagine that for 25 years in a city of 29,000 everyone had to leave the city to buy fresh groceries. Yet a 2008 MSNBC report shows that many urban centers still are without stores where residents can buy fresh healthy foods, which is particularly significant in neighborhoods where residents lack a car or decent bus routes to commute to grocery stores in more affluent arias. What organizers call “food apatite” continues even today.
When I grew up hearing stories of the civil right movement, I thought of racism and oppression as a thing of the past, overcome by our great legislative strides of the 1970s. But now it is clear to me that just because our laws say that persons of all races have equal rights, this does not guarantee that persons of all races will have equal opportunity. According to an ACLU 2009 study, “Black and Latino students attend schools more segregated today than during the civil rights era. Schools are still separate and not equal more than 50 years after the U.S. Supreme Court case, Brown v. Board of Education.” Racism and racial injustice are alive and well today, and King challenges our complacency with his challenge that “with each modest advance the white population promptly raise the argument that the Negro has come far enough.” (p. 11)
We all know the violent and oppressive history of slavery in our country, but It bears repeating that most African Americans came here in chains, with out possessions, without rights, without even family ties. King reminds us that it was a practice for generations to tear families apart- to separate mothers and children, brothers and sisters. He reminds us that when slavery was finally abolished, at a time when the American Government granted white settlers millions of acres of land in the western U.S., “Four million newly liberated slaves found themselves with no bread to eat, no land to cultivate, no shelter to cover their heads. It was like freeing a man who had been unjustly imprisoned for years, and on discover his innocence sending him out with no bus fare to get home, no suit to cover his body, no financial compensation…to help him get a sound footing in society.” (p. 83-84) Or to quote Frederick Douglas “Emancipation granted the Negro freedom to hunger, freedom to winter amid the rains of heaven. Emancipation was freedom and famine at the same time.”
The systemic realities of broken families, separate and unequal education, discrimination and “blockbusting” in the housing market, and a history of profound poverty affected African-Americans in King’s time, and affect racial minorities in our time today. Legacies of poverty are handed down from generation to generation just as are legacies of education, property and privilege. It is easy to say “it’s been over 40 years since the civil rights legislation passed, why are we still talking about this?” But there has never been a sustained systematic program to overturn those basic inequalities, and the passage of time is not in and of itself a force that guarantees eventual justice. We know from Gandhi’s work in India that societal oppression and inequity can persist for centuries if unopposed. King responds “Based on the cruel judgment that Negroes have come far enough, there is a strong mood to bring the civil rights movement to a halt or to reduce it to a crawl. Negro demands that yesterday evoked admiration and support, today – to many – have become tiresome, unwarranted and a disturbance to the enjoyment of life.” (p. 12) To king the work of civil rights will not be ended until all those gaps- the education gap, the housing gap, the infant mortality gap are closed and the people of this country really do have equal opportunity.
I want to confess to you that I caught myself in this thinking sometime, to feel that because there has been this gap as long as I have been on this planet, it must somehow make sense, it is just “the way things are”. King cites Ruth Benedict’s definition of racism as: “the dogma that one ethnic group is condemned by nature to hereditary inferiority and another group is destined to hereditary superiority.” (p. 73) So how can I justify to myself the deep inequalities in our society unless at some level there is a seed of that racist notion that one ethnic group is destined to hereditary superiority?
Our Unitarian Universalist association has, through deep soul searching and attempts to understand the mistakes of its history, decided that we need to be held accountable. We believe that it is not for the European-American members of our churches to decide when racism has been eliminated from our communities, we ask our members of color to hold us accountable for creating an anti-oppressive institution. Because we know in the past 300 years we have allowed great injustices to go un-rectified, we have been content with a snail’s pace towards progress. We know that sometimes the pain of the oppressed is invisible to people of privilege.
We want to be held accountable, not only for our action but our inaction, for whatever injustice goes un-noticed or un-addressed. Our hearts are broken by this history and present reality of injustice, and we ask with King “Where do we go from here?” For King one of the most important answers to the question “where do we go from here” – is that we address poverty, the poverty which oppresses people of all races. White and black, Hispanic and Asian must join together to lift everyone out of poverty. He writes that “We are called to play Good Samaritan on life’s roadside; but that will be only an initial act. One day the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be beaten and robbed as they make their journey through lige. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it understand that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.” (p. 198) King cites research that if we took just 2% of our GNP we could guarantee a job to every adult at a living wage, an amount similar to that spent on the war in Vietnam during his day. He notes, as so many have since, that we choose to prioritize the war overseas instead of our own war on poverty at home.
This was another important road forward for King, who called us to make a “peace offensive” waging peace around the world. He writes “If we assume that life is worth living and that man has a right to survive, then we must find an alternative to war.” (p. 194) He wanted this not only because African-American men were dying in the war in Vietnam at twice the rate of white men, but also because he because he believed the only way we could be come a truly just and great nation, the only way for humanity to survive and reach its potential in this world we inescapably share with all nations and races, was to put an end to war. Writes King: “It is not enough to say ‘We must not wage war.’ It is necessary to love peace and sacrifice for it.” (p. 195).
Given King’s courageous and principled commitment to non-violent action his call to end war should not surprise us. Further, he believed that non-violent action was the only possible path to create a peaceful world- it was an alternative to war. Where shall we go from here? If we chose war we choose a future of chaos, if we choose non-violence, there is a possibility of world community.
By 1967 African-American activists were beginning to question the practice of non-violence which seemed so slow. The saw that the non-violent method had lead to laws being changed, but that these laws were not being enforced, nor did racism cease. Non-violence felt to many like a perpetuation of the submissive attitude which had been required of African Americans for centuries. How much better, many thought, to express their anger and frustration more directly. Many activists were moved by Frantz Fannon’s book The Wretched of the Earth which counseled ”that violence is a psychologically healthy and tactically sound method for the oppressed… that violence is the only thing that will bring about liberation.”(p. 56) But King’s could not be turned around. His vision was for the future beyond the struggle for civil rights. He knew that black and white would have to live together in this country. He knew that there was an inescapable network of mutuality that bound us together saying: “In a real sense, all life is interrelated. The agony of the poor impoverishes the rich; the betterment of the poor enriches the rich. We are inevitably our brother’s keeper because we are our brother’s brother. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly.” (p. 191)
This resonates with our own 7th principle- the interdependent web of life. King’s vision for the future is one we UUs must take seriously, because he bases it on principles that are so much at the core of who we are. He is a universalist in the literal sense because he believes, with us, that “Deeply rooted in our religious heritage is the conviction that every man is an heir to a legacy of dignity and worth. ... There is no graded scale of essential worth. …. The worth of an individual does not lie in the measure of his intellect, his racial origin or his social position. Human worth lies in relatedness to God. An individual has value because he has value to God. Whenever this is recognized, ‘whiteness’ and ‘blackness’ pass away as determinants in a relationship and ‘son’ and ‘brother’ are substituted.” (p. 102-3)
King issues a special charge to white liberals- those like the Unitarian Universalists, those of us who believe in the inherent worth and dignity of all persons. He wonders how we can look at these persistent inequities between the races in the United Sates, we who know the history of how power and oppression have moved in this country, and who have not yet committed to work to end these inequities, these injustices in our country and in the world.
“The white liberal must see that the Negro needs not only love but also justice. It is not enough to say, “We love Negroes, we have many Negro friends.” They must demand justice for Negroes. Love that does not satisfy justice is no love at all.” (p. 95) This is where Unitarian Universalists hear their call to racial justice today. We understand that we cannot let our passivity enable an un-just status quo. What King said in 1967, we have believed for a century or more, that “There is nothing to keep us from remolding a recalcitrant status quo with bruised hands until we have fashioned it into a brotherhood.” (p. 199)
We, as a denomination, have issued our statement of conscience -- we know the work of racial justice is not finished, nor the work of economic justice, nor the eradication of violence in our world. We know that racism is not a black issue, class-ism is not an issue for the poor, and homophobia is not a gay issue. No matter who we are, these are our issues, because they stand between us and a just, peaceful world. We honor Martin Luther King’s birthday because the history of the civil rights history is American history, it is your history and mine. We celebrate today because King’s vision of the future is our vision of the future – a vision of not chaos but community. One nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
Endnotes:
King, Martin Luther Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community Boston: Beacon Press, 2010.
http://articles.cnn.com/2009-03-25/us/black.america.report_1_whites-blacks-urban-league?_s=PM:US Report sees 'sobering statistics' on racial inequality March 25, 2009
http://www.newsbatch.com/race.htm “Race and Ethnic Policy Issues” updated 2008
http://www.educationequalityproject.org/what_we_stand_for/achievement_gap “What Is The Achievement Gap?” Education Equality Project
“More African-Americans Attend College, But Graduation Lags” Post by News One in Nation on May 10, 2010 at 8:46 am http://newsone.com/nation/news-one-staff/more-african-americans-attend-college-but-graduation-lags/
“Black boys score far behind white students: Poverty alone doesn't seem to explain gap; expert cites 'racial differences'” By Trip Gabriel The New York Times updated 11/9/2010 4:41:51 PM ET http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/40095887/ns/us_news-the_new_york_times/
http://www.rhrealitycheck.org/blog/2010/05/05/racism-behind-disgracefulinfant-mortality-rates-among-africanamericans “Is Racism Behind High Infant Mortality Rates Among African-Americans?” By Megan Carpentier, RH Reality Check May 5, 2010 - 6:00am
http://abclocal.go.com/kgo/story?section=news/local/peninsula&id=7118331 “East Palo Alto gets first grocery store” ABC Local News, Friday, November 13, 2009
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/28300393/ns/health-diet_and_nutrition/ “Urban areas struggle to get grocers, fresh food Inner city ‘food deserts’ are instead loaded with fast food and fatty snacks” Associated press 12/18/2008
http://news.newamericamedia.org/news/view_article.html?article_id=bc8c6994f8bbccf16cf0a83663f3a445 “Racial Inequality Still Going Strong in U.S.” San Francisco Bay View, News Report, Peter Phillips, Posted: Apr 27, 2009
King wrote this book after more than a decade of action had brought into being important pieces of legislation, like the voter rights act, and the civil rights act, yet at this time the non-violent tactics of the civil rights movement were being questioned for those who felt that no progress could be made without violence. In the same year that the voter rights act was finally passed, just 3 months later 6 days of riots tore apart the Watts neighborhood in Los Angeles- 34 people had been killed, thousands were injured or arrested. It seems the Watts riots of 1965 weight heavily on King’s mind as he wrote this book in 1967.
While acknowledging the tremendous strides for civil rights made in his lifetime, King felt strongly that there was more work to be done, and that all of us whether black or white, rich or poor were called to help create a more just world. In many ways the situation King describes is not very different from where we are today. The landmark legislation that broke down segregation and ended legalized discrimination has been passed, but creating a truly equal world for folks of all colors has yet to be achieved. Changing laws is not enough to change our culture, nor to change the hearts of all Americans.
Because, dear friends, though 40 years have passed injustice is not only a fact of King’s time, but of our own. King reminds us of many of the inequities our country faced in the late 1960s: the racial gaps in housing, education, jobs and poverty. He points out that in his time half of all Negros lived in substandard housing, had half the income of their white brethren, had twice the infant mortality. Those of us who gathered this past Tuesday to discuss King’s writing wondered how those statistics might be different today. It took a little digging, but I found some numbers that were really informative.
A 2009 Urban league report shows “that Blacks remain twice as likely to be unemployed, three times more likely to live in poverty and more than six times as likely to be imprisoned compared with whites.”
In education, for example, the progress has been substantial. In 1968, 70% of African Americans were high school drop-outs. Now, the figure is closer to 20% and there has been over a 300% improvement in the rate of African Americans who attend college But a significant gap persists. Barely half of African-American, Latino, and Native American students graduate from high school, with African American students graduating at 54%, Latinos at 56%, Native Americans at 51% and their white counterparts at 77%. WE have also seen progress in higher education. Fifty-five percent of African-American high school seniors go on to college these days, compared to 45 percent in 1970. But only 43 percent of African-Americans who enter college graduate – 20 percent lower than the rate for whites.
So though there have been significant strides, there is a long way to go. In the elementary schools only 12 percent of black fourth-grade boys are proficient in reading, compared with 38 percent of white boys, and only 12 percent of black eighth-grade boys are proficient in math, compared with 44 percent of white boys. Could this difference be explained by the economic circumstances of the students? It seems not, as poor white boys do just as well as African-American boys who do not live in poverty, (this was measured by whether they qualify for subsidized school lunches.)
A really heartbreaking gap is in infant health and mortality. Dr. Michael Lu, a UCLA Associate Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology and Public Health reported that African-American children are twice as likely as white children to be born at a low birth-weight, twice as likely to be born premature and more likely to die in infancy. African-American women are three to four more times likely to die in childbirth as white women. Again, income was factored in, and race alone seemed to have a significant impact on health.
King noticed how in his time folks in predominately black and poor urban areas had to pay more and travel farther for basic goods. Just last year community organizers in East Palo Alto finally achieved a victory; they now have a grocery store into their community after a decades long struggle from 1974 to 2009, when no grocery store could be convinced to locate in their city. Imagine that for 25 years in a city of 29,000 everyone had to leave the city to buy fresh groceries. Yet a 2008 MSNBC report shows that many urban centers still are without stores where residents can buy fresh healthy foods, which is particularly significant in neighborhoods where residents lack a car or decent bus routes to commute to grocery stores in more affluent arias. What organizers call “food apatite” continues even today.
When I grew up hearing stories of the civil right movement, I thought of racism and oppression as a thing of the past, overcome by our great legislative strides of the 1970s. But now it is clear to me that just because our laws say that persons of all races have equal rights, this does not guarantee that persons of all races will have equal opportunity. According to an ACLU 2009 study, “Black and Latino students attend schools more segregated today than during the civil rights era. Schools are still separate and not equal more than 50 years after the U.S. Supreme Court case, Brown v. Board of Education.” Racism and racial injustice are alive and well today, and King challenges our complacency with his challenge that “with each modest advance the white population promptly raise the argument that the Negro has come far enough.” (p. 11)
We all know the violent and oppressive history of slavery in our country, but It bears repeating that most African Americans came here in chains, with out possessions, without rights, without even family ties. King reminds us that it was a practice for generations to tear families apart- to separate mothers and children, brothers and sisters. He reminds us that when slavery was finally abolished, at a time when the American Government granted white settlers millions of acres of land in the western U.S., “Four million newly liberated slaves found themselves with no bread to eat, no land to cultivate, no shelter to cover their heads. It was like freeing a man who had been unjustly imprisoned for years, and on discover his innocence sending him out with no bus fare to get home, no suit to cover his body, no financial compensation…to help him get a sound footing in society.” (p. 83-84) Or to quote Frederick Douglas “Emancipation granted the Negro freedom to hunger, freedom to winter amid the rains of heaven. Emancipation was freedom and famine at the same time.”
The systemic realities of broken families, separate and unequal education, discrimination and “blockbusting” in the housing market, and a history of profound poverty affected African-Americans in King’s time, and affect racial minorities in our time today. Legacies of poverty are handed down from generation to generation just as are legacies of education, property and privilege. It is easy to say “it’s been over 40 years since the civil rights legislation passed, why are we still talking about this?” But there has never been a sustained systematic program to overturn those basic inequalities, and the passage of time is not in and of itself a force that guarantees eventual justice. We know from Gandhi’s work in India that societal oppression and inequity can persist for centuries if unopposed. King responds “Based on the cruel judgment that Negroes have come far enough, there is a strong mood to bring the civil rights movement to a halt or to reduce it to a crawl. Negro demands that yesterday evoked admiration and support, today – to many – have become tiresome, unwarranted and a disturbance to the enjoyment of life.” (p. 12) To king the work of civil rights will not be ended until all those gaps- the education gap, the housing gap, the infant mortality gap are closed and the people of this country really do have equal opportunity.
I want to confess to you that I caught myself in this thinking sometime, to feel that because there has been this gap as long as I have been on this planet, it must somehow make sense, it is just “the way things are”. King cites Ruth Benedict’s definition of racism as: “the dogma that one ethnic group is condemned by nature to hereditary inferiority and another group is destined to hereditary superiority.” (p. 73) So how can I justify to myself the deep inequalities in our society unless at some level there is a seed of that racist notion that one ethnic group is destined to hereditary superiority?
Our Unitarian Universalist association has, through deep soul searching and attempts to understand the mistakes of its history, decided that we need to be held accountable. We believe that it is not for the European-American members of our churches to decide when racism has been eliminated from our communities, we ask our members of color to hold us accountable for creating an anti-oppressive institution. Because we know in the past 300 years we have allowed great injustices to go un-rectified, we have been content with a snail’s pace towards progress. We know that sometimes the pain of the oppressed is invisible to people of privilege.
We want to be held accountable, not only for our action but our inaction, for whatever injustice goes un-noticed or un-addressed. Our hearts are broken by this history and present reality of injustice, and we ask with King “Where do we go from here?” For King one of the most important answers to the question “where do we go from here” – is that we address poverty, the poverty which oppresses people of all races. White and black, Hispanic and Asian must join together to lift everyone out of poverty. He writes that “We are called to play Good Samaritan on life’s roadside; but that will be only an initial act. One day the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be beaten and robbed as they make their journey through lige. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it understand that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.” (p. 198) King cites research that if we took just 2% of our GNP we could guarantee a job to every adult at a living wage, an amount similar to that spent on the war in Vietnam during his day. He notes, as so many have since, that we choose to prioritize the war overseas instead of our own war on poverty at home.
This was another important road forward for King, who called us to make a “peace offensive” waging peace around the world. He writes “If we assume that life is worth living and that man has a right to survive, then we must find an alternative to war.” (p. 194) He wanted this not only because African-American men were dying in the war in Vietnam at twice the rate of white men, but also because he because he believed the only way we could be come a truly just and great nation, the only way for humanity to survive and reach its potential in this world we inescapably share with all nations and races, was to put an end to war. Writes King: “It is not enough to say ‘We must not wage war.’ It is necessary to love peace and sacrifice for it.” (p. 195).
Given King’s courageous and principled commitment to non-violent action his call to end war should not surprise us. Further, he believed that non-violent action was the only possible path to create a peaceful world- it was an alternative to war. Where shall we go from here? If we chose war we choose a future of chaos, if we choose non-violence, there is a possibility of world community.
By 1967 African-American activists were beginning to question the practice of non-violence which seemed so slow. The saw that the non-violent method had lead to laws being changed, but that these laws were not being enforced, nor did racism cease. Non-violence felt to many like a perpetuation of the submissive attitude which had been required of African Americans for centuries. How much better, many thought, to express their anger and frustration more directly. Many activists were moved by Frantz Fannon’s book The Wretched of the Earth which counseled ”that violence is a psychologically healthy and tactically sound method for the oppressed… that violence is the only thing that will bring about liberation.”(p. 56) But King’s could not be turned around. His vision was for the future beyond the struggle for civil rights. He knew that black and white would have to live together in this country. He knew that there was an inescapable network of mutuality that bound us together saying: “In a real sense, all life is interrelated. The agony of the poor impoverishes the rich; the betterment of the poor enriches the rich. We are inevitably our brother’s keeper because we are our brother’s brother. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly.” (p. 191)
This resonates with our own 7th principle- the interdependent web of life. King’s vision for the future is one we UUs must take seriously, because he bases it on principles that are so much at the core of who we are. He is a universalist in the literal sense because he believes, with us, that “Deeply rooted in our religious heritage is the conviction that every man is an heir to a legacy of dignity and worth. ... There is no graded scale of essential worth. …. The worth of an individual does not lie in the measure of his intellect, his racial origin or his social position. Human worth lies in relatedness to God. An individual has value because he has value to God. Whenever this is recognized, ‘whiteness’ and ‘blackness’ pass away as determinants in a relationship and ‘son’ and ‘brother’ are substituted.” (p. 102-3)
King issues a special charge to white liberals- those like the Unitarian Universalists, those of us who believe in the inherent worth and dignity of all persons. He wonders how we can look at these persistent inequities between the races in the United Sates, we who know the history of how power and oppression have moved in this country, and who have not yet committed to work to end these inequities, these injustices in our country and in the world.
“The white liberal must see that the Negro needs not only love but also justice. It is not enough to say, “We love Negroes, we have many Negro friends.” They must demand justice for Negroes. Love that does not satisfy justice is no love at all.” (p. 95) This is where Unitarian Universalists hear their call to racial justice today. We understand that we cannot let our passivity enable an un-just status quo. What King said in 1967, we have believed for a century or more, that “There is nothing to keep us from remolding a recalcitrant status quo with bruised hands until we have fashioned it into a brotherhood.” (p. 199)
We, as a denomination, have issued our statement of conscience -- we know the work of racial justice is not finished, nor the work of economic justice, nor the eradication of violence in our world. We know that racism is not a black issue, class-ism is not an issue for the poor, and homophobia is not a gay issue. No matter who we are, these are our issues, because they stand between us and a just, peaceful world. We honor Martin Luther King’s birthday because the history of the civil rights history is American history, it is your history and mine. We celebrate today because King’s vision of the future is our vision of the future – a vision of not chaos but community. One nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
Endnotes:
King, Martin Luther Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community Boston: Beacon Press, 2010.
http://articles.cnn.com/2009-03-25/us/black.america.report_1_whites-blacks-urban-league?_s=PM:US Report sees 'sobering statistics' on racial inequality March 25, 2009
http://www.newsbatch.com/race.htm “Race and Ethnic Policy Issues” updated 2008
http://www.educationequalityproject.org/what_we_stand_for/achievement_gap “What Is The Achievement Gap?” Education Equality Project
“More African-Americans Attend College, But Graduation Lags” Post by News One in Nation on May 10, 2010 at 8:46 am http://newsone.com/nation/news-one-staff/more-african-americans-attend-college-but-graduation-lags/
“Black boys score far behind white students: Poverty alone doesn't seem to explain gap; expert cites 'racial differences'” By Trip Gabriel The New York Times updated 11/9/2010 4:41:51 PM ET http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/40095887/ns/us_news-the_new_york_times/
http://www.rhrealitycheck.org/blog/2010/05/05/racism-behind-disgracefulinfant-mortality-rates-among-africanamericans “Is Racism Behind High Infant Mortality Rates Among African-Americans?” By Megan Carpentier, RH Reality Check May 5, 2010 - 6:00am
http://abclocal.go.com/kgo/story?section=news/local/peninsula&id=7118331 “East Palo Alto gets first grocery store” ABC Local News, Friday, November 13, 2009
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/28300393/ns/health-diet_and_nutrition/ “Urban areas struggle to get grocers, fresh food Inner city ‘food deserts’ are instead loaded with fast food and fatty snacks” Associated press 12/18/2008
http://news.newamericamedia.org/news/view_article.html?article_id=bc8c6994f8bbccf16cf0a83663f3a445 “Racial Inequality Still Going Strong in U.S.” San Francisco Bay View, News Report, Peter Phillips, Posted: Apr 27, 2009
Wednesday, January 12, 2011
Holy Moments (Janary 6, 2011)
It happened at the ground breaking for the Opportunity Center. It was to be the only housing shelter in the county, with a wing for single people and a wing for families. When I went to the first briefing on the project I had been really touched by the architect’s vision of the space- it was so artistic and focused on a blending of indoor and outdoor space to be welcoming to un-housed people who were skeptical of the indoors. But on the day of the groundbreaking I don’t remember the scene too clearly; we were outside near the site of the building project, and local businesses had provided a table-ful of finger food. I was there with a few members of my congregation, some of whom were on the board of the capitol campaign, and we were representing a congregation that had surprised itself by raising $100,000. Different dignitaries got up to the microphone to speak, and when Jim Burklo, the founding minister of Urban Ministries got up to speak, a wave of the power of that moment swept over me. Jim explained that for decades landlords had refused to rent space for a shelter, but after decades of being denied a place to shelter those who needed to come in out of the cold and rain, here we were. All these people who had gathered to celebrate were there because they had believed in this common vision. I was overwhelmed by the holiness of the moment; he puncturing of ordinary by a flood of hope, the real concrete knowledge that people could come together to change this very particular and local, but in no way small part of the world.
That was a holy moment for me. It surprised me because it was different than what usually comes to mind when I think of a holy moment. I think for a lot of Unitarian Universalists our most commonly shared holy moment is one stumbled upon in nature. We share this also with that great poet and activist Wendell Berry, whose gift is to capture it in his poetry:
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
I can almost see that place “where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.” And feel the peace that such a place would give.
So how can 2 such different moments- one in a crowded party and the other in the solitude of a wild place, how can they both be holy, what do they have in common?
The most common contemporary meaning of the word holy is “exalted or worthy of complete devotion as one perfect in goodness and righteousness” but we usually think of holy as “pertaining to” the divine. So we need to wrestle with that for a moment. We Unitarian Universalists are very diverse theologically. We are atheists and theists and pantheists and agnostics. But because we are Universalists, we believe that whatever is most important, whatever is most worth of devotion, whatever is good and right is so for all people. We believe that not only prophets of old can experience something holy, but such experiences are available to everyone. It is the first source of our living tradition we find on the inside of the hymnal; “direct experience of that transcending mystery and wonder, affirmed in all cultures, which moves is to a renewal of the spirit and an openness to the forces that create and uphold life.” For those of us who use the word “divine” to describe those forces that create and uphold life, we Unitarian Universalists conceive a divine that must be accessible to all people.
As diverse as we are, as diverse as the many people sharing this world with us, naturally we can expect to see some diversity in the holy moments experienced by each of us; we should expect how we experience the holy to be as various as we are. People have told me over the years about holy moments that happen between themselves and another person, one woman told me that she has experienced several such moments playing softball. For me, I often find that the presence of live music increases the possibility of something holy happening- something about the creating of art before our very ears. I know folks who will mention privately that it is the conjugal act where they experience their holy moments.
A holy moment is not something that comes only to Moses on the mountaintop, but to all who are looking carefully and all who are open to awe and wonder and gratitude in the experience of this life. In a novel by Tamora Pierce called “The Trickster’s Choice” the heroine has a special gift- a “trick of sight” and with this gift she can refocus her vision so that she can see magic wherever it is present around her. I liked this image immediately, because it reminds me of how each of us experiences the holy in our own lives. We refocus our sight from the ordinary to seeing the extraordinary present in the very same places and people and events. Now this is a character from fantasy fiction, where magic defies our laws of nature. But I think we of this world miss out on a lot of holy moments, miss out on the miraculous because of the way our sight is focused. We think that because we did not witness the parting of the red seas that there are no holy moments in our ordinary lives. I believe the holy functions within the laws of physics, and that this makes it no less special. So Today I invite you to practice the trick of sight that allows us to see the holy in our own lives.
I also want to acknowledge, that sometimes these moments happen alongside tragedy or despair. Sometimes being with someone who is dying is imbued with a sense of holiness that shines through the pain and fear of the moment. There can be in such moments a connection between people, or a feeling of connection to something larger than oneself that is present even in a moment of great pain and loss. And so I propose that it is the sense of connection, of one-ness that is at the common core of our holy moments. Merriam-Webster tells us that the root of “holy” comes from Middle English, from Old English hālig; akin to Old English hāl whole “healthy, unhurt, entire” To me this is the essence of the experience. For me the archetype of a holy moment is as Alice Walker describes it in her book “The Color Purple”
“One day when I was sitting quite and feeling like a motherless child, which I was, it come to me: that feeling of being part of everything, not separate at all. I knew that if I cut a tree, my arm would bleed. And I laughed and cried and I run all around the house.”
For Walker’s protagonist, there is no act, no parting of the red sea, not even the beauty of a wood drake that foretells the experience of something holy, just the spontaneous knowing of the one-ness of all living things.
The wholeness of such an experience is not necessarily that I myself feel whole- for me it is the realization that the whole is larger than myself. I can feel this in a moment of deep connection with another person, in a moment of wonder as the “wood drake rests on his beauty in the water” in which I feel myself part of the eco-system that surrounds me. I can feel this deep connection with my community when we make our hope manifest in real actions in the world. Whether it is music or a brilliant theorem that awakens this sense in us, the common thread is that our sense of what it is to be alive expands. It may be “good and righteous” as the definition of Holy suggests. Such a moment may be filled with power or beauty – filled with the Spirit of life as it were.
As for the character in the Color purple, such a moment of expanded awareness often comes as a surprise. I think it is in the nature of such experiences to come unbidden. I don’t know why- maybe it’s like what scientists are learning from quantum physics, that the gaze of the observer changes the path of the observed, or more colloquially, “The watched pot never boils.” But it is possible to cultivate such experiences, practicing that “trick of sight” that allows us to see the holy in the ordinary. Many religious traditions seek the powerful experience through preparing by fasting, or extended meditation, by right living, or by spiritual practices. They are cultivated by remembering, as Wendell Berry does, to search out the quiet of wild places. (The poem I read earlier was published by Berry in a collection of poems written over 20 years of his Sunday morning walks through the forests and fields near his Kentucky farm.) The most critical element, however, is openness. Because it is easy to stay on the surface of things and not sink down into their depths, to give only the minimum of attention needed to complete the task at hand. The great American spiritual teacher Ram Das tells the story of a friend of his who would approach each person he met as a Bodhisattva, and interact with each as if they were an enlightened being. As you might imagine it changed substantively the quality of their interactions. We “Increase the odds” of something holy happening through our willingness to say “this person before me, this wood drake, this moment is of deep significance. I open myself fully to it.”
We can have this openness not only when we are at our best, but even in our lowest moments. In a way our despair, our pain can crack us open so that we are ready to listen for that which is worthy of devotion. Then the “direct experience of transcending mystery and wonder” crashes over us or whispers quietly in a calm and stillness at our center. It lets us know that even though we are broken in body, heart or spirit, we are not alone. We are not without power, or beauty or hope. These moments are like a precious gift. We cannot count on them coming right when we want or expect them, only be grateful when they do come. We can also return to those moments to remind us of the shining depths at the heart of life. They can become touchstones, reminding us to remain open for the holy in each moment.
That was a holy moment for me. It surprised me because it was different than what usually comes to mind when I think of a holy moment. I think for a lot of Unitarian Universalists our most commonly shared holy moment is one stumbled upon in nature. We share this also with that great poet and activist Wendell Berry, whose gift is to capture it in his poetry:
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
I can almost see that place “where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.” And feel the peace that such a place would give.
So how can 2 such different moments- one in a crowded party and the other in the solitude of a wild place, how can they both be holy, what do they have in common?
The most common contemporary meaning of the word holy is “exalted or worthy of complete devotion as one perfect in goodness and righteousness” but we usually think of holy as “pertaining to” the divine. So we need to wrestle with that for a moment. We Unitarian Universalists are very diverse theologically. We are atheists and theists and pantheists and agnostics. But because we are Universalists, we believe that whatever is most important, whatever is most worth of devotion, whatever is good and right is so for all people. We believe that not only prophets of old can experience something holy, but such experiences are available to everyone. It is the first source of our living tradition we find on the inside of the hymnal; “direct experience of that transcending mystery and wonder, affirmed in all cultures, which moves is to a renewal of the spirit and an openness to the forces that create and uphold life.” For those of us who use the word “divine” to describe those forces that create and uphold life, we Unitarian Universalists conceive a divine that must be accessible to all people.
As diverse as we are, as diverse as the many people sharing this world with us, naturally we can expect to see some diversity in the holy moments experienced by each of us; we should expect how we experience the holy to be as various as we are. People have told me over the years about holy moments that happen between themselves and another person, one woman told me that she has experienced several such moments playing softball. For me, I often find that the presence of live music increases the possibility of something holy happening- something about the creating of art before our very ears. I know folks who will mention privately that it is the conjugal act where they experience their holy moments.
A holy moment is not something that comes only to Moses on the mountaintop, but to all who are looking carefully and all who are open to awe and wonder and gratitude in the experience of this life. In a novel by Tamora Pierce called “The Trickster’s Choice” the heroine has a special gift- a “trick of sight” and with this gift she can refocus her vision so that she can see magic wherever it is present around her. I liked this image immediately, because it reminds me of how each of us experiences the holy in our own lives. We refocus our sight from the ordinary to seeing the extraordinary present in the very same places and people and events. Now this is a character from fantasy fiction, where magic defies our laws of nature. But I think we of this world miss out on a lot of holy moments, miss out on the miraculous because of the way our sight is focused. We think that because we did not witness the parting of the red seas that there are no holy moments in our ordinary lives. I believe the holy functions within the laws of physics, and that this makes it no less special. So Today I invite you to practice the trick of sight that allows us to see the holy in our own lives.
I also want to acknowledge, that sometimes these moments happen alongside tragedy or despair. Sometimes being with someone who is dying is imbued with a sense of holiness that shines through the pain and fear of the moment. There can be in such moments a connection between people, or a feeling of connection to something larger than oneself that is present even in a moment of great pain and loss. And so I propose that it is the sense of connection, of one-ness that is at the common core of our holy moments. Merriam-Webster tells us that the root of “holy” comes from Middle English, from Old English hālig; akin to Old English hāl whole “healthy, unhurt, entire” To me this is the essence of the experience. For me the archetype of a holy moment is as Alice Walker describes it in her book “The Color Purple”
“One day when I was sitting quite and feeling like a motherless child, which I was, it come to me: that feeling of being part of everything, not separate at all. I knew that if I cut a tree, my arm would bleed. And I laughed and cried and I run all around the house.”
For Walker’s protagonist, there is no act, no parting of the red sea, not even the beauty of a wood drake that foretells the experience of something holy, just the spontaneous knowing of the one-ness of all living things.
The wholeness of such an experience is not necessarily that I myself feel whole- for me it is the realization that the whole is larger than myself. I can feel this in a moment of deep connection with another person, in a moment of wonder as the “wood drake rests on his beauty in the water” in which I feel myself part of the eco-system that surrounds me. I can feel this deep connection with my community when we make our hope manifest in real actions in the world. Whether it is music or a brilliant theorem that awakens this sense in us, the common thread is that our sense of what it is to be alive expands. It may be “good and righteous” as the definition of Holy suggests. Such a moment may be filled with power or beauty – filled with the Spirit of life as it were.
As for the character in the Color purple, such a moment of expanded awareness often comes as a surprise. I think it is in the nature of such experiences to come unbidden. I don’t know why- maybe it’s like what scientists are learning from quantum physics, that the gaze of the observer changes the path of the observed, or more colloquially, “The watched pot never boils.” But it is possible to cultivate such experiences, practicing that “trick of sight” that allows us to see the holy in the ordinary. Many religious traditions seek the powerful experience through preparing by fasting, or extended meditation, by right living, or by spiritual practices. They are cultivated by remembering, as Wendell Berry does, to search out the quiet of wild places. (The poem I read earlier was published by Berry in a collection of poems written over 20 years of his Sunday morning walks through the forests and fields near his Kentucky farm.) The most critical element, however, is openness. Because it is easy to stay on the surface of things and not sink down into their depths, to give only the minimum of attention needed to complete the task at hand. The great American spiritual teacher Ram Das tells the story of a friend of his who would approach each person he met as a Bodhisattva, and interact with each as if they were an enlightened being. As you might imagine it changed substantively the quality of their interactions. We “Increase the odds” of something holy happening through our willingness to say “this person before me, this wood drake, this moment is of deep significance. I open myself fully to it.”
We can have this openness not only when we are at our best, but even in our lowest moments. In a way our despair, our pain can crack us open so that we are ready to listen for that which is worthy of devotion. Then the “direct experience of transcending mystery and wonder” crashes over us or whispers quietly in a calm and stillness at our center. It lets us know that even though we are broken in body, heart or spirit, we are not alone. We are not without power, or beauty or hope. These moments are like a precious gift. We cannot count on them coming right when we want or expect them, only be grateful when they do come. We can also return to those moments to remind us of the shining depths at the heart of life. They can become touchstones, reminding us to remain open for the holy in each moment.
Sunday, December 5, 2010
Enough! (December 5, 2010)
At this time of year, our whole consumer society is set up to make us itch for more. I mean, don’t you kind of feel like you should be shopping right now? The advertisements, the promotions, the coupons have been coming fast and hard, and I confess to you that I am a sucker for a coupon. I go into the store to replace the mittens with the holes in them, and I totally lose hold of my senses. Suddenly I’ve got my arms loaded down with good deals and sales. Sometimes it only takes the walk outside through the parking lot to come back to my senses. By the time I have my keys in the ignition, I suspect there will be some returns in my future. I know I’m not alone in this, because when I friend of mine posted on Facebook “I went to the store for milk and somehow spent $100” and he got almost 50 sympathetic comments on his status. It is just hard to say “Enough!”
Today, we turn to the wisdom of Buddhism to help us bring some sanity to the season, to return us to our senses as we inhabit a culture that encourages us to want more and more until it is too much.
It is said that the first truth given to us by the Buddha when he rose from his meditation under the Bodhi tree where he achieved enlightenment were the 4 noble truths. These are also the kernel, the most basic of teachings of Buddhist philosophy, and yet also the most advanced. The 4 noble truths are:
1. Thus is the Noble Truth of Suffering
2. Thus is the Noble Truth of the Accumulation of Suffering
3. Thus is the Noble Truth of the Elimination of Suffering
4. Thus is the Noble Truth of the Path that Leads Away from Suffering
So the first truth of Buddhism is that suffering exists. It is further analyzed this way in one of the longer sutras: “Birth is stressful, aging is stressful, death is stressful; sorrow, lamentation, pain, distress, & despair are stressful; association with what is not loved is stressful, separation from what is loved is stressful, not getting what is wanted is stressful.” And what causes this stress, or suffering? According to the second noble truth it is suffering is caused by carving. We “cling to a certain sense of existence, to selfhood, or to the things or phenomena that we consider the cause of happiness or unhappiness.” Or we have craving that things were not as they are. The word for Craving is Tanha, which literally means Thirst, but can also be translated as desire.
I think what happens when we encounter the American Marketing Machine, is that it speaks to our thirst, our craving. We become dissatisfied with what we have and long for more. But the Buddha is talking about not just thirst for superficial pleasures, but the suffering that comes from losing things we love, people we love, our health, it comes from realizing that someday we will lose our lives.
And he says, in the 3rd noble truth, there is in fact an end to suffering, which is good news. In the 4th noble truth he tells us that there is a path to follow to lead us away from suffering. That path is called the Eight Fold path. That is: right view, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness and right concentration. Obviously, if we are doing or saying things that are causing harm to ourselves and others, this will cause us stress or suffering. But the inner work we do with our own thoughts and how we focus our attention is part of that path as well. Cultivating mindfulness helps us retain our equanimity. It cultivates that “inner strength that allows us to be with things the way they are instead of how we wish they could be. Mindfulness practice does not involve trying to change who we are, instead it is a practice of seeing clearly who we are…”
But despite our best intentions, suffering and stress are inevitable. American Buddhist teacher Gil Fonsdel teaches that “It is possible to experience the inevitable pain of life in a straightforward, uncomplicated way….The suffering addressed by the Four Noble Truths is the suffering and stress that arises from the way we choose to relate to our experience. When we cling, it is painful. When we try to hold our experience at a distance, to push it way, that too is painful. We cling to or push away from our experience in an infinite variety of ways”
I propose that in this season of rampant consumerism, business, and dearly held expectations, I think cultivating mindfulness can help us come to a place where we can finally say “enough”. It is not through doing more that we will find that sense, because we know there is always more we could acquire, more we could do. To break the chain of wanting, the Buddhists tell us that we must turn not to more buying or more doing, but inward to our own minds. This is where the wanting begins, this is where suffering and stress arise. I know from personal experience that shopping never leaves me MORE satisfied than when I started. Does this ever happen to you? I go to the store for those new mittens, and realize that there is a new kind of scarf without which I am now itching to have? Now I am dissatisfied, I have another action item on my to-do list and my stress is increased, not decreased.
That example shows the most superficial kind of wanting. But the concept is the same for the big wants- I want a home to call my own. I want a partner when I am single. Perhaps I always wanted to have a child, but never had any children. But Says Buddhist teacher Gil Fonsdel, we can use our small every-day experiences to help us with the big ones when they come. He writes: “If we attend to the small ways that we suffer, we create a context of greater ease, peace, and responsibility which can make it easier to deal with the bigger difficulties when they arise.” [P. 13].
This is where mindfulness comes in. Mindfulness is the practice of bringing all your attention into the present moment. We don’t judge the present moment, we are just aware of it. If something happens that we don’t like, instead of saying “I hate long lines at the cash registers!” we notice the line. We notice our response to it. We observe the anger rising, but we don’t cling to the anger, we just observe it. When we find the “perfect” gift, we don’t get attached to that either. We notice what thoughts and feelings arise without clinging to them, noticing “excitement is rising, pride is rising” Because all things that rise also pass away. If we get too attached to our great prize we won shopping, think how much greater the suffering will be when we drop it on the way to the car and it breaks, or the person we got it for already has one.”
Says Fonsdel, “In mindfulness practice, we learn how to pay attention in the present in moment so that when suffering arises we’re able to notice it. We can take an interest in it instead of running away from it. We can learn how to be comfortable with suffering, so that we don’t act inappropriately because of our discomfort. Then we can begin understanding its roots, and let go of the clinging.” So as we are standing in the mall and notice the craving, the clinging, the stress, we breathe in and breathe out, observing each breath, observing our experience and our reaction to it, without clinging and without judging. We develop an inner observer which exists with equanimity. The more we practice, the easier it is to find that observer. The desire for a new smart phone is fleeting, but the presence of the observer, this will endure, can be with us our whole lives.
Mindfulness also helps us navigate the business of the season. There are an infinite number of actions we can take this time of year- so part of the challenge is to choose the “right action” -- actions which are going to be the best for our emotional and physical health, and for the health of our communities. We choose wisely which of the 100 activities are going to make the healthiest difference in our lives. And then once we have chosen, we mindfully inhabit those choices. Over the Thanksgiving holiday, there was one night where I thought “I’m so glad I passed up the opportunity to see that wonderful show, because I really needed a night home with the family” and there were other days when I thought “I can’t believe I scheduled a day where I have so much to do and visitors on the way” But on good days and bad days, I can be mindful and breathe.
The real danger is not that we won’t have enough time to “get it all done” over the holidays, but that we will not be present to the time we have. In his book “Miracle of Mindfulness” Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh writes about a friend who was a father of 2 small children who told the monk one day “I’ve discovered a way to have a lot more time. In the past, I used to look at my time as if it were divided into several parts. One part I reserved for [my son] another part was for [my wife] another part of r household work. The time left over I considered my own. I could read, write, do research, go for walks. But now I try not to divide my time into parts anymore. I consider my time with Joe and Sue as my own time. When I help Joey with his homework, I try to find ways of seeing his time as my own time. I go through his lesson with him, sharing his presence and finding ways to be interested in what we do during that time. The time for him becomes my own time. The same with Sue. The remarkable thing is that now I have unlimited time for myself.”
How do we have enough time in this busy season? we breathe. In… and Out… Each breath is my time. Each breath is enough. “Breathing in I calm my body” Breathing out I smile. Breathing In it is a pleasant moment. Breathing out is a wonderful moment.
It is very simple, but not easy. I challenge you throughout the holiday season, to remember to breathe. To continuously draw yourself back into the present moment. Not so that you can experience perfect equanimity, but so that you can just be. Observe anger and frustration as it rises and falls away. Observe joy and satisfaction they rise and fall away. Observe your wanting as you see the new car commercials on tv. Observe that thirst as you see images of happy families, and you know this winter is a time when your family is in crisis. Observe the wanting as you see the ornament your grandmother gave you and you anticipate your first Hanukah without her. Observe the good times too, mindfully, without clinging or judging. Observe the times you get caught up and forget to breathe, and choose to bring yourself back to your breath.
Thich Nhat Hanh talked about eating tangerines with is friend Jim. He said “Jim became so immersed in [his thoughts about the future] that he literally forgot about what he was doing in the present. He popped a section of tangerine in his mouth and, before he had begun chewing it, had another slice ready to pop into his mouth again. He was hardly aware he was eating a tangerine. All I had to say was, “You ought to eat the tangerine section you’ve already taken.” Sometimes we celebrate the holidays in this way. Young children give a perfect expression of this when the open one present after another without stopping to enjoy any of them, and when they are sitting in a pile of wrapping paper ask “is that all?” We adults often feel the same way about time. We are disappoint to find we will have only a short visit from our mother or grandson, and as they come to an end think “it’s a shame we didn’t have more time together” As Hanh says “If you can’t eat a single section, you can’t eat a tangerine” If we can’t enjoy one gift, one moment with a friend, one bite of Grandma’s apple pie, the holiday season will pass away without our ever having tasted it. But sometimes just one moment of connection with someone, one moment listening to the snow fall under the stars can be enough. This present moment is enough.
Silent meditation
“Breathing in I calm my body” Breathing out I smile. Breathing In it is a pleasant moment. Breathing out is a wonderful moment.
Endnotes:
1) http://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/study/truths.html The Four Noble Truths: A Study Guide by Thanissaro Bhikkhu © 1999–2010
2) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddhism#The_Four_Noble_Truths
3)The issue at Hand: Essays on Buddhist Mindfunless and Practice by Gil Fronsdal p. 17
4) The issue at Hand: Essays on Buddhist Mindfunless and Practice by Gil Fronsdal p. 4
5) The Miracle of Mindfilness! A manual opn Meditation Thich Nhat Hanh Beacon Press 1975 p. 2.
6) The blooming of the Lotus Thich Nhat Hanh
7) The Miracle of Mindfilness! A manual on Meditation Thich Nhat Hanh Beacon Press 1975 p. 5
8) The blooming of the Lotus Thich Nhat Hanh
Today, we turn to the wisdom of Buddhism to help us bring some sanity to the season, to return us to our senses as we inhabit a culture that encourages us to want more and more until it is too much.
It is said that the first truth given to us by the Buddha when he rose from his meditation under the Bodhi tree where he achieved enlightenment were the 4 noble truths. These are also the kernel, the most basic of teachings of Buddhist philosophy, and yet also the most advanced. The 4 noble truths are:
1. Thus is the Noble Truth of Suffering
2. Thus is the Noble Truth of the Accumulation of Suffering
3. Thus is the Noble Truth of the Elimination of Suffering
4. Thus is the Noble Truth of the Path that Leads Away from Suffering
So the first truth of Buddhism is that suffering exists. It is further analyzed this way in one of the longer sutras: “Birth is stressful, aging is stressful, death is stressful; sorrow, lamentation, pain, distress, & despair are stressful; association with what is not loved is stressful, separation from what is loved is stressful, not getting what is wanted is stressful.” And what causes this stress, or suffering? According to the second noble truth it is suffering is caused by carving. We “cling to a certain sense of existence, to selfhood, or to the things or phenomena that we consider the cause of happiness or unhappiness.” Or we have craving that things were not as they are. The word for Craving is Tanha, which literally means Thirst, but can also be translated as desire.
I think what happens when we encounter the American Marketing Machine, is that it speaks to our thirst, our craving. We become dissatisfied with what we have and long for more. But the Buddha is talking about not just thirst for superficial pleasures, but the suffering that comes from losing things we love, people we love, our health, it comes from realizing that someday we will lose our lives.
And he says, in the 3rd noble truth, there is in fact an end to suffering, which is good news. In the 4th noble truth he tells us that there is a path to follow to lead us away from suffering. That path is called the Eight Fold path. That is: right view, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness and right concentration. Obviously, if we are doing or saying things that are causing harm to ourselves and others, this will cause us stress or suffering. But the inner work we do with our own thoughts and how we focus our attention is part of that path as well. Cultivating mindfulness helps us retain our equanimity. It cultivates that “inner strength that allows us to be with things the way they are instead of how we wish they could be. Mindfulness practice does not involve trying to change who we are, instead it is a practice of seeing clearly who we are…”
But despite our best intentions, suffering and stress are inevitable. American Buddhist teacher Gil Fonsdel teaches that “It is possible to experience the inevitable pain of life in a straightforward, uncomplicated way….The suffering addressed by the Four Noble Truths is the suffering and stress that arises from the way we choose to relate to our experience. When we cling, it is painful. When we try to hold our experience at a distance, to push it way, that too is painful. We cling to or push away from our experience in an infinite variety of ways”
I propose that in this season of rampant consumerism, business, and dearly held expectations, I think cultivating mindfulness can help us come to a place where we can finally say “enough”. It is not through doing more that we will find that sense, because we know there is always more we could acquire, more we could do. To break the chain of wanting, the Buddhists tell us that we must turn not to more buying or more doing, but inward to our own minds. This is where the wanting begins, this is where suffering and stress arise. I know from personal experience that shopping never leaves me MORE satisfied than when I started. Does this ever happen to you? I go to the store for those new mittens, and realize that there is a new kind of scarf without which I am now itching to have? Now I am dissatisfied, I have another action item on my to-do list and my stress is increased, not decreased.
That example shows the most superficial kind of wanting. But the concept is the same for the big wants- I want a home to call my own. I want a partner when I am single. Perhaps I always wanted to have a child, but never had any children. But Says Buddhist teacher Gil Fonsdel, we can use our small every-day experiences to help us with the big ones when they come. He writes: “If we attend to the small ways that we suffer, we create a context of greater ease, peace, and responsibility which can make it easier to deal with the bigger difficulties when they arise.” [P. 13].
This is where mindfulness comes in. Mindfulness is the practice of bringing all your attention into the present moment. We don’t judge the present moment, we are just aware of it. If something happens that we don’t like, instead of saying “I hate long lines at the cash registers!” we notice the line. We notice our response to it. We observe the anger rising, but we don’t cling to the anger, we just observe it. When we find the “perfect” gift, we don’t get attached to that either. We notice what thoughts and feelings arise without clinging to them, noticing “excitement is rising, pride is rising” Because all things that rise also pass away. If we get too attached to our great prize we won shopping, think how much greater the suffering will be when we drop it on the way to the car and it breaks, or the person we got it for already has one.”
Says Fonsdel, “In mindfulness practice, we learn how to pay attention in the present in moment so that when suffering arises we’re able to notice it. We can take an interest in it instead of running away from it. We can learn how to be comfortable with suffering, so that we don’t act inappropriately because of our discomfort. Then we can begin understanding its roots, and let go of the clinging.” So as we are standing in the mall and notice the craving, the clinging, the stress, we breathe in and breathe out, observing each breath, observing our experience and our reaction to it, without clinging and without judging. We develop an inner observer which exists with equanimity. The more we practice, the easier it is to find that observer. The desire for a new smart phone is fleeting, but the presence of the observer, this will endure, can be with us our whole lives.
Mindfulness also helps us navigate the business of the season. There are an infinite number of actions we can take this time of year- so part of the challenge is to choose the “right action” -- actions which are going to be the best for our emotional and physical health, and for the health of our communities. We choose wisely which of the 100 activities are going to make the healthiest difference in our lives. And then once we have chosen, we mindfully inhabit those choices. Over the Thanksgiving holiday, there was one night where I thought “I’m so glad I passed up the opportunity to see that wonderful show, because I really needed a night home with the family” and there were other days when I thought “I can’t believe I scheduled a day where I have so much to do and visitors on the way” But on good days and bad days, I can be mindful and breathe.
The real danger is not that we won’t have enough time to “get it all done” over the holidays, but that we will not be present to the time we have. In his book “Miracle of Mindfulness” Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh writes about a friend who was a father of 2 small children who told the monk one day “I’ve discovered a way to have a lot more time. In the past, I used to look at my time as if it were divided into several parts. One part I reserved for [my son] another part was for [my wife] another part of r household work. The time left over I considered my own. I could read, write, do research, go for walks. But now I try not to divide my time into parts anymore. I consider my time with Joe and Sue as my own time. When I help Joey with his homework, I try to find ways of seeing his time as my own time. I go through his lesson with him, sharing his presence and finding ways to be interested in what we do during that time. The time for him becomes my own time. The same with Sue. The remarkable thing is that now I have unlimited time for myself.”
How do we have enough time in this busy season? we breathe. In… and Out… Each breath is my time. Each breath is enough. “Breathing in I calm my body” Breathing out I smile. Breathing In it is a pleasant moment. Breathing out is a wonderful moment.
It is very simple, but not easy. I challenge you throughout the holiday season, to remember to breathe. To continuously draw yourself back into the present moment. Not so that you can experience perfect equanimity, but so that you can just be. Observe anger and frustration as it rises and falls away. Observe joy and satisfaction they rise and fall away. Observe your wanting as you see the new car commercials on tv. Observe that thirst as you see images of happy families, and you know this winter is a time when your family is in crisis. Observe the wanting as you see the ornament your grandmother gave you and you anticipate your first Hanukah without her. Observe the good times too, mindfully, without clinging or judging. Observe the times you get caught up and forget to breathe, and choose to bring yourself back to your breath.
Thich Nhat Hanh talked about eating tangerines with is friend Jim. He said “Jim became so immersed in [his thoughts about the future] that he literally forgot about what he was doing in the present. He popped a section of tangerine in his mouth and, before he had begun chewing it, had another slice ready to pop into his mouth again. He was hardly aware he was eating a tangerine. All I had to say was, “You ought to eat the tangerine section you’ve already taken.” Sometimes we celebrate the holidays in this way. Young children give a perfect expression of this when the open one present after another without stopping to enjoy any of them, and when they are sitting in a pile of wrapping paper ask “is that all?” We adults often feel the same way about time. We are disappoint to find we will have only a short visit from our mother or grandson, and as they come to an end think “it’s a shame we didn’t have more time together” As Hanh says “If you can’t eat a single section, you can’t eat a tangerine” If we can’t enjoy one gift, one moment with a friend, one bite of Grandma’s apple pie, the holiday season will pass away without our ever having tasted it. But sometimes just one moment of connection with someone, one moment listening to the snow fall under the stars can be enough. This present moment is enough.
Silent meditation
“Breathing in I calm my body” Breathing out I smile. Breathing In it is a pleasant moment. Breathing out is a wonderful moment.
Endnotes:
1) http://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/study/truths.html The Four Noble Truths: A Study Guide by Thanissaro Bhikkhu © 1999–2010
2) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddhism#The_Four_Noble_Truths
3)The issue at Hand: Essays on Buddhist Mindfunless and Practice by Gil Fronsdal p. 17
4) The issue at Hand: Essays on Buddhist Mindfunless and Practice by Gil Fronsdal p. 4
5) The Miracle of Mindfilness! A manual opn Meditation Thich Nhat Hanh Beacon Press 1975 p. 2.
6) The blooming of the Lotus Thich Nhat Hanh
7) The Miracle of Mindfilness! A manual on Meditation Thich Nhat Hanh Beacon Press 1975 p. 5
8) The blooming of the Lotus Thich Nhat Hanh
Wednesday, November 10, 2010
Morality and Politics (November 7, 2010)
Morality has become kind of a dirty word these days. It smacks of nosy neighbors trying to see past the hedge into your bedroom window. But I think it is a word we should not give up on. Morality means relating to principles of right and wrong in behavior -- thinking about what is good and bad. But maybe that still feels uncomfortable for us as a culture; maybe we think of ourselves as a post-moral culture, and “right and wrong” as outdated. I know we often like to use the word “ethics” instead, as somehow more humanist or scientific, but actually ethics are just a system or set of moral values and issues. For example, in the Buddhist tradition “non-harming” is a moral value, and falls within a whole set of Buddhist Ethics. When it comes to Ethics in our own life we have a choice- we can observe a an ethical code grounded in a tradition we trust, or we can use community standards and laws. As Unitarian Universalists, we have our common principles, and a tradition of ethical action to guide us. We don’t have a clear set of rules for every situation, but a set of principles to help us find our way. For example, our principles don't tell us we can't kill, but if we truly “affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of every person” and “respect the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part” then some kinds of behavior are “right out.”
Laws also help us stick to our shared ethics as a society. They clarify what behaviors are clearly crossing a line that our society has agreed upon, and back them up with our legal system. We have started to notice that the law doesn't really help us in all areas, so when we encounter murkier ethical areas, our religious community helps us clarify our highest ideas. It's right there in our mission which is “to provide a forum for liberal religious expression in an atmosphere which encourages spiritual growth and ethical living.” For example: we as a congregation and as a movement have spent a lot of time this past year thinking about the ethics of eating, so that we can live out our principles. We have noticed that there is a huge gap between what the law allows us to eat, and law around how food is produced, and what we believe shows respect to the interdependent web of existence. As a community which encourages ethical living, it's not enough for us to say “do what you want as long as you don't break any laws.” We call ourselves to something higher, knowing that sometimes our own integrity and principles can call us to be leaders in creating a just and compassionate world, when the law is slow to respond, or is downright unjust. IN the same way that we cannot assume that whatever is legal is moral, we must not assume that social norms describe what is moral. Sometimes our community standards do help us keep track of what is ethical. If you park in a handicapped parking spot without a permit, even if you don’t get a ticket, you are going to get a lot of dirty looks. But segregation was socially acceptable in the southeast even after it was not longer legal. “Everyone else is doing it!” didn't even fly with your mom when you were in high school.
Morality is about doing what is right, not what you can get away with. I have a bumper sticker on my car that exemplifies this point: it says “A Living Wage is a Moral Value.” The law says that employers have to pay their employees $7.25 per hour. Now it happens that the Tompkins County Worker's Center where I got this sticker learns with surprising frequency of folks who aren't making that $7.25 for some reason – this is called wage theft, it is illegal and a fine can be levied by the Department of Labor. You might get voted “Goat of the year” by the worker's center if you are guilty of wage theft- you are violating not only the law but societal norms. But if you do the math, you will find that people living in Tompkins County cannot actually live on $7.25 an hour. The Credit Union has calculated that in order for workers to be able to provide for their basic needs, a living wage is $11.11 per hour. And there is a group of employers in Tompkins County who are committed to being moral leaders around this issue- even though they could probably get away with paying folks minimum wage. They have decided the moral thing to do is to commit to paying this higher wage.
Now in American Ethics, there is another “guiding hand” at work - the “free market.” If you hear folks talk about the free market long enough, you will realize the faith folks have in the market is like that which generations past had in the divine. “If we just have faith in the market, and trust in the market, and let it do its work our lives, everything will turn out for the best” we are told. We have a similar faith in technology- that it will lead us onward and upward forever. In his analysis of agribusiness and the academic fields which supports it Wendell Berry writes: “They have no apparent moral allegiances or bearings or limits. Their work thus inevitably serves whatever power is greatest… Lacking any moral force or vision of its own.” [Berry p. 156]. The market is just a tool, like money is just a tool. It is only as good or bad as the moral vision which guides it. It does not reflect the whole of life. It does not reflect the love and care we give to one another. It does not reflect the health of the earth. It does not reflect the strength of our communities, or the sustainability of our futures. It does not reflect awe and wonder, or beauty or justice or even truth. I submit to you that the market is not an appropriate moral center- profit, money is not the best thing to put at the core of who we are as persons or as a society. And when we ask our government to put this at the center of value, there will be no morality in government.
Because what we put at the center of our own life, at the center of the ethical system we use to guide our life must have a broad glance. Compassion, that’s a pretty safe choice. A Buddhist Monk once explained that compassion is something all persons must hold on to until the moment of enlightenment, even when they have relinquished everything else. If you put compassion at your center you are bound to make sure that not only your life but those around you will be respected in the living of your life. There are other values that are worthy too- beauty, justice, truth but you can see how easily they can go awry if compassion, if respect for the inherent worth and dignity of each life, and of the interdependent web are not there to guide their unfolding. Even Justice as a guiding principle could be wielded like a weapon if not paired with compassion.
In all the ancient religions of the world, I have yet to encounter one that put money at its center, at it’s heart. I believe the reason we see such a fuzzy moral center in our political life is because we have for too long abdicated our own moral responsibilities to market, as if had a heart and a soul and was looking out for all of us. As if the choices we make don’t matter. As if we are all just tumbleweed blown about by its winds. I say, it’s time for us to put a stake in the ground, no better- a tree. Let us sink our moral roots deep into things that really do matter, really do endure. Like this religious tradition- it has turned out plenty of heroes worth emulating- Susan B Anthony, Clara Barton, The Waitsil-Sharps who personally helped evacuate hundreds of persons during the Nazi occupation before WW2, and so founded our UU service committee. Beacon press, which has been a voice of truth even when it had to choose between that and profitability. Linus Pauling who was not only a Nobel prize winning scientist, but also an activist. And when it comes right down to it, there are a lot of ethical, principled people in this room whom I admire deeply for the integrity with which they live their lives.
Our roots must not only go deep in to the wisdom of the past, but out into the neighborhood, into the community. There is more and more research to suggest that trees connect and even share resources through their roots and through the mycorrhizal fungi that links networks of trees below ground to share nutrients and water among them. This connection enhances their chances of survival, and of regeneration . Now imagine the strength of a trunk that has grown straight and true, that won’t fall in the first storm. That straight trunk is like our own integrity, how we grow ourselves according to our moral center. From there we can grow all kinds of leaves and branches, changing season by season, taking in the nourishment of the sun and shaping the winds that pass through the canopy, but by growing straight and true and sinking our roots deep and wide, we become people of character.
It’s easy to say “everyone does it” or “it’s legal” but it is often hard to ask ourselves “is it moral?” and “Is this compassionate to my community and to future generations?” Brian and I share a disappointment that so many of our political leaders today do not seem to be moral leaders. I think it is time for us as people of integrity, as people of character, to change the conversation -- from one of mud slinging to one of integrity. Let us provide the moral leadership that seems so absent in our world today. Let us raise our children to be leaders with integrity, and let us continue to support one another in this small community as we which encourage one another to spiritual growth and ethical living.
Laws also help us stick to our shared ethics as a society. They clarify what behaviors are clearly crossing a line that our society has agreed upon, and back them up with our legal system. We have started to notice that the law doesn't really help us in all areas, so when we encounter murkier ethical areas, our religious community helps us clarify our highest ideas. It's right there in our mission which is “to provide a forum for liberal religious expression in an atmosphere which encourages spiritual growth and ethical living.” For example: we as a congregation and as a movement have spent a lot of time this past year thinking about the ethics of eating, so that we can live out our principles. We have noticed that there is a huge gap between what the law allows us to eat, and law around how food is produced, and what we believe shows respect to the interdependent web of existence. As a community which encourages ethical living, it's not enough for us to say “do what you want as long as you don't break any laws.” We call ourselves to something higher, knowing that sometimes our own integrity and principles can call us to be leaders in creating a just and compassionate world, when the law is slow to respond, or is downright unjust. IN the same way that we cannot assume that whatever is legal is moral, we must not assume that social norms describe what is moral. Sometimes our community standards do help us keep track of what is ethical. If you park in a handicapped parking spot without a permit, even if you don’t get a ticket, you are going to get a lot of dirty looks. But segregation was socially acceptable in the southeast even after it was not longer legal. “Everyone else is doing it!” didn't even fly with your mom when you were in high school.
Morality is about doing what is right, not what you can get away with. I have a bumper sticker on my car that exemplifies this point: it says “A Living Wage is a Moral Value.” The law says that employers have to pay their employees $7.25 per hour. Now it happens that the Tompkins County Worker's Center where I got this sticker learns with surprising frequency of folks who aren't making that $7.25 for some reason – this is called wage theft, it is illegal and a fine can be levied by the Department of Labor. You might get voted “Goat of the year” by the worker's center if you are guilty of wage theft- you are violating not only the law but societal norms. But if you do the math, you will find that people living in Tompkins County cannot actually live on $7.25 an hour. The Credit Union has calculated that in order for workers to be able to provide for their basic needs, a living wage is $11.11 per hour. And there is a group of employers in Tompkins County who are committed to being moral leaders around this issue- even though they could probably get away with paying folks minimum wage. They have decided the moral thing to do is to commit to paying this higher wage.
Now in American Ethics, there is another “guiding hand” at work - the “free market.” If you hear folks talk about the free market long enough, you will realize the faith folks have in the market is like that which generations past had in the divine. “If we just have faith in the market, and trust in the market, and let it do its work our lives, everything will turn out for the best” we are told. We have a similar faith in technology- that it will lead us onward and upward forever. In his analysis of agribusiness and the academic fields which supports it Wendell Berry writes: “They have no apparent moral allegiances or bearings or limits. Their work thus inevitably serves whatever power is greatest… Lacking any moral force or vision of its own.” [Berry p. 156]. The market is just a tool, like money is just a tool. It is only as good or bad as the moral vision which guides it. It does not reflect the whole of life. It does not reflect the love and care we give to one another. It does not reflect the health of the earth. It does not reflect the strength of our communities, or the sustainability of our futures. It does not reflect awe and wonder, or beauty or justice or even truth. I submit to you that the market is not an appropriate moral center- profit, money is not the best thing to put at the core of who we are as persons or as a society. And when we ask our government to put this at the center of value, there will be no morality in government.
Because what we put at the center of our own life, at the center of the ethical system we use to guide our life must have a broad glance. Compassion, that’s a pretty safe choice. A Buddhist Monk once explained that compassion is something all persons must hold on to until the moment of enlightenment, even when they have relinquished everything else. If you put compassion at your center you are bound to make sure that not only your life but those around you will be respected in the living of your life. There are other values that are worthy too- beauty, justice, truth but you can see how easily they can go awry if compassion, if respect for the inherent worth and dignity of each life, and of the interdependent web are not there to guide their unfolding. Even Justice as a guiding principle could be wielded like a weapon if not paired with compassion.
In all the ancient religions of the world, I have yet to encounter one that put money at its center, at it’s heart. I believe the reason we see such a fuzzy moral center in our political life is because we have for too long abdicated our own moral responsibilities to market, as if had a heart and a soul and was looking out for all of us. As if the choices we make don’t matter. As if we are all just tumbleweed blown about by its winds. I say, it’s time for us to put a stake in the ground, no better- a tree. Let us sink our moral roots deep into things that really do matter, really do endure. Like this religious tradition- it has turned out plenty of heroes worth emulating- Susan B Anthony, Clara Barton, The Waitsil-Sharps who personally helped evacuate hundreds of persons during the Nazi occupation before WW2, and so founded our UU service committee. Beacon press, which has been a voice of truth even when it had to choose between that and profitability. Linus Pauling who was not only a Nobel prize winning scientist, but also an activist. And when it comes right down to it, there are a lot of ethical, principled people in this room whom I admire deeply for the integrity with which they live their lives.
Our roots must not only go deep in to the wisdom of the past, but out into the neighborhood, into the community. There is more and more research to suggest that trees connect and even share resources through their roots and through the mycorrhizal fungi that links networks of trees below ground to share nutrients and water among them. This connection enhances their chances of survival, and of regeneration . Now imagine the strength of a trunk that has grown straight and true, that won’t fall in the first storm. That straight trunk is like our own integrity, how we grow ourselves according to our moral center. From there we can grow all kinds of leaves and branches, changing season by season, taking in the nourishment of the sun and shaping the winds that pass through the canopy, but by growing straight and true and sinking our roots deep and wide, we become people of character.
It’s easy to say “everyone does it” or “it’s legal” but it is often hard to ask ourselves “is it moral?” and “Is this compassionate to my community and to future generations?” Brian and I share a disappointment that so many of our political leaders today do not seem to be moral leaders. I think it is time for us as people of integrity, as people of character, to change the conversation -- from one of mud slinging to one of integrity. Let us provide the moral leadership that seems so absent in our world today. Let us raise our children to be leaders with integrity, and let us continue to support one another in this small community as we which encourage one another to spiritual growth and ethical living.
Monday, November 1, 2010
A Spooky Universalist Halloween Story (October 31, 2010)
I want to tell you a family secret, a secret the Universalist historians don’t want you to know. Have you ever seen a movie where a bunch of well dressed old-timey people are sitting around a table holding hands while a medium calls on the spirits of the dead: “rap on the table if you can hear us” the medium says. Well, chances are that at least one of those folks at the table were Universalists. In fact, there’s a decent chance the medium was a Universalist, maybe even a Universalist Minister. Then you know how later in that movie, someone will say, “Bah, this is hogwash! You’re tapping on the table yourself!” Chances are that guy was a Universalist too.
You see, back in the 1800s there was a new religious movement sweeping the nation- it was called spiritualism. Now it was nothing new for folks to have experiences in which they understood themselves to be having visions of those who had died, or to have communications with celestial spirits. It seems to me that over the past few thousand years of western culture, depending on the current fashion, these visions have been treated either as demonic and evil, mystical, or signs of mental illness. It was generally the position of Christian folks before this time that all voices or visions were demonic; so most folks did not mention their experiences to any but a trusted friend. But in the mid 1800s several different persons, such as the Rev. John Dods, Universalist minister, began to speak of their experiences.
As a 13-year-old boy, Dods had seen a vision of his father, who had died 2 years before. His father said “The spirit world was not what people supposed- that great darkness and error hung over the religious world – that the sects differed as widely from the truth as they did from each other – but that a new era of light was soon to dawn on earth.” When Dods told his family, they laughed, and when Dods was next visited by his father, the vision advised him not to tell anyone about the visits saying “The world is not yet prepared to receive them” And so Dods hid his experiences for many years, though they caused him to re-think his conservative beliefs. Dods beliefs changed particularly about the fate of souls after death, since the ones who appeared to him seemed glorious, not suffering in hellfire as his old theology would lead him to believe.
In 1824, the “hauntings” began. “Sounds like the striking of heavy stones forcibly thrown against the building, rumbling sounds, explosions as of a cannon near the house, violent shakings of the whole building, the movement of various articles of furniture, even to that of a bed with a heavy man upon it, across the room, with great force.” Even relatives and visitors noticed the strange happenings “One of the curious gentlemen visitors encountered something like an invisible cannon ball, which fell from the ceiling; rolled, hopped, and bounded about the room, up and over the furniture and careening off the walls; and then hopped up on a bed, where the apparent depression of its weight on the bedclothes moved from the head to the food of the bed. A gentlemen in the room walked towards the bed… but one of the company caught hold of his arm, and said ‘Do not touch it for your life’ It then dropped on the floor, and rolled out of the side of the house.”
So it was his experience of these visitations, or hauntings, that drew Dods to convert to Universalism and to become a Universalist Minister. To Dods these hauntings were “Evidence of a providence whose saving grace extended to all” Then in 1836 Dods saw an exhibition of the French Mesmeric Charles Poyen St. Saveur. He became enthralled both with mesmerism, and with electricity, which was considered a related field. Remember, the study of electricity was an exciting new field in the 19th century, and by the second half of the century, the field of Electrical engineering was emerging, with such greats as Thomas Edison turning this field of study into a viable electrical light bulb in 1879. Dobs believed that “Electricity was the body of god, and all spirits God’s emanations.” He worked for a while with the theory that these visions were actually an electrical or mesmeric phenomenon- that they were in some way all in the mind, and worked for years to prove his theory, until in the 1850s a new series of spirits revealed themselves to him, He became a speaker and preacher in the field of “electrical psychology” just as the brand new spiritualist movement was emerging.
What is spiritualism? It was a movement growing out of Christianity that in some ways thought of itself as a scientific movement. Science was going through some exciting revelations in those days; such luminaries as Charles Darwin were in the midst of their groundbreaking research. “[Spiritualism] treated even the spirit as natural phenomenon susceptible to scientific explanation and manipulation.” [p. 17]What if we could use science, use direct experience to prove once and for all the nature of God? What if we could use the brand new knowledge of electricity or speak directly with St. Peter to pose our theological questions to him directly? And in fact Spiritualism did seem to provide external validation of the Universalist idea that all souls could be saved, since many of the spirit messages were of the Universalist theology even when given by non-Universalist mediums. [p. 93]
This was at the time, the cutting edge of religion. And the churches in the area now called the St. Lawrence District were the hotbed of religious radicalism. Elmira, Utica, Glens Falls, Poughkeepsie, Canandaigua, Buffalo, Albany, Oswego, and Auburn are all congregations who play a role in the Spiritualist movement. Remember this was the heady days of the Abolitionist movement and women’s suffrage, and both Universalists and Spiritualists were active in these movements for justice. Their radical egalitarianism and sense that a new progressive theology was in harmony with their work for progress in the world. Dozens of Universalist ministers became spiritualist mediums or healers. They felt that Universalism had begun to calcify, relying on revelations from other generations. They felt that any generation could encounter new revelations of religious truth, and that the truth learned from interactions with the spirits would help them connect past present and future. They could use these modern spiritual techniques to help clarify religious truth, and guide us all into the future. Their visions were not only theological in nature, but often scientific, since they believed things of the spirit were subject to natural law. In fact, it was the spiritualists who were strong advocates for Evolution, often lecturing on paleontology and archeology during a spiritualist lecture. Some of the more conservative Universalists found this uncomfortable in their theology. What did this mean for the progression of human souls after death, if all animals were on a path of evolution?
Historian John Buescher in his book "The Other Side of Salvation" compares the early spiritualist movement to the early history of universalism, when pietistic small groups and study circles formed the core of the movement as the message was spread by itinerant preachers. Spiritual séance groups could be seen the same way, gathering in a circle in a member’s home, hands held around a circle calling on the spirits together. Buescher remarks that “spiritualism renewed the sense of the spirit that had begun to disappear from their faith. Heaven was not far way from earth; the spirit (and the spirits) was close by. Angels were busy in the world” Some Universalists found Spiritualism a natural evolution of Universalism. Others were not so sure- not sure how much to believe, not sure what to make of the séances and speakers they heard. Said Rev. William Allen Drew of the much-touted Rev. Andrew Jackson Davis, a spiritualist medium “His whole art is shown to be the art of humbuggery and nothing else.”
The Universalist church was split over these events. There was a strong reaction from the more conservative of our brethren. In a Universalist publication based in New York called “The Christian Messenger” Rev. Thomas Jefferson Sawyer proclaimed “They know themselves to be rank infidels, and yet persist in claiming to be Christians.” He said, “Let Universalists be on their guard” against this “duplicity “ and “Knaves” [41] He was one who called for all the Universalist associations to withdraw their fellowship from ministers who associated with Rev. Davis. And many did. It lead, in fact, to a time of creedal tests, if you can believe such things possible in our movement. In fact much of this debate happened here in our home territory; the New York Convention of Universalists voted that no minister could come from another Universalist district into their convention unless they “subscribed to it’s creed” [p. 60] And the Buffalo association of Universalisms adopted a creedal test in the early 1850s. Many Universalist ministers were either “De-fellowshipped” or withdrew from fellowship when their Convention adopted such creedal tests. Many went on to be freelance spiritualist lecturers. Some congregations left the association to become Spiritualist congregations. By 1948 Dod, the minister who experienced the hauntings in our story, was no longer in fellowship with his Universalist Convention.
But the Susquehanna Association of Universalists resolved “Several of our ecclesiastical bodies have established tests of fellowship hitherto unknown in our denomination, and in our opinion inconsistent with the freedom of human mind and the liberty of thought, speech and opinion.” A reporter in 1879 asked a Universalist Minster, who himself was a spiritualist and his wife a ‘partial medium,' and who estimated 1/3 of his congregation were spiritualists, “Why don’t you call yourself a Spiritualist” and her responded “I could not get a living, I have 4 children and they must be educated. Were I to leave my pulpit and become a traveling lecturer, what would become of my family?” [p. 119]
So why would Universalist clergy risk their livelihood with this movement? Universalist Minister Rev. Byron Brittan retorted on behalf on the spiritual camp that they believed “the granted old prophets, Jesus and his Apostles, absorb and monopolized all the revelations of God; and hence, that [all] we poor followers of the 19th century get is second-handed, stereotyped forever!” [p. 43] Theodore Parker was not a spiritualist, but was interested in the movement. He wrote about it “Every man bearing within ‘lively oracles’ the present witness of God.” “The Spritualists are the only sect that looks forward and has new fire on its hearth.” [140]
Other Universalist ministers took the route of trying to evaluate the rappings and furniture movement at séances. Some worked actively to expose frauds. Daniel Mason Knapen exposed local mediums that were found to be stealing jewelry and other valuables from those at séances. [p. 98] Rev. Charles Chauncey Burr toured denouncing spiritualism and “expose[ing] its adherents and practitioners as “weak, insane, deluded creatures.” 2 magazines expressed the poles of the movement The Banner of Light “made little effort to distinguish sincere mediums from deliberate frauds.” On the other hand the Religio-Philosophical Journal steered away from the more sensational phenomena like levitation and disembodied voices and noises. In the late 1800s they turned their attention to investigating séances to expose frauds. They championed a “more scientific psychical research” [p. 124]
There are 2 themes I see in all this. First, it reminds us of the perennial tension between religious establishment and novelty even within so radical a religion as Universalism within a couple of generations from its settling on these shores. Now they were instituting creedal tests, de-fellowshipping ministers, and refusing to rent their buildings to Spiritualists because they were not proper Christians. They expressed strongly that the bible was all the spiritual wisdom that any proper Christian needed. The spiritualists on the other hand, found the church had become stuffy and calcified. They were returning to the small circles of the early days of Universalism, where they could be comforted by their sense of connection to loved ones who had died. They were craving that “direct experience” that is our first source of our tradition today. They believed that a new generation could still discover new truth, and experience new revelation.
But even in the biblical times folks rarely believed the prophets and visionaries. How is a person to tell the difference between newly revealed truth and ordinary claptrap? This is our second theme, and it’s the theme I was trying to get at with my silly children’s story today. Sometimes those in authority refuse to listen to us, even when we are right, so how can we tell when the authorities are right and when we should trust ourselves? Whether that authority is the church, or a spiritualist telling of a vision she has seen. Or even, if we ourselves have strange visions, how can we tell what to make of them?
Many contemporary UUs have had powerful spiritual experiences they would be hard pressed to explain. Many folks keep these secret for fear of being judged. It is also true that many UUs have also been betrayed or hurt by religious experience, and so are skeptical of all such things. This is a particularly important tension for us as a movement today- to keep our minds open, while also guarding against “idolatries of mind and spirit”. I think this is a question that can never be resolved one way or the other. Instead we live into that tension, and keep our minds open and also questioning.
The spiritualist movement has largely been left out of our history books, even the history of our own movement. Seances are not so popular any more, and we no longer us the electrical engineering to try to understand the nature of god. We leave these unfashionable practices out of our story when we tell it. But surely the creedal tests, the de-fellowshipping of ministers and the loss of many Universalists from our movement left their mark on our history. Mediums and Mesmerism are completely gone from our religious tradition. But let us keep the wisdom we gained from that part of our history - the lesson about the importance of not letting our movement become calcified and rigid. Let us be open to new revelation, and let us be wary of humbuggery even as we are open to new truth.
You see, back in the 1800s there was a new religious movement sweeping the nation- it was called spiritualism. Now it was nothing new for folks to have experiences in which they understood themselves to be having visions of those who had died, or to have communications with celestial spirits. It seems to me that over the past few thousand years of western culture, depending on the current fashion, these visions have been treated either as demonic and evil, mystical, or signs of mental illness. It was generally the position of Christian folks before this time that all voices or visions were demonic; so most folks did not mention their experiences to any but a trusted friend. But in the mid 1800s several different persons, such as the Rev. John Dods, Universalist minister, began to speak of their experiences.
As a 13-year-old boy, Dods had seen a vision of his father, who had died 2 years before. His father said “The spirit world was not what people supposed- that great darkness and error hung over the religious world – that the sects differed as widely from the truth as they did from each other – but that a new era of light was soon to dawn on earth.” When Dods told his family, they laughed, and when Dods was next visited by his father, the vision advised him not to tell anyone about the visits saying “The world is not yet prepared to receive them” And so Dods hid his experiences for many years, though they caused him to re-think his conservative beliefs. Dods beliefs changed particularly about the fate of souls after death, since the ones who appeared to him seemed glorious, not suffering in hellfire as his old theology would lead him to believe.
In 1824, the “hauntings” began. “Sounds like the striking of heavy stones forcibly thrown against the building, rumbling sounds, explosions as of a cannon near the house, violent shakings of the whole building, the movement of various articles of furniture, even to that of a bed with a heavy man upon it, across the room, with great force.” Even relatives and visitors noticed the strange happenings “One of the curious gentlemen visitors encountered something like an invisible cannon ball, which fell from the ceiling; rolled, hopped, and bounded about the room, up and over the furniture and careening off the walls; and then hopped up on a bed, where the apparent depression of its weight on the bedclothes moved from the head to the food of the bed. A gentlemen in the room walked towards the bed… but one of the company caught hold of his arm, and said ‘Do not touch it for your life’ It then dropped on the floor, and rolled out of the side of the house.”
So it was his experience of these visitations, or hauntings, that drew Dods to convert to Universalism and to become a Universalist Minister. To Dods these hauntings were “Evidence of a providence whose saving grace extended to all” Then in 1836 Dods saw an exhibition of the French Mesmeric Charles Poyen St. Saveur. He became enthralled both with mesmerism, and with electricity, which was considered a related field. Remember, the study of electricity was an exciting new field in the 19th century, and by the second half of the century, the field of Electrical engineering was emerging, with such greats as Thomas Edison turning this field of study into a viable electrical light bulb in 1879. Dobs believed that “Electricity was the body of god, and all spirits God’s emanations.” He worked for a while with the theory that these visions were actually an electrical or mesmeric phenomenon- that they were in some way all in the mind, and worked for years to prove his theory, until in the 1850s a new series of spirits revealed themselves to him, He became a speaker and preacher in the field of “electrical psychology” just as the brand new spiritualist movement was emerging.
What is spiritualism? It was a movement growing out of Christianity that in some ways thought of itself as a scientific movement. Science was going through some exciting revelations in those days; such luminaries as Charles Darwin were in the midst of their groundbreaking research. “[Spiritualism] treated even the spirit as natural phenomenon susceptible to scientific explanation and manipulation.” [p. 17]What if we could use science, use direct experience to prove once and for all the nature of God? What if we could use the brand new knowledge of electricity or speak directly with St. Peter to pose our theological questions to him directly? And in fact Spiritualism did seem to provide external validation of the Universalist idea that all souls could be saved, since many of the spirit messages were of the Universalist theology even when given by non-Universalist mediums. [p. 93]
This was at the time, the cutting edge of religion. And the churches in the area now called the St. Lawrence District were the hotbed of religious radicalism. Elmira, Utica, Glens Falls, Poughkeepsie, Canandaigua, Buffalo, Albany, Oswego, and Auburn are all congregations who play a role in the Spiritualist movement. Remember this was the heady days of the Abolitionist movement and women’s suffrage, and both Universalists and Spiritualists were active in these movements for justice. Their radical egalitarianism and sense that a new progressive theology was in harmony with their work for progress in the world. Dozens of Universalist ministers became spiritualist mediums or healers. They felt that Universalism had begun to calcify, relying on revelations from other generations. They felt that any generation could encounter new revelations of religious truth, and that the truth learned from interactions with the spirits would help them connect past present and future. They could use these modern spiritual techniques to help clarify religious truth, and guide us all into the future. Their visions were not only theological in nature, but often scientific, since they believed things of the spirit were subject to natural law. In fact, it was the spiritualists who were strong advocates for Evolution, often lecturing on paleontology and archeology during a spiritualist lecture. Some of the more conservative Universalists found this uncomfortable in their theology. What did this mean for the progression of human souls after death, if all animals were on a path of evolution?
Historian John Buescher in his book "The Other Side of Salvation" compares the early spiritualist movement to the early history of universalism, when pietistic small groups and study circles formed the core of the movement as the message was spread by itinerant preachers. Spiritual séance groups could be seen the same way, gathering in a circle in a member’s home, hands held around a circle calling on the spirits together. Buescher remarks that “spiritualism renewed the sense of the spirit that had begun to disappear from their faith. Heaven was not far way from earth; the spirit (and the spirits) was close by. Angels were busy in the world” Some Universalists found Spiritualism a natural evolution of Universalism. Others were not so sure- not sure how much to believe, not sure what to make of the séances and speakers they heard. Said Rev. William Allen Drew of the much-touted Rev. Andrew Jackson Davis, a spiritualist medium “His whole art is shown to be the art of humbuggery and nothing else.”
The Universalist church was split over these events. There was a strong reaction from the more conservative of our brethren. In a Universalist publication based in New York called “The Christian Messenger” Rev. Thomas Jefferson Sawyer proclaimed “They know themselves to be rank infidels, and yet persist in claiming to be Christians.” He said, “Let Universalists be on their guard” against this “duplicity “ and “Knaves” [41] He was one who called for all the Universalist associations to withdraw their fellowship from ministers who associated with Rev. Davis. And many did. It lead, in fact, to a time of creedal tests, if you can believe such things possible in our movement. In fact much of this debate happened here in our home territory; the New York Convention of Universalists voted that no minister could come from another Universalist district into their convention unless they “subscribed to it’s creed” [p. 60] And the Buffalo association of Universalisms adopted a creedal test in the early 1850s. Many Universalist ministers were either “De-fellowshipped” or withdrew from fellowship when their Convention adopted such creedal tests. Many went on to be freelance spiritualist lecturers. Some congregations left the association to become Spiritualist congregations. By 1948 Dod, the minister who experienced the hauntings in our story, was no longer in fellowship with his Universalist Convention.
But the Susquehanna Association of Universalists resolved “Several of our ecclesiastical bodies have established tests of fellowship hitherto unknown in our denomination, and in our opinion inconsistent with the freedom of human mind and the liberty of thought, speech and opinion.” A reporter in 1879 asked a Universalist Minster, who himself was a spiritualist and his wife a ‘partial medium,' and who estimated 1/3 of his congregation were spiritualists, “Why don’t you call yourself a Spiritualist” and her responded “I could not get a living, I have 4 children and they must be educated. Were I to leave my pulpit and become a traveling lecturer, what would become of my family?” [p. 119]
So why would Universalist clergy risk their livelihood with this movement? Universalist Minister Rev. Byron Brittan retorted on behalf on the spiritual camp that they believed “the granted old prophets, Jesus and his Apostles, absorb and monopolized all the revelations of God; and hence, that [all] we poor followers of the 19th century get is second-handed, stereotyped forever!” [p. 43] Theodore Parker was not a spiritualist, but was interested in the movement. He wrote about it “Every man bearing within ‘lively oracles’ the present witness of God.” “The Spritualists are the only sect that looks forward and has new fire on its hearth.” [140]
Other Universalist ministers took the route of trying to evaluate the rappings and furniture movement at séances. Some worked actively to expose frauds. Daniel Mason Knapen exposed local mediums that were found to be stealing jewelry and other valuables from those at séances. [p. 98] Rev. Charles Chauncey Burr toured denouncing spiritualism and “expose[ing] its adherents and practitioners as “weak, insane, deluded creatures.” 2 magazines expressed the poles of the movement The Banner of Light “made little effort to distinguish sincere mediums from deliberate frauds.” On the other hand the Religio-Philosophical Journal steered away from the more sensational phenomena like levitation and disembodied voices and noises. In the late 1800s they turned their attention to investigating séances to expose frauds. They championed a “more scientific psychical research” [p. 124]
There are 2 themes I see in all this. First, it reminds us of the perennial tension between religious establishment and novelty even within so radical a religion as Universalism within a couple of generations from its settling on these shores. Now they were instituting creedal tests, de-fellowshipping ministers, and refusing to rent their buildings to Spiritualists because they were not proper Christians. They expressed strongly that the bible was all the spiritual wisdom that any proper Christian needed. The spiritualists on the other hand, found the church had become stuffy and calcified. They were returning to the small circles of the early days of Universalism, where they could be comforted by their sense of connection to loved ones who had died. They were craving that “direct experience” that is our first source of our tradition today. They believed that a new generation could still discover new truth, and experience new revelation.
But even in the biblical times folks rarely believed the prophets and visionaries. How is a person to tell the difference between newly revealed truth and ordinary claptrap? This is our second theme, and it’s the theme I was trying to get at with my silly children’s story today. Sometimes those in authority refuse to listen to us, even when we are right, so how can we tell when the authorities are right and when we should trust ourselves? Whether that authority is the church, or a spiritualist telling of a vision she has seen. Or even, if we ourselves have strange visions, how can we tell what to make of them?
Many contemporary UUs have had powerful spiritual experiences they would be hard pressed to explain. Many folks keep these secret for fear of being judged. It is also true that many UUs have also been betrayed or hurt by religious experience, and so are skeptical of all such things. This is a particularly important tension for us as a movement today- to keep our minds open, while also guarding against “idolatries of mind and spirit”. I think this is a question that can never be resolved one way or the other. Instead we live into that tension, and keep our minds open and also questioning.
The spiritualist movement has largely been left out of our history books, even the history of our own movement. Seances are not so popular any more, and we no longer us the electrical engineering to try to understand the nature of god. We leave these unfashionable practices out of our story when we tell it. But surely the creedal tests, the de-fellowshipping of ministers and the loss of many Universalists from our movement left their mark on our history. Mediums and Mesmerism are completely gone from our religious tradition. But let us keep the wisdom we gained from that part of our history - the lesson about the importance of not letting our movement become calcified and rigid. Let us be open to new revelation, and let us be wary of humbuggery even as we are open to new truth.
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