Seventh Annual William Channing Gannett Awards

The Gannetts: Domesticating the Infinite

Religious institutions are often accused and found guilty of having an "edifice complex"—a kind of idolatry through architecture. But church buildings are deliberate and meaning-conveying constructions. How they carve and contain space, how they endure through time and exert their influence on the human imagination through generations is part of the collective religious experience. The effect on the individual is often subtle but persuasive.

I have been greatly affected by our space, our one hundred twenty year old Church Home.

I adore our worship space for so many reasons. It is warm with wood. It is relatively intimate. Yet its symbolism is rich.

When created by the congregation one hundred twenty ago it was called a Church-Home. The symbolism is obvious: the Living Room opening into the Auditorium represents the family as the starting place. The fireplace around which the mythic family gathers is the central element. And that element repeats in the Auditorium—as this large room was originally called—to represent how the family's essential values and needs are at the heart of liberal worship. And the name Auditorium indicates that this room was also intended to be a home for community events.

So in one flowing space family, church and society are joined together.

I adore the hymn written to dedicate this space in January 1889; Here Be No Man a Stranger (though we're more likely with our contemporary sensibilities to now say Here Be No One a Stranger. "Here be no one a stranger/no holy cause be banned/No good for one person/not counted/good for all the land."

I adore the historic architectural style—not just the chapel-likeness echoing church and home on an accessible human scale. I find the Arts and Crafts/ American Craftsman architectural style very appealing. The overall effect insinuates the craft of artisans working with local materials of pine and limestone (it's known locally as Lemont Limestone). It is also something of a reaction to the industrial revolution/machine age, as well as the rise of the city. After all in 1888, when this building was constructed Hinsdale was, for some, a suburban retreat from the city, yet accessible to the city by train.

The building bows to the Chicago vernacular with the rusticated stone arches of Sullivan/Adler and other turn of the twentieth century architects who made the Chicago arch a signature of a great and very modern city—the Metropolis of the Midwest.

The general design of this building came from the religious imagination of the founding minister of this congregation—William Channing Gannett—who sketched a floor plan on a single sheet of ruled paper, which then was executed by a local architect. (There is suspicion that it was really a young Frank Lloyd Wright who designed it—an early “illegal” or “gypsy” commission.)

Mr. Gannett had an impeccable New England Unitarian pedigree—his godfather was the saint-like founder of Unitarianism, William Ellery Channing; his father, Ezra Stiles Gannett was the Unitarian Association's founding president in 1825. William Channing Gannett was an intellectual protégé of Emerson and Parker, firmly joined to the radicals of the Western Unitarian Conference.

Mr. Gannett in the year he came to Hinsdale had forged the great compromise that kept the Christian Unitarians in fellowship with the radical Emerson/Parker wing. Perhaps no one else could have accomplished that. He also was a popular essayist. Mr. Gannett's celebrated essay, “House Beautiful” inspired his good Unitarian friend Frank Lloyd Wright. It was through Wright the magazine founded in Chicago at the turn of century took the name “House Beautiful.”

In my twenty-six years as this congregation's minister, I have been much influenced by that relatively long-ago minister, William Channing Gannett through the unspoken, yet powerful influences of this Church Home and also by what Mr. Gannett spoke to in that celebrated essay “The House Beautiful,” which extols the values that make a house a home. The phrase that sticks and resonates with me is "domestication of the infinite." It implies that what we find to be ultimately valuable—and I like the classic Platonic categories of the beautiful, true, good—should inspire how we craft our world.

For those of you relatively new to this congregation, for a number of years I gave a yearly sermon that I called the "Vulgarity Awards"—highlighting aspects of our common culture that I found egregiously ugly or destructive, regarding the human condition. They were rants, really. And one year when I ranted against a rising crescendo of media rancor and other forms of uncivil public verbal displays, I saw that I too was ranting—ranting about rants. I searched my intentions and realized that what I was concerned with was advancing ideals and values. So I changed the negatively toned Vulgarity Awards to the positive William Channing Gannett Awards, to highlight certain things that I find excellent and of which you might like to partake, things that infuse the here and now with timeless values through the process of the "domestication of the infinite."

I have five Gannetts to award today:

Bronswood Cemetery

One of the intentional and more successful forms of “domesticating the infinite,” that is bringing transcendent ideals into tangible forms, is now not so much appreciated as it once was. I’m speaking of what is known as the rural or garden cemetery.

The nineteenth century had a curiously robust culture of death” associated with the Romantic Movement. In this country the culture of death gained impetus with the death of George Washington. For example, school girls embroidered tapestries with weeping willow trees, tapered cedar trees, poppies, and urns—they and their like symbols of grief for the great man.

One of the great cultural events of the New Republic was the establishment in 1831of Mt. Auburn Cemetery outside of Boston, with the entrance in Cambridge and most of the grounds in Watertown. It opened with a procession of carriages, a large gathering of Bostonians, and a famous speech by an esteemed orator of the day, Judge Joseph Story, who spoke about the purposes of this “place of repose.” Rural or garden cemeteries quickly appeared throughout the suburbs of American cities

The rural or garden cemetery imitated classical Greek practices. It removed the grave from the pallor of the church's traditional graveyard, taking it to the sunshine and fresh air of nature. In an inspired and carefully crafted landscape, a park of philosophy and even recreation, human mortality could be contemplated under liminal influences. Liminal influences included the borderlines between the living and the dead, the earth and sky, water and land, the cycling seasons, night and day, and so on.

These cemeteries have become places that serve the needs of the living, beyond the original intentions to contemplate through liminalities the meaning/reality of mortality. Mt. Auburn for example is an arboretum with over 700 species of trees as well as a bird sanctuary visited by hosts of bird watchers throughout the year.

Chicago has two famous and early garden cemeteries: Graceland and Rosehill. Either is worth a visit. But you really don’t have to venture so far as the northside of Chicago to find an exquisite setting. In our own backyard is Bronswood Cemetery, 3805 Madison Street. Bronswood, originally known as Hinsdale Cemetery, was founded in 1887, almost coincident with this church’s founding.

Now, I find this season, full autumn to be a most liminal time of year. Indeed, All Hallow’s Eve is grounded on tan ancient Celtic calendar when it was believed the veil between the realms of the living and dead grew thin and raged and could be breached.

I encourage you to take an aware and contemplative leisurely stroll through the rolling landscape of Bronswood. It’s a setting with experiences that will encourage you to return time and again.

Forrest Church

I present my next Gannet to my colleague Forrest Church who died on September 24th, a day after his 61st birthday, following an up and down struggle with esophageal cancer. Forrest was the best known Unitarian minister of his (my) generation. Son of Idaho Senator Frank Church, Forrest served as minister of Manhattan’s All Soul’s Unitarian Church over three decades.

He was a prolific author of more than twenty books on a variety of subjects including early Christian prayers and hymns, a biography of his father Frank Church, the theology of Paul Tillich, Unitarian Universalism and liberal religion, and the role of religion among the founders of the American Republic. He chronicled his response to imminent death in Love and Death published last year.

His successful ministry in transforming All Souls into one of the larger UU congregations rested on his scholarly eloquence, on his social activism and community involvement, and on his personal transparency. To the chagrin of his children he spoke openly from the pulpit and in his public writing of his alcoholism and divorce, the latter a public scandal.

Toward the end of his life Forrest spoke more and more about Love, hence the title of his recent book Love and Death. He declared, “The only thing that can never be taken from us, even by death, is the love we give away before we go.”

His notion of Love—theologically reasoned but also true to the human condition lived by one who loved—will be Forrest’s lasting legacy, particularly for UU’s who will find his liberal message of being saved by Love healing and comforting.

Relative to the intentions of the Gannet and the “domestication of the infinite,” Forrest Church strove to bring one of the greatest of all Ideals, Love into our common world. I suspect his final book, to be published posthumously; The Cathedral of the World will extol not only a contemporary Universalism but also historic Universalism’s call to love oneself, to love one another, and to love the Divine.

Google

In the mid 1970s a computer-science visionary, Ted Nelson, coined the word intertwingled. He declared “everything is deeply intertwingled,” meaning that there are myriad links creating a great web of connection.

Whenever I think of the Internet, the World Wide Web, I think of a great intertwingling—an enchanted realm of ideas and images.

I award a third Gannet this morning to Google, the internet behemoth that is just beginning its second decade. Google's mission is "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful."

I love the search engine that began the empire. You probably know how a misspelling of the word googol (10 to the 100th power) became Google which quickly became a new verb “to Google.” I remember some years ago when I first Googled my name and up popped a succession of web site references.

I use many Google products: the search engine that is the most visited site on the Internet with over half the traffic of all search engines; the Google blog resources where I’ve built 8 blogs for professional and personal use; the Google sites where I have a web presence for sermons and to promote my funeral and memorial resources. All of these are free.

I use Google products to organize my photos—Picasa. I find addresses and chart my driving with Google maps. My favored email account, with layers of organization and search capabilities, is Google’s gmail. My books are listed and some excerpted in Google Books. (Did you know that Google has set out to digitalize all the books and documents in print. Its contents are amazing. For example, Judge Story’s address at the dedication of Mt. Auburn cemetery in 1834 that I mentioned earlier can be read via Google Books.)

I am a citizen of the Internet, a wanderer of the World Wide Web, thanks to Google.

It is said that the unofficial company slogan, coined by a founder, is “do no evil.” Fortune magazine has called Google the best workplace in the country; and it has contributed to society through environmentalism and philanthropy.

I love Google for its various tools that I use. And I love Google as a portal to an intertwingled realm of endless information.

La Cabinita

I often award a Gannett to a favored restaurant, usually a small and intimate place, figuratively off the culinary beaten track. This year the honoree is a cheerful and intimate storefront Mexican establishment La Cabanita in Brookfield on Ogden Avenue. It’s family owned and operated. The owner Ralphy speaks of offering an authentic Mexican restaurant experience.

Recently it underwent a renovation of sorts, removing cheesy, time-worn fiberglass booths for friendlier and more attractive tables. Festive artwork was added to the walls. A counter to order take out from and an open kitchen/grill complete the space. Floor to ceiling windows look across a parking area; but the plus side is lots of sluicing sunlight, cheerful and warming. I like to sit by the windows.

A friendly waitress will serve you. The food comes quickly. The fare is what you would expect, tacos, burritos, tortas, sopes and gorditas, tostatas. They serve breakfast and dinner plates, including soups.

I’m addicted to the chile relleno tacos on handmade tortillas, which cost a little extra but are really a treat.

My ultimate criterion for a restaurant is how it makes me feel. La Cabinita makes me happy—for the food, but also for the overall warmth. It has an unpretentious grace and family-feel, which fits the criteria that William Channing established in The House Beautiful.

Charles Fisher, RLA, PC

My final Gannett awardee is one of our very own, Charlie Fisher, and follows in the path of last year’s awardee Nancy Holt. Nancy received a Gannett for her many efforts in making our Church Home (and religious education building) more home-like. Nancy worked closely with Charlie in transforming our grounds into gracious and usable space.

Charlie grew up in this church. He is a registered landscape architect with his own business. His motto “Embracing the World's Great Garden Traditions” only hints at Charlie’s passion for the artful and ecologically sensitive crafting of public and private landscapes.

On our grounds Charlie designed the natural playground on the west end of the Religious Education Building and the adjacent butterfly garden which is a registered Monarch Way Station. For years the Religious Education Building presented a stark façade to Maple Street. Now its softened by Charlie’s planting of low trees and flowering plants by the sidewalk in front of its long length. Charlie had a hand in the planting around the “Peace Pole” near the Church building on the east lawn. Generally, Charlie watches over the trees and various plantings, such as the planting in front of the sign on the corner of Washington and Maple Streets and the memorial bench on the north edge of the east lawn.

A few years ago Charlie presented a master plan for the east lawn, including a gracious parabola and a council ring in the style of the famed Chicago area landscape architect of the early 20th century, Jens Jensen. (There’s conversation about making the council ring a memorial.)

Charlie favors designs and plantings that are harmonious with this wonderful area of the Midwest. His aesthetic, sense of beauty, is rooted in history as well as nature. And as his website declares, he is “inspired.” I think has a romantic vein—as a true artist should.

Charlie is hands on and conscientious. He is always working on our grounds and has organized others to help out. Just last week, when we faced the remains of our flower exchange in the vases at the front of the pulpit, Charlie said he would take the remainder home and eventually compost them. Charlie has strong values and morals to go with them.

I don’t doubt that some of his values/morals along with his aesthetic were influenced by our Church Home as it embodies the principles and precepts of the “House Beautiful.”

I can think of no more worthy or exemplary recipient of a William Channing Gannet Award than Charlie Fisher, because Charlie strives to “domesticate the infinite.” through his art of crafting landscapes.

UU Heroes and Exemplars

Theodore Parker

My favorite Unitarian is Theodore Parker, who lived from 1810 through 1860. All great historical personalities are a product of the age in which they live. Parker’s years coincided with momentous times for both a fledging Unitarianism and a fledgling American Republic. And he became a major influence on both our liberal religion and our American experience.

He was born the unexpected last and therefore “heaven sent” child of a large Lexington, Massachusetts farm family. He witnessed his family’s Congregational church transform from a tolerant though evangelical Calvinism to a more reserved and rational Unitarianism. As a young man he considered converting to Calvinist Orthodoxy, but stayed Unitarian.

Parker’s contemporary biographer suspects that domestic tragedy shaped an emerging sensibility toward belief in a benevolent God, as well as immortality of the soul. By Parker’s mid 20s his parents and 7 of 9 siblings had died from tuberculosis.

He was also ambitious—surely what we now call a Type A personality. He dreamed of becoming part of the Boston, that is Unitarian, social elite.

At 16 he taught school. By 19 he had passed the entrance exams for Harvard but couldn’t pay the tuition. At 22 he’d started up his own academy in Watertown, with plenty of time for self-directed studies: Greek, Latin, Hebrew, German, church history, and the Bible. At age 24, Harvard Divinity School admitted him with advanced standing. Probably the wealthy family of his future wife, whom he’d met in Watertown, paid Parker’s way.

At Harvard he continued his polymath scholarship. He claimed to have taught himself a new language every month—20 new tongues in 2 years.

After graduating in 1836 Parker married Lydia Cabot and was called to a small congregation of 60 adults in West Roxbury, not far from the Cabot home. He had plenty of time to devote to his scholarship and writing, and gained a reputation as far as Boston as a preacher/speaker of intelligence and eloquence.

His theology diverged from the Rational Christianity of most of his churched colleagues. The new biblical criticism emerging from Germany and the new enthusiasm of Transcendentalism led Parker toward what he called Natural Religion. He interpreted the Bible through the lens of mythology, and openly doubted the miracle stories of Jesus and contended that the Bible was full of contradictions and mistakes.

In 1841 he preached an ordination sermon, “The Transient and Permanent in Christianity,” claiming that the authority of Jesus did not reside in the person rather in the message, which is universal. Had there not been an historical Jesus, still there would have been a Christian Religion, though of a different name, Parker contended.

The sermon was truly outrageous for its time and place. As a result Parker was shunned/ostracized by his fellow ministers—who to a person denied him pulpit exchanges and as a group asked him to resign from the Boston Ministerial Association because they judged him not to be Christian. This controversy raised the issue of a Unitarian creed; a notion of no creed had been a principle of William Ellery Channing and other founders a generation earlier.

Theological change was in the air. In 1845 supporters wanted Parker to be heard in Boston, so they rented the Melodeon Theater that he might preach there regularly in the morning and then travel home to West Roxbury to preach in the afternoon. He was a sensation in the city. His supporters organized the 28^th Congregational Society for him. In 1846 he was preaching to a 1000 persons; by 1852 some 2000 came to his Sunday service. His congregation included the intellectual elite, such as Julia Ward Howe and husband, as well as trade persons and mechanics.

His sermons and writings ranged widely and continually progressed. His radical appraisal of Jesus continued. He attacked the sensational ways of revivalism during an era of one of the country’s great awakenings. He advocated democracy: the phrase “of all the people, by all people, and for all the people” was first spoken by him. He declared that prison should be about reforming, not punishing, the criminal. He championed women’s rights, including suffrage: many of his prayers began “In the name of the Mother and of the Father….” He even introduced the custom of flowers in the pulpit, when he placed tribute bouquets brought by admiring congregants in front of his pulpit. Before Parker flowers were considered to be paganism at best, Catholicism at worst.

Most famously, Parker was anti-slavery, an abolitionist of the greatest stature. He resisted the arrest of so-called “fugitive slaves,” including a black woman in his congregation that he helped spirit to Canada. For helping another fugitive, he was indicted by a federal grand jury, but never tried due to public sentiment. He raised funds to send “Beecher Bibles,” that is rifles to the Free-Soilers in Bleeding Kansas. And he was one of the Secret Six who financed John Brown’s insurrection at Harper’s Ferry on the eve of the War of Rebellion. (Had he and he others been identified they would have hanged as high as Brown and Sons. Count him as part of radical abolitionist contingent who made the Civil War an “irrepressible conflict.” He refused to back down or take half measures regarding slavery.

Parker died from tuberculosis, the family disease, it while abroad in Italy as a leg in a world tour to restore his health. His grave is in Florence.

I admire Parker for many reasons. I’m enough of a contrarian to resonate to his contrarian ways within Unitarianism. His prodigious appetite for knowledge is inspiring. He had read every book in his 13,000 book library and written many books and endless articles. One of the familiar social justice phrases of this day, often attributed to Martin Luther King but “borrowed” from Parker, declares: “the arc of a moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” (Parker’s actual words were, "I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one… And from what I see I am sure it bends toward justice."

A favorite affirmation by Theodore Parker doesn’t get any better relative to ways and means, the mission and meaning of Unitarianism:

Be ours a religion which, like sunshine, goes everywhere.

Its temple all space.

Its shrine the good heart.

Its creed all truth.

Its ritual works of love.

Its profession of faith divine living.

Olympia Brown

Another noteworthy exemplar of the liberal religious way of Unitarian Universalism comes from the Universalist side of our merged tradition: Olympia Brown who lived from 1835-1926. Some of you might recognize her name because the Racine WI UU congregation is named in her memory.

She belonged to a remarkable generation who pioneered women in the ministry and who championed woman’s suffrage. She was the first woman whose ministerial standing was recognized by a denomination—the Universalists. And she was one of a few original suffragettes who lived to vote in the 1920 election.

Without a doubt, her activism and perseverance had deep roots in her family’s committed Universalism.

In a nutshell, Universalism was a liberal Protestant sect somewhat similar and parallel to Unitarianism. Each resonated to Enlightenment values. Each had strong New England sources. Each had a unitarian, or non-trinitarian, theology. The Universalists believed in God as a loving parent and argued that Jesus’s atonement was for all, without reservation. Their doctrines that God is Love and there was No Hell had significant influence in reforming liberal Protestantism. Universalism’s benign sources had benevolent consequences for those who practiced it.

Olympia’s parents, Vermont Universalists, moved to Michigan where they raised 4 children. They valued education so much the parents founded their own school. Later Olympia and a sister attended Mt. Holyoke College, but they left because the school was too Calvinist. Olympia then went to Antioch College, the progressive school founded by Unitarian Horace Mann. Olympia’s experience was so positive that her parents moved to Yellow Springs, Ohio, that all the Brown family might attend Antioch.

At Antioch Olympia heard the first ordained woman, Antoinette Brown, preach. “It was the first time I had heard a woman preach and the sense of victory lifted me up. I felt as if the Kingdom of Heaven was at hand.”

Determined she would be a minister, too, Olympia applied to the Unitarian school at Meadville Pa and was turned down by the trustees “as too great an experiment.” Oberlin allowed she might attend, but wouldn’t allow her to participate in public exercises. The Universalist Divinity School at St. Lawrence in Canon, NY, reluctantly offered her admission. But the president, Ebenezer Fisher wrote that he “did not think women were called to the ministry. But I leave that between you and the Great Head of the Church." Olympia remembered, “…When I arrived, I was told I had not been expected and that Mr. Fisher had said I would not come as he had written so discouragingly to me. I had supposed his discouragement was my encouragement." She graduated in 1863 and the local conference ordained her as a Universalist minister.

In 1864 Olympia had her first church in Weymouth Landing, Massachusetts, where she became active in the suffrage movement, a literal colleague to the likes of Susan B. Anthony and Lucy Stone. In the summer of 1867, under physical and public duress, Olympia toured Kansas on behalf of suffrage, delivering some 300 speeches in favor of suffrage during a 4 month leave from her church.

In 1870 Olympia took on a discouraged Universalist church in Bridgeport CT, where P.T.Barnum held membership. She married in 1873, though her mother and sister argued marriage would harm her ministry. Olympia lasted at the Bridgeport church through 1874. Though she had detractors who questioned the authority of a female minister, Olympia also had a large group of supporters.

In 1876, with two young children and husband in tow, Olympia became minister of another dispirited Universalist church, this one in Racine WI where she stayed for 9 years, leaving a rejuvenated congregation.

Then at age 53, in 1885 she resigned from the full time ministry to devote herself as an activist for suffrage. She served as President of the Wisconsin Suffrage Association and Vice-President of the National Woman Suffrage Association.

Interestingly, as she grew older and the suffrage movement seemed to stall, Olympia welcomed a more activist, fire-in-the-belly suffrage campaign for a woman’s right to vote. When Woodrow Wilson turned his back on suffrage, an octogenarian Olympia Brown joined other activists in front of the White House to burn the President’s speeches.

In 1920, the year suffrage was attained, Olympia said, "the grandest thing has been the lifting up of the gates and the opening of the doors to the women of America, giving liberty to twenty-seven million women, thus opening to them a new and larger life and a higher ideal."

No denomination has stronger ties to woman’s rights than the merged tradition of Unitarian Universalism. And this tradition has no brighter light, when it comes to equal rights for women, than Olympia Brown.

Is there any wonder that today, more than half of the UU clergy are women?

The Worm in the Apple

Scott and Helen Nearing

Are you familiar with Scott and Helen Nearing? In mid-twentieth century they were pioneers of the back-to-land movement. Their co-authored book Living the Good Life: How to Live Simply and Sanely in a Troubled World (1954) chronicled their 19 year experiment in simple living in rural Vermont.

Scott Nearing was one of the larger than life personages of the 20^th Century. His radical views, including socialism and pacificism around the years of World War I, led first to his dismissal as an economics professor at University of Pennsylvania and then Toledo University. After nearly two decades of activism as a socialist and communist in NYC, Scott with wife Helen retreated to Vermont, c. 1935, where they broke their days into three parts: 4 hours of physical work; 4 hours of service related work; and 4 hour of personal work. Born in 1883, Scott Nearing lived one hundred years. The nature of his dying and death is noteworthy. Helen Nearing’s account of her husband’s end of life choice is packaged with much good thought about the art of dying, which she weaves into the fabric of living the good life.

This extended piece, which I will now read, comes from the foreword to a collection of quotes, Light on Aging and Dying, compiled by Helen Nearing in 1995.

Helen Nearing

There is much speculation about life after death.

What about life before death? To learn how to be old is one of life's last lessons. To learn how to die is the very last lesson of all.

When vital powers ebb and we realize we are on the downturn, we can prepare with equanimity or with trepidation. How we approach old age, and finally death, is our own affair and no one else's. We are the ones who must choose our attitudes and behavior.

Our live's experiences, well assimilated, can be our gift to the mainstream. We can take care to pass on in some form what we have learned in living our lives. We have received; now we can confer what we have learned and gained, while we are still around to do it. Up to the last moment of life there are opportunities to make a contributory mark.

The inevitable aging of the body need not cut us off from leading a good life. Even abed or in a wheelchair we can contribute in some slight or great way by little particulars of personal conduct. We can deal with circumstances in nondestructive ways: we can be pleasant and cheerful or we can growl and complain and criticize, demeaning others and their projects. While losing some of our vital powers, we can try to remain healthy and strong in mind and spirit, if not in body.

Psychological aging, melancholic and misanthropic, need not accompany physiological aging. There can be such a thing as successful aging. A sense of wholeness, of integrity, can be the culmination of old age. It can be a time of rich involvement, with a golden glow over the inevitable ending.

The whole of our lives so far has been our message. What now, in the time still available? We can deepen our awareness; we can fulfill ourselves and help others by imparting what we may have learned from the high and low phases of our existence. In that way we can find completion at the end of our lives….

A good old age can be the crown of all of our life's experiences, the masterwork of a lifetime. Behind us are years of actions and thoughts that developed us, changed us—and the world—for the better or the worse. We know in our inner selves which they have been and to what goal they have led.

That is past and gone. Now, or at any age, we can still make adjustments, can still become the best of what was in embryo at our birth. We came with incalculable opportunities ahead, no matter in what circumstances we were born. Some changes for the better we grasped; others we let slip. We sometimes frittered away our time and got nowhere; at other times we made the very most of the situations in which we found ourselves. It is up to us still to become what we are capable of becoming. There is time while we are still in the body. …

Just as the last stages of one's life can be a shiningness or shadowed, so the act of dying can be bright or dark. It can be a harrowing ordeal or a hallowed happening. As we can live into our old age with consideration and grace, we can approach death with minimal distress, meeting it with dignity and deference.

There are techniques for dying well, just as there are for living well. There are ways of transition, sane approaches to death. We can make a conscious and worthy exit. Dying can be a natural and desirable process, a happy act, a rendering back to the whole what has been separated for a time-—a willing and glad restitution, almost a celebration of successful aging. …

My husband, Scott Nearing, died with deliberation and in full consciousness. He knew exactly what he was doing and planned it in advance. It was a death in keeping with his life— a reasoned process which he wanted to experience and make manifest. Death, to him, was merely the last stage in his growth, a natural organic act. He knew he was near the end and he wanted a death by choice—his own decision. His life had been sane and lived quietly and purposively. He wanted to go the same way—to live right into death.

One day, as we were starting our evening meal at the table, he said, "I think I won't eat any more." He was ninety-nine, approaching his hundredth year. His body was wearing out, his usual vigor ebbing, and he was ready to call it quits. He thought he had lived long enough, and he was interested to know what lay beyond. He believed in some kind of survival of the spirit, some continuity, and was ready to enter into and partake of that phase, as he had learned from and contributed to the physical phases of life.

From that time—a month before his hundredth birthday—he abstained from all solid food, taking only liquids. He waned and lost his strength, but kept his wits and good cheer— and determination. After a month of fasting on vegetable and fruit juices he announced, "Only water, please."

His aim had been to avoid all pills, drugs, doctors, and particularly forced feeding in hospitals or nursing homes. He had wanted to die at home, quietly, and in his own good time. All of which he did, simply and serenely and resolutely. He stepped quietly and consciously into death.

At the very end, alone with me, after a week on water, he breathed his last, detached and yet still aware. He drifted away and off, like an autumn leaf from the parent tree, effortlessly and tranquilly. It was a benign and calm departure—well-timed and appropriate. He breathed low; then he breathed no more. He went somewhere else, with active volition. He had practiced the art of dying well.

End of Life Issues

The health care reform brouhaha has shone light on one of the crucial social issues looming on the western horizon: end-of-life.

Three factors converge: 1) American lives are being extended by extraordinary health care—longevity generally, but also palliative care when it is clear that a person is dying. So, lives are generally longer and the decline into death is often relatively slow and long. 2) There is a demographic bulge, the much-ballyhooed Baby Boom generation, who are entering elder years, some 85 million Americans born between 1946 and 1964—a little more than a quarter of the current population. It is anticipated that Baby Boom men will live into their early 80s and women into their mid 80s. 3) Currently 27% of Medicare’s budget is expended during a patient’s final year of life; and as we have learned, resources of health care providers, facilities, and dollars are limited.

Some of the loudest voices against health care reform, ironically, are from seniors already receiving Medicare, ironically a form of socialized medicine, who fear a diminishing of services/care.

There are also fears, and for elders it might be more visceral, regarding a coming triage, when rationing of health resources favors the younger and the healthier, relative to the older, ill, and even dying.

In mid-August opponents to the Obama Administration’s progress toward health care reform raised the specter of bureaucratic death panels who would have the power to “pull the plug on grandma.”

How this perception came to be has a torturous path of insinuation and misinformation against liberal health care reform as imposing (through government funding) abortion and euthanasia. Shortly after Mr. Obama’s election a November Washington Times editorial, according to a NY Times article, reminded its readers “…of the Aktion T4 program of Nazi Germany in which ‘children and adults with disabilities, and anyone anywhere in the Third Reich was subject to execution who was blind, deaf, senile, retarded, or had any significant neurological condition.’

“Noting the ‘administrative predilections’ of the new team at the White House, The Washington Times urged ‘anyone who sees the current climate as a budding T4 program to win the hearts and minds of deniers.” (I editorialize that this is a very clever bit of propaganda—blending so-called Obama “predilections” toward socialism with Nazism with Holocaust deniers.)

Conservative talk radio personalities furthered such innuendo and misinformation that misinterpreted a possible provision regarding end of life counseling. And most famously, former Vice President candidate Sarah Palin in an August Face Book posting declared: “The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s ‘death panel’ so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their ‘level of productivity in society,’ whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.”

The furor caused Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa, one of the 3 swing Republicans, to declare: “There is some fear because in the House bill, there is counseling for end-of-life. And from that standpoint, you have every right to fear. You shouldn't have counseling at the end of life. You ought to have counseling 20 years before you're going to die. You ought to plan these things out. And I don't have any problem with things like living wills. But they ought to be done within the family. We should not have a government program that determines if you're going to pull the plug on grandma.”

Though patently false, accusations of Mr. Obama promoting death panels, touched raw nerves. Some of those raw nerves, maybe the most, concerned animosity toward Mr. Obama. And this week there has been plenty of back and forth regarding the nature/source of that animosity against him.

However much animosity for Mr. Obama plays in the debate, I don’t want to discount very real end of life issues. We have a large and aging population, living longer than ever before, using a significant percentage of health resources especially in the last year of life.

I’ve offered you two aspects of moral reasoning that I consider when it comes to ethical reasoning generally, by this morning specifically to end of life concerns. The first is Schweitzer’s Ethic of Reverence of Life. The second involves the notion of Choice, as lived out by Scott Nearing who chose to gently end his life in his 100^th year.

With Schweitzer I maintain that it is good to sustain life and it is evil to destroy life. Our personal and collective humanity is significantly defined by how we treat those most vulnerable among us--the young, the infirm/ill, and the aged. The hospice movement, especially with the viable option of spending final days at home, has proven how we can care for one another, humanely and lovingly, at life’s end.

And Scott Nearing’s example reminds me of what I’ve witnessed before and affirm, the right of a person to choose to die. This is especially true when it comes to one facing an exceptionally debilitating illness such as ALS. I’ve long believed that freewill—the right to choose one’s outlook in any stage of life—is essential to be fully human. The right-to-die is a tricky area and fraught with dangers. Still, in this regard I lean toward carefully framed means for Physician Assisted Suicide as in Oregon and Washington. At the very least, though it may never be acted upon, a right to die gives a patient a sense of control, even in the depths of the worst circumstances imaginable.

Scott Nearing’s life along with Helen Nearing’s commentary reminds us of 2 important considerations: 1) “the good life” is, in part, preparation for a life’s final days; 2) and that the final days themselves can be incorporated into the greater scheme of living meaningfully and well. How shall we care for one another at life’s end?

The most intelligent sentences spoken in the “death panel” brouhaha was by Senator Grassley: “You shouldn't have counseling at the end of life. You ought to have counseling 20 years before you're going to die. You ought to plan these things out.”

My friends, these two conclusions relate directly to what religion is all about. My colleague Forest Church has put it quite simply and I agree: “Religion is our human response to the dual reality of being alive and having to die.”

In this Church of the Human Spirit we do this pondering of he dual realities of “being alive and having to die” extraordinarily well—that is realistically, seeking the fullest meanings possible inherent in the human condition.

Metaphors of Love

Now and again I so enjoy putting a sermon together, I can hardly stand it. This is one of those sermons. It’s theme is LOVE, not only one of the centering concerns of all religions, but also a preoccupation of civilization from time immemorial.

I’ve written plenty of sermons about love through the years exploring a variety of perspectives. Early on in my career I offered a predictable sermon or two drawing from various categories of love using the traditional Christian categories learned in seminary, such as erotic love--eros, or brotherly love—philia, or self-sacrificing love—agape. I’ve mined our Universalist tradition’s liberal and freeing theological assertion that “God is Love.” I’ve spun sermons on Unconditional Love for Mother’s Day. I’ve returned time and again to the great analysis of Love by the 20th century psychologist Erich Fromm, whose book the Art of Loving is a classic, in my estimation a definitive narrative of the social and psychological dimensions of Love in the modern era. In more recent years I’ve turned to the insights of neuroscience in mapping the brain in Love, asserting that Love derives from mammalian bonding instincts and resides in the limbic (mammalian) brain.

I’ve collected hundreds of poems that touch on various aspects of Love, sacred but mostly profane offerings. Some of those selections I included in a recent (2006) quote collection on Love and Marriage titled We Pledge our Hearts.

I’ve officiated over hundreds of wedding ceremonies, in the process listening to the testimonies of couples in Love and in turn counseling them about the vicissitudes of Love. I have sagely intoned to smittened couples Anne Morrow Lindberg’s cautionary advice: “When you love someone you do not love them all the time, in exactly the same way, from moment to moment. It is impossibility. It is even a lie to pretend to. And yet this is exactly what most of us demand. We have so little faith in the ebb and flow of life, of love, of relationships. We leap at the flow of the tide and resist in terror its ebb. We are afraid it will never return. We insist on permanency, on duration, on continuity; when the only continuity possible, in life as in love, is in growth, in fluidity - in freedom, in the sense that the dancers are free, barely touching as they pass, but partners in the same pattern.”

I’ve written meditations on Love, my favorite inspired by the lost generation British poet Rupert Brooke, “The Great Lover:”

“Love is a flame: —we have beaconed the world’s night.
A city:—and we built it, these and I.
An emperor: —we have taught the world to die.”

This meditation of mine speaks to an ongoing aspiration:

A quarter of a century ago I first aspired to make Brooke’s words, “say,’ He loved,’” my epitaph.

No other poem has had such an enduring effect. I had an intuition that to love, more and more, would save me and satisfy me as no other attribute might.

To love more things, more often heightens perceptions, broadens appreciations, deepens connections, set frees empathy.

Loving — seized by and yielding to the quality of a person or thing that is beautiful, good, or true — is a signature of humanity. The more we love, the more we encounter that part of the human condition that is divine: Eternal!

To the extent I actively love I am free from the limitations of ego self.

Let me be remembered not so much for what I have loved, rather let me be remembered for my growing capacity to love freely and purely.

Say of me someday, “He loved, too!”

So for more than thirty years, now and again, I’ve looked at Love and spoke about it from a variety of perspectives as a religious phenomenon relative to the meaning and purpose of the human condition. You might think I’d have tired about Love as a sermon theme.

What excites me now is a whole new way of getting at Love, not from poetry and theology, but from science that leads me to a thoroughly natural understanding of Love.

The Science of Love

It’s appropriate during this week of the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth to take a scientific look at Love. More and more we realize that we live in a post-Darwinian world. Darwin’s theory of evolution, particularly the notion of natural selection, is embedded in our bodies through our genes, revealing patterns of behavior that cluster in what we now call social biology. Our biology and our social biology are now revealing Love’s origins.

A leading researcher/writer on the Science of Love is Helen Fisher. An evolutionary anthropologist by training, Dr. Fisher has spent her career writing on the biology of Love. A recent book, Why We Love: the Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love (2004) is a handy resource, not only on up to date findings about science’s take on Love, but it’s also spiced with helpful advice.

Dr. Fisher presents three levels of Love that she and her colleagues have mapped that function in certain areas of the brain through the agency of brain chemicals. The first is sexual desire or lust, the second is romantic love, and the third is attachment or bonding. Taken together these three progressing levels make sense: Lust causes one to search the population for a mate. Romantic Love causes one to connect physically and emotionally with one other person. And Attachment keeps the couple in relationship for the length of time necessary to raise a child. In the simplest sense this is the network of Reproduction.

Dr. Fisher’s research for this book involved brain imaging of college students who claimed to be in the first few weeks of being in love. The subjects of the study where shown a photograph of their beloved while an MRI machine scanned their brains. Then their brains were “cleared” by having the subjects count backwards by seven from an arbitrary number. Next the subjects were shown a photograph of a neutral acquaintance. The images that resulted detected blood flow in the brain, a symptom of neural activity.

Dr. Fisher and her team found activity in certain areas of the brain, hot spots that are part of a circuit that is dense in cells that produce or receive the brain chemical dopamine. (This circuit relates to wanting or anticipating a reward.) Another area, shaped something like a medium sized shrimp and residing on one side of the brain, releases the brain chemical norepinephrine to incite passionate love. Yet another similarly shaped and sized area, on the opposite side of the brain from the passion zone, registers physical attractiveness, as well as related longing, desire, and that compulsive neural itch to be physically an emotionally connected with another. All of this is occurring in the so-called mammalian brain. A surge of dopamine and norepinephrine with a reduction of serotonin are the primary ingredients of a cocktail the produce a Romantic Love state of mind: elated, infatuated, craving, obsessive, focused, passionate, ruptured…. New love can seem almost like a mental illness—mania, dementia, and obsession rolled into one state.

In love-making and orgasm other chemicals are triggered including oxytocin in women and vasopressin in men that promote bonding or attachment. (Oxytocin is the biochemical that bonds Mother to Infant.) Curiously seminal fluid has dopamine and norepinephrine in it as well as serotonin, testosterone, and estrogen--a mixture of chemicals that stimulates bonding and also has an antidepressant effect.

It is clear, and it will become clearer as research advances, Romantic Love as a literal state of mind, is being reduced to a biochemical chain of events triggered in the brain.

Transcendent Love

Yet, I recommend that this reductionist vision of Love is not an end place, rather it is a starting place for those who seek to explore transcendent aspects of the human condition.
Regarding the transcendent nature of Love, David Buss, a psychologist from the University of Texas and author of the book The Evolution of Desire, said:

“I've spent two decades of my professional life studying human mating. In that time, I've documented phenomena ranging from what men and women desire in a mate to the most diabolical forms of sexual treachery. I've discovered the astonishingly creative ways in which men and women deceive and manipulate each other. I've studied mate poachers, obsessed stalkers, sexual predators, and spouse murderers. But throughout this exploration of the dark dimensions of human mating, I've remained unwavering in my belief in true love.”While love is common, true love is rare, and I believe that few people are fortunate enough to experience it. The roads of regular love are well traveled and their markers are well understood by many—the mesmerizing attraction, the ideational obsession, the sexual afterglow, profound self-sacrifice, and the desire to combine DNA. But true love takes its own course through uncharted territory. It knows no fences, has no barriers or boundaries. It's difficult to define, eludes modern measurement, and seems scientifically wooly. But I know true love exists. I just can't prove it.”
True love is a good phrase to begin to explore the transcendent dimension of the complex of brain chemistry that I’ve been sketching. Through imagination, intuition, and empathy love seeps into our seeing and knowing. Time and again, across the ages, we experience love in multiple dimensions; and it is a primary source of meaning in our lives/world. We speak of it in terms of a golden rule: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” We intone Love’s primacy in religion: “Faith, hope, love abide; these three. But the greatest of these is love.” And there any number of ancient and modern meditations on love,--poems, essays, books,--such as the following by Anne Morrow Lindberg: “Love is a force in you that enables you to give other things. It is the motivating power. It enables you to give strength and freedom and peace to another person. It is not a result; it is a cause. It is not a product; it produces. It is a power, like steam or electricity. It is valueless unless you can give something else by means of it.”

I want to sketch, just a little, the transcendent nature of Love as I imagine it.

The seat of Love is the brain, an evolutionary marvel that can be effectively conceptualized in three aspects: First the ancient reptilian brain with its autonomic activities; then the mammalian (limbic) brain; and third the neocortex where thinking and other so-called higher function emanate. Together these areas work together, through the alchemy of brain chemicals and electrical circuits (neural pathways) to create consciousness and self-consciousness. In the process of instinct and experience we invariably transform “mere” physical/emotional Love of brain chemistry into the metaphors of “transcendent or true love” that give our lives and world layers of meaning: heaped upon meaning, heaped upon meaning, heaped upon meaning….
It is clearly our nature to first, biologically Love and then to make metaphors of Love that give meaning to our lives and world. I believe the religious dimension of the human condition is also the meaning making dimension. It’s totally understandable why Love marks so many of the world religions.

I suspect that the when we know any sort of Transcendent Love our thoughts are flowing along familiar and pleasurable neural pathways while inciting centers associated with biological Love. There is a direct correspondence between biochemical Love of brain chemistry and transcendent Love of the brains’s consciousness. Nature has implanted Love in us and the miracle of our mind (conscious/self-conscious) projects Love onto our world, thereby creating many nuanced forms of Love.

This is a natural miracle, a natural miracle that happens for each of us.

My colleague Dick Gilbert wrote a brief meditation that is a fitting end for these remarks intimating how a “merely” biochemical Love in the brain transforms into the ideals of Transcendent Love that give our lives and our world meaning:

We are, therefore, we love.
Cosmic bits of energy
Come to life together.
We love, therefore, we are.
May we be humbled before the wonder
Of what we dare to create.