Searl Sermons

A Pilgrim Soul

2012-01-27T11:49:00.000-08:00

The Notion of Pilgrim

I want you to envision soul—not the soul of dogma that lives on after death, but the living quality of soul that the refulgent Mr. Emerson proclaimed as the remedy for the dead churches of his day: “...first, soul, and second, soul, and evermore soul.” (Someday I will make a more thorough case for the Unitarians as the first “soul” church.) Specifically, I want you to envision what the Irish poet William Butler Yeats memorialized as “the pilgrim soul” in his celebrated poem “When You Are Old”:

“…many loved your moments of glad grace.
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;”

I’m talking this morning about “the pilgrim soul in you and me”

Pilgrim is a vivid image for Americans. In the popular imagination—New England-centric—the Pilgrims of Plymouth were the first settlers: religious dissenters from a hostile Church of England, who covenanted among themselves, freely if not democratically, as they crossed the Atlantic in search of a free (at least for themselves) home, who wrested a home from a so-called wilderness, and who in gratitude established the Thanksgiving feast. In their quaint costumes, the Pilgrims of Plymouth seem more lovable than their radical Protestant cousins, the dour Puritans of Massachusetts Bay.

I’ve long been fascinated by one aspect of the John Wayne cowboy persona—his mature character’s familiar drawling moniker of not buddy or friend or stranger, but of pilgrim. Pilgrim in this regard has a favorable cachet, is a friendly salutation—suggesting, perhaps, a fellow traveler—probably one who’s known some suffering but who is still on a journey.

Whenever I think of pilgrim as a moniker, I think Annie Dillard’s Pulitzer Prize winning book of 1974, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, which, arguably, had significant impact on the popular understanding of what the condition of a pilgrim might be. Ms. Dillard’s writing in Tinker Creek and subsequent works established her as one of the significant thinkers who bridge the secular and the sacred, demonstrating the secular is sacred. Her writings establish her as a contemporary pilgrim in search of the sacred in the everyday and close at hand.

In recent decades, a more expansive spirituality as contrasted to a narrow religiosity, has recognized pilgrimage as one of the unifying motifs of world religions. Religions have their sacred places and their adherents travel to those places to experience them.

Pilgrimage has become a significant postmodern spiritual discipline. My favorite pilgrimage site/event is the old adobe Sanctuary at Chimayo, New Mexico, on the High Road to Taos from Santa Fe, during Holy Week, when tens of thousands trek to it along narrow highways. A quick search on the Internet brings up a host of businesses that organize religious pilgrimages to sacred places around the world, touching nearly every faith tradition.

And scores of contemporary books have been written about pilgrimages and pilgrims—both as travelogue/tales of discovery (here is a sub-genre, for instance, of the mid-life crisis pilgrimage of self-discovery) and as more analytical studies of the quest or journey for the sacred.

Mathew Fox, a leading voice of contemporary spirituality, describes pilgrims in apt terms: “Pilgrims are not ‘know-it-all’ people but seeking people. They go on pilgrimage to find something they know they do not have—usually something of the heart. A pilgrim is one who does not have all the answers. A pilgrim is not steeped in righteousness, but in humility, with an awareness that we must all be willing to learn together. A pilgrim seeks what s/he does not have. What his/her country, religion or economic system has failed to give. A pilgrim has looked at the dark side of life. A pilgrim people are keenly aware that they have not arrived, are not yet there. The reign of God still eludes us.

“For the pilgrim, the place one seeks is not to be seized, controlled, owned by anyone. A sacred site is a place of reverence. It is not to be manipulated. One’s shoes are to be taken off. One is to be silent, to listen, to pray, and to open one’s heart. A sacred site can change us, but we do not seek to change it.”

And whenever I think of pilgrims and pilgrimage, I recall the narrative poem of Geoffrey Chaucer, “Canterbury Tales,” dating from the fourteenth century. On their pilgrimage to the shrine of Thomas a Becket in Canterbury the various characters agree to tell each other stories along the way. The stories are entertaining and revealing of the teller. Pilgrimages are often group journeys where diverse strangers discover commonalities and comradeship.

So what are characteristics of a “pilgrim soul?”

Aspects of a Pilgrim Soul

A pilgrim soul has depth. Contemporary commentaries about pilgrims are quick to contrast the pilgrim with the tourist who only brushes the surface of a place, who wants to be entertained rather than transformed. A pilgrim soul wants to be transformed.

A pilgrim soul has an instinct for the sacred that is also a love for Creation, including the most intimate expression of Creation: the Self. A pilgrim soul’s answers to Creation—deep resonating to deep.

A pilgrim soul seeks to experience life first hand. The pilgrim soul’s restlessness and yearning is really zest for experience.

A pilgrim soul is curious and often takes a simple and even mundane act and makes an adventure of it. In this regard pilgrim souls are not turnpikers in a hurry to get to a destination, rather they are shunpikers apt to take the blue highways of life to squeeze experience from the journey.

A pilgrim soul is teachable and perhaps fears most of all the conservative sin of “a foolish consistency.” Again, a pilgrim soul’s curiosity is not for mere entertainment but for knowledge that may transform—leading deeper into the depths. A pilgrim soul pays attention to other pilgrim souls—hearing the stories and telling them, too, like Chaucer’s Canterbury pilgrims.

A pilgrim soul is ever growing. Because the pilgrim soul plumbs the depths, her or his experiences are mottled: the tragic marbles the excellent. A pilgrim soul is etched with a quiet wisdom—is truly soulful. Being a pilgrim soul is not a matter of youth or mid-life but continues to death. A pilgrim soul becomes richer and richer.

A pilgrim soul is companionable because he or she first at peace with his or her own self. Yet a pilgrim soul is also her or his own best counsel.

A pilgrim soul is beautiful and useful, as Life is beautiful and useful. A pilgrim soul abets Creation rather than uses or consumes it.

Discover the pilgrim soul in yourself.

Away from Religion; Toward a Philosophy of Life

2012-01-14T10:47:00.000-08:00

Rembrandt, Philosopher's Meditation

Proving and Holding

Here’s an historical sketch about the first Unitarian sermon and the beginning of Unitarianism as a distinct religious denomination.

The prevalent, progressive intellectual outlook of the 18^th century was The Enlightenment—the Age of Reason. What we now proclaim as American Exceptionalism was the product of an intellectual elite--yes, an elite including the likes of Jefferson, Washington, and John Adams,--an elite well versed in Reason’s way and thoroughly steeped in Greek and Roman Classicism.

Included in this intellectual elite of the emergent American Republic was a certain group of liberal clergy within the traditional New England Church, mostly Harvard educated and Boston-centric. Their influence rippled through the Boston congregational establishment. These liberals gained control of the Divinity School at Harvard in the first decade of the 19^th century. In reaction, all the conservative ministers abandoned Harvard and the Boston churches, retreating to Western Massachusetts’s newly minted Williams College and then to Amherst college to build a new base, from which a later generation would try to recapture Boston.

For twenty years, between 1805 through 1825, the liberals within the old Puritan church establishment, evolved into a denomination. The name they took on, Unitarian was originally intended by the conservatives to be a term of derision. In 1825 the fledging liberal New England Churches joined together in The American Unitarian Association.

The turning point for this emerging denomination occurred several years earlier and can be narrowed down to a day and hour in an 1819 sermon given by William Ellery Channing in Baltimore at the ordination of a fellow minister. This so-called Baltimore Sermon was titled “Unitarian Christianity” by its author. When Channing delivered the Baltimore Sermon, he was the preeminent liberal minister; his pulpit the influential Federal Street Church in Boston

Channing was a persuasive liberal preacher, distinguished for his presence/demeanor as for his reasoned rhetoric. As the acknowledged leader of the Boston liberals, he had long resisted becoming what he called a sectarian, that is, he didn’t want to tear the liberals who rallied around him from the traditional New England congregational establishment

So, it was a major event that Channing publically declared that the so-called Unitarians were a distinct sect. That he did so in “faraway” Baltimore cast it as an event of national import.

I still enjoy reading that long ago sermon. It was a bold declaration offering not only the attributes but also justifications of the new Unitarians. It’s first among the three important documents of 19th century Unitarianism. 14,000 words in length, it took Channing an hour and a half to deliver it. It is said that Channing could be heard only by the first three pews. Yet in publication, the sermon became an instant and long running “bestseller.” Through 1830 it was the single must published piece of literature in the country.

As with all sermons of that era, it was preached from a Biblical text, a verse from 1 Thessalonians attributed to Paul: “Prove all things; hold fast that which is good.”

I maintain that its scriptural verse (“Prove all things; hold fast that which is good.”) has been and continues to be Unitarianism’s (now Unitarian Universalism’s) foundational and fundamental) orientation. It continues to be my orientation to all that is presented to me as truth, especially regarding Religion.

“Prove all things; hold fast that which is good.”

Dr. Suess’s Counsel

Here’s a more whimsical expression of Unitarianism’s proving and holding, from the inimitable Dr. Seuss, Ted Geisel, who once gave an unforgettable and short commencement speech at Lake Forest College:

My uncle ordered popovers
from the restaurant's bill of fare.
And when they were served,
he regarded them
with a penetrating stare . . .
Then he spoke great Words of Wisdom
as he sat there on that chair:
"To eat these things,"
said my uncle,
"you must excercise great care.
You may swallow down what's solid . . .
BUT . . .
you must spit out the air!"

And
as you partake of the world's bill of fare,
that's darned good advice to follow.
Do a lot of spitting out the hot air.
And be careful what you swallow.

My Critical Odyssey

I first studied history, expecting to write and teach it in university. Generally, I learned that what we call history involves the organization and interpretation of surviving information. There is no one true history, but a multitude of possible interpretations serving the historian and her audience’s point of view. My early discipline of History honed my analytical/critical skills.

In my early adult years a skill set relating to my study of history and the essential orientation of Unitarianism came together, informing me when I began to study theology. Forty years later, I've not been dissuaded.

I first look at any particular religion as embedded in its historical time and place. I also put all religions into the larger context of Comparative Religion that looks at religion in terms of commonalities—as human phenomena.

I have delighted in what now seems a lifelong journey into Religion, less from a spiritual yearning or quest, more as an ENLIGHTENED UNITARIAN charged to prove all things; hold fast to that which is good. On this journey, I’ve gained considerable knowledge about a variety of historical faiths as well have come to an understanding of from time immemorial. In recent years, I have self-identified as a Religious Naturalist, and advocate Natural Religion, while continuing to function with an historic liberal Protestant church and denomination context. To be fair, my sense of Natural Religion bends more to the natural sciences, such as, psychology, than it does to traditional revelation.

In the last decades of the 20^th century I grew into a postmodern perspective that includes the notion of deconstruction, that all attempts to create a system of belief inevitably falls prey to critical analysis—being taken part. Systems are time bound; and systems are subjective. Ever-advancing knowledge and an outsider’s point of view cannot be accommodated to make any system universally true. Postmodernism has made me an ever-more radical Unitarian who proves all things and holds fast to that which is good. Again, I look at Religion as a human phenomenon.

Having spent a lifetime studying them, I have a lover-of-knowledge’s fascination about organized religions. For example, the millennia-long conflict among the Abrahamic faiths, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, is a crucial aspect of the world’s immediate future that I actively strive to understand in historical terms and contemporary global dynamics.

And I am studying up on Mormonism, an area of interest way back when, when I studied ante-bellum American history. Mormonism was one of several enthusiastic religions that followed the course of the Erie Canal’s construction from Albany to Buffalo in the 1820s, a wide swath that earned the region the name of the Burned Over District. Why my renewed interest? It looks like Mitt Romney, a respected/influential leader in his Mormon church, will get the Republican nomination for President. His practice of Mormonism will be scrutinized.

A few weeks ago, the NY Times presented a lengthy article on Mr. Romney’s Mormon commitments in Massachusetts, affirming that his Mormon identity is integral in his worldview.

Several years ago, I presented a sermon series on world religions, in part, acknowledging this congregation’s historic interest in world faiths. The leading personality of the epochal World Parliament of Religions (1893), Swami Vivekananda of the Krishna Society spoke here twice in his first brief American sojourn. In the mid-twentieth century the congregations’ minister was Sunder Joshi, a respected lecturer on World Religions. During Sunder’s tenure six great paintings, representing six great world religions filled the wall behind me.

My sermon series focused on my approach to world religions, looking not at similarities rather at an “essential truth” each major world religion gives me, for example, Social Order from Confucianism, Justice from Judaism, and Compassion from Buddhism.

As I was putting this sermon series together, I realized my personal perspective on Religion was shifting away from theology/religion and toward what is more properly called a philosophy of life.

A Philosophy of Life Orientation

Throughout my career I’ve striven to keep a practical perspective, that is, how does my counsel relate to two overarching concerns for each and for all: meaning and happiness. That’s what a philosophy of life is concerned with. As a result, I have a growing appreciation for developing personal philosophy of life as compared for a striving to build a personal theology. (This goes against the UU grain a little, since one of the keystone UU adult curricula is called “Building Your Own Theology.”)

To my mind, a philosophy of life recommends a constant testing, a trying out through one’s own life arc and experiences. A philosophy of life relies on Wisdom. For me, Wisdom points to a broadly human consensus—a conventional sort of wisdom readily recognizable and affirmed.

In contrast, a theology has in it the notion of faith, which includes a cluster of attributes such as commitment, trust, and hope without proof. Theology is religion’s way of knowing, which from an objective perspective makes it easily deconstructed by new knowledge, by other subjective perspectives, or by essential flaws in its tenets of belief.

In my latter years, I’m advocating a philosophy of life over religion and spirituality. Once again a philosophy of life relates to meaning and happiness. And it’s also true that a philosophy of life can operate in addition to or to supplement one’s religion, though I also maintain that a philosophy of life can also replace a traditional religion in our postmodern context.

One of my favorite contemporary public intellectuals is William B. Irvine who teaches traditional philosophy at Wright State in Ohio; he has become a contemporary voice for Stoicism, an ancient, influential philosophy of life. Stoicism’s aim is the achievement of tranquility by taking negative emotions under control. Professor Irvine speaks not to fellow professional academic philosophers but to an ordinary, albeit intellectually upscale audience.

In October, I spoke to Stoicism via Irvine’s fine recent book A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy. I mentioned that Irvine fell upon Stoicism while he was seeking, at midlife, a philosophy of life to order his living. He wrote: “I was contemplating becoming a Zen Buddhist and wanted to learn more about it before taking the leap. But the more I learned about Zen, the less it attracted me.

“Practicing Zen would require me to suppress my analytical abilities, something I found it quite difficult to do. Another off-putting aspect of Zen was that the moment of enlightenment it dangled before its practitioners was by no means guaranteed. Practice Zen for decades and you might achieve enlightenment -- or you might not. It would be tragic, I thought, to spend the remaining decades of my life pursuing a moment of enlightenment that never came. Zen doubtless works for some people, but for me, the fit wasn't good. …

“I mentioned above that the benefits to be derived from practicing Zen are uncertain. Stoicism, by way of contrast, does not dangle before its adherents a moment -- maybe -- of life-transforming enlightenment. Instead, it provides a body of advice for them to follow and a set of strategies for them to employ in everyday life. The strategies in question are easy to use.”

Irvine offers a cogent description of what a philosophy of life is: “a body of advice to follow and easy to use strategies to employ in everyday life.” I add that such philosophies of life are a constant proving and holding. The proof is in the pudding, with the pudding being one’s progressing life.

One of my foundational/favorite philosophy of life is the Old Testament book Ecclesiastes, the testimony of an Agnostic Realist, a Jew living in the yeasty era of Greek hegemony following Alexander the Great’s death, circa 300 BCE, who finds the meaning of life in enjoyment of the gifts of life through Wisdom.

If you want to consider the possibilities of developing a disciplined philosophy of life, I recommend my guide to Ecclesiastes, Wisdom for the Ages. I have a couple of websites where you can access more information about this carpe diem, seize the day, approach of an ancient and influential text.

Also look to William Irvine’s materials from his personal website. It includes a link to a compelling video of a lecture by Professor Irvine regarding a Stoic’s outlook on aging.

You are already familiar with various philosophies of life: Thoreau’s Walden is a philosophy of life that pares life down to its essentials; William Channing Gannett (our first minister) and his famous essay “The House Beautiful” is a philosophy of life on how to make a house a home. The collected works and aphorisms of Emerson converge in a philosophy of life that urges “Trust thyself.)

I’m going to end with a brief philosophy of life that is often called “My Symphony,” by William Henry Channing, a nephew of William Ellery Channing: You can follow along in our hymnal, Reading #484.

To live content with small means.
To seek elegance rather than luxury,
and refinement rather than fashion.
To be worthy not respectable,
and wealthy not rich.
To study hard, think quietly, talk gently,
act frankly,

To listen to stars, birds, babes,
and sages with open heart,

To bear all cheerfully,
do all bravely, await occasions, hurry never.
In a word, to let the spiritual,
unbidden and unconscious,
grow up through the common.
This is to be my symphony.

And what is your symphony?

Identity

2012-01-06T12:56:00.000-08:00

The name of our denomination, The Unitarian Universalist Association is awkward. It has an embarrassing abundance of syllables—16 (17 with The), way too many for contemporary marketing sensibilities. The customary acronyms or shortened forms don’t do much for me. How about for you: UU or UniUni? To the unitiated, these sound bytes might suggest a cult, while doing no justice to the tradition behind the contractions. They also tend to exclude those not in the inner circle.

And then ciphering out the whole name might seem on first hearing contradictory: Unitarian—One; Universalism—All. One/All! Is one/all oxymoronic, a self-contradiction, like jumbo shrimp?

When each part of the name stands alone there is often confusion with other religions. Unitarian gets confused with Unity (a new-agy Christian offshoot). This congregation was founded in 1886 as the Unity Church of Hinsdale—a mission church of the Unity Men, radical Unitarians of the Midwest whose motto was “the Unity of all things.” Unitarian also gets confused with Unification (the Korean cult of Sun Yung Moon). Universalism conjures up the Universal Life Church of Modesto, California, which since the 1950’s has ordained anyone who applies to be a minister, able to perform marriages. (Whenever I read the marriages chronicled in the Sunday New York Times, I’m astounded/amused by the number of officiants identified as Universal Life Ministers.

Historically Unitarian has social cachet (its roots are Boston Brahmin after all). And it has a certain cultural notoriety and will show up in those lists that circulate now and again, offshoots or variations of the classic “how many so-and-sos does it take to screw in a light bulb.” (I’ll let you figure out the punch line of how many Unitarians it takes—a hint, it involves a committee.) Arguably the best known joke regarding Unitarians involves the proverbial pearly gates and two signs: one sign reads this way to heaven, the second sign reads this way to a discussion about heaven. Recently departed Unitarians invariably head toward the discussion about heaven. The second best known joke, arguably, is Mort Sahl’s rhetorical question, “What do Unitarians burn on a lawn—a question mark?

Unitarians are relatively well known in New England, particularly in Massachusetts and in the Boston orbit, which for many Unitarian Universalists is still the Athens of America. Universalists, though some loyalists still cling to the identity, are hardly known at all, anywhere. I don’t know any popular Universalist joke.

Unitarian Universalism is a merged denomination. Merger was effected in 1961 when the Universalist Church of America joined with the American Unitarian Association. The separate denominations shared some similarities, though there were also differences of substance and style—including significant markers of class. They both had their origins in the American Enlightenment and emerged in New England at the turn of the 18^th into the 19^th century. At their beginnings, each had a Unitarian Christology—that Jesus was special but not part of Trinitarian Godhead; each extolled freedom of belief and conscience; and most importantly each eschewed the notion of a creed. Each evolved doctrinally throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The famous quip that still goes a long way in discerning the differences between the two traditions claims “the Unitarians thought humankind too good to be damned by God, while the Universalists thought God too good to damn humankind.”

One of the hot trends within our denomination these days involves writing what are called “elevator speeches.” Imagine you’re on an elevator and a fellow rider asks you about being a Unitarian Universalists. What can you say in fifteen or twenty seconds?

American culture, among its many aspects, is a religious marketplace. Some contemporary observers argue that the proliferation and vigor of religion generally, in American culture, is a consequence of competition among the many possibilities—that there is at the very least a product branding that distinguishes religion from religion, and that branding sets denominations apart and appeals to religious seekers/consumers.

A few years ago our Association launched an ad campaign, thoroughly market tested, around the phrase “The Uncommon Denomination^sm.” (When I first heard of it a few years ago, I flashed the 7-Up campaign around the notion of the UnCola!)

A famous and effective marketing campaign of the 1950s used the line “Are You a Unitarian and Don’t Know It?” This slogan is the one we used when we placed ads in local papers for our “open-houses.”

I have discerned a yearning among my younger and/or new ministerial colleagues for what is summarized as UU Identity. Toward this end they have elevated the seven principles of the Unitarian Universalist Association. No one is yelling, “Let’s make these seven principles a creed,” but many seem to want something to at least hang a hat on. (The Association is a free gathering of a thousandsome kindred liberal religious societies across the country; the Association has no hierarchical power over the independent congregations; yet the Association promotes even as it serves Unitarian Universalism.)

In the larger perspective, then, the problem of ambiguity—what Unitarian Universalism as a denomination stands for as well as identity for individual Unitarian Universalists—has been a result of the defining features of our liberal religious way: freedom for the individual and independence for the local society, that is, congregation. Unitarian Universalism is many things suspended in an ever-progressing context.

What I love about Unitarian Universalism is its richness—a complex history that has led to an easy eclecticism—that I find on target for a world on the fast track of globalization, but even more on target for a wonderful human heritage I can claim, in any aspect, as my heritage.

A decade ago Jeff Briere, then our intern, and I wrote 101 Reasons I’m a Unitarian Universalist. Jeff and I each wrote 50 one paragraphs sketches about aspects of our liberal religious tradition. It recently has been published as an ebook, and among the niche category of UU books has had success in the UK as well as the States. It is the briefness of the paragraphs and their variety that makes it effective and creates a pointillist portrait of our complex heritage.

In a similar way, what we’re going to do today, sketching our own personal elevator speeches will not only help us hone our descriptions, it will illustrate the richness of our point of views.

Here’s, my elevator speech:

Unitarian Universalism is a non-creedal, liberal religious community of kindred spirits. We value reason, freedom of belief and conscious, as well as respect for one another and for other religions. Character—personal integrity—matters, perhaps most of all. We seek a just and equitable society, not for some but for everyone. And we will continue to progress from generation to generation. We’re never finished.

Winter: A Season of Itself and of the Self

2011-12-18T17:16:00.000-08:00

Lawren Harris, "Red House"

I have admiration for many things Canadian. I lived in Canada from 1970 through 1976—a year in Ottawa and five years in Montreal.

Beginning in those years, I have adored the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the CBC. In the 70s, it helped me acquire a cache of Canadian lore, as well as an appreciation of a Canadian point of view. Back then, while still in my intellectually formative years, I listened to its a.m. programing from morning to night. (For a couple of those years I was working on my theology degree at McGill’s Faculty of Religious Studies.)

Thanks to the Internet and streaming audio, I once again am listening a lot to CBC programing throughout the day.

I’m glad that our own National Public Radio has adopted some Canadian programs. Perhaps you’ve listened to one called IDEAS that is a potpourri offering of cultural and intellectual topics. It’s simply outstanding.

This program, Ideas, has become the venue for one of the major Canadian intellectual events, the yearly Massey lectures. These lectures were first offered 50 years ago by the CBC. The lecturers have been distinguished, including Martin Luther King, Jr. who delivered the five talks in 1967.

The 2011 Massey Lectures were delivered in November by Adam Gopnik, writer, essayist, and commentator, well known for his work in The New Yorker Magazine. Gopnik, born in 1956 in Philadelphia, was raised in Montreal where his parents taught at McGill. He titled his lectures, Winter: Five Windows on the Season. Those lectures have been published as a book.

The central theme of Gopnik’s Winter lectures involves a modern state of mind. Modern means an era from the beginning of the19th century through the end of the twentieth century. He says:

A mind of winter, a mind for winter, not sensing the season of loss and life, and with them hope of life and divinity, but ready to respond to it as a positive, and even purifying, presence of something else – the beautiful and peaceful, yes, but also the mysterious, strange, the sublime – is a modern taste.

Now, modern I mean in the sense that the loftier kinds of historians of ideas like to use this term, to mean not just right here and now but also the longer historical period that begins sometime around the end of the 18th century, breathes fire from the twin dragons of the French and Industrial Revolutions, and then still blows cinder-breath into at least the end of the 20th century, drawing deep with twin lungs of applied science and mass culture. An age of growth and an age of death, the age in which, for the first time in both Europe and America, more people are warmer than they had been before, and in which fewer people had faith in God – an age when, at last, the nays had it.

Gopnik contends that in 200 years of a modern era, winter had ceased to be a season to be endured and tested (fated by God) and had become a season of metaphor (for human imagination to find meaning). He labels this a Romantic vision.

Gopnik further says:

Loving winter can seem, in a very long perspective of history, perverse. Of all the natural metaphors of existence that we have – light versus dark, sweet against bitter – none seems more natural than the opposition of the seasons: warmth against cold, spring against fall, and above all, summer against winter. Human beings make metaphors as naturally as bees make honey, and one of the most natural metaphors we make is of winter as time of abandonment and retreat. The oldest metaphors for winter are all metaphors of loss. In classical myth, winter is Demeter's sorrow at the abduction of her daughter by death. In almost every other European mythology it is the same: winter is hard and summer soft, as surely as sweet wine is better than bitter lees.

The taste for winter, a love for winter vistas – a belief that they are as beautiful and seductive in their own way, and as essential to the human spirit and human soul as any summer scene – is a part of modern condition. Wallace Stevens, in his poem the “Snowman,” called this new feeling a mind for winter, and he identified it with our new acceptance of a world without illusions, our readiness to live in a world that might have meaning but that doesn't have God.

And Gopnik summarizes: My subject is the new feelings winter has provoked in men and women of those modern times: fear, joy, exhilaration, magnetic appeal and mysterious attraction. Since to be modern is to let imagination and invention do a lot of the work once done by tradition and ritual, winter is in some ways the most modern season—the season defined by absences (of warmth, leaf, blossom) that can be imagined as stranger presences (of secrets, roots, hearth).

I invoke Adam Gopnik’s lectures and their central theme, because my UU colleagues have liberally engaged in finding the meaning of the Winter Season we’re about to enter, particularly during the high tide of mid-Twentieth Century humanism. These colleagues, as have I, have looked through the Winter window, perhaps etched with hoarfrost crystals, and have had their religious imaginations respond to the waterscape they encountered. Adam Gopnik’s understandings have made me realize that UUs have made Winter, not only a season of the mind, but even more a season of meaning.

This meaning-making is no little undertaking/accomplishment, especially in the absence of God, a mark of the modern point of view. This morning I invite you to repose in the reflections of a few favorite UU meaning-makers.

Lionel Fitzgerald

Look through this window and encounter your own feelings of a winter landscape. What feelings, what meanings do you find?

Here are familiar words by Greta Crosby, one of my 20^th century colleagues and pioneering female minister:

Let us not wish away the winter. It is a season to itself, not simply the way to spring.

When trees rest, growing no leaves, gathering no light, they let in sky and trace themselves delicately against dawns and sunsets.

The clarity and brilliance of the winter sky delight. The loom of fog softens edges, lulls the eyes and ears of the quiet, awakens by risk the unquiet. A low dark sky can snow, emblem of individuality, liberality, and aggregate power. Snow invites to contemplation and to sport.

Winter is a table set with ice and starlight.

Winter dark tends to warm light: fire and candles; winter cold to hugs and huddles; winter want to gifts and sharing; winter danger to visions, plans, and common endeavoring – and the zest of narrow escapes; winter tedium to merrymaking.

Let us therefore praise winter, rich in beauty, challenge, and pregnant negativities.

A. Y. Jackson

This phrase, pregnant negativities, is my favorite expression of the modern propensity to make meaning, finding metaphor in an activity that comes naturally to we UUs.

[This was followed by readings by Henry David Thoreau, Kenneth L. Patton, and Max Coots.]

The Holidays, Liberally

2011-12-05T12:33:00.000-08:00

Preview/ buy at Amazon

OPENING WORDS

Increasingly, we Unitarian Universalists speak of the Holidays rather than using the culturally traditional word Christmas. The Holidays embrace all Mid-Winter festivals–ancient and modern. Christmas is one element in a season of diverse celebrations, and observances, a confusion of cultural appropriations. We honor Hanukkah, working its themes of freedom and light. We honor the Winter Solstice, reveling in its natural imagery and proclaiming the goodness of the cycles of life. We honor the African American intentional festival of Kwanza, with its contemporary values and intentions. Ours is a deliberately inclusive vision, celebrating religious and cultural pluralism, resulting in an easy eclecticism. Yet we find harmony and common meaning summarized as light, life, and love.

If any religious way can do justice to the many moods and purposes of Christmas/Holiday Season, it is our liberal Unitarian Universalist tradition. It is elastic enough and encompassing enough to allow each of us the latitude to observe the December Holidays as the spirit moves us to observe them–a little or a lot, with secular joy or spiritual meaning, with excess or responsible consumption, in grand public performances or intimate family circles. [46]

Cosmic Drama

Sunlight grows thinner.

Trees are mostly bare.

Flakes of snow float

from gray clouds.

Early mornings,

Without calling birds,

Are silent,

Except for sounding wind.

Our houses take on the odors

of warmth, the pungency

of domesticity.

In them, throughout the dark nights,

We gather in pools of electric brightness.

So, winter approaches.

And we, creatures of the earth,

Protagonists in the cosmic drama

of life/not life,

Steel our wills,

Feeling the warmth of our bodies

against the seeping cold.

And we lift our voices,

Lamenting all form of oblivion,

As we feel the fragility,

as well as the tenacity of being.

We lift our voices

For our own life,

For all Life,

In return

We are strengthened

by Life’s undeniable tenacity. [25]

READING

A Christmas Card to You From Us

We live, not by things, but by the meaning of things.

Antoine de St. Exupery

Ellie maintains the quality of the Christmas card matters. “We shouldn’t send a cheap card,” she insists.

I confess. I found this card in a 99¢ Store in Orange County, California–and that’s not 99¢ a card but 30 cards for 99¢. (But you knew this wasn’t a 99¢ card the moment you opened the envelope.)

With a little distance from the purchase and the perspective that distance allows, I suspect I was drawn to this card by sentiment, because the design, especially the cheesy gold embossed foil, reminded me of my Grandmother Searl’s decorations from the 1950s–how she garlanded her bungalow with similar cheap cards strung above doorways and windows. (And there’s nothing wrong with sentiment during the Holidays.)

In the fever of the biggest shopping day of the year, I thought this card was more than okay and brought two boxes of them home. That’s when Ellie immediately pronounced them cheap. “Look at the printing. It’s off-center. That’s why they were discounted.” She paused and added, “But that’s not the only reason. They’d be cheap with perfect printing.” She paused again, then asked, “What will we do with 60 of these cheap cards?” But I’m getting ahead of the story.

I bought the cards on the Friday after Thanksgiving, when I was out and about for the day with our daughter Katie who lives in Brea, California. Katie’s quite a shopper, and the 99¢ store where I bought this card is one of her favorite bargain haunts. (It’s near the Vietnamese sandwich shop Katie had to introduce me to, Lee’s Sandwiches. By the way, the vegetarian sandwich I had on French bread at Lee’s was outstanding and quite the bargain at $1.49; and the iced Vietnamese coffee was a perfect complement!)

Following lunch, at the 99¢ store, Katie and I poured over boxes of cards tossed in a bin at the entrance. Back and forth, we showed each other various designs. It was like old times when Katie was 10 and not 35–which is a little ironic, because Katie’s making a big transition.

Did you know Katie’s pregnant? She’s going to birth to a boy in January–Brett Michael Bodnar, he’s already named. (The Dad is Mike Bodnar.) Ellie and I were in California for Katie’s Saturday-after-Thanksgiving baby shower.

Back at the Bodnar house, after Ellie “dissed” my Christmas card purchase, and Katie and Mike joined in to tease me about my chronic love of bargains, I surreptitiously began to place the cards around the house: on the entertainment center, on the fire-place mantle, among the photos and notes on the fridge. When Katie or Mike or Ellie found a card, they groaned and removed it. I managed to stay a card or two ahead of them the whole weekend. I hid one card a little more deceptively as my parting carte de visite. Mike and Katie will find it one day.

So you see, our Holiday greeting, though it comes via a truly cheap (3.3¢) card, featuring two geese (why geese?) surrounded by a gold embossed foil border, with printing that is definitely off center, in faded red ink, is nevertheless rich in meaning.

SPOKEN MEDITATION

Ellie and I share this meaning with you this Holiday Season. So this card carries our wishes to you and yours:

May your Holidays also be full of meaning–old and new meaning–

And lots of Love, too,

Particularly the satisfying, intimate Love of family

And those friends

Who are like family.

We count you as such a friend.

Along with the usual blessings of health and prosperity,

May your New Year bring freshness and hope.

Most of all:

Now and throughout the year

May you discover and revel in the meaning

That holds our world together–

The meaning of things, yes,

But even more the meaning of those

Who love us

As we love them. [13-14]

MESSAGE I

A Unitarian Universalist Christmas

A Progressing Doctrine of Incarnation

When it comes to Christmas, we Unitarians have long been of two minds. True to our Puritan heritage, we demand the truth and meaning of it all. But we also want to feel IT–to be possessed by the Spirit of the Season. We want to expose falsehoods; but we don’t want to strip the season bare.

As I view it, throughout the 20^th Century, Unitarians developed a consistent way to talk about and experience the meaning of Christmas–the Christian festival. It was a serious way, because it surveyed the traditional Christian story, interpreting and re-interpreting it in light of world religions. It involved the Incarnation of the divine and the symbolism of the child.

First, Unitarians and Universalists recognized that the Incarnation of God in Jesus has parallels in the Incarnation of Krishna in Hinduism and the birth of Buddha (and subsequent buddhas), events that recur whenever the world is in need of an infusion of the Divine Spirit. Among Unitarians and Universalists, the notion of Incarnation became universal. We came to realize that every child is the Christ child, that every night a child is born is a holy night. The hope and salvation of humanity became vested in every baby. In this progression, Unitarian Universalists identified the mythology of the traditional Christmas story, found parallels in other world religions, universalized it, and made it compatible for a naturalistic and humanistic age.

In this serious/critical approach to the Season, literally and figuratively, the baby was not thrown out with the bathwater. In this interpretation, Unitarians Universalists retained Jesus as a focus and the “true” meaning of Christmas. In integrity, a good Unitarian could enter into the Christian Spirit of the Season. [45]

The Green Eyed Goddess of Envy

When the Solstice approaches and the wheel of the year turns, memories abound. In the Season of Memory, I remember the Christmas of 1976 first of all.

That year, I was an intern minister at the First Universalist Church of Syracuse. We were living in a government subsidized townhouse apartment complex in Fayetteville, NY, a Syracuse suburb. In particular, I remember the yellow shag carpeting. (Remember shag carpeting?) I also remember a canary yellow AMC Pacer owned by an adjacent neighbor. (Remember AMC and its curious collection of cars?) And I remember a single parent dad, father to a young boy, whose living room was bare except for a television, reclining chair, and, next to the chair, a life-size plastic Santa Claus illuminated from within–a bleak but beguiling tableau seen through the drapeless patio doors, the dad often in full recline, with a can of beer in his hand, bathed by a soft light of Santa-glow.

It was our first American Christmas after living in Canada for six years. Our daughter Katie was nine years old. Ellie had a make-money job as a chair assistant to an orthodontist. We had little money, but enough to get by. We were relatively young, embarking on a new adventure, unsure of what our future would be. I was an apprentice minister in a remnant Universalist congregation, testing my suitability for the trade. For reasons of economy but more for the sake of our daughter, we tried to make Christmas hand-fashioned and family centered.

That year it snowed at least a little for more than forty consecutive days. We ventured forth on a bitterly cold Saturday morning to cut a crooked little tree at a picked-over Christmas Tree farm. When I dragged the tree through the sliding doors, from the patio to the living room, a frozen mouse fell out of a bird’s nest that rested in the midst of the tight branches onto the yellow shag carpeting. (When we left that place six months later, we were still picking out balsam needles from the rug.)

In the afternoon on the Saturday we cut our tree and brought it home, we fashioned ornaments from Styrofoam and chunks of wood, festooning our creations with plastic jewels, glitter, and water paint. I used the occasion to lecture Katie about the real meaning of Christmas. As an illustration, I moralized as I created the head of an anti-Christmas spirit that I named the Green-Eyed Goddess of Envy. Her round Styrofoam head had green acrylic hair and shimmering emerald green eyes. I told Katie, the Green Eyed Goddess of Envy’s refrain is “Gimmee, gimmee, gimmee!”

No longer a moral lesson, but a symbol of my ridiculous excess, the Green-Eyed Goddess of Envy–sometimes called the Green-Eyed Goddess of Excessmas–appears each year to perch at the top of our tree.

When she appears, her green eyes are undiminished by ever-increasing years. Memories flow. We laugh at my moralizing about Christmas meaning, even as I savor the irony of the lesson I learned. [73-74]

MESSAGE II

A Natural History of

Christmas Customs

In pagan northern and central Europe, straw played a significant part in Winter Solstice celebrations. It symbolized the fertility of the earth and was a talisman for a good harvest. Yule straw, preferably from the last sheaf of the harvest, housed the corn spirit. Farmers spread it on their floors, scattered it in the fields and tied it to tree trunks to encourage fruitfulness. In Denmark and Sweden, straw from that same last sheaf was used to bake the Yule Boar, a loaf in the shape of a boar that stood on the table throughout the various observances; it also contained the corn spirit. Norwegians slept on Yule straw so guests who visited at year’s end might sleep in the beds; a dream dreamed on Yule straw would come true.

Scandinavians hung sheaves of oats outdoors for the birds to eat, probably a relic of an ancient sacrifice to the agricultural gods. Polish people put a sheaf of rye, oats, wheat, and barley in each of the four corners of their homes. In the Slavic countries of Eastern Europe, a creature name Polaznik visited the house at dawn on Christmas Day, throwing a handful of wheat over those who lived within, an omen of prosperity in the New Year.

Most familiar to us today–we can buy them in artsier specialty stores– are straw ornaments. Perhaps you’ve seen the Swedish “jublock,” a straw goat to be placed on the Christmas table or beneath the tree. No, it’s not a symbol of the devil, rather a representation the Norse god Thor, a friend of humanity, said to ride a goat. And there is a variety of Scandinavian straw stars, crosses, and other figures derived from ancient fertility symbols. In many areas, the Yule log, when first lighted, was sprinkled with wine and grain, another reenactment of sacrifice to the agricultural gods

In Europe, the Yule Log continues to be a centerpiece of the Seasonal observances. It is strictly pagan, relating to the Viking Yule (which means wheel and suggests the turning of the seasons) and symbolizing the triumph of light over darkness–the rebirth of the sun at the Winter Solstice, the darkest time of the year. Before the relatively recent advent of The Christmas Tree in England, the Yule Log was the season’s central symbol. It was carried to the great hearth on Christmas Eve, children astride it, pulled by ivy-covered ropes. A brand from the previous year’s Yule lighted it. To assure a good harvest, corn and wine were sprinkled on the flames. In Scotland a female effigy carved out of wood, the Christmas woman (perhaps a link to Freya, Norse goddess of fertility), was burnt in the fire.

Many different European groups beat the burning Yule Log, for example, Northern Italians, Bulgarians, and Spaniards, probably to drive out evil spirits. Many other superstitions by many other peoples were associated with the great log of the Solstice Season.

The symbolism of evergreens is apparent, even in our contemporary observances, however removed and remote they may be from their sources. In ancient as in modern times, they represented that which endures the darkest and coldest time of the year, when all else is sear, dormant, or dead. In pagan days, evergreens of all sorts–mistletoe, holly, yew, bay, laurel, rosemary, ivy, plus firs of all varieties–were cut at the time of the Winter Solstice and brought indoors to help the sun rise again. Northern Europeans brought branches in to their homes as a refuge for the woods spirits during the worst weather of the year. Romans, at the January Kalends, gave each other green branches of holly; they nailed laurel to their doorposts.

The Druids held mistletoe in especially high regard. The called it the Golden Bough and believed it contained the life of their sacred oak tree through the winter. At the Winter Solstice, a white robed priest would cut it down with a golden sickle, sacrifice two white bulls, place some on the altar, and give the remainder to the celebrants that they might hang it above their doors. Kissing under the mistletoe today, from a British custom, combines the Scandinavian custom of declaring a truce when under it with the belief that it conveyed fertility and vitality.

An evergreen plant that bore berries–holly, ivy, and mistletoe–was a seasonal symbol of fertility. Bound into wreaths as symbols of renewal, peace, and friendship, their round shape kept evil witches and spirits at bay. Ivy, the sacred plant of Bacchus, was valued as a protection against drunkenness. Yew protected against witches. Bay leaves came from a Roman award to poets and conquerors.

Of course, the Christmas Tree has a more ancient history. St. Boniface, completing the Christianization of Germany in the eight century, cut down the sacred oak of Odin; behind it was a small fir tree Boniface dedicated to the Christ Child. The custom of decorating a fir tree can be accurately traced back only to the 1600s in Alsace. In its modern form, the Christmas Tree relates to the universal archetype of the Tree of Life from which springs all goodness and bounty. The hanging of fruit and other foods, facsimile animals, symbolic treasures of all sorts may well be the most authentic and spontaneous celebration of the season.

To the ancients, straw and grain, the great Yule Log, various forms of evergreen plants were more immediate or vital symbols than they are to us today, removed as we are from Nature and agriculture.

For us, they are familiar decorations, though their timeless symbolism surely endures on an unconscious level. They are archetypes of our collective unconscious.

When days grow short and the warmth of the sun grows weak, a vital essence in each of us responds, because we’re of Nature, too. These natural symbols, allow us to respond psychically, in the midst of the seasonal drama of life ebbing and flowing, assuring us that once again winter turns toward spring. [28-30]

MESSAGE III

Magic and Miracle

Santa Biker

Last year after the Christmas Eve service, I rushed to O’Hare to catch an eight o’clock flight to Los Angeles to join Ellie and Katie for a West Coast Christmas Eve. O’Hare had so few passengers, it had the eerie illusion of being deserted. The only noteworthy activity occurred at my gate, where a sixty-year-old man in a well worn Santa Claus suit sat–long gray hair and beard with a credible pot belly. He looked so authentic that young children stopped and stared, while flight attendants veered to talk to him.

I wondered if he were working the airport, the City of Chicago’s Christmas Eve ambassador. What a beguiling possibility.

When the flight to LA boarded, he was first in line, carrying not a sack of presents but a scuffed briefcase. Passengers joked with him, of course, asking him what had happened to his reindeer and sleigh. Up close, he was the most convincing Saint Nick I’d ever seen.

Cruising over Kansas at 30,000 feet on Christmas Eve, it was enchanting to have that red and white, right jolly old elf sitting forward. The quarter-full cabin was transformed. Usually blasé attendants were charmed by his presence; one produced a camera for group photos. He produced a press kit from which he took eight by ten glossy photographs. He autographed a head shot for each of the attendants. Because of the press kit and our destination, I was thinking this was not a Chicago but a Hollywood Santa.

I’d stashed my bag in the overhead, two seats in front of Santa’s seat. When we could walk about, I went through the pretext of looking for something in a bag. In the process, Santa and I struck up a conversation.

Here’s the skinny: He worked for a Santa Clause agency that contracted major malls and stores through the US. He was in special demand and commanded greater pay, because he was a “natural beard” Santa. For the past fortysome days, he’d worked in a Connecticut mall. He’d come directly from work, without time to change (so he claimed), to catch a flight back to his LA home. The rest of the year, he worked for the Navy making model ships and planes that were used in gunnery practice. He hoped to become a movie actor and already had a couple of bit parts in major movies–hence his press kit from which he produced a resume.

As a young adult, he’d been a biker–not a Hell’s Angel, but another bike club. As he talked, he removed his red Santa’s tunic to reveal a black, biker’s club tee shirt with a club logo. Fading blue tattoos etched thick forearms.

His insights into being a good Santa fascinated me. He related how he comported himself for both children and parents. This man, who in civilian garb surely looked menacing–particularly on the seat of a thundering Harley wearing club colors–had internalized a complex Santa Clause code of behavior–a persona that was palpable.

He had just enough of a menacing glint in his piercing blue eyes to make me suspect he was a markedly different man when not wearing that costume, a costume and persona he obviously relished, because he chose to wear it cross-country.

It was Christmas magic what that costume did to an elder, bona fide California biker, rendering him a curiously serious but still right jolly old elf. It was Christmas magic to be flying to LA on the night before Christmas with Old Biker Santa.

Magic of the Season

The Holiday Season is magical. Think of the stories we love, though we know them romantic fictions:

the Hanukkah miracle of the oil that occurred when the defiled temple of Jerusalem was rededicated in 165 BCE.
the traditional Nativity Tale of a guiding star, an angel speaking to shepherds, a virgin birth, a promised child, magi bearing gifts, and a cruel king.
Charles Dickens “A Christmas Carol” with three ghosts and redemption of the archetypal curmudgeon Ebenezer Scrooge.
Frank Capra’s “It’s a Wonderful Life” with a guardian angel and excursion to what-might-have-happened-if land.

They all respond to a common impulse and touch us with a similar message of hope and transformation.

[62-63]

CLOSING WORDS

If Only for the Season

If only for the Season…

Let us banish cynicism

and welcome wonder.

If only for the Season…

Let us downplay our differences

and discover bonds

of common origin and continuing cause.

If only for the Season…

Let us deny apathy and indifference

and truly live by loving.

If only for the Season…

Let us set aside worry

and smile and laugh and sing.

If only for the Season…

Let us subvert greed and jealousy

and be good gift getters and givers.

If only for the Season…

The brief season

of light,

of life,

of love,

Let us be wise enough to be a little foolish

about candlelight and children and matters

of the heart…

If only for the Season. [12]

Thanksgiving for Our Four Homes

2011-11-20T16:45:00.000-08:00

What Is Ours

I have one daughter, now an adult living in Brea, CA with two young children of her own. One of my great pleasures is watching her being fully embedded in the timeless art of being a nurturing mother—providing physical care yes, but more passing through the generations love and guidance, while taking joy and satisfaction in her 7 year old son Brett and her 2 year old daughter Bridget.

The year Katie was 9, I was intern minister in Syracuse NY. We lived in a government subsidized housing complex of town house packed together in a little complex. The complex was atumble with kids. I remember most of all the sound of plastic tires—Big Wheels—racing over the asphalt pavement at all hours of the day.

Katie had a lot of playmates in that confined and family-packed place, including several girls her age. Some were nice and some weren’t. One girl, her name was Becky I remember, lorded it over Katie throughout the year we lived there. Becky took every opportunity to tell Katie that whatever she had or did was better than what Katie had or did.

This irked Katie to no end. However, Katie, even at 9, was able to process Becky’s ways. Once Becky blurted out, “I like my Mommy, better than your Mommy.”

Now think of all the possible responses -- different ways of tearing down Becky’s mother and lifting Katie’s own Mom. But Katie gave a response that is among the wisest responses possible, which I’ve processed among the best insight/advice I’ve ever heard.

Katie said simply, “Of course you like your Mommy better. She’s your Mommy.”

Now think about that inborn wisdom – that whatever is ours we like the best, whether it’s our political party, or our sports team, or our school, or our whatever… (Notice that we claim so many things as ours.)

Just because something is ours and we like it the best, doesn’t mean it’s categorically the best, but from within our own experience we tend to like it better than anything, anywhere, else.

This Thanksgiving service we’re going to talk about Home. Actually I want to talk about our several Homes, because we have many different kinds of Homes, beyond the home in which each of us lives, nurturing and sheltering us.

Church Home

Our church’s first minister William Channing Gannett was famous for writing an essay in the 1890’s in which he described ordinary graces that made a house a home -- what he called the House Beautiful.

This building designed by William Channing Gannett is unique. From its beginning it was called a Church-Home. It combines the elements of a Church and a Home in one building. The room with the fireplace represents The Family, with a hearth (or fireplace) around which a 19^th century family might have gathered. There is a fireplace in the Auditorium to show that the family’s hearth flows into the Auditorium, where our congregation’s services have taken place since 1889, when the building was dedicated with a special hymn written for the occasion by Rev. Gannett– “Here Be No One a Stranger.” The words were heartfelt then and I believe are still heartfelt now. For nearly 125 years, this congregation has intentionally opened its doors for whosoever seeks a religious home of reason and freedom of belief and conscience. Not only Welcome, but Welcome Home is our greeting to all visitors.

Whenever I think about the intentional meanings of our Church Home, I remember a famous poem by Robert Frost in which a husband and wife, Warren and Mary, have a conversation about the meaning of home.

First Warren speaks, then Mary:

"Home is the place where, when you have to go there,
They have to take you in."

"I should have called it
Something you somehow haven't to deserve."

Our City Home

Our family home and our Church Home are in Chicagoland, meaning that we live in the orbit of the city of Chicago. Chicago is world class, meaning that it has a host of features that only a city of vast resources and concentration of culture can offer. Think of all the things that Chicago offers: colleges and universities, a symphony orchestra and a civic opera, theaters, museums (the Field Museum, the Art Institute, the Museum of Science and Industry, the Oriental Institute are among the finest of their sorts in the world), two important zoos, beaches, boulevards, and parks, an Arboretum and Botanic Garden, professional sports teams – football, baseball, soccer, hockey, basketball, no end of restaurants, research hospitals, airports, public transportation, including the El and Metra….

I remember when I first came here in 1983, when Ellie, Katie, and I were part of a springtime, Saturday throng of people flowing and eddying along the upper part of Michigan Avenue known as the Miracle Mile with its tony stores—a canyon of glittering prosperity towered by great buildings, including one of the tallest skyscrapers of the world. The surviving Water Tower in the midst reminded me of the momentous history of the city that had risen from the ashes to erect architecture that led the world in the 20^th century. How I felt a surge of pride in my newly chosen home. I was glad to be here, in this place—my recently adopted home. It became more and more my home.

I became familiar with Chicago history (and has a rich history) and acquired what I call lore–stories, anecdotes, images. I haunted neighborhoods and had firsthand experiences that filled my days.

Many years ago, I acquired a poster from the 1933 World’s Fair – The Century of Progress. Whenever I look at it, all that I know to be Chicago is imagined—the idea of our city, the city that is our home. Sweet home Chicago!

Our Heartland Home

Our world class city of Chicago is here because of Nature. A frequent word we use in talking about the region in which we live is Heartland. Heartland evokes a variety of responses: Heart evokes love. Heart evokes center—and we are in the middle of the country, indeed continent. Heart evokes the muscle that keeps the body alive.

For me, Heartland reminds me of the great living organism—the Nature—of our country, indeed continent. I have been influenced by two great books: Nature’s Metropolis by William Cronon and Sacred Sands by my colleague Ron Engels.

Nature’s Metropolis explains Chicago’s pre-eminence by virtue of being the likely center where the resources of the Midwest were concentrated and processed, not only to build a city, but to build a country. The past and present greatness of Chicago is a matter of location, originally the course of the Great Lakes and river systems, later enhanced by canals, railroads, and highways. And the Nature around Chicago is incredibly abundant.

My greatest revelation of our Heartland’s Nature came via Ron Engel’s study of the significance of region known as the Dunes, what he aptly called Sacred Sands, at the bottom of Lake Michigan, sweeping from South Chicago around the lake into Northwest Indiana to and beyond Michigan City. In this incredibly varied ecosystem all of the nature of North America converges.

Ron Engel used terms like Axis Mundi (world center/pivot) and God’s Navel to try to describe in mythic language the sacredness of this part of our Heartland Home.

The Ancient Greeks spoke of the spirit of a place—their phrase was genius loci. For me the spirit of where we live is the spirit of a great, abundant, varied, and beautiful continent. We live in the ecological center of it, and it is the reason for Chicago’s existence and greatness.

For me the physical representation of the resident spirit of Chicago is an ancient Greek grain goddess. Ceres stands in Art Deco serenity, atop the Board of Trade building, 40 stories above La Salle Street, the central street of the financial district.

Gladness for Our Several Homes

Let’s be thankful for the several homes I’ve spoken about:

· --our individuals homes where we make meaning and find deep sanctuary;

· --our Church Home where we meet kindred spirits and create community;

· -- our city home, Chicago that is world class;

· --and our Heartland home where the Nature of a continent converges.

How fortunate and blessed we are.

Our Enlightenment Tradition

2011-11-11T08:51:00.000-08:00

Remaindered

I truly love a bargain. My consumer passion is dress shirts.

Before there were outlet malls I shopped manufacturers’ stores. When I was in college, I travelled 80 miles from Newark, DE, to the Eagle shirt factory in Quakertown, Pennsylvania. Ellie’s New York home was across the lake from Burlington, Vermont, where there was a Hathaway Shirt outlet; when I was in graduate school UVM, I shopped at Burlington's Hathaway store at least once a week. More recently, I bought shirts at the Bachrach outlet at the North Riverside Mall. Sadly, it’s been closed for a couple of years.

Not only do I not like to pay full price, I loathe the markups that branding and advertising create. Over the years I shaped an occasional sermon about the role of advertising as the slippery slope of deceit.

I preached one of my all-time favorite sermons in the early 1980s. Do you remember when so called generic products first reached the grocery stores? Visually, generic products had a similar look: white packaging and industrial – stencil lettering. No illustrations. Nothing but the generic name, ingredients, nutritional values, and a bar code.

Thanks to my daughter who lives in Orange County California and who was born to shop, I've developed a fascination with what are called $.99 stores there and dollar stores here. I often visit the dollar store off of La Grange Rd. in Countryside. Typically, I'll buy every day sundries there, including rubbing alcohol, hydrogen peroxide and even deodorant and toothpaste. It’s all a buck.

It takes a little energy to sort the good and substantial from the merely cheap, but the process for me is a little adventure – something of a consumer’s meditation about the meaning of stuff – at least that's how I rationalize it.

I've even bought a few books from that Dollar Store – books I hadn’t known about. I practice discernment. The Dollar Store’s little pile of books usually contains a bunch of unsuccessful self-help guides and a cache of Christian orientated pap. Now and again there's something worthwhile. A couple of years ago I purchased an outstanding book by a Vietnamese woman, a doctor, who kept a personal diary during the war against American invaders; she died in service to her cause.

The basis of this sermon comes from another book I found in the Dollar Store, Garry Wills Head and Heart: American Christianities, published in hardcover by Penguin Press in 2007, originally selling for $29.95. I bought a first edition this summer for a dollar.

Having once been remaindered by Penguin press, I had considerable compassion for Garry Wills and what I estimate to be a noteworthy and valuable book. Consigned to a dollar store is heart wrenching for a Pulitzer Prize winning author.

Enlightenment Religion

Wills, once professor at Northwestern University, is one of my favorite authors of popular history. He also is an interested commentator on Roman Catholicism. Wills is sympathetic to Unitarians. One of my favorite monographs is his remarkable Lincoln at Gettysburg, which attributed famous Unitarian minister/abolitionist Theodore Parker as an influence for Lincoln’s memorable phrasing: “of, by, and for the people.”

In Head and Heart Wills charts the scope of the American experience from the Pilgrims to the present day, relative to two opposing religious points of view: A rational or enlightenment point of view (the head) and an evangelical point of view (the heart.)

I have all sorts of thoughts regarding the remaindered fate of this well considered and important book. The one that keeps coursing through my mind relates to my general impression that the populace prefers their prejudices to substantiated fact – in this instance, well-researched and well-reasoned fact. At the heart of Wills’ analysis is the religious foundation of the American Republic. And yes, Wills confirms there is a religious foundation.

Here's what he wrote in the Introduction. He pulls no punches.

Without the 18th century Enlightenment, with its emphasis on reason, benevolence, tolerance, and secular progress, there would be no Disestablishment of religion in America. Without it, there would have been no escape from the theological monopoly that governments had always imposed, no rapid proliferation of sects that multiplied as soon as this Disestablishment occurred. Without the Enlightenment, Franklin's humanitarian efforts and Jefferson' s intellectual projects would have had no purchase on the citizenry. Without it, Quakers could not have challenged the Bible' s sanctioning of slavery. It was a great stroke of fortune that the American Republic was shaped at the moment when the Enlightenment was having its full effect on the men who did the shaping. Political freedom and religious freedom arrived together, nudging each other forward. Before then, it had been assumed that a national throne and national altar must be an alliance, to command the necessary ad hoc quiescence of the rule. The United States rid itself of the throne and altar in one inclusive gesture.

Though there was no official religion for the nation, the framers had an enlightened religion. Those who have a different kind of religion said in the past and say now that this is no religion at all, simply a cult of reason. It is true that some leaders of the Enlightenment in France were hostile to religion, but that was not true of the main and most numerous followers in enlightened America. They were friendly to religion and were religious themselves. Even the most secular of them, Tom Payne, believed in a personal God, in divine providence, and in the afterlife.

Enlightened religion was such a strong force in all the founding period that it might also be considered the typical American religion. It is true that this form of belief has assumed the moral leadership of the nation at certain crucial times, and one of its forms – Transcendentalism – set much of the intellectual tone of 19th century. But it has rarely been the religion of the mass of Americans. One reason Enlightened religion had such unchallenged sway the late 18th century was that the other characteristic form of American religion – Evangelicalism – was at its lowest ebb in just that. It came roaring back in the early 19th century, and has been adhered to by most Americans in succeeding ages.

Wills's analysis is a mythbuster, reaching a conclusion that a preponderance of today’s Evangelicals don't want to accept. Their common contention, a popular, perhaps even default mode of the culture, righteously contends that the founders were Evangelical like them, Bible-based, Trinitarian believers of a personal and involved God.

The Founders Were Deists

Accurately, Gary Wills describes the founders as preponderantly Deists. Their God had set the world in motion, then removed Himself from its operations, including human agency. The Deist God was essentially disinterested.

Furthermore, at its founding America was hardly a religious culture as we know it now. In fact, during the founding of the American nation, Americans were largely unchurched; in 1776 only 17% of the population held to a formal religion.

Now, we UUs are interested in Garry Will’s argument, because we are heirs to Enlightenment Religion – a religion centered in reason that is the head. Ironically, our way has been marginalized in a popular culture whose religion is of the heart.

You may have heard, and Garry Wills mentions it, that Thomas Jefferson among other Deists of his era proposed that Unitarianism, circa 1800, would become the American religion. Now that obviously didn’t and won't ever happen.

As a consequence, we modern Unitarians have been by default charged with the task of continually reminding the larger culture about values and principles. These values and principles have allowed for a lively arena for many religions to flourish, including the Evangelical sects. And so we continue to lift up reason, as well as freedom of belief and conscience, while maintaining the Disestablishment of religion with the notion of strict separation of church and state. Not only were these and the like founding values, they are the components of the best soil for Religion to flourish. The American Experience testifies to this.

This assertion regarding the American experience and the flourishing of religion is not well understood, nor is it often spoke to. It answers an obvious question. Among all the Western nations in the beginning of the 21st-century, why does religion in America remain so vital, so much a part of so many people's lives?

The answer, repeat after me, is the Enlightenment, the Enlightenment, the Enlightenment … as it was institutionalized by a generation of Enlightenment geniuses who head the list of those we call our founders. Without a doubt, this is the greatest generation.

As I said earlier, in Head and Heart Garry Wills looks at the sweep of the American experience, from 1640 through these early years of the 21st century. It is an overview, of course, but also dense with particulars he assumes the informed readers have an acquaintance with. It’s not so much a book for the uninformed.

He does pause to focus and elaborate on a few of the key Enlightenment-besotted players who shaped the American Republic: Thomas Payne, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and George Washington. These individuals were Deists, or strongly influenced by Deist thoughts. These men and their like were, after their own fashion, were religious; but they were not religious from the perspective neither of their contemporary Evangelicals nor of Evangelicals today.

These American Deists did not walk in lock-step, though they generally advocated reason, Disestablishment, and freedom of belief when it came to Religion.

Wills takes a particular interest in George Washington. He wrote:

One founder is often thought of as “something more than a Deist, “ though there is nothing in his writings to indicate that this is the case. The director of Washington's home in Mount Vernon, James Reese, told me that people often inquire why there are no marks of religion in the building – the crucifix, or holy picture, or prayer displayed, or any religious symbol at all, though Washington was very shrewd of symbolism and carefully chose signs of peace, Republicanism, and agrarian virtue for his home. Jordan has to tell them that Washington was not a devout man in the way they want him to be. The famous 19th century engraving of Washington kneeling in prayer at Valley Forge is fiction, though bloggers on the religious right protested when it was removed from the classroom. …

The same people who think Jefferson was not religious contrast him with Washington, though Jefferson thought and wrote about religion far more than Washington did. The reverence toward Washington as reverent is not based on history or scholarly treatment but on the early myth mongering including the extraordinary popular (and fanciful) biography by Parson Weems, which ran through 29 editions during its author's lifetime, and extended to many dozens more after he died.…

There is a heavy investment by some modern conservatives in the idea that Washington was devout. This belief has endured despite the work of scholars showing it to be groundless. Washington never himself invoked the name Jesus or Christ in prayer – he referred to Jesus only once, speaking to some Indians. He normally used terms for God that were common parlance of other Deists – “governor of the universe," or the “architect of the universe," or "author of the universe," terms that Thomas Payne would have been quite comfortable with. … There were no clergy called for or prayer said as Washington was dying. "There were no ministers in the room, no prayers uttered, no Christian rituals offering the solace of everlasting life… He died as a Roman stoic rather than a Christian saint."

Furthermore, Washington went to church with his wife, but he always left before communion was served. When his minister challenged him on that, Washington thereafter conspicuously didn’t attend services on communion Sundays.

In Head and Heart Garry Wills does a commendable job in setting the record straight: doing decent history and a fair job of demythologizing popular misconceptions. That's what a reputable historian tries to do, to set the record straight according to the best evidence available, while providing a compelling narrative. But such history is a hard sell in American culture embedded in its prejudice and righteousness.

We Are Charged

Here's your take away. We Unitarian Universalists are the heirs of an Enlightenment religion that joins reason and freedom of belief, as embodied in the first amendment freedom of religion. We are scrupulous in maintaining the separation of church and state, the result of the doctrine of Disestablishment in which our founders saw wisdom and made America a model for the world.

In this Enlightenment scheme, all religions flourish.

Stoic Calm

2011-11-04T08:35:00.000-07:00

A Philosophy of Life Point of View

Being a Unitarian Universalist minister has been an extraordinary occupation.

At UU ordinations the charge to the newly minted minister traditionally includes the phrase “to speak the truth in love." As I understand truth, it is all-encompassing and love relates to the intimacies of the human condition. So, I have been free, indeed charged, to explore and soar among all disciplines. As I’ve soared I have been centered by attention and service to others, thereby coming into greater self-knowledge.

I've been an active minister since 1978. When I'm reflective, as I frequently am these days, I look back and see a clear progression of my interests in the broad realms of religion and ethics as I’ve sought “to speak the truth in love.” Here’s a chronological sketch of my journey.

1) When I studied theology at McGill University in the early 1970s, the psychology of religion – religious experience – was a focus. I read William James's foundational, The Varieties of Religious Experience, explored mystical experiences through the writings of Evelyn Underhill, and became acquainted with the work of Carl Jung. I found Jung’s scheme of archetypes and what later was called the Hero’s Journey by Joseph Campbell, the process of individuation or the lifelong journey of becoming one's true self, a compelling explanation of universal religious questing.

2) When I began as minister of the first Unitarian Church Youngstown Ohio in 1978, I continued my interest in the Jungian scheme. I also read deeply in the naturalistic mysticism of my colleague Kenneth Patton, a humanist. I also found a great resonance with Transcendentalism, Emerson in particular. Nature led me into naturalism.

3) When I came here in 1983 I was working intently on developing a coherent scheme of what I called natural religion, religion free of religion, if you can imagine that. I was moving ever further away from institutionalisms, dogma, systematic theology, and other such traditional stuff. I was of a postmodern state of mind. All rational systems, theologies in particular, I contended, deconstruct.

4) By the mid-1990s I became deeply interested in the extraordinary advancements of science, particularly social biology/social psychology and neuroscience in describing the human condition. I became a great fan of the so-called father of the sociobiology, Edward O. Wilson. His notion of consilience, the unity of knowledge in one realm – that is the natural world encouraged me. Thomas Wolfe's celebrated essay of the late 1990s, "Sorry Your Soul Just Died," for me, summed up the great shift from supernaturalism to naturalism that has taken place. With brain imaging, we were acquiring the tools to understand the intricacies of the human condition, not by speculation, rather by fact.

5) Most recently I’ve drifted into the area of what might be summarized as “philosophy of life.” I’ve had a half century of interest in the eccentric Old Testament Book of Ecclesiastes, part of an ancient Middle Eastern Wisdom tradition. Ecclesiastes offers one of the most enduring and influential philosophies of life of all time. Two summers ago I did a season-long study of Ecclesiastes and chronicled it in a recently self-published book, Wisdom for the Ages: A Season with Ecclesiastes.

The notion of philosophy of life rather than systematic theology has resonance for me these days. It meets the needs of an age when more and more individuals are claiming to be spiritual (if they call themselves anything), rather than religious, while becoming non-affiliated with any religious tradition. In my own experience, Ecclesiastes has been an incredible mentor. I often muse about the influence Ecclesiastes had in the publication of my five quote collection books by Skinner House, because Ecclesiastes was a famous collector of aphorisms.

Ecclesiastes was compiled some 2300 years ago by a cosmopolitan Jew, who led an assembly or school. It was a yeasty era after the Babylonian exile, in a yeasty place, a crossroads of the world. Those who study Ecclesiastes find diverse influences, including the two popular emergent Greek philosophies, Stoicism and Epicureanism.

While working on Ecclesiastes throughout the summer of 2010, I came across a contemporary philosopher and writer, William B. Irvine, and his recent book, A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy, via a Canadian Broadcast Corporation podcast.

I recommend this book to you for a variety of reasons. It offers an accessible and relevant introduction to Stoicism. For a philosopher, the author has an easy and jargon free/unacademic style. He accurately delivers well organized information about a much-misunderstood and underappreciated philosophy of life. I particularly recommend his personal and anecdotal introduction, much of which I agree with regarding the significance and value of a personal philosophy of life.

I close this first section of my remarks with an excerpt from Mr. Irvine's Introduction: “A Plan for Living:”

What do you want out of life? You might answer this question by saying that you want a caring spouse, a good job, and a nice house, but these are really just some of the things you want in life. In asking what you want out of life I am asking the question in its broadest sense. I'm asking not for goals you form as you go about your daily activities but for your grand goal in living. In other words, of the things in life you might pursue, which is the thing you believe to be most valuable?

Many people will have trouble naming this goal. They know what they want minute by minute or even decade by decade during their life, but they have never pause to consider their grand goal in living. It is perhaps understandable that they have. Our culture doesn't encourage people to think about such things; indeed, it provides them with an endless stream of distractions so they won't have asked. A grand goal in living is the first component of a philosophy of life. This means that if you lack a grand goal in living, you lack a coherent philosophy of life.

Why is it important to have such a philosophy? Because without one, there is a danger that you will mislive – that because goals can come into conflict, we need to decide which of our goals should take precedence when conflicts arise. She will therefore help us sort through our goals and place them into a hierarchy. The goal at the pinnacle of this hierarchy will be what I call our grand goal for living: it is the goal that we should be willing to sacrifice to attain other goals. And after helping us select this goal, a philosopher of life will help us devise a strategy for attaining it.

The obvious place to look for a philosopher of life is in the philosophy department at the local university.… But unless we are at a most unusual University, we will find no philosophers of life in the sense I have in mind.

It hasn't always been this way. Many ancient Greek and Roman philosophers, for example not only thought philosophies of life were worth contemplating but thought that the raison d’etre of philosophy was to develop them.… Furthermore, these ancient philosophers did not keep their discoveries to themselves or share them only with their fellow philosophers. Rather, they formed schools and welcomed as their pupils anyone wishing to acquire a philosophy of life.…

This book is written for those seeking a philosophy of life. In the pages that follow, I focus my attention on the philosophy that I have found useful that I suspect many readers will also find useful. It is the philosophy of the ancient Stoics. The Stoic philosophy of life may be old, but it merits the attention of any modern individual who wishes to have a life that is both meaningful and fulfilling – who wishes, that is to have a good life.

In his book, A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy, William Irvine described how he stumbled into Stoicism through his academic study of Desire. He admitted to having been largely ignorant of and otherwise misinformed about Stoicism. Also, at age fifty he was seeking a philosophy of life that would take him out of what he called his (and society’s ) default philosophy of life—an enlightened hedonism, marked by affluence, social status, and pleasure. He suspected that Zen Buddhism might be the answer for him. But once acquainted with Stoicism, he found admiration in famous Roman Stoics; he also found Stoicism has striking similarities with Zen. In Stoicism he found an agreeable philosophy of life that results in a “cheerful disposition and secure joy,” attained in large part by recognizing and controlling negative desires.

Principles of Stoicism

Stoicism’s emergence is associated with the beginnings of the Hellenistic Age, an era preceded by Alexander the Great's conquests and specifically his death in 323 BCE. This was a yeasty time, an early and great episode in what we now call globalization. This was also an era of new philosophies, of which Stoicism was prominent.

Stoicism’s name references the meeting place of the first Stoics. Stoa means porch. There was a colonnaded porch projecting from the central market and communal gathering place in Athens, the Agora. Known as the painted porch, it was there that Zeno, a Greek from Cyprus, began to discourse on a new philosophy of life.

The Stoics were embedded in a truly a new age. As the world was unified under Greek influence, so the Stoics saw a unified world of nature and society. They were newly formed cosmopolitanites, worldy in outlook, if not citizens of their brave new world. They looked to nature for their inspiration, viewing the divine or god in a pantheistic fashion. Their sense of the Divine—portrayed through Zeus, was essentially optimistic.

The Stoics held to a benign determinism. Nature was the macrocosm; the human spirit or soul was the microcosm. The Stoics sought to bring the inner life, the microcosm, in accord with the outer world, the macrocosm. When this harmony was achieved, happiness was realized. (This suggests to me an inherent psychological savvy.)

So, like all philosophies of life, Stoicism sought an answer to the question of successful living with the goal of happiness. The Stoics found an answer to this question by controlling negative or violent emotions. Their aim was to achieve a state of equanimity – proverbial Stoic calm.

Contrary to popular understandings, the Stoics weren’t emotionally cold, intentionally indifferent. They were involved but contained by self-control, as they sought the inner means to avoid unnatural anguish or pain. The individual was responsible for her or his happiness.

Stoics sought to live a life of virtue as a means of controlling negative emotions. A logical understanding of nature provided insight into personal virtue. Integrity mattered in the most practical sense, because right and fitting actions resulted in happiness. Actions, not beliefs, best measured personal virtue and character. Stoicism, as compared to another new philosophy of life Epicureanism, had a strong ethical component for the self and for society.

Living the good life was active and reasoned, a matter of deliberate choice and continuous attention. It had a well-developed scheme of philosophical/spiritual practices that included: attending to the teachings of Stoic sages, self-reflection about happiness as it related to the cause and effect of one’s own desires and emotions, seeking to understand the natural harmony of the macrocosm of Nature, contemplating mortality and death, seeking to live in the moment, and what we might now call mindful meditation. Stoics were not casual observers but engaged and involved practitioners of an aware and engaged philosophy of life.

Features of the Stoics’ cosmopolitan worldview included a broad respect and even the inklings of an inherent egalitarianism among human beings, for aren’t we all the product of the same nature. For example, the major organizer of Stoic philosophy was Epictetus, who lived from 55-135 CE. Of Greek heritage, he was born a slave and lived and philosophized in Rome. At the other end of the Stoic social spectrum was the Emperor Marcus Aurelius, whose Meditations remains a standard for personal self-control and civic duty. (It would be good required reading for anyone seeking public office today.) Stoics were socially aware and applied their sense of natural harmony to society.

Stoicism was a popular and influential philosophy, particularly among the learned and ruling classes of the Roman Empire, through 529 when the Emperor Justinian I closed all philosophical schools in the name of Christianity. That’s some eight hundred years of significance and influence.

Why Stoicism Today?

Stoicism has several significant correspondences to our contemporary situation. First, it looks to a unified nature for guidance and inspiration. Second, the yeasty age in which it came to prominence parallels our own age, particularly through the influences of globalization. Third, it preceded Christianity, finding the answer to the purpose and meaning of a human life through nature and human experience. We live in a post-Christian age and once again find ourselves seeking the answers to the great questions in a naturalistic scheme. Fourth, Stoicism strikes me as very congenial to our Unitarian way, with its emphases on personal character and integrity. In this regard, listen to this quotation from the Stoic Marcus Aurelius:

Make for yourself a definition or description of the thing which is presented to you, so as to see distinctly what kind of a thing it is in its substance, in its nudity, in its complete entirety, and tell yourself its proper name, and the names of the things of which it has been compounded, and into which it will be resolved. For nothing is so productive of elevation of mind as to be able to examine methodically and truly every object which is presented to you in life, and always to look at things so as to see at the same time what kind of universe this is, and what kind of use everything performs in it, and what value everything has with reference to the whole.

To me this resonates with a great Unitarian mantra, the text from the first Unitarian sermon preached by William Ellery Channing in 1819: "Prove all things, hold fast to that which is good."

Incidentally, Stoicism survives through a number of wise quotes – sayings that are very accessible, understandable, and relevant. They often ring the reader like a bell. Who among us would disagree with the observation of the Stoic Seneca the Younger: “The point is, not how long, but how nobly you live.” Or the proposition by the Stoic Epictetus: “If, therefore any be unhappy, let him remember that he is unhappy by reason of himself alone.”

William B. Irvine’s A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient of Stoic Joy is an excellent starting place to become familiar with Stoicism’s enduring and relevant philosophy of life. Immediately accessible is his literary website that includes three essays (see articles on pull down menu) on his experience and insights into Stoicism’s contemporary relevance. The essays will be a good test to determine if you want to go deeper into this ever relevant philosophy of life.

Tolstoy Argues with Ecclesiastes

2011-10-24T13:06:00.000-07:00

[This is both a coda to my recent sermon on Leo Tolstoy's "dark night of the soul" and an additional chapter to my new book Wisdom for the Ages: A Season with Ecclesiastes.]

Leo Tolstoy (born 1828) had a spiritual crisis at full midlife. By then, this scion of old Russian nobility had become the acclaimed author of two monumental books, War and Peace and Anna Karenina. Many already considered him the greatest novelist of the 19^th century. Additionally, he had privileges of status and wealth, as well as a large family. Yet he was a spiritual wretch.

He chronicled his life experiences, as well as his state of mind, in Confession, one of the most noteworthy religious autobiographies ever written—still readable.

In Confession, Tolstoy sketched the dissipations and debaucheries of his youth and early adulthood. He also expressed guilt over his inherited privileges, including a large ancestral estate, replete with serfs. (His early debauchery resulted in an illegitimate child by one of these serfs.)

A contemporary, the American psychologist William James, in the now classic Varieties of Religious Experience, provided a handy category to understand Tolstoy’s spiritual state of mind as he approached fifty years of age. Tolstoy was a classic “sick soul,” tormented by his sinful nature in the midst of a meaningless world.

In Confession, Tolstoy described his dilemma clearly and cogently: “My question — that which at the age of fifty brought me to the verge of suicide — was the simplest of questions, lying in the soul of every man from the foolish child to the wisest elder: it was a question without an answer to which one cannot live, as I had found by experience. It was: ‘What will come of what I am doing today or shall do tomorrow? What will come of my whole life?’

“Differently expressed, the question is: ‘Why should I live, why wish for anything, or do anything?’ It can also be expressed thus: ‘Is there any meaning in my life that the inevitable death awaiting me does not destroy?’”

A rational, organized thinker, Tolstoy posited four responses: 1) ignorance—not knowing the question in the first place; 2) Epicureanism—living in the moment and moderately enjoying life, nonetheless, oblivious to deeper concerns; 3) the way of strength and courage--suicide; and 4) the way of weakness—knowing life’s absurdity, yet clinging to in vain hope. Tolstoy saw the fourth way as his personal situation, yet another instance of his inherent wretchedness.

My appreciation for Ecclesiastes causes me to examine Tolstoy’s criticism of the Epicurean solution, which Tolstoy strongly identified with Solomon of the Book of Ecclesiastes.

Tolstoy opined, “Solomon expresses this way out thus: "Then I commended mirth, because a man hath no better thing under the sun, than to eat, and to drink, and to be merry: and that this should accompany him in his labour the days of his life, which God giveth him under the sun.

"’Therefore eat thy bread with joy and drink thy wine with a merry heart.... Live joyfully with the wife whom thou lovest all the days of the life of thy vanity...for this is thy portion in life and in thy labours which thou takest under the sun.... Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might, for there is not work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave, whither thou goest.’

“That is the way in which the majority of people of our circle make life possible for themselves. Their circumstances furnish them with more of welfare than of hardship, and their moral dullness makes it possible for them to forget that the advantage of their position is accidental, and that not everyone can have a thousand wives and palaces like Solomon, that for everyone who has a thousand wives there are a thousand without a wife, and that for each palace there are a thousand people who have to build it in the sweat of their brows; and that the accident that has today made me a Solomon may tomorrow make me a Solomon's slave. The dullness of these people's imagination enables them to forget the things that gave Buddha no peace — the inevitability of sickness, old age, and death, which today or tomorrow will destroy all these pleasures.”

In a previous chapter of Confession, Tolstoy had quoted more than a thousand words of Ecclesiastes, one fifth of the ancient book’s text. This suggests that Tolstoy realized how formidable a voice Solomon (or whoever wrote it, Tolstoy editorialized) presented.

Tolstoy’s judgment of moral dullness is an apt criticism of Ecclesiastes and Epicureanism. Both lack ethical responses to injustices and inequities.

The moral acuity of Tolstoy—the moral acuity of Siddhartha, too, before his Enlightenment--might be the peculiar sensibility of what William James called a “sick soul.”

In the end, Tolstoy embraced faith in answer to his despairing question, in particular, the radical Christianity of Jesus’s teachings as evidenced in the Sermon on the Mount. (Tolstoy became a Christian anarchist and something of an ascetic.)

Ecclesiastes and Tolstoy both faced the notion of life’s absurdity arbitrated by death and reached divergent conclusions. These conclusions show the divergence of the “sick soul” from the “sick soul’s” counterpart, the “healthy minded” person.

Ecclesiastes leans to a realistic healthy mindedness, that is, a reasonable enjoyment of life in the face of life’s absurdities, nonetheless.

A New Normality: A Culture of War

2011-10-16T17:08:00.000-07:00

The events of September 11, 2001, turned the world upside down – at least from the American perspective. Almost immediately, commentary asked, when would there be a return to normality; or would there ever be normality again? Normality of course, referred to the relative halcyon days of our common life before that fateful day.

Ten years ago, I remember thinking about this hoped for, so-called return to normality, in part, because normality is one of those words I stumble on. Back in the day when I studied history, I learned about one of the great linguistic faux pas by an American president. In his 1920 inaugural speech, President Warren G. Harding coined the phrase a “Return to Normalcy," referring to the way things were before the first world war. At the time normalcy wasn't an accepted word. Through the years, for some perverse reason, I haven't been able to keep the two words straight, though that distinction no longer matters, because normalcy has become an acceptable word alongside the normality.

The decade of the 1920s – the decade of the lost generation; of women's suffrage, short skirts, and bobbed hair; of jazz, prohibition, and speakeasies; and, of course, the great crash – established new standards of what was normal. There was to be no returning, rather a radical reordering.

History, for the sake of convenience, often breaks time into decades. In an ironic sense, the “Return to Normalcy” is sometimes used to describe the 1920's.

I wonder, what will the decade of our new millennium be known as? It surely seems a significant decade.

After a sober review of the past 10 years, the decade 2001-2011 appears to be, at the very least, a time, of transition, relative to the narrative arc of the American experience. That arc is comprised of a number of bands. There's a social/cultural component. There's an economic component. There's a political component, including human rights. There's an international component, also including human rights. Most, if not all of these components, can be interpreted as converging in the decline of America.

There are clear nodal points: the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001; wars with Afghanistan and Iraq; hurricane Katrina, the perfect storm, and the tragedy of New Orleans; the bursting of the housing bubble and with it the meltdown of the US economy; the melancholy years of what is now known as the “great recession;” and a populist response against all aspects of government known as the tea party movement, that aggravated a red and blue divide in American politics, as well as highlighted what is now being called class warfare.

With all this in mind, rather than a return to pre-9/11 normality, we have a dramatically reformed normality. Bill Schulz mentioned aspects of this new normality in his Christian Science Monitor piece, that includes the acceptance of the term American gulag, the humiliation and torture of prisoners of war, a pre-emptive war, and the assassination of an American citizen deemed to be a terrorist.

And of course, the new normality includes the tacit acceptance of war. It was decade of varied wars.

Commentators generally agree that the term “the war on terror,” from the outset promised to be protracted, against a nefarious enemy, with, at best, vague objectives. Rashly, uttered, the “war on terror” almost as quickly lost most of its cachet. Though they are being drawn down, we continue to wage hot wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, to mixed reviews.

History will emphasize the Bush administration's policy of war (and the Obama administration continuing it), from the immediate rhetoric of September 11, 2001, including the open-ended declaration of war against terror, beginning with attacking the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan; through the propaganda against Saddam Hussein and his weapons of mass destruction that resulted in the invasion of Iraq; to the surges that sought to counter the insurgents first in Iraq and then in Afghanistan.

At the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University, there is a program named the Eisenhower Research Project. The Eisenhower Research Project is a new, non-partisan, non-profit, scholarly initiative dedicated to studying the effects of militarization on U.S. society, democracy and foreign policy. The Project derives its purpose from President Eisenhower's 1961 farewell address, in which he warned of the 'unwarranted influence' of the military-industrial complex and appealed for an 'alert and knowledgeable citizenry' as the only force able to balance the often contrasting demands of security and liberty in the democratic state.

The Eisenhower Research Project assembled a team that included economists, anthropologists, political scientists, legal experts, and a physician to do this analysis—to determine the “cost” of ten years of war.

Here are the project’s findings:

While we know how many US soldiers have died in the wars (just over 6000), what is startling is what we don’t know about the levels of injury and illness in those who have returned from the wars. New disability claims continue to pour into the VA, with 550,000 just through last fall. Many deaths and injuries among US contractors have not been identified.

At least 137,000 civilians have died and more will die in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan as a result of the fighting at the hands of all parties to the conflict.

The armed conflict in Pakistan, which the U.S. helps the Pakistani military fight by funding, equipping and training them, has taken as many lives as the conflict in neighboring Afghanistan.

Putting together the conservative numbers of war dead, in uniform and out, brings the total to 225,000.

Millions of people have been displaced indefinitely and are living in grossly inadequate conditions. The current number of war refugees and displaced persons -- 7,800,000 -- is equivalent to all of the people of Connecticut and Kentucky fleeing their homes.

The wars have been accompanied by erosions in civil liberties at home and human rights violations abroad.

The human and economic costs of these wars will continue for decades, some costs not peaking until mid-century. Many of the wars’ costs are invisible to Americans, buried in a variety of budgets, and so have not been counted or assessed. For example, while most people think the Pentagon war appropriations are equivalent to the wars’ budgetary costs, the true numbers are twice that and the full economic cost of the wars much larger yet. Conservatively estimated, the war bills already paid and obligated to be paid are $3.2 trillion in constant dollars. A more reasonable estimate puts the number at nearly $4 trillion.

As with former US wars, the costs of paying for veterans’ care into the future will be a sizable portion of the full costs of the war.

The ripple effects on the U.S. economy have also been significant, including job loss and interest rate increases, and those effects have been underappreciated.

While it was promised that the US invasions would bring democracy to both countries, Afghanistan and Iraq, both continue to rank low in global rankings of political freedom, with warlords continuing to hold power in Afghanistan with US support, and Iraqi communities more segregated today than before by gender and ethnicity as a result of the war.

Serious and compelling alternatives to war were scarcely considered in the aftermath of 9/11 or in the discussion about war against Iraq. Some of those alternatives are still available to the U.S.

There are many costs of these wars that we have not yet been able to quantify and assess. With our limited resources, we focused on U.S. spending, U.S. and allied deaths, and the human toll in the major war zones, Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan. There is still much more to know and understand about how all those affected by the wars have had their health, economies, and communities altered by the decade of war, and what solutions exist for the problems they face as a result of the wars’ destruction.

So, the new normal includes a permanent war culture, out of sight and out of mind of most Americans. I believe these wars were ill-advised and ginned up. (Remember the so-called neo-conservatives’ line of rhetoric ten years ago?) They have had questionable positive affect. (I’m of the mind they have had many and varied negative consequences.) They have cost us a treasure and will continue to do so, at last 3.2, perhaps 4 trillion dollars.

The Eisenhower Project recommends that it’s not too late to implement more beneficial policies.

Remember the Chinese proverb from an earlier reading: “Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves.” … The second grave is ours. We dug it ourselves. The question now is: do we have to lie in it?

The Gannets: Excellence in Our Common World 2011

2011-10-06T16:11:00.000-07:00

I & M Canal, Morris

Some years ago I offered a yearly sermon series called “the annual vulgarity awards.” I would rant a little about four or five egregiously ugly or corrosive aspects of our common culture. But I tired of that series; and I also felt, I was, ironically, contributing to a negative social climate.

So I flipped the series 180 degrees and developed a yearly sermon series on what I find to be excellent in our common life. I immediately named this new series The William Channing Gannett Awards in honor of the first minister of this congregation, whose signature phrase “domestication of the infinite” suited my sense of the source and result of excellence.

Mr. Gannett was a remarkable man with an impeccable Unitarian pedigree. His father, the Rev. Ezra Stiles Gannett, was the first President of the American Unitarian Association, 1825. Ezra Stiles Gannett was also the associate minister at the famed Federal Street Church in Boston, where the saintly founder of American Unitarianism William Ellery Channing was for senior minister. Dr. Channing was William Channing Gannett’s godfather, hence the middle name Channing.

Mr. Gannett was a modernist compared to his godfather and father, who were Christian Rationalists. Young William was influenced by Transcendentalism’s more expansive vision of religion; and when he made his way west, he joined the Unity Men of the Western Unitarian Conference, whose motto “the unity of all things” summarized their broad view of religion. The Unity Men also promoted ethics as the proper focus of religion, in which character (ingenuousness) blended with what we now call social justice.

William Channing Gannett wrote the great compromise, “The Things We Hold in Common” that allowed the Christians and the emergent not-just or more-than Christian liberals to stay in one Unitarian denomination. His essay, “The House Beautiful,” inspired the magazine of the same name thanks to the efforts of his good friend Frank Lloyd Wright. And his plan for our Church-Home has shaped generations of Hinsdale Unitarians over one hundred, twenty years.

Before I present this year’s awards, I want you to think about Mr. Gannett’s signature phrase “domestication of the infinite.” The ideals we recognize (and you might see them in terms of the great categories of the good, the true, and the beautiful), if they are our ideals, are necessarily compelling—so compelling that we must implement them in our self and our world. This is a process of domestication—of household and home infusing our larger world. The doors open in and welcome the worthy; the doors then open out and infuse the world with the warmth, intimacy, and values of the home and the home-like.

I’ve been greatly influenced by William Channing Gannett, through his writings and through his sculpture in wood, brick, and stone, this Church-Home, that he was instrumental in designing. In his honor and memory I once again lift up the excellent in our common world.

The I and M Canal

I have neglected an obvious choice, The Illinois and Michigan Canal National Heritage Corridor. Here’s a summary of the Corridor from the official website:

The Illinois & Michigan Canal National Heritage Corridor is a 100 mile long cultural park between Chicago and LaSalle/Peru. It is a geographic area of about 322,000 acres within the counties of Cook, DuPage, Will, Grundy and LaSalle. On August 24, 1984, President Ronald Reagan signed legislation establishing the region as the nation's first National Heritage Corridor. It thereby recognized the historic importance of this region and the waterway that connected Lake Michigan and the Illinois River. The goal of the Corridor is to preserve, protect and interpret its rich natural and cultural history while fostering economic growth in the region. The Corridor is not owned or governed by a single authority. Its creation involved the partnership of federal, state, and local governments in cooperation with private industry and interest groups. The corridor is an on-going partnership between the public and private sectors created to achieve a successful mixture of preservation, public use and industrial activity.

I've known about the I and M national historic corridor from its onset, thanks to a church member, Stan Johnson, who died a few years. From its outset, Stan was deeply involved with the civic authority that joined the various municipalities along the old canal’s hundred mile length.

The history of the I and M Canal is integral to the history of Chicago. It was constructed from the early 1820s through the late 1840s, beginning in Bridgeport on the south side Chicago, reaching ever-further West to Lasalle/Peru, connecting Lake Michigan to the Illinois River and eventually the Mississippi. It helped Chicago become, what one historian has so aptly described, Nature' s Metropolis. I recommend that you review the canal’s history – an easy Internet search.

And with the history and perhaps lore of the canal in your imagination, visit a remnant stretch of it. The most accessible stretch is within a few miles on Willow Springs Road near Archer Avenue. But even more, I recommend a very beautiful stretch of the old canal that's in Morris – a pleasant drive of the some 60 miles. Today is a good day to stroll the towpath, because you can also take in the last day of the Grundy County corn Festival in downtown Morris, a remnant shire town along the Illinois River. (The Corn Festival is one of my favorite agricultural celebrations. I'm especially fond of the roasted ears of corn.) You can follow a towpath from the foot of Morris's main street and walk southwest. Within a half mile or so, you'll enter a serene section of the canal, towpaths on either side, canopied by graceful trees, and with mirror like water. This time of year, autumn-painted leaves float and slowly eddy, while the water reflects those on the trees. When I'm there, I like to imagine the convergence of nature and history.

A good day trip, or perhaps weekend trip, would follow the course of the canal (along blue highways, of course) with visits to surviving sections. For example, at canal’s end in LaSalle you can board a replica towboat pulled by a mule from the towpath.

Joliet Public Art

I award my second Gannett to the city of Joliet for its public art. I have a perverse fondness for Joliet – one of America's many aching post-industrial cities. Perhaps Joliet reminds me of my 5 1/2 years in Youngstown, Ohio before I came to Chicago. Joliet is a city supported by the notorious penitentiary, Statesville, two casinos, and a regional hospital. It has a history of corruption. Like many other struggling cities it tries all sorts of things to keep it viable – creating, if only an illusion, of vitality.

The recent history of Joliet's public art has an interesting parent, joining local artists – many of them women, if not feminists, – with public money, is now driven by a not-for-profit organization known as Friends of Community Public Art, organized in 1996. Their website offers this narrative: FCPA is dedicated to the creation, planning, promotion and preservation of public art increase the awareness of the communities rich historical and cultural heritage. FCPA was formed to the an artist run, multiracial, intercultural organization that represents the economic diversity.. F CPA captures communities history and culture through site-specific, audience responsive art work.

FCPA specializes in murals, mosaics and sculpture…

The FCPA traces its origin to 1975, when a group of women painted the first mural on a concrete viaduct, titled " Downtown is Our Town." This was followed by a major project, a large mural painted in the then recently renovated railroad station downtown, circa 1991. Between 1994 and 1997, 42 original works of art were created on walls around the Joliet area, using public funds set aside for viaduct beautification. The friends of community public art, founded in 1996 and incorporated in 1998 as a not-for-profit corporation, embarked on an ambitious program of painted murals, mosaics, and sculptures. Many of sculptures were placed on column-like, mosaic decorated pedestals distributed throughout the city of Joliet.

I like these sculptures a lot. They are didactic – sculptures with clear messages, lifting up collective values. Here are a few examples: Planting The Seeds: Children And Education; An, Informed Mind Make Better Choices; History Clings Like Ivy; Education Is The Window To The World; A Teachers Gift.

You can spend an interesting day visiting the various pieces of public art in Joliet. (The Friends of Community Public Art has an informative website with images of the art and their locations.) You might plan to eat lunch in the downtown Renaissance Center restaurant operated by the Joliet Junior College. Nearby is the Route 66 Museum. And if you drove to Joliet via Archer Avenue, you will pass through Lockport, where you can visit a peaceful of stretch of the I and M Canal and one of the better restaurants in the area, the Gaylord Building.

Minor League Baseball

Joliet has another gift for our common world – a minor-league baseball team, called the Slammers. The city, a few years ago, built a downtown stadium, White Cross Field, not far from Union Station in the old downtown. The stadium seats nearly 6000. Parking is close and free. Libations are relatively inexpensive. The best seat in the house costs only $10.

I long ago lost my interest in major league baseball; the Cubs and the Sox in my quarter-century here have only occasionally captured my interest. So when I get an urge to watch a game, I now go to Joliet to watch aspiring, young athletes play what used to be called America's pastime.

Joliet's Slammers are typical of the minor-league baseball's revival that's taken place across the country in the last couple of decades. In these venues, the atmosphere is family centered; the kids always seem to have a good time in a fan-friendly atmosphere. The games are entertaining and between every inning is entertainment. By the way, the Slammers, two weekends ago won the championship of the Frontier League.

So my third Gannett goes to minor-league baseball, especially my champion Joliet Slammers.

The Contrary Farmer

Last year I presented a sermon based on a curious novel, Pope Mary and the Church of Almighty Good Food, by Gene Logsdon. Gene bills himself as The Contrary Farmer. A former editor of the Farm Journal magazine, for the past 30 years or so, he's operated a small farm in Sandusky, Ohio region and has written prodigiously. His passion is the small family farm; his farming philosophy incorporates responsible environmentalism and traditional values, along with a progressive outlook. He has a host of qualities of what I call a wise elder.

I read his blog, The Contrary Farmer, with every post. (I recommend it to you, if you have an interest in rural life, as well as provocative ideas.)

He recently wrote something in his blog that I adored. He advocated small family farm of 300 acres over the industrial farm of 5,000 acres as a partial solution to our national economic crisis. I’ll let him tell the economics as he sees it:

The 5000 acres of industrial corn, which is employing two people, could be providing jobs and homes for about 17 family farmers and their wives and children. Run all the figures and all the farmland out to a logical mathematical conclusion and the number of new jobs created by restructuring agriculture is unbelievably awesome. There are about 90 million acres in corn this year. That would make 300,000 family farms of 300 acres each. That means 600,000 parents would be fully employed and let us say two teenagers who are trying desperately right now to find part time jobs,— a total of 1,200,000 new jobs. If we take into account industrial soybean, wheat, and cotton acreages as well and divide all that land into 300 acre family farms, the number of new jobs created rockets to somewhere in the three to five million range.

Gene’s line of reasoning fascinated me. Not feasible, I first thought. But then, I wondered, why not? What a wonderful combination of traditional, down- to-earth-thinking and radical, out-of-the-box-thinking. (This combination reminded me of his advocacy of manure, including human excrement, over chemical fertilizers, that he wrote about in his recent book Holy Shit.)

For his humane and reasonable advocacy of the small family farm, Gene Logdson receives my fourth Gannett this year. I’ve begun to think of him as a national treasure, along the likes of Pete Seeger or Wendell Berry.

Tony's Breakfast Cafe

I usually have one food oriented Gannett to give each year. I don't like to think of myself as foodie, in part, because of my contrary nature. I'm drawn not to the trendy and expensive, but to the honest and simple, and, yes, the off-the-beaten-track, if not obscure.

Surrounded by choices, last Sunday, Ellie and I considered many possibilities of where to have Sunday dinner –either sit down or take out. Not that we go there often, we decided to go to a smallish family restaurant in Brookfield on Ogden Avenue called Tony's – the sort of place that has a seven or eight page menu with inserts, including a senior citizen’s insert.

The place suited our criteria: fast and efficient service, friendliness, a big menu with comfort foods, and just enough busyness to make for a cozy feeling.

We each ordered a complete meal from salad to desert with beverage included. I could only eat half of my plate, Ellie too. So we took our leftovers home in Styrofoam boxes-- dinner the next day. And the total bill was under $20.

There still are plenty of such family restaurants, sometimes I call them greeky spoons, because their often run by Greek families, in the Chicago area. Tony’s, “over-the bridge” in Brookfield, is one of the type, but better than most. And Tony’s certainly seems to try hard with basic food and attentive/fast service, and even a certain cheerfulness.

So my final Gannett of 2011 goes to Tony’s in Brookfield a truly traditional, old-school restaurant, a good example of all the warm, fragrant, embracing, comfort-food places you’ve been in throughout he years—the sort of place you might hope to find in a small town along a blue highway when you want to be in the midst of real people and never have your coffee cup be empty.

R-E-S-P-E-C-T

2011-09-16T09:32:00.000-07:00

I like and recommend David Brooks, a syndicated op-ed columnist of the New York Times. He's a conservative who holds traditional values. I like him because he's value rich and draws his information from the best of contemporary thought, including various realms of science, even the somewhat fuzzy social sciences.

This week he wrote about the amorality of young adults, 18-23 year olds that seemingly do not have a moral center. They lack ethical grounding, according to a recent study and new book by a distinguished Notre Dame sociologist Christian Smith. Here's part of what Brooks wrote in a column titled “If It Feels Right.”

Smith and company asked about the young people’s moral lives, and the results are depressing.

It’s not so much that these young Americans are living lives of sin and debauchery, at least no more than you’d expect from 18- to 23-year-olds. What’s disheartening is how bad they are at thinking and talking about moral issues.

The interviewers asked open-ended questions about right and wrong, moral dilemmas and the meaning of life. In the rambling answers, which Smith and company recount in a new book, “Lost in Transition,” you see the young people groping to say anything sensible on these matters. But they just don’t have the categories or vocabulary to do so.

When asked to describe a moral dilemma they had faced, two-thirds of the young people either couldn’t answer the question or described problems that are not moral at all, like whether they could afford to rent a certain apartment or whether they had enough quarters to feed the meter at a parking spot.

“Not many of them have previously given much or any thought to many of the kinds of questions about morality that we asked,” Smith and his co-authors write. When asked about wrong or evil, they could generally agree that rape and murder are wrong. But, aside from these extreme cases, moral thinking didn’t enter the picture, even when considering things like drunken driving, cheating in school or cheating on a partner. “I don’t really deal with right and wrong that often,” is how one interviewee put it.

The default position, which most of them came back to again and again, is that moral choices are just a matter of individual taste. “It’s personal,” the respondents typically said. “It’s up to the individual. Who am I to say?”…

He concluded with this paragraph: In most times and in most places, the group was seen to be the essential moral unit. A shared religion defined rules and practices. Cultures structured people’s imaginations and imposed moral disciplines. But now more people are led to assume that the free-floating individual is the essential moral unit. Morality was once revealed, inherited and shared, but now it’s thought of as something that emerges in the privacy of your own heart.

Postmodernism

What Brooks is talking about is nothing new. It is a reflection of the postmodern era in Western civilization that includes the erosion of a culturally traditional Christian point of view and the ethical grounding it long offered. Here's my quick understanding of postmodernism.

I’ve long argued that the modern era was petering out in the late 19^th century and was finished by the utter horror of World War I. There were a number of thinkers who anticipated and realized the end of the modern era, such as Nietzsche who by the mid-1880s had proclaimed the Death of God. (This really meant that a long prevailing Western Christian worldview/value system no longer prevailed.) My favorite voice/prophet of postmodernism is Albert Schweitzer. (I'm so glad that Ron Solberg presented Albert Schweitzer's magnificent life in his summer service.") Among his extensive accomplishments, Schweitzer was an eminent Christian theologian of the transitional, modern-to-postmodern, era. At the turn of the 19^th into the 20^th century, Schweitzer declared that the great organizing principle of Western Civilization, what he summarized as the will-to-progress, was no longer valid. And so he set about to find a new organizing principle. After much striving and a mystical intuition on an African River while gazing upon a herd of hippopotamus he settled upon the powerful notion of Reverence for Life. (Incidentally, it's that point of view which is now inspiring the Animal Ministry movement within Unitarian Universalism, especially within our own congregation.)

The postmodern dilemma, including the deconstruction of values, has been magnified by what is generally called globalism: the shrinking of the world and an ever increasing pluralism, playing out as a clash of cultures.

One of the most apt expressions of a postmodern world comes from a celebrated poem: by William Butler Yeats, written at the conclusion of the First World War. It's called “The Second Coming.” You probably know the chilling opening stanza:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Over the years I've returned repeatedly to Schweitzer's Reverence for Life Ethic. I find it, and the story of its making, compelling. But it's not an easy sell for a variety of reasons. And so, like Schweitzer a century ago, I've striven to come up with an organizing principle for the 21st-century sensibility -our brave new millennium.

In recent years, I've considered the ethic of the Golden Rule and the notion of Compassion, as organizing principles – the basis of an effective new world ethic that takes into account the conjoined realities of pluralism and an ever-shrinking world. I've spoken to each in recent years, particularly as expressed in the recent movement known as Charter for Compassion which uses Compassion to edge toward the Golden Rule. The leading voice for this movement is Karen Armstrong, former nun and now popular writer on religious concerns.

Now, I like Charter for Compassion. Compassion, I maintain, emerges from a natural instinct; it’s not surprising then, that Compassion is a principle embedded, explicitly and implicitly, in many world religions, notably Buddhism. And I appreciate the relative simplicity, as well as the obvious universality, in time and across cultures, of the Golden Rule. But as I monitor their conjoined progress, that is, their contemporary appeal, I see them as deficient. (For example, I don't think Compassion can be easily compelled. Additionally, Karen Armstrong has been strongly criticized as a Muslim apologist; and there’s considerable anti-Islamism. The proof, arguably, of an underwhelming response is a relative paucity of signatures on Charter for Compassion web site, only 77,000 signatures of affirmation in 22 months—hardly viral.)

I've been thinking, there has to be a more effective organizing ethical principle.

This summer, with fewer obligations, I've reflected on such an organizing ethical principle. And in late August my musings cohered, thanks to CNN. On an idle Sunday morning during the Labor Day weekend, I saw four pieces of news that converged in a theme.

First, there was a tape showing a high school football game in Sarasota, Florida, a melee following a questionable call by a referee. It ended with one of the 14-year-old players running across the field and tackling the referee, throwing him to the ground.

Second, speaker of the house John Boehner, second in succession to the presidency, had refused the original date that Pres. Obama proposed for speaking before a joint session of Congress regarding unemployment creation of jobs—crucial issues for the nation. It would interfere with House business and a televised debate of Republican presidential hopefuls.

Third, one of our Illinois Representatives (8^th District), the Republican Joe Walsh, justified his intentions in calling Pres. Obama an idiot. Representative Walsh protested," what I meant was Obama is not an idiot but his policies are idiotic." Rep. Walsh announced he was intending to stay home during the special joint session of Congress.

Fourth, an African-American comedian Katt Williams defended his 8 min. rant against Mexicans that spewed forth in the middle of his Phoenix comedy club act. He'd been heckled and that was his response. Of course, the act had been videotaped by someone in the audience.

These four news items brought to my mind the theme of respect, really a lack of respect each incident illustrated.

The Notion of Respect

The notion of respect has been percolating in my thoughts for a couple decades, at least. When I started out in the Ministry it is commonplace to talk about three signatures of historic Unitarianism: 1) reason in religion, 2) complete freedom of belief and of conscience, and 3) broad and generous toleration of one another and of other religions. From the beginning the signature of toleration disturbed me; it seemed condescending. So I began to substitute the word acceptance for toleration. But acceptance seemed patronizing. I finally settled upon the word respect, that respect is an historic signature that we strive to emulate and perpetuate today.

Of course, whenever I think of respect what always pops into my mind is the song of that name, an American pop anthem, made famous by Aretha Franklin: "r-e-s-p-e-c-t, find out what it means to me/take care of TCB."

Next I think of a term more recent: to diss or to be dissed. Diss of course is urban lingo for disrespect.

My point here is that respect and its opposite disrespect are popular terms, commonly and widely understood. (Compassion and Reverence, to which I’ve already referred, are more difficult and even obscure concepts, too elitist.) Respect and disrespect involve both a doer and a receiver—a subject and an object.

One of the better Internet references is the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. The SEP has a lengthy article on Respect that begins with a popularized prelude to more scholarly thoughts.

Respect has great importance in everyday life. As children we are taught (one hopes) to respect our parents, teachers, and elders, school rules and traffic laws, family and cultural traditions, other people's feelings and rights, our country's flag and leaders, the truth and people's differing opinions. And we come to value respect for such things; when we're older, we may shake our heads (or fists) at people who seem not to have learned to respect them. We develop great respect for people we consider exemplary and lose respect for those we discover to be clay-footed, and so we may try to respect only those who are truly worthy of our respect. We may also come to believe that, at some level, all people are worthy of respect. We may learn that jobs and relationships become unbearable if we receive no respect in them; in certain social milieus we may learn the price of disrespect if we violate the street law: “Diss me, and you die.” Calls to respect this or that are increasingly part of public life: environmentalists exhort us to respect nature, foes of abortion and capital punishment insist on respect for human life, members of racial and ethnic minorities and those discriminated against because of their gender, sexual orientation, age, religious beliefs, or economic status demand respect both as social and moral equals and for their cultural differences. And it is widely acknowledged that public debates about such demands should take place under terms of mutual respect. We may learn both that our lives together go better when we respect the things that deserve to be respected and that we should respect some things independently of considerations of how our lives would go.

… Although a wide variety of things are said to deserve respect, contemporary philosophical interest in respect has overwhelmingly been focused on respect for persons, the idea that all persons should be treated with respect simply because they are persons. Respect for persons is a central concept in many ethical theories; some theories treat it as the very essence of morality and the foundation of all other moral duties and obligations.

I'm just beginning to appreciate the practical possibilities and wide range implications of respect as an ethical organizing principle. And throughout this coming church year, now again, I will touch upon aspects of respect.

For now, I ask you to think often, when you are out and about, navigating your larger world, in terms of respect.

Be aware of what you respect and why. Recognize when you behave in respectful ways, as well as disrespectful ways. Muse about the motivations and source of the respect you offer.

I urge you to be intentionally respectful, monitoring the effect on yourself as well as the results on others. The focus of course, is respect for other human beings, our fellow women and men. But there's so much more that we respect in the common course of our lives beyond human kind, even beyond the natural world. (One of our treasured UU principles speaks “to respect for the interdependent web of existence of which we are all a part.) We respect traditions, institutions, ideas, places and so much more.

Also think about self-respect in terms of your first nature (instincts) and your second nature actions (nurture).

I'm of the mind that respect is transformative; it makes you a better person and our world a better place. It should be our default attitude.

Here's a little consciousness raiser to begin: sign your e-mails or your letters Respectfully or Respectfully Yours, and mean it.

The Sexual Politics of Meat

2011-08-04T05:53:00.000-07:00

[I fashioned this sermon 20 years ago, June, 1991. It transformed me. I became a complete non-meat eater. It's interesting to return to this book's provocative critical feminist perspective, the linking of vegetarianism and feminism. I particularly like Ms. Adams' identification of vegetarianism as a reform movement. My predictions two decades ago regarding the ethical frontier of animal rights, may be coming true, as evidenced by UCH's emergent Animal Ministry initiative.]

Prove All Things

A critical attitude is one of Unitarian Universalism's distinctive traits. The first Unitarian sermon (Channing, 1819) used the text, "Prove all things, hold fast to that which good." For nearly two centuries, we Unitarians have examined, through the twin lenses of reason and experience, whatever has been presented to us as truth. In part, this critical attitude is fueled by a belief in progress – that revelation is ongoing, that knowledge is ever increasing, and that the individual and society may improve through advancing information and ongoing inspiration.

Within Unitarianism, it began 200 years ago, when Enlightenment reason looked critically at Puritan dogma and tradition, as well as the Bible. Within a generation, Idealism, taking the name of Transcendentalism, looked critically at first-generation Unitarianism based solely on a rational reliance on Scripture. Next, at mid-19th century, abolitionism looked critically at the prevailing social and political structure and declared slavery a great evil. In the latter years of the 19th century, evolution and science looked critically at supernatural assumptions and proposed a new naturalism. As this 20th century began, a modern humanism, motivated by the social and physical sciences, asserted a new naturalism over an old supernaturalism. In our own era (the latter days of the 20th century), feminism has significantly challenged thousands of years of cultural patriarchy, reestablishing the order of relationships and seeking to recast social structures of access and power.

Through two centuries of "proving all things, holding fast to that which is good," there has been real advancement of insight and understanding, resulting in new realizations. I even say there has been movement toward perfection, though our reach will always exceed our grasp regarding absolute perfection.

Ethical Vegetarianism

This morning, I'm going to talk about vegetarianism as a critical outlook and the beginning of a reform movement, potentially as important as any that has moved Unitarianism toward the twin purposes of perfection of character and perfection of society.

My remarks draw from a recent book, The Sexual Politics Of Meat: A Feminist Vegetarian Critical Theory by Carol J. Adams. Perhaps I was waiting for such a book to come along. I was certainly ready for it. Every chapter brought consciousness-raising insight.

Before talking about the contents of the book and how the contents affected my outlook, I will review my own relationship with meat:

· When I was young my parents raised and harvested chickens. My father chopped off the chickens ' heads with a hatchet. The expression "like a chicken with its head cut off" always had vivid meaning for me. I can still see in my memory’s eye, headless birds careening about with blood spurting from severed necks. My mother cleaned them. I watched the plucking of feathers and smelled the distinctive aroma of eviscerated intestines. These were unforgettable formative experiences.

· Raised Catholic, Fridays were meatless; and since I wouldn't eat fish, one day each week, until I went off to college, I was vegetarian – perhaps, a bowl of potato soup or breaded zucchini.

· The first time I found meat truly repulsive occurred when I was in my early 20s. While living in Ottawa, Ontario, we were invited to a summer cottage along the Ottawa River for a Canada Day pig roast. When we arrived, a suckling pig was impaled on a spit, slowly turning above a bed of glowing coals. The flesh proved to be soft and sweet, pink and moist. It was remarkable and not in a good way. (I flashed Jonathan Swift's famous satire, "A Modest Proposal.") Served on a platter, its snout agape, I had a difficult time eating the exceedingly young, roasted flesh sliced from the carcass.

· Several years later, circa 1973, while viewing an autopsy as part of my ministerial training, standing a safe distance from the cadaver's chest being opened with a spinning saw, from the corner of my eye, I watched a lab assistant meticulously cleaning fat from a human liver. From that moment, I never ate liver again. It was also the beginning of an ethical realization that I shouldn't be eating meat at all.

· A dozen years ago, circa 1978, during my first year as a minister, I stopped eating red meat. And while I continued to eat chicken and fish, I began to avoid those so-called white meats, too.

· It was also early in my ministry that I began to read seriously Albert Schweitzer’s, finding his reverence for life ethic – “that which enhances life is good, that which destroys life is evil “– especially congenial to my own progressing way of knowing and doing.

· A couple of years ago, Ellie and I spent an afternoon on a fair sized Wisconsin dairy farm. It was a bad day for the farmer. The night before, a cow had strangled itself, when it twisted its neck in a stanchion. It was lying in the muck behind the barn with blood still draining from its nostrils and its eyes staring blankly. The renderer’s truck arrived, full of contorted carcasses, to winch another dead cow aboard. During the afternoon milking, a young cow being milked for the first time after giving birth broke free and rampaged through the barn; the farmer, taking no chance, shot it. The rifle shot resounded while we bottle-fed his calves soon to be slaughtered for veal. This experience started me thinking about dairy products as I had years earlier begun to think about meat.

· I'm not a true vegetarian, since I've continued to eat animal flesh, though only white meat and even that meat infrequently. Yet my progressing consciousness hasn't allowed my conscience to rest. I don't think a moment of eating any animal flesh has passed in the last dozen years without an accompanying awareness that to do so was probably not morally right.

The Sexual Politics Of Meat is a book I am ready for. It is propitious and will probably change my behavior. Carol Adams' reasoning is compelling – hard for me to ignore when processed by my own power to reason and through my life experiences.

A Feminist Critique

The thesis of The Sexual Politics Of Meat is provocative. Ms. Adams maintains that the same cultural attitudes and hierarchies of power that oppress women also oppress animals. As women have been and continue to be objectified – not respected for their spirit of being – similarly the spirit of being of animals is not respected; therefore the animals are objectified. In her book Ms. Adams presents vegetarianism as not a fad but as a valid and valuable reform – a logical extension and application of feminist criticism.

Ms. Adams' analysis of the meaning of meat is an exercise in demythologizing symbolic language, revealing how language masks reality and enforces patriarchy. She writes:

"From the leather in our shoes, the soap so we use to cleanse our face, the down in our comforter, the meat we eat, and the dairy products we rely on, our world as we know it structured around the dependence on the death of the other animals. The death of the other animals is an accepted part of life, either envisioned as being granted in Genesis 1:26 by a human-oriented God who instructs us that we may dominate the animals or conceptualized as a right because of superior rationality. For those who hold to the dominant viewpoint in our culture, the surprise is not that animals are oppressed (though that is not the term they would use to express human beings relationship to the other animals), the surprise is that anyone would object to this. Our culture generally accepts animals' oppression and finds nothing ethically or politically disturbing about the exploitation of animals for the benefit of people. Hence our language is structured to convey this acceptance.”

She makes a compelling argument regarding meat in terms of what she calls an absent referent. What is meat, really? Meat is the flesh of a dead animal. In every instance, when you say meat, the absent referent is a once living animal. You eat a hamburger, well, the absent referent is cow. How did that cow die? It was slaughtered – stunned and bled, thereby killed, then dismembered and ground. But rather than think of meat in this manner, we obfuscate and distance ourselves from the reality through symbolic language.

Ms. Adams correctly points out that for most of us, suburbanites and urbanites, our major interaction with animals is through meat, though we don't often think about it in such a manner. "We eat them. This simple fact is the key to our attitudes to other animals, and also the key to what each one of us can do about changing these attitudes." She suggests when you eat meat, think, how am I now interacting with an animal?

Saying that probably makes you uncomfortable. I know that it makes me uncomfortable. Adams knows this, too, observing:

"On an emotional level everyone has some discomfort with the eating of animals. This discomfort is seen when people do not want to be reminded of what they are eating while eating, nor to be informed of the slaughterhouse activities that make meat eating possible; it also is revealed by the personal taboo that each person has toward some form of meat: either because of its form, such as organ meats, or because of its source, such as pig or rat, insects or rodents. The intellectual framework of language that enshrouds meat eating protects these emotional responses from beginning examined. This is nothing new; language has always sided with us in sidestepping sticky problems of conceptualization by obfuscating the situation."

Ms. Adams asks, do you see yourself as eating a succession of chops, burgers, and steaks? Real food for real people? Or do you see yourself consuming – as does the average American in a lifetime – 43 pigs, 3 lambs, 11 cows, 4 calves, 1107 chickens, 45 turkeys, and 861 fish?

She further points out that language is not just male-centered but also human-centered. We generally use the word animal as though it did not apply to us, too. Our language is structured to avoid our essential biological identity with non-human animals.

Here we squarely face the real issue of the relationship between human animals and non-human animals. Is it moral to use animals – to turn them them into things, to objectify them? Indeed, a deeper issue involves what we UUs call the interdependent web of existence, specifically our place in an intricate web of life where life form is connected to life form. What does it mean when we say we have respect for the interdependent web of existence? What is that respect for, if not for life in all forms, what Ms. Adams calls the spirit of being. Throughout her critical analysis, Ms. Adams observes that much of the protein we eat comes from the female of the species – what she calls feminized protein.

Ethical vegetarianism joined to an animal rights movement challenge long held attitudes of oppression and violence by human animals on non-human animals. In the Sexual Politics Of Meat Ms. Adams joins the feminist cause to the cause of ethical vegetarianism – challenging the attitudes of the patriarchy, that are oppressive (not respectful of life) and do violence (hurtful of life). At the very heart of her argument for feminism and vegetarianism is reverence for a spirit of life no matter what form a life may take. Life is sacred. Ms. Adams recommends that an effective personal strategy to undermine the patriarchy with its violent and death-dealing ways is to, in her poetic phrasing, "eat rice have faith in women." In this regard, vegetarianism is not a fad, but is a serious and potentially powerful reform movement.

I've been long pondering the meaning of meat within my own life. This book galvanizes years of thinking and leads to these personal conclusions:

1. The distinction between human and nonhuman animals continues to dissolve into a swelling naturalism. It's clearer and clearer to me that the spirit of being in me identifies with the spirit of being in all creatures. I am more and more loath to do violence on other creatures, as well as on fellow human beings.

2. There is not just an ethic but also an aesthetic in vegetarianism. Vegetarianism transforms what is a social obsession – eating – into a more thoughtful and graceful act. And when eating is so, it enhances my whole pattern of living.

3. That being an ethical vegetarian is indeed a powerful personal political act challenging a dysfunctional and dangerous existing order, as well as giving ongoing persuasive witness to a more fitting and beneficial order.

4. Vegetarianism fits into a "seamless garment" scheme of reverence for life, pushing my humanism into the deeper spirituality of what I call Natural Religion.

I've left out big pieces of Carol Adams' analysis, particularly regarding the cultural identification of meat eating with maleness, superiority, and power. Though her book is only 190 pages, the reasoning in those pages is dense and rich. The book is part cultural history, part moral philosophy, and part literary criticism. (For instance she deals with Mary Shelley's Frankenstein as a significant vegetarian text.) It's a tough but good read.

And What About You?

I suspect that many of you have felt discomfort this morning – a dis-ease. Some images have been gory and other images have been discomforting. There's good cause why you should find them so. Examine your responses, particularly the visceral feelings. And then examine the arguments of ethical vegetarianism, as presented by Ms. Adams. Ponder the practical meaning of meat (the missing referent) and how that meaning permeates your life. Think about the reform – the perfection – of your character and of society that vegetarianism may offer.

At the very least, prove to your satisfaction through your abilities to think and experience that meat eating is right and good. ("Prove all things." and as always, "hold fast to that which is good.")

How Free Are We, Really?

2011-06-13T09:25:00.000-07:00

Sorry, Your Soul Just Died

One of the more important essays of our era comes from Tom Wolfe, novelist and student of the American Experience. It dates from 1996 and was originally published in Forbes Magazine—“Sorry, Your Soul Just Died.” In it, Wolfe reported about and riffed in his inimitable way on the astounding new discipline of neuroscience that was drawing on tools, such as MRI, magnetic resonance imaging, to view, in actual time, the firing of the brain. In reviewing the new brain sciences and related evolutionary studies, Wolfe considered the timeless dialogue between Nurture and Nature. This dichotomy is one facet of the philosophical/theological debate regarding determinism and free will. He predicted a new determinism that would undercut both liberal humanism and traditional theology regarding the notions of free will and the human soul. In this essay Wolf was both provocateur and seer. Wolfe wrote:

Here we begin to sense the chill that emanates from the hottest field in the academic world. The unspoken and largely unconscious premise of the wrangling over neuroscience's strategic high ground is: We now live in an age in which science is a court from which there is no appeal. And the issue this time around, at the end of the twentieth century, is not the evolution of the species, which can seem a remote business, but the nature of our own precious inner selves.

… [T]he new generation of neuroscientists are not cautious for a second. In private conversations, the bull sessions, as it were, that create the mental atmosphere of any hot new science—and I love talking to these people—they express an uncompromising determinism.

They start with the most famous statement in all of modern philosophy, Descartes's "Cogito ergo sum," "I think, therefore I am," which they regard as the essence of "dualism," the old–fashioned notion that the mind is something distinct from its mechanism, the brain and the body. (I will get to the second most famous statement in a moment.) This is also known as the "ghost in the machine" fallacy, the quaint belief that there is a ghostly "self" somewhere inside the brain that interprets and directs its operations. Neuroscientists involved in three–dimensional electroencephalography will tell you that there is not even any one place in the brain where consciousness or self–consciousness (Cogito ergo sum) is located. This is merely an illusion created by a medley of neurological systems acting in concert. The young generation takes this yet one step further. Since consciousness and thought are entirely physical products of your brain and nervous system—and since your brain arrived fully imprinted at birth—what makes you think you have free will? Where is it going to come from? What "ghost," what "mind," what "self," what "soul," what anything that will not be immediately grabbed by those scornful quotation marks, is going to bubble up your brain stem to give it to you? I have heard neuroscientists theorize that, given computers of sufficient power and sophistication, it would be possible to predict the course of any human being's life moment by moment, including the fact that the poor devil was about to shake his head over the very idea. I doubt that any Calvinist of the sixteenth century ever believed so completely in predestination as these, the hottest and most intensely rational young scientists in the United States at the end of the twentieth.

Now, I remind you that our Enlightenment Religion, Unitarianism, departed from The New England Calvinist church over the notion of free will. It is our founding tenet, that each of us is free and responsible to determine the course of her or his life. We hold our destiny in our own two hands. In human experience this leads to individual character (and so we are saved) and to progress in society (ever onward and upward).

This morning, I consider free will not only as a personally important consideration, but also as the hottest/most important intellectual debate of our day.

First and Second Nature

When I woke up on Monday, May 16, I didn’t expect that I’d be thinking about the notion of free will, one of the great philosophical/theological questions. But a NY Times article about the so-called housewives reality shows that plague the contemporary television landscape nudged me in that direction.

Critic Neil Genzlinger wrote, “’One of the annoying things about believing in free will and individual responsibility is the difficulty of finding somebody to blame your problems on,’ the great religious scholar P. J. O’Rourke wrote in Rolling Stone in November 1989. ‘And when you do find somebody, it’s remarkable how often his picture turns up on your driver’s license.’

“We are faced with two possibilities. One is that there is no free will, which means that God actually planned for there to be a 'Real Housewives of New Jersey ' and for people to watch it. Contemplating a universe built on that premise can lead only to collective insanity, and therefore the notion must be rejected.

“Thus we must embrace the other possibility: that there is free will, and that the enablers who make “The Real Housewives of New Jersey” possible could transform the show from the lame caricature it is, if only they — in Mr. O’Rourke’s formulation — looked at their driver’s licenses. That they have not done so suggests a need for some forcible action.”

Though tongue-in-cheek, this article led me down the Unitarian Universalist path of freedom and responsibility.

Personally, I don’t put God into the free-will equation. I am a Religious Naturalist and frame my musings by the insights of evolutionary biology and neuroscience. From these perspectives, I see both determinism and free will. For some years, I’ve mused about a First Nature and a Second Nature.

Our First Nature is our creatureliness—what has evolved over billions of years to become the Human Species that bends us toward generally shared behaviors that seem determined. (Anyone who has ever been sexually attracted to another knows how powerful First Nature influences are.)

Our Second Nature emerges from the workings of our incredible, highly evolved mind—its consciousness and self-consciousness. Through reason, we make choices that counter our First Nature instincts, and can be called a result of free will. (Though sexually attracted to another person, we might choose not to act on the urge for a variety of reasons, including a vow of exclusivity to another.)

Metaphorically, human nature describes a realm somewhere between angels and animals. The phrase “angels of our better nature,” speaks to what I understand as our Second Nature possibilities.

In the end, I maintain that each of us is responsible for her or his actions. O’Rourke has it right. When we begin to assess the source of our problems, the place to begin is one’s self. Yes, look at the face on your driver’s license. Or remember Michael Jackson’s reflections about the “Man in the Mirror.”

I'm starting with the man in the mirror
(Ooh!)
I'm asking him to change his ways
(Change his ways-Ooh!)
And no message could've been any clearer
If you wanna make the world a better place
(If you wanna make the world a better place)
Take a look at yourself and then make that...
(Take a look at yourself and then make that...)
Change!

The Soul Is Dead, But the Spirit Lives On

I always read David Brooks’s op-ed pieces in the New York Times. His politics are too right of center for my own point of view; however, he’s always well-reasoned and even more importantly draws upon much of the scientific research that I find authoritative, regarding the human condition. Brooks has an interest in morality, as do I. He often cites evolutionary biologists and psychologists, as well as neuroscientists who explore the landscape of the mind.

I’ve long been convinced that these areas of science have successfully challenged traditional philosophy, ethics, and theology. The popular writer Tom Wolfe, relatively early on, recognized the impact the new sciences, neuroscience, in particular, would have in a 1996 essay “Sorry Your Soul Just Died.”In it he wrote, “Thereupon, in the year 2006 or 2026, some new Nietzsche will step forward to announce: ‘The self is dead’—except that being prone to the poetic, like Nietzsche, he will probably say: ‘The soul is dead.’ He will say that he is merely bringing the news, the news of the greatest event of the millennium: ‘The soul, that last refuge of values, is dead, because educated people no longer believe it exists.’”

On Tuesday, May 17, Brooks posted an op-ed piece “Nice Guys Finish Last” in which he makes a case, based on recent scientific thought that human beings are intrinsically moral, though programmed by evolution to be selfish. Is this an oxymoron? No. Because evolution also involves complex equations to be cooperative and part of a community. If the group benefits, so the individual benefits, reasons Brooks.

Brooks continued, “In his book, ‘The Righteous Mind,’ to be published early next year, Jonathan Haidt joins Edward O. Wilson, David Sloan Wilson, and others who argue that natural selection takes place not only when individuals compete with other individuals, but also when groups compete with other groups. Both competitions are examples of the survival of the fittest, but when groups compete, it’s the cohesive, cooperative, internally altruistic groups that win and pass on their genes. The idea of ‘group selection’ was heresy a few years ago, but there is momentum behind it now.

In the end, Brooks makes a conservative pitch for religion/ethics, saying, “[T]he big upshot is this: For decades, people tried to devise a rigorous ‘scientific’ system to analyze behavior that would be divorced from morality. But if cooperation permeates our nature, then so does morality, and there is no escaping ethics, emotion and religion in our quest to understand who we are and how we got this way.

If I could question David Brooks, I’d ask him to name the “people” who sought a scientific system divorced from morality. Sounds a bit like a straw man to me. I’ve never seen science (scientists) wanting to diminish morality—or religion or God. Such a judgment comes from the religionists or traditionalists who become defensive.

My bottom line maintains that we human beings, by virtue of millions of years of creaturely evolution are hardwired to be moral. Morality has been a linchpin in a scheme that has allowed the human species emerge, survive, and yes, thrive.

A few years ago Jonathan Haidt, a leading evolutionary psychologist, described five moral colors, which he describes on his web site’s home page as

1) Harm/care, related to our long evolution as mammals with attachment systems and an ability to feel (and dislike) the pain of others. This foundation underlies virtues of kindness, gentleness, and nurturance.

2) Fairness/reciprocity, related to the evolutionary process of reciprocal altruism. This foundation generates ideas of justice, rights, and autonomy. [Note: In our original conception, Fairness included concerns about equality, which are more strongly endorsed by political liberals. However, as we reformulate the theory in 2010 based on new data, we are likely to include several forms of fairness, and to emphasize proportionality, which is more strongly endorsed by conservatives]

3) Ingroup/loyalty, related to our long history as tribal creatures able to form shifting coalitions. This foundation underlies virtues of patriotism and self-sacrifice for the group. It is active anytime people feel that it's "one for all, and all for one."

4) Authority/respect, shaped by our long primate history of hierarchical social interactions. This foundation underlies virtues of leadership and followership, including deference to legitimate authority and respect for traditions.

5) Purity/sanctity, shaped by the psychology of disgust and contamination. This foundation underlies religious notions of striving to live in an elevated, less carnal, more noble way. It underlies the widespread idea that the body is a temple which can be desecrated by immoral activities and contaminants (an idea not unique to religious traditions).

Previous remarks regarding First Nature and Second Nature have relevance here. To my reckoning Second Nature is the rationalization and application of First Nature instincts, including the five moral colors. To these five instincts, I certainly add the mammalian bonding instinct which has resulted in a cornucopia of the various nuanced expression of love.

To return to Wolfe and the soul, the soul may be dead, but the human spirit is more vibrant than ever—a source of awe and wonder. We are one in the sense that our desires and drives are essentially the same, coded by the complex wonder of our shared DNA. We are many in the sense that we develop a second nature that modifies our first nature and makes each unique. In this context we have plenty of free will and in our own life span create the character we choose to become.

When we speak of such notions as transcendence, soul, even human spirit, we are really talking about second nature qualities. I’d say that our second nature is a sublime imperative. Every conscious deed we do presents us with choices. Each choice forges our character.

Red and Green May Days

2011-04-29T12:52:00.000-07:00

Red May Day

May 1 is a curious day on the seasonal calendar—a day around which are a variety of observances, what an old UU children’s curriculum called Holidays and Holy Days.

May Day celebrations fall into the broad categories of Red and Green. First, Red May Day:

While the US celebrates a national holiday in September called Labor Day, around the world, May 1 is the traditional international day to honor workers—the gains they have collectively made through the years, as well as fruits of their labor that benefit society. Why May 1? Well, the date commemorates a still controversial event that took place in Chicago in 1886: the Haymarket Affair.

I remember the first time I realized that I stood in what was once known as Haymarket Square, on the north edge of the loop, where Randolph and Des Plaines Streets. It was at least a decade ago. I had unintentionally rambled into what was nondescript open space and, embedded in the pavement, I came upon an inauspicious brass plaque that marked the spot where on May 3, 1886, a bomb was thrown at a workers’ rally that shook the world. I was amazed that this was the only commemoration of one of the significant events of Chicago, indeed world, history.

Here’s a recent Chicago Sun Times account that cogently describes the event:

The story of the Haymarket Incident is rich in themes that resonate to this day.

It was a time when Americans felt threatened by terrorists. When suspicion fell heavily on certain groups of immigrants. When basic civil rights, such as free speech, were under attack in the name of national security.

On May 3, 1886, two men were killed by police outside a McCormick reaper factory on the Southwest Side, where striking workers were demanding an eight-hour day.

The following night, several thousand protesters, outraged by the killings, turned out for a rally at the Haymarket, west of today's Loop. One flier promoting the rally -- and this really alarmed the police -- called for "revenge" and encouraged workers to fight back with weapons: "To arms, we call you, to arms!"

The rhetoric at the rally was just as fiery, with anarchists calling for not just an eight-hour day, but the complete overthrow of the capitalist system. The rally was otherwise peaceful, however, so much so that Mayor Carter Harrison, who had stopped by to observe, walked home early.

But as the rally was winding down, when only a few hundred protesters were still present, about 180 police officers marched to the makeshift speaker's stand -- the bed of a Crane's Co. wagon. An officer ordered the crowd to disperse and, at that moment, somebody threw a bomb into the cops' ranks.

One officer was killed almost instantly. Gunfire and general panic broke out. At least four workers were killed. Six more officers would die of their injuries in the coming weeks.

Precisely what else happened that night remains a matter of intense disagreement, but what followed is indisputable -- a shameful travesty of justice.

Eight protestors were arrested and charged with conspiracy in the death of the police officer. There was a speedy and quick trial. Five were found guilty and four hanged, the fifth condemned man committed suicide by biting on a blasting cap; the other three were later pardoned by Governor John Peter Altgeld. The trial drew international interest/protest and was generally considered a miscarriage of justice.

The bomber was never identified. The police had acted against the mayor’s wishes and possibly killed their comrades by friendly fire. Altgeld’s pardons seemed to verify the injustice of the trial and executions, that he did it on the day after the dedication of a martyr’s monument, had unmistakable significance. (He actually announced the pardons at the monument’s dedication.)

In 1893, just in time for the Columbian Exposition and a flood of visitors, a monument to the worker martyrs of Haymarket Square was erected in Forest Park Cemetery, where they were buried. The monument, often called the Statue of Liberty for international workers, depicts a woman representing Justice (the five condemned men before the hanging sang the Marseilles) placing a crown of laurel on a fallen worker. 8,000 attended the dedication.

This monument has been restored in time for the 125^th anniversary of the Haymarket Affair. This week pay attention to the observances and perhaps even visit the monument. (This afternoon at 1:00 p.m. there will be a special progam at the monument, 863 Des Plaines Avenue in Forest Park.)

The first monument to this Haymarket Affair, funded by Chicago’s Union League and erected in 1889, commemorating the fallen policeman Mathias Degan, has had a telling history. You only need to look at it to discern what it represented: law and order. It was deemed a traffic hazard, though, and a year later it was moved from Haymarket Square to Union Park at Randolph and Ogden Avenues. In 1927 a streetcar driver drove his streetcar into it, declaring he’d grown tired of looking at it. It was removed to a safer location in Union Park. In 1958 the statue was returned to Haymarket Square. During the Vietnam War protests and ’68 Democratic Convention it was so frequently vandalized, that in 1972 the statue was taken first to the lobby of Police Headquarters and then in 1976 to a protected atrium at the Police Academy, out of public sight. In 2007, after extensive refurbishment, including a new pedestal, it was returned to Police Headquarters.

Now, on the Haymarket site there’s a recently installed monument to the 1886 Affair, a sculpture by Mary Brogger erected by the city in 2004. It depicts the wagon from which the speakers spoke as well as the mayhem of that famous moment. The official narrative pays a curious homage to all participants. One of the several plaques at the monument’s base reads, “Over the years, the site of the Haymarket bombing has become a powerful symbol for a diverse cross-section of people, ideals and movements. Its significance touches on the issues of free speech, the right of public assembly, organized labor, the fight for the eight hour work day, law enforcement, justice, anarchy and the right of every human being to pursue an equitable and prosperous life. For all, it is a poignant lesson in the rewards and consequences inherent in such human pursuits.”

Given the recent and continuing brouhaha over unions, particularly public unions in the states of Wisconsin and Ohio, I recommend the Haymarket Affair as an historical window of understanding. You can make a contemplative pilgrimage among these three monuments. I bend toward Martyrs’ Monument as the one that moves me the most and contains the abding truth of the Haymarket Affair to which I resonate.

The course of organized labor has always been contentious. My experiences in Youngstown in the late 1970s, as Little Steel vanished in the Mahoning Valley overnight, led me to greatly sympathize with the steel workers over the capitalists and corporations who had run the mills. But that’s another tale. I reference it as the influence that bends me to be pro-union.

More generally, as a matter of personal dignity and character, I find virtue and value in work. And as my earlier reading suggests, I think as a cultural matter we need to respect and support workers for their sake and very selfishly for our sake. They provide us the varied stuff that fill our lives.

I’m amused at the course of Red May Day as International Workers Day in the United States, following its proclamation by International workers in 1890. After WWI, the Veterans of Foreign Wars lobbied to make May 1 Americanization Day. In 1949 Americanization Day became Loyalty Day. President Eisenhower designated May 1 Law Day as well.

In my own understanding, in this time of acute globalization May 1 is a good time to pay particular attention to workers around the world, as well as our nation.

Green May Day

I think of these early May days as “the high tide of the year,” after the 19^th century Unitarian poet James Russell Lowell. He was referencing June, but then spring comes later in New England than here in the Heartland.

I say the high tide of spring is rising. You only need to look around you: leaves are unfurling, grass is growing shaggy, and the yellow of forsythia, the purple of red-bud, and the white of a host of flowering shrubs and trees bring ephemeral beauty—so delicate and cheerful.

By the solar calendar, the early May celebrations coincide with the cross-quarter day, halfway between the Vernal Equinox and the Summer Solstice—actually May 5. But it’s not the calendar, but something in the human spirit that responds to the season’s flowing tide and creates festivals, which in my estimation weave in and out of each other across millennia, so it’s not easy to identify a cultural cause and effect. However, the underlying spirit is consistent.

The more ancient of the festivals, “called Beltane by the Celts, Walpurgis by the Teutons, and Floralia by the Romans, … were a time of ‘wearing of the green.’ Throughout the Northern Hemisphere, the month of May is a time to celebrate renewal of life. May is named for Maia, grandmother, the Goddess of death and fertility. Maia scorned marriage, so it was a good idea to put weddings off until June. Although less stern goddesses now oversee May festivities, wreaths and baskets of Hawthorn are still used in some May festivals in Maia's honor.”

We celebrate May Day here at UCH in the Celtic fashion that became medieval British custom. The central symbol is the Maypole that mythologists discern to have multiple meaning. 1) It represents the axis mundi or the pivot on which the earth, and also the heaven, turn. Perhaps the weaving of the ribbons in a circular dance weaves a new order on the world which has become disordered since the last spring. 2) Surely the Maypole is yet another of one of the greatest archetypes, the World Tree or the Tree of Life. The world tree has association with the Norse god Odin, who tied upon it was granted the Runes and later by, Christian tradition is associated with the Cross on which Jesus died. 3) A third, but I would argue in a mythic sense, first and preeminently, it is a fertility symbol—the male phallus—balanced by the female symbols of baskets and wreaths traditionally carried by the young girls weaving the ribbons around the pole.

In old England this was a lusty time when pretend marriages were performed around the pole, allowing young couples to “go into the green” to do what young couples have forever done. If there was a child as a result, it is said they it went unacknowledged by the father and was attributed to be an act of God.

The older English festivities included a May Queen, a lusty figure true to the very name of the month. As you’ve already learned May is named for Maia, one of the Pleiades (seven sisters) of mythology, goddess of renewal. Hawthorn sprigs, worn by all, honored her. Later tradition replaced Maia with a more virtuous Queen Marian. (Yes, the same Marian who appeared in later Robin Hood tales.)

Queen Marian, riding a white horse, was a central figure of later May festivities. How she originated is moot, but the poet/mythologist Robert Graves identified her with a sea goddess, a virgin, dressed in blue, wearing a string of pearls. These attributes also suggest Mary, the Mother of Jesus, don’t they? In later years, medieval and later, May became the month of Mary and is still celebrated as such among many Catholics who honor The Blessed Virgin with flowers. So, in this regard Mary appears to continue ancient Roman festivities fashioned to the goddess of flowers—Flora.

In more recent years, culminating in the Victorian era, there was a lovely May Day custom of secretly, anonymously leaving May Baskets on front doors/porches. These little baskets, filled with flowers and sprigs, as well as little gifts, were given without any obligation of return. I wonder if this isn’t a kind of imitation of Nature’s free gifts that come so liberally in this wondrous season.

I love all these associations, and I’ve touched upon some, but not all of Green May Day festivals and observances in our cultural heritage.

There’s no great lesson here, except what might be the greatest lesson of all: To Love Life and Life’s great surge that is in the heart of spring as well in the human breast, a rising tide of desire that keeps Life through the seasons and generations.

Now the heart is so full that a drop overfills it,

We are happy now because God wills it;

No matter how barren the past may have been,

'T is enough for us now that the leaves are green;

We sit in the warm shade and feel right well

How the sap creeps up and the blossoms swell;

We may shut our eyes, but we cannot help knowing

That skies are clear and grass is growing;

The breeze comes whispering in our ear,

That dandelions are blossoming near,

That maize has sprouted, that streams are flowing,

That the river is bluer than the sky,

That the robin is plastering his house hard by;

And if the breeze kept the good news back,

For other couriers we should not lack;

We could guess it all by yon heifer's lowing,--

And hark! how clear bold chanticleer,

Warmed with the new wine of the year,

Tells all in his lusty crowing!

from “The Vision of Sir Launfal,” James Russel Lowell

Sense of Wonder: Easter Sunday 2011

2011-04-25T08:17:00.000-07:00

In 1962, while Nature was literally dying, Rachel Carson audaciously, gently wrote of a Silent Spring, an imaginary but plausible season, when the customary birds wouldn’t be singing, because they had been eradicated by human artifice. A prime culprit was a very effective insecticide (dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane) with a harmless acronym: DDT. (Remember these were the days when better living was being proclaimed through chemistry.) DDT was liberally sprayed across the landscape to kill mosquitoes and other objectionable insects, but killing other creatures, causing the likes of birds and squirrels excruciating deaths. Other unintentioned consequences affected other species, such as eagles which ate DDT infested fish, their eggs becoming too fragile to hatch chicks.

In 1962 this rather unassuming but persistent and poetic woman, Rachel Carson, helped launch an environmental movement that arguably saved Nature in America. Rachel Carson is a contemporary hero and an Earth Mother whose wisdom resonates.

I’ve made a study of Ms. Carson, inspired in part by a fine, one woman presentation of her by author/actor Kaiulani Lee that I recently re-aired on public television. (I’m doing my best to give kudos to Public Broadcasting these days.)

On this Easter Sunday, in concert with the rising tide of Nature in the spring as well as in recognition of a Web of Life saved and being saved by awareness and conservation, I speak first to Ms. Carson’s understated ethical and spiritual understandings.

First her ethics, what might be called in aggregate an environmental ethic. In Silent Spring, she proposed three ethical reasons to rescue and keep Nature: 1) for purposes of human health, 2) out of respect for the inherent value of non-human life, and 3) to preserving Nature for human edification and happiness. The first, for purposes of human health is, in a good sense, a thoroughly selfish reason. The second and third reasons, respect for the life of another and the beauty and meaning that Nature brings, lead into Ms. Carson’s spirituality, though she didn’t actually speak explicitly about religious matters, as such.

She once spoke to how her reverence for life had concrete sources. That such an awareness comes “… from some personal experience, perhaps the sudden, unexpected sight of a wild creature, perhaps some experience with a pet. Whatever it may be, it is something that takes us out of ourselves that makes us aware of other life. From my own memories, I think of the sight of a small crab alone on a dark beach at night, a small and fragile being waiting at the edge of the roaring surf, yet so perfectly at home in its world. To me it seemed a symbol of life, and of the way life has adjusted to the forces of its physical environment. Or I think of a morning when I stood in a North Carolina marsh at sunrise, watching flock after flock of Canada geese rise from resting places at the edge of a lake and pass low overhead. In that orange light, their plumage was like brown velvet. Or I have found that deep awareness of life and its meaning in the eyes of a beloved cat.”

And in a magazine article (Woman’s Home Companion 1952) that became a posthumous little book called The Sense of Wonder she asked, “ Is the exploration of the natural world just a pleasant way to pass the golden hours of childhood or is there something deeper?”

She replied, “I am sure there is something much deeper, something lasting and significant. … Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. There is symbolic as well as actual beauty in the migration of the birds, the ebb and flow of the tides, the folded bud ready for the spring. There is something healing in the repeated refrains of nature—the assurance that dawn comes after the night and spring after the winter.”

Earlier this church year, I gave a sermon that asked “Do We Need Nature More than Ever?” I answered yes, of course we do. I argued, “Parents, I’ve come to believe, have a moral obligation to ensure that their children grow up nurtured by Nature. And though an intellectual understanding, such as acquired in school, or via natural history museums, or books and videos has value in this regard, yet none of these methods approach what’s acquired by a child getting down and dirty and maybe holding an earthworm, grasshopper, snake, or even a lifeless bird. (Anecdotally, contemporary parents loathe their children being “contaminated” by direct contact with Nature.)”

I consider Rachel Carson an authority on the spiritual possibilities of a direct relationship with Nature. In her words you heard earlier, in the experience of Nature, there is something lasting and significant. What this something is, to use words that describe a mystical experience, is something both ineffable and noetic. Ineffable means that it defies description, though we strain to describe it. Noetic means it brings knowledge/understanding. Both are matters of personal experience.

I believe that with every mystical encounter with Nature in its parts and in its larger systems, in the micro and the micro schemes, you come to directly realize again and again, something deep—lasting and significant.

Rachel Carson’s posthumous little book that I mentioned earlier, The Sense of Wonder, in my opinion, is a genuine religious classic. Taken from a "Women's Home Companion" 1952 article written for parents to better nurture their children; it’s also a text for adults to keep their sense of wonder alive and vital.

[I then read an excerpt from The Sense of Wonder.]

By Their Fruits

2011-04-11T08:34:00.001-07:00

[The person who bought one of the two sermons I offered at November's Holiday Harvest Auction made this request when I asked for a topic to speak on: "What Experiences in My Life Influenced My Decision to not Believe in the Divinity of Christ." In other words, as I have heard you preach over the years, I have come to think that you think of Jesus as a great religious thinker, perhaps a prophet even, like Mohammed, Buddha, or Abraham. But, I don't believe you believe that Jesus is the Son of God, nor is he any more special than those other guys. I'm not interested in the philosophical/intellectual reasons that you arrived at this belief, as much as learning any personal, earlier experiences in your life, as you lived it in this predominately Christian country that brought you to this conclusion."

Now, this is a theme I wouldn't have chosen on my own, in part because, relative to Christianity, I'm not reactive and I don't like to appear anti-Christian in the pulpit. If forced to label myself, I'd say I'm post-Christian.

So, here are personal, very mundane experiences that have contributed to my thorough post-Christian point of view regarding Jesus.]

A Catholic Youth

I was raised Roman Catholic in suburban (then rural) Wilmington, DE, in the 1950s. My mother and father were both Catholic, though of differing intensity. She was the daughter of hard working German speaking immigrants from Austro-Hungary. He was the son of a backsliding Irish American mother and indifferent English American father, both nominally Roman Catholic, essentially non-practicing.

My earliest church memories took place in a nearby river town, blue collar Claymont, surely the same parish where Joe Biden worshipped in his Claymont youth. I remember black granite, traditional Catholic building, solid and modest, cool and dry, and redolent of burning candles. In order to prepare for my first communion, I attended the parish school's 2^nd grade class for two weeks. I have three memories from then, of being thrust into an alien environment: 1) a long narrow classroom crowded with twice as many Boomer kids as was my secular classroom, 2) the classroom sale of crackers and candy from a huge glass jug during recess, 3) and a young nun who sat with me at lunch and asked “Do you eat to live, or live to eat?” I wish I could show you the black and white photo of me in my white suit, hands folded in prayer in front of the Claymont church after the ceremony took place. The somber confessional and the wafer that stuck to the roof of my dry mouth are still vivid. We communicants had been warned, under the penalty of a grave sin, not to leave the communion rail without swallowing the host; and, oh yes, not to chew the host, under penalty of an even graver sin. I didn’t feel anything sacred. It was, in a word I might have used then, creepy.

We moved from that parish to a startup parish nearer our home. The suburbs north of Wilmington, as they were across the country, were burgeoning, turning farm fields and forests into tract developments. The new church, named after Mary Magdalene, first met in the building that would become the parish school. (To my meager understanding, St. Mary Magdalene was something of fallen women, perhaps prostitute rescued by Jesus.) The sanctuary would eventually become the school’s cafeteria. It wasn’t in the least awe inspiring, to say the least, though I didn’t know it at the time. Some of the dreariest memories of my youth took place there: a Latin mass that sounded like so much mumbo jumbo, scant majesty and little ceremony, and strange homilies that often sought to explain paradoxical gospel readings. (My father enjoyed skewering the homilies at Sunday dinner. For example, he could never accept that the prodigal son received forgiveness, insisting, in his way, that this just wasn’t fair.)

As a family we didn’t go to confession often (my father never), only at the obligatory times of Easter and Christmas. It usually meant standing in a long line, waiting for a seat in one of the two booths in the center of which sat the priest confessor. Once, as a young adolescent, I stood in line in front of my mother. I rehearsed a half-year of sins, which I made up, trying to find the right proportion of venial sins to impress the priest of honesty/sincerity. When I left the booth and walked past my mother, I had a smirk on my face at the farce of it all—a smirk she interpreted, and remembers to this day, as a beatific smile after having the burden of my sins lifted from my soul. Of course, I let her keep that impression.

A few years later, before Christmas, a few buddies and I rushed to confession after playing an afternoon of basketball. The three confessionals had exceedingly long lines. But the head priest, an older fellow, was sitting at the communion rail, hearing confession. There was no line. What sinner wanted to confess transgressions out in the open? So we agreed among ourselves to get out of there as quick as possible to get back to our game; we used the priest at the altar. We shared a common experience. When we got outside we exploded as one, “He was drunk!” We smelled the alcohol and heard him slur his words. That was the last time I went to confession.

So, by the time I entered college, I’d finished with my Catholic upbringing, though I didn’t recognize it as such. About religion I was green. I knew little and didn’t care much.

Early in my marriage to Ellie we talked about religion, what we might practice, if we were to practice. She’d been raised Federated, growing up in a small Upstate New York village where the Methodists and Northern Baptists became one congregation to survive. Her family’s roots leaned toward the Methodists. In our conversation I said one of the dumbest, most illogical things I’ve ever said, reckoning that Catholic was the way for us to go, since the Catholics came first in the scheme of Christianity. She firmly dissuaded me of this line of reasoning.

The first 20 years of my life as a Catholic gave little impression of God and Jesus, though I blessed myself with holy water “In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, amen.”

A Unitarian in Training

I skip ahead, circa 1971-73, my years as an unformed theolog at the Department of Religious Studies at McGill, where I prepared for the Unitarian ministry. When I first thought of going to a theological school, still a graduate student at the University of Vermont in 1970, I’d bought a Bible, which Catholics of my era had little acquaintance with. I have vague memories of trying to read the Old Testament tales on my own, finding them incomprehensible.

A few years later, at McGill, I took both an Old and New Testament class, in the company of fellow students preparing for various traditional ministries: Anglican, Presbyterian, and United Church of Canada primarily. They were all Christian and the Bible was their primary source, as it is for all Protestants, who are truly people of the book. At the time I found them as a group to be intellectually dull, uninformed, and curiously disinterested in our studies in the scholarly tradition of the texts. I had no religious investment in these so-called inspired works, but took to biblical exegesis, a scholarly process of critical interpretation in the quest for meaning. When the grades were posted, I was amused and horrified to rank first in Old and second in New Testament—I who had scant prior knowledge and no commitment to scriptural authority compared to my Christian peers who would soon be preaching the gospel.

In 1976, in order to meet UUA requirements toward becoming a UU minister, before leaving Canada and doing an internship at First Universalist Society of Syracuse, in the company of a half a dozen other clergy-types, I engaged in an 11-week session of Clinical Pastoral Education at the Montreal General Hospital. (It was 1976, the year of the Olympics in Montreal.) We were all intern chaplains, under the supervision of a seasoned veteran chaplain. We had patient assignments, wrote detailed reports of encounters, and had daily encounter sessions along the lines of the old school of Transactional Analysis. (Remember, I’m Okay, You’re Okay?) My fellow participants seemed to me the strangest lot of clergy. I remember in particular a youngish, handsome Italian immigrant priest, a midlife Quebecois bother who looked like a woodcarving, and a paunchy Missouri Synod Lutheran midlife pastor. The priest had all sorts of sexual fantasies, the brother couldn’t talk about death, and the pastor was going through a nasty divorce and had one of the darkest personalities I’d ever encountered. I learned counseling skills and something about myself in such situations, but even more indelible was a sense of the clergy being a troubled profession. None of my colleagues seemed to embody the Christ they professed, in fact, they were tortured souls.

A final anecdote comes from my first church in Youngstown Ohio, First Unitarian on the edge of the old downtown. When I arrived, the congregation had a renter, a start-up Southern Baptist group that met before our 11 a.m. service on Sunday morning. I had nodding acquaintance with the minister. Toward the end of my 5.5 years there, they held a week long revival. In the midst of that time a small delegation of these Baptists appeared in my office one afternoon and proceeded to try and convert me. I was offended. I was their host and they had crossed a line. They told me I was bound for hell as were all in the world who hadn’t accept Jesus as Christ. All in the world, I asked? Yes, they argued, because modern technology had reached everyone. I didn’t begrudge their enthusiasm; but I thought them uncharitable and missing the mark that Jesus represented to my, by now, well-formed understanding of him. Later that week, in the middle of the night, I was awakened by a phone call from an hysterical woman who'd attended the Baptist revival. I agreed to meet her at my office. The Baptist service had left her with the impression she was a sinner doomed to hell and she needed to lay herself at the feet of Jesus. When I opened the door she rushed into the sanctuary and threw herself sobbing inconsolably on the steps leading up to the chancel.

Now, these are a few memorable impressions that came to my consciousness when I searched for life experiences that further persuaded me that Jesus Christ, the second person of the Trinity, who offered his life as a blood atonement to redeem humankind, who the culture has long called God IS NOT SO. This Christ is a matter of dogma, not reputable history.

After studying theology at McGill in the early 70’s I had my own abiding sense of Jesus as portrayed in the New Testament Gospels and other books, studied in the academy as an historical figure, often called the Historical Jesus and as redacted by a host of Unitarian forebears who, for two centuries have explored Jesus’s reflective question “Who do men say that I am?” (The latter was the title of a famous Unitarian book and church school curriculum written by our great religious educator Sophia Fahs in the 1950s.)

The New Quest for the Historical Jesus

I found a renewed interest in the historical Jesus in the 1990s, when under the influence of the Jesus Seminar, particularly its co-founder John Dominic Crossan of Chicago's DePaul University, a new Historical Jesus emerged, grounded in progressive studies of the texts of the era and a swelling of archeological discoveries. Here’s an apt summary of Crossan's work from a Wikipedia entry:

Crossan suggests Jesus was an illiterate "Jewish Cynic" from a landless peasant background, initially a follower of John the Baptist. Jesus was a healer and man of great wisdom and courage who taught a message of inclusiveness, tolerance, and liberation. "His strategy . . . was the combination of free healing and common eating . . . that negated the hierarchical and patronal normalcies of Jewish religion and Roman power . . . He was neither broker nor mediator but . . . the announcer that neither should exist between humanity and divinity or humanity and itself.

I largely subscribe to Crossan’s portrait of Jesus and recommend his thin monograph of the Jesus who lived, Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography. It's an essential text for anyone interested in an historically reconstructed Jesus.

Some years ago, during Holy Week, I heard Crossan being interviewed by Terry Gross regarding this book that had just been published. (I was traveling through the Sangre de Cristo--Blood of Christ--mountains in Northern New Mexico.) Toward the end of the interview, she asked him where he would be attending services that Easter. He gently responded that he doesn’t go to church anymore, because he doesn’t want to be offended by what’s said from the pulpit. It’s often so unchristlike.

I’ve long given up, too, on finding Jesus Christ in churches—or in Christianity generally.

Where I Expect to Find Jesus the Christ

Where I continue to expect to discover Jesus Christ is in individual believers transformed by their belief and His Presence. The historical Jesus I subscribe to has had considerable influence on me: early on as a young adult drawn to his Sermon on the Mount teachings on nonviolent resistance and more recently as a preacher of egalitarianism (particularly regarding women). But I often speculate that if I believed Jesus were indeed God, whose sacrificial Atonement gave me eternal life, how passionate I would be to embody the difficult but clear example he set. No matter what demands it made on me, I would have one choice to be, in imitation of Christ, as radical—even unto death—as Crossan has drawn Jesus to be.

In the final analysis, I say that through the generations professed Christians have failed through the millennia to embody what Jesus prayed for, and even more sought to establish in his brief three year ministry: the Kingdom of God, on Earth as it is in Heaven, what 2 Peter calls a “new world where righteousness dwells.”

Like Diogenes the Cynic, --remember the Wikipedia characterization of Jesus as a Jewish Cynic--, like Diogenes the Cynic, who traveled by daylight with a lantern in hand in search of an honest person, I keep a vigilant eye, ever open for a Christian who has been transformed by the Spirit of Christ to be radically Christ-like, too, unequivocally committed to inclusiveness, toleration, and liberation, who lets nothing stand in the way or mediate a direct relationship with the Divine for self and for others, and who follows the ways of Jesus as though her or his life depended on it.

I close with a simple and, for me, compelling text: Mt 7:16 " By their fruits ye shall know them."

Holy Food

2011-04-01T07:00:00.001-07:00

Gene Logsdon

I’ve grown fond of a blog, “The Contrary Farmer,” written by an Ohio “cottage farmer” named Gene Logsdon. He farms in the Upper Sandusky region south of Toledo. He’s 79 years old and advocates

small farms, though economically as a half time venture, with another job to supplement income;
organic methods, yet he will use herbicide in limited quantities in difficult areas;
and a host of compelling, alternative ways of raising crops and animals.

His attitudes are a complex cluster: idealistic, visionary, practical, critical, and appreciative.

Recently he’s become a voice for manure, including human waste, rather than chemical fertilizer. The title of his book about this, Holy Shit: Managing Manure to Save Mankind, reflects his persona as a down to earth, a little irreverent, and avuncular soul, who respects the old ways but looks to a sustainable future.

He was raised on a family farm not far from his current farm. He attended seminary for 10 years but chose a career that blended farming and writing, first as an editor of the magazine, Farm Journal based in Philadelphia. Twenty-five years ago, he returned to his Ohio roots and bought 32 acres with a house, 14 acres of which he now farms. (His parents’ farm had fallen to bankruptcy in the 1970s.)

A prolific writer, he has written scores of essays and a host of books, including 3 novels in addition to monographs on varying aspects of farming and the rural life—what’s left of it. What he has to say about farming and a good life touches virtue and grace, relative to ecological responsibility and personal happiness.

I rediscovered him several months ago. For more than 30 years I carried with me a poem he wrote and which I found in an anthology of the Farm Journal. (As it is often with a real book, I vividly remember the circumstances when I bought it: on a crisp and sunny winter’s afternoon on a remainder table outside an old- fashioned bookstore on Middlebury, VT’s main street.)

The poem made an impression on me then, and I went searching for it and its author at the end of December, when I thought my 93 year old mother was about to die. I was doing a little pre-grieving. My mother was raised on a New Jersey truck farm and so many of her ways were shaped by that long ago experience. The poem evokes her for me.

Here’s the poem, "Roots":

"You plant them early in July,” she told me,
The son who didn't know the pleasures of the old days."

Come February, the frost will take out all the bitterness.
Fixed right, they make the first good eating of the year. "

So I planted parsnips and planned, come February,
To take them to her to fix right, for who else could?
We 'd eat them together, relishing old-fashioned 'ways
That meant nothing except to our kind.

But February did not come for her, just November
With a cruel coldness that was not the weather only,
That was the weather least of all.
The greentops of the parsnips fell and died-their time.

A pile of leaves now 'rests within my garden,
Beneath which parsnips roots lie snug against the cold.
I stand and stare today, too long, at that low mound.
It looks like Mamma 's grave.

A last and tenuous link between her soul and mine,
Between old days dying and new ones yet to live,
Between an old woman saying good-bye
And a young man, taking root.

But who will cook those parnips, come February,
Who will eat them, relishing rich old ways?
And will the frost, by then,
Take out the bitterness?

Church of Almighty Good Food

An Internet search for the poem and author took me to Gene Logsdon’s blog, "The Contrary Farmer." I’ve read every posting since. He’s just published a third novel that joins the two chords of religion and food through a story that obviously conveys the author’s self-proclaimed contrary attitudes.

I enjoyed my reading of the novel, particularly for the way Logsdon insinuates his well-seasoned opinions and general outlook. Its obvious what he favors and what he eschews.

The book, Pope Mary & The Church of Almighty Good Food, tells a tongue in cheek tale of a quixotic priest serving two small parishes in the farmland south of Toledo, a cosmopolitan woman who returns to her home farm roots to recover after a failed romance in Chicago, and a host of minor characters rich in the ways and idiosyncrasies of the region.

The characters are thinly drawn; but the plot is thickly marbled with Logsdon’s views about farming and community, economics and ecclesiology. The plot turns on the closing of one of the little churches ensconced in the cornfields and how the community saves it by turning it into The Church of Almighty Good Food. The redeemed building, by novel’s end, has become a center for a community farmer’s market, surrounded by lush public garden plots and a public orchard. On festival days, when visitors come from as far away as Pittsburgh, a meal centered on roasted fresh corn is served in the old sanctuary, now converted into a dining hall. When people taste the corn for the first time, it was as though they had never tasted real corn before.

When I read the passages in the novel describing one of the festivals of The Church of the Almighty Good Food, I imagined a Breughel-like painting, teeming with ordinary folk enjoying one another and sumptuous foods in the midst of a sea of cornstalks. I even imagined a whisper from gently undulating tassels, “Serve it, and they will come.”

It’s clear that Logsdon doesn’t have much truck with the Catholic Church, which he apparently left behind years ago. Yet to my reading, he has abiding respect and gentle awe for natural spirituality. In an interview, he once said he wasn’t atheistic or agnostic; he was more an animist, if he had to describe his beliefs. He declared that he experienced spirituality in nature. Organized religion had pretty much gone off track, in his opinion.

In his blog, introducing his new novel, he wrote: “I was half way through the writing before I realized what my characters were telling me. In all religions (well, all Christian and Muslim sects anyway) the consumption of food is at the center of the worship ceremonies. The Eucharist or Communion service in Christian sects and Ramadan in Islam are really centered on spiritual and physical celebrations of eating communal meals, the Last Supper over and over again. Food really does, in an ecological sense anyway, transubstantiate or consubstantiate into body and blood, no big mystery about it. Food is supposed to be sacred, not fast. Maybe I should have titled the novel 'Holy Food,' to go with my other book,'Holy Shit.'"

There’s a theological term for communal meals and their affect, particularly the fellowship of the table that results: commensality. "The Fellowship of the Table" celebrates nature and human nature--bounty and community. (The root of commensality, commensal, means to live together without doing harm to one another.)

As I said in earlier remarks, I’m not a foodie, but I agree with Gene Logsdon that food holds the possibility of a spiritual connection, particularly when it connects us to Nature and to one another, and yes, to something transcendent, as the following selection from the novel suggests. Early in the novel the priest (Lone Ranger) and the title’s Pope Mary have a conversation:

"You talk about this kind of stuff in the pulpit?" Mary sounded incredulous.

"If you'd come to church you'd know that," he said, pointedly, but without accusation. He was glad she didn't come to church. She'd be a problem for sure. "I am trying to show the congregation how Christianity, especially in a rural parish like this one, should be concerned about not letting big business take our food independence away from us. Seems to me food has a spiritual value, sort of; that it is at the heart of a healthy, virtuous life." …

"You know something, Lone Ranger. You have a great idea there. Why don't you start a new religion based on sustainable farming instead of praying to some God that doesn't exist? Change St. Philo's name to Our Lady of Good Food. Or maybe The Church of the Divine Wine. Or how about Good Spirits Chapel." She still tried not to smile. "You know how people are. Once they got converted to the religion of good food, they'd load up the collection plate. Not for reward in the hereafter, but for right now. Something delicious to eat, And drink. What a great idea you have there, Lone Ranger."

Fr. Ray stared at her, aware that she was making fun of him. But just maybe she was on to something that he had not dared put into words even to himself. To her surprise, he nodded.

"And then we could make sense out of changing the bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ at Mass. If a person could understand that the food chain is the creative force we call God, then bread and wine would indeed become body and blood, literally."

It was one of his pet ideas, but one which, being utterly heretical, he had never talked about out loud before. Why had he now?...

Mary, on her part, was trying to build on her teasing, wondering if she could draw him out even farther. Maybe he wasn't a stuffy clergy type at all. Why she wanted to find out she was not sure. But something else had suddenly inserted itself into her mind. That food chain analogy he had suggested was the first time the Eucharist theology she had been raised on had ever made any sense to her. In a sudden flash, she realized that the whole idea of a church of good food might be more than just a joke.

“Tell you what, Lone Ranger. I know, and you know, that you don't really go along with the bishop on this church closing. I have a hunch you don't really go along with all that religious stuff you pretend to believe either. It's time to give serious thought to what you've really been up to. Turn that parish of yours into the Church of Good Spirits. Tell the Pope to go fly a kite.

[This essay, from my Ecclesiastes series, preceded the sermon]

Eating Seasonally

Our culture is food obsessed. I credit television with launching the trend, beginning with public broadcasting that has long offered half hour cooking shows, featuring certain cuisines and genial personalities cooking them. A recent movie “Julie and Julia,” in which a contemporary blogger cooks her way through the late twentieth century classic Mastering the Art of French Cooking by the first mega food personality Julia Childs, “The French Chef,” summarizes the evolution of the contemporary food obsession.

Cable television has ratcheted up the trend in recent years, with shows driven by over the top personalities and cooking competitions. There’s even a Food Network, all food, all day, all week.

Then the subtle and not so subtle effects of globalism have introduced Americans to world cuisines. All sorts of world cuisines abound. You never know what unexpected restaurants you find across the continent. For example, did you know that Washington D.C. abounds with Ethiopian restaurants?

In another dimension America has earned the apt moniker of Fast Food Nation, helping to fuel an epidemic of obesity, particularly among children. Fast food references both the ubiquitous drive-in chains as well as over processed convenience foods purchased in grocery stores. (I live only a couple of miles from the so-called Hamburger University of the McDonald Corporation and have often eaten at the campus lodge.) Insightful articles have connected the dots between inexpensive foods and federal agricultural policy, for instance, the results of a glut of cheap corn product sweeteners—“super size it!”

We can’t neglect the ethical dimension of mass produced foods whether it’s the result of Monsanto’s virtual monopoly of seed grain through genetically engineered and patented seeds or the inhumane treatment of factory farm animals.

The term “Foodies” embraces a wide spectrum from those who espouse only organic food, or those who advocate eating locally, or those who travel the blue highways in search of regional idiosyncrasies, such as deep-fried bacon with white gravy, or those who count the stars in a Michelin Guide before having a meal.

As a result of all of this and more, I’ve become mostly indifferent to food. I hear a Taoist-like adage in my head, “Too many tastes spoil the palate.”

It really takes something special to incite my taste buds and stir my culinary imagination, as it happened yesterday. I cut into a home-grown tomato, plucked from the vine and still warm from the summer sun. It was baseball size, gnarled, and tinted with green—not at all the commercially sold, perfectly red specimens of the fruit sold in the supermarket year round. But the flesh, when cut, had that perfect blend of firmness and juice, a distinctive, fresh aroma, and a taste, sweet and savory as TV chefs intone, that made my senses tingle. I realized I hadn’t really savored a tomato for more than a year, or should I say I hadn’t eaten a “real’ tomato over that time?

The sensations of the tomato took me back to my northern Delaware childhood, the large garden that my parents cultivated each year and which sustained our little family—truly my salad days when salad was an early spring offering and the greens had to be thoroughly washed to remove the soil in which they grew.

In my memory, I’ve just strolled through a growing season from the first tender spears of asparagus to parsnips left in the ground to winter and sweeten. As a child I quickly learned the succession and anticipated the progressing harvest. Indeed, “for everything a season.”

I further indulged my memory by recounting the seasonal foods of the various places we’ve lived over forty-five years: the exquisite sweetness of treacly maple syrup poured on snow outside a Vermont sugar shack in the thin sunlight of early spring; pea soup with chunks of carrots and coarse brown bread washed down with alcoholic cider during Quebec winters; salt potatoes of the early spring of Syracuse and the crisp, juicy apples from orchards on rolling hillsides cut by US 20 through Upstate New York; and the baskets of red peppers in the village farmer markets of the Chicago suburbs where I live—red peppers from the truck farms of Michigan that I roast to eat, as is, on slabs of fresh bread.

There’s no comparison between the experience of eating an ear of corn in mid-August only hours after being picked and eating a frozen ear with its ends docked, microwaved, and served in winter.

I could continue with more examples; however such indulgence might tip me toward the Foodie sensibility that I eschew. I’m not so much speaking to food as I am to its season and the successions. Ecclesiastes (“for everything there is a season”) has continued to alert me through the years to the idea of appropriate seasons of life as well as of the self. There’s something to be said about eating seasonally, not only for taste, but also for the anticipation that embeds one’s self into the rhythms and cycles of nature, heightening appreciation.

I continue to develop an aesthetic about food. Naturally, practically food fits into an overarching spiritual scheme of wholeness and health. My subsequent remarks will explore spiritual aspects of food.