Meatless Mondays: A Worthwhile Discipline

[One of three offerings from an April 2010 sermon, "Dime a Dip."]

I’m a vegetarian, a personal arc that began in the late 1970s when I stopped eating red meat, including pork, through the early 1990s when I went totally meatless, including seafood. My tipping point was a feminist book, The Sexual Politics of Meat, that argued that most of animal protein in our lives comes from the exploitation of the females of various species. (Since I’d preached on it, I felt compelled to live by the brilliant logic of my remarks.)

I haven’t spoken much from the pulpit about my personal ethics regarding vegetarianism , so as to not cross the thin line of counsel and self-righteusness, so as to not use the pulpit in a holier-than-thou, guilt tripping manner.

Several years ago I did a sermon on a new book by daughter of Lucille and Ted Teisler: Pamela Rice’s 101 Reasons I’m a Vegetarian. I wanted to promote vegetarianism, yes; but I also wanted to lift up a line of ethical reasoning that uses a compelling number of relatively unrelated reasons to build a crescendo of persuasion. 101 reasons is an avalanche.

This is somewhat the approach of a recently minted campaign: Meatless Monday.

“Meatless Monday is a non-profit initiative of The Monday Campaigns, in association with the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

“Our goal is to help reduce meat consumption 15% in order to improve personal health and the health of our planet.

“We provide the information and recipes you need to start each week with healthy, environmentally friendly meat-free alternatives.

“Presidents Wilson, Truman and Roosevelt galvanized the nation with voluntary meatless days during both world wars.

“By reviving this American tradition we can help address the challenges we face today. We can improve our health, reduce our carbon footprint and lead the world in the race to mitigate climate change.”

I’m particularly interested in the rationale behind the Monday choice;

“For most Americans the week begins on Monday. On Monday we move from the freedom of the weekend back to the structure of work or school. We set our intentions for the next six days. We plan ahead and evaluate progress.

“From an early age we internalize this rhythm. And studies suggest we are more likely to maintain behaviors begun on Monday throughout the week. That makes Monday the perfect day to make a change for your health and the health of our planet.

“Monday is the call to action built in to every calendar each week. And if this Monday passes you by, next week is another chance to go meatless!”

Yes, vegetarianism has health benefits and it is a step toward greener green. I add, for the thoughtful and informed, it is also a discipline of compassion. For me the great issue of not eating meat (and other forms of animal protein) involves compassion, which edges into an even more controversial area: Animal Rights.

So, take a look at Meatless Mondays. For those of you who take the examined life seriously, it’s a campaign of several ethical dimensions tied to a spiritual notion of personal discipline.

Practice Resurrection: I

[From NY Times Magazine, March 28: Dominique Browning writes a column for the Environmental Defense Fund Web site and has a new blog, SlowLoveLife.com. This piece is an excerpt from “Slow Love: How I Lost My Job, Put on My Pajamas and Found Happiness,” to be published next month by Atlas & Company.]

“For 12 years, I had a job I loved as the editor of House & Garden, a magazine that celebrated the good life. It would be an understatement to describe this enterprise as part of a company not primarily in the business of philosophical, spiritual or moral soul-searching. Condé Nast’s roots and branches are in the material world. The good life at House & Garden generally meant cultivating your own backyard rather than being involved in the body politic. I pushed against the limits of making a so-called shelter magazine by publishing articles about spiritual issues and the environment, but I always felt clear-eyed about how things stood.

“Spring blew in so wildly that year that it seemed unnatural, or perhaps I just noticed what spring feels like once I wasn’t sealed in a climate-controlled building all day. Weather — the actual experience of it, not the forecast — is one of the more dramatic discoveries to come with a slower pace of life. There were days at the office when I didn’t know whether it was muggy or cool, or if it had rained. It dawned on me that there was something unsavory about having been so cut off from nature that I was surprised by the golden hue in the slant of light at four in the afternoon — on a weekday, no less.

“I took to wandering in my garden at all hours. As if to give me one last chance to change my mind about leaving, spring unfolded in splendor. The daffodils multiplied generously and spilled across the front in a riot of gold. Bunches of hellebores appeared in March and nodded their prim white, mauve and purple caps for more than two months; when I bent down to turn up a small head and peer into a quiet, trusting face, I winced at the thought of leaving them vulnerable to whatever depredations a new owner might visit upon them. I apologized in anticipation. I strolled the paths, examining the thick, furry spools of the unwinding ferns; the gnarled purple fingers of the peonies clawing out from the damp, fragrant earth; the green stubs of the Solomon’s seal; the sharp tips of the hosta encircled by improbably large patches of bare ground that would soon be hidden by gigantic leaves, bearing aloft the fragrant white wands that seduce the moths at dusk. ...

“I find room in my life again for love of the world, let the quiet of solitary moments steal over me, give myself over to joy. What a surprise! … these are moments of grace. Old Testament loving-kindness, the stuff of everyday life.”

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When I read them a week ago, Ms. Browning’s words struck a chord and sent me musing, especially her summary thoughts regarding “moments of grace … the stuff of everyday life.”

It’s a function of the Season that theology has appropriated: the notion of resurrection that the farmer poet Wendell Berry audaciously admonishes us to practice. Resurrection is a fact of Nature’s cycling seasons that includes the succession of generations. We, with mind’s imagination, make resurrection a reasonable hope in society and self. Nothing new here, but one of those little pieces of wisdom we need to be continually reminded of, moments that give us renewed life.

To stimulate imagination and to inspire reasonable hope how fundamental, how essential Nature is. We slip away from it to our perpetual peril.

As I look back over my influences and how those influences formed and beguiled me through the decades, I begin with an early and long and deep intimacy with Nature.

I grew up in Northern Delaware on my parents’ beloved homestead, an acre wedge. Where it came to a point was the largest oak tree in a several square mile patch of climax forest. The oak was named accurately, but unimaginatively: the Big Oak. The Woods, also a family name, had in it plenty of other great oaks, wizened gray beech trees that littered the loamy leaf-textured forest floor with curiously shaped beech nuts, gum trees with spiky gum balls perfectly sized to hit with a golf club, an occasional hickory both smooth and shaggy barked, and beneath the towering canopy smaller dogwoods that flowered white and hop hornbeams or ironwood with trunks that looked like muscled arms plus skinny saplings of sunlight seeking maples and poplars. The Woods provided squirrels with food and they forever protested from high branches. For a few days in the autumn great flocks of blackbirds rooked in the high branches, their twilight chorus a Hitchcokian loud staccato.

My parents were famous gardeners—mostly vegetables for consumption and canning—later freezing. My Mom had grown up on a family truck farm in Southern New Jersey and was an expert. Before they could afford a gasoline cultivator, my Dad tilled the ground with a one wheel hand plow. In his wake robins dared to forage for earthworms. The texture and aroma of the loam in early spring remain with me from more than half a century ago. Into the ground went the distinctive seeds of the respective plants: carrots, beets, yellow and green beans, zucchini, lettuce, cabbage, cauliflower, and of course corn. Also into the ground went the tomato and bell pepper seedlings that had be nursed along in a hot house sash arrangement on the sunny side of the chicken coop. Chickens scratched and clucked, laying their eggs inside in straw lined roosts. Year after year the earliest vegetables were the asparagus spears that poked from a long bed at one end of the great garden. Here there was also a compost pile of grass clippings, clean kitchen garbage, and in high summer season overgrown zucchini. When they began to ripen the zucchini hills were impossible to keep up with. (“Betcha’ never smelled a real compost pile before!”)

I didn’t go to kindergarten, Mr. Fulghum. I learned about Nature from Nature first hand, not via a little seed in the Styrofoam cup. I didn’t need to be taught wonder. It flowed from Nature. I was filled with simple awe that has proved to be abiding by the seed planted into the prepared soil, becoming fruit with new seeds in it; fruit that I ate and grew. It was a simple realization that life goes on in spite of death.

In the distance of time, it seems every day of my childhood and early youth was spent in part outdoors, wandering the woods among the trees, a cross a meandering stream with minnows, crayfish, and salamanders, up and down hillsides studded with great blue granite boulders, and into a cornfield that had once been a Leni Lenape settlement where arrowheads could be found by searching the furrows between the rows. Seasons didn’t slide by as much as they gracefully edged toward, out of and into, then feathered away from each other.

Back to Wendell Berry’s admonition: practice resurrection. Remembering Dominique Browning’s journey from obsessive career to renewed leisurely living. Honoring the spirit of Spring/Easter observed on this Sunday across Western Civilization:

In the midst of what my barber called on Tuesday, “this concrete paradise where we live,” begin your resurrection by intimately, vitally reconnecting with Nature. Be open and responsive to its moments of grace. There's no better season than early spring.

And those of you with impressionable children in your life--grandparents, and other significant adult figures,--practice preemptive resurrection on them. Give them intimate. grace filled moments through first hand experiences of Nature.

Yes, practice resurrection.

Around the World Religions

UCH and the World Religions

This historic congregation, soon to be 124 years old, has long had a keen interest in World Religions. This interest relates generally to the vision of the Unity Men who seeded this congregation, first called the Unity Church of Hinsdale.

The Unity Men were an informal group of radical Unitarians of the West—so-called because the Unitarian congregations of the nineteenth century outside of New England were part of the Western Unitarian Conference. The Unity Men rallied around the patriarch of a Welsh Unitarian clan living in South-central Wisconsin near Spring Green, the lion-like Jenkin Lloyd Jones. (Frank Lloyd Wright, for whom Unity became a lifelong motto, grew up in this liberal religious orbit, called the Rev. Jenkin Lloyd Jones, his mother's brother, Uncle Jenks.) Jones and his cohorts, including the first minister of this congregation, William Channing Gannett, had as a motto “The Unity of All Things.” Their vision was expansive, including the then culturally heretical notion that spiritual truths could be found beyond the Jewish-Christian traditional realm that defined American culture throughout the nineteenth century.

Even by the last decade of the 1800s Americans had scant knowledge of “other” religions. A few Unitarians were the exception, because a little Hinduism had seeped into and even influenced the famous Transcendentalists such as Emerson, Melville, and Thoreau. For example, Emerson’s notion of the Oversoul found resonance in the Hindu notion of the god Brahma. In 1856 he wrote a short poem, now famous, titled “Brahma.”

Jenkin Lloyd Jones, with the motto of the “Unity of All Things,” lobbied successfully to bring one of the great culture transforming events to the Columbian Exposition, the 1892-93 Chicago World’s Fair: The World Parliament of Religions. At the Parliament representatives of a variety of Eastern religions spoke, most notably Swami Vivekananda. Vivekananda began a revival of Hinduism in India and introduced Vedanta to the West through the Ramakrishna Mission. He received a two minute standing ovation from 7000 attendees when in his brief introductory remarks before the Parliament he began with the salutation "Sisters and brothers of America."

This greatest figure of the World Parliament of Religions and the first of the modern international spiritual leaders, Vivekananda came to this Sanctuary during September, 1893 to speak to this congregation.

The high tide of interest in world religions at UCH occurred in the 1950s and 1960s when Sunder Joshi served as minister. Sunder, an Indian of the bramhin class had a Harvard background in comparative religions. He came to Hinsdale in the early 1950s to supply preach during one of the congregation’s downturns. He was invited to return. The congregation soon called him as minister and ordained him. His frequent sermons on world religions led to the commissioning of six paintings of great world religions, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Confucianism, that for many years decorated the length of the wall behind the pulpit. (They now reside in the chapel next door.)

The post World War II era within our liberal religious traditions had a particular interest in World Religions, if only as an aspect of the creation of the United Nations. There was also an impulse within Universalism, called the New Universalism, that moved away from Universal Salvation into Universal Religion.

A great experiment took place in the late 1940s and into the 1950s to reestablish a Universalist presence in Boston, drawing upon a Religion for One World approach of an innovative, enthusiastic young minister, Kenneth Patton. Patton drew on science (the great images of the Charles Street Meeting Houser were of the Andromeda Galaxy painted as a mural and a stylized atom to represent the macro and the micro the Universe), on the arts, and on the teaching of world religions.

While Patton’s Religion for One World, and expression of the New Universalism, never attracted a large Boston congregation (and he moved on), it nevertheless had influence across the Universalist and Unitarian domains. Many of the resources Patton created, and he was prodigious, turned up in the first hymnal of the new Unitarian Universalist Association founded in 1961.

This Hinsdale congregation, thanks to Sunder Joshi’s influence was very much in step with a post-war global religious vision.

Several years ago at the beginning of the new millennium, I did a once a month, yearlong sermon series on the essential truths of the several major world religions. I maintained, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, and Taoism each had a centering truth that we might incorporate for reasons of wholeness into our individual religious orientations.

And in the past couple of years I’ve been speaking, now and again, to a contemporary vision that is often summarized as the Golden Rule, the do unto others as you would have done to you, expressed through the ages in a variety of religions and philosophies. It is a global ethic President Obama returns to in his speeches. It is a global ethic that the Charter for Compassion aims toward. (You may remember the video of a Karen Armstrong speech regarding the Charter for Compassion I showed earlier in the church year.) In my opinion the search for a global ethic is an attempt for religions to positively respond to a post 9/11 world situation when the Abrahamic religions have become once again dangerously contentious.

And you will find it interesting that a former intern minister, now the Rev. Myriam Renaud, who just passed her Ph. D. comprehensive exams at the University Of Chicago Divinity School, is about to begin her doctoral dissertation focused on the global ethic of the recent (1993) World Parliament of Religions. We, you and I, considerably shaped Myriam’s interests and outlooks. She will, I anticipate, make a significant contribution to the emerging concept of a global ethic.

Taking all of this under consideration, here at UCH world religions are more than curiosities or exotica. We’re not so much religious tourists as we’re religious pilgrims. The world religions offer significant insights and transformative truths and they ought to approached, at the very least, respectfully. Respect, indeed, is a high principle we hold together—expanding Unitarianism’s historic attitude of broad and generous tolerance into a new era. Respect and diversity go hand in hand. The world is a much more interesting place than it would be otherwise thanks to the reality of religious diversity.

An ever progressing globalism, the world becoming smaller and smaller because of transportation and communication, presses the importance of world religions upon us, so much more urgently than when Swami Vivekananda spoke from this pulpit in 1893.

Spiritual Essences of Seven World Religions

I've long been fond of a quotation from Pierre Teilhard de Chardin: "I make my soul from all the elements of the earth." This has inspired me to maintain that nothing that is human is alien to me, especially when it comes to religion, because I know that religion is not a matter of revelation from above or outside the human experience, rather the religious impulse relates to the human condition—common to all exclusive to none. The world religions are the result of that common condition—multitudinous religious experience annealed and systematized through various cultures.

I recommend that you explore a variety of world religions. Each religion, in my estimation, has a distinct note. When we take what we perceive to be the essence of various world religions, we are drinking a distilled liquor, like grapes to wine to brandy. And when we lift our cup and drink, we drink of and to the ages and yeasty processes of the human condition, as well as toasting the living traditions that hundreds of millions of human beings observe.

Let's lift the cup together and sip the essence of seven major religions.

Judaism gives us Justice as a basis for living together in society. Jewish Justice is grounded not in power or privilege, rather it is centered in the transcendent notion that we are in relationship with one another through our fundamental relationship with God, or in a more secular understanding, through transcendental ideals such as our American ideals of life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness.

Christianity gives us Love. It tells us that we are Ultimately loved by God, who is the convergence and paragon of Love. We love one another because we can—we are made in God or Love's image. We love one another because we see the Divine Image in the other person, as well as in our own self. We are loved. And we love.

Islam gives us Surrender (Yielding) as a personal pathway to peace. Islam calls for our surrender to the will and way of Allah as the means for solving the existential conflicts of the human condition. We can use the spiritual notion of Surrender to counter the perverse tendencies to hold back our goodness, including our compassion and love, from one another.

Hinduism gives us Acceptance of the variety of human personalities and predilections throughout the stages of life, as well as of the diversity of human expressions. Hinduism maintains that there is not one path to the Ultimate but there are many paths. Follow, even revere, your path; but also let others follow their path, and perhaps you can revere those paths, too.

Buddhism gives us Compassion in recognition of the suffering and loss that hedge the human condition. This most psychological of the world religions engenders incredible empathy. Though we may not have love for another person, we can yet meet them with compassion. Buddhism enjoins us to work to reduce suffering in our world.

Confucianism gives us Right Relationships—the orderliness of Nature and Society through the teaching of character, the "second nature" of habit, we develop Right Relationships that create a harmonious society and developed a rich culture where humanity has its most congenial environment.

Taoism gives us the Way, acknowledging that in the world of cause and effect, actions matter and there is an overarching Way that leads to a state of freedom from fear and to a certain contentedness. The Way of Nature, including human nature, can be our way, too. If we follow the Tao (or Way) we repose in a quiet beauty—not bliss, but a sense that we are of and in the world as we should be.

In the Eclecticism I recommend there is a dynamic synergy among the essential truths of the various world religions. Their sum is exponentially greater than the arithmetic parts. These essential spiritual truths blend together harmoniously. However, they also enhance one another and even offer an implicit challenge back and forth, thereby teasing out deeper understandings and meanings through the ever present possibility of dialogue.

Justice is enhanced by Compassion and Love. Compassion and Love are in dialogue: though they're related, they're not the same. Right Relationships have resonance with the Way, yet the Way is much more intuitive and spontaneous (first nature), while Right Relationships are much learned and traditional (second nature). Surrender always reminds me of the Way—a yielding to the natural order, where peace and happiness await.

In closing, there’s a well known teaching story from Jewish Tradition: "When God created Adam from clay, God gathered that clay from every part of the world and of every color of earth to signify the oneness of humanity."

Building on this teaching story I offer a teaching story from our own Unitarian Universalist Eclectic tradition. (It's not so ancient, since I made it up recently.

When Nature’s God, using the slow but sure means of evolution, shaped and then sent our ancestors across the face of the earth to inhabit it, she did so with great expectations:

First, that through the millennia women and men would have many and diverse experiences, thereby teasing out and embodying the vast possibilities of the human condition in varying climates and cultures.

And second, that someday, when the world would seem to grow much smaller, as it has in our times, we might gather together the many people of the earth along with the deposit of their respective culture. Then, now, we might learn of multudinous experiences and discover how the various cultures not only evolved but also found and lived the meaning of their lives.

Why did she do so? She did so because she is a bountiful and generous God. She made the human condition virtually boundless that we might discover the many meanings that may be lived and discovered, not just in our own life but through many, many lives.

No one life, no one culture is large enough to encompass the human condition. For she is a wise and Loving God, who delights and unconditionally loves all her progeny in all its diversity.

The Reason for Cities (2001)

[The quotations in the body of this sermon/address are taken from: "Soul Searching: Does your hometown have a soul? If you can define the character of your town, maybe you can keep it intact." By Pythia Peay, Washingtonian as reprinted in Utne Reader, January-February 2001. Citations from the article appear in red.]

I have a friend, a member of my Hinsdale congregation -- Hinsdale is fifteen miles due west of the Chicago Loop in the exurban sprawl known as Chicagoland. My friend is passionately involved with the Illinois and Michigan Canal Historical Corridor. The I & M Historical Corridor is innovative public space, connecting a score of municipalities along its 97 miles from Summit at the edge of Chicago to LaSalle and the Illinois River. It follows the remnants of the 1840 canal that joined the Great Lakes to the Mississippi River and led to Chicago's explosive expansion as the great city of the Midwest.

Last spring my friend invited me to tag along with a few local civic officials to explore an area along the I & M Canal Historical Corridor known as The Chicago Portage-one of only two national historic sites in Illinois. It's pocketed in one of those remnant pieces of Nature known in Chicagoland as a forest preserve. It's backed by a chemical plant that's perched on higher ground that leaks noxious chemicals. Numerous times I'd driven past the site's entrance on Harlem Avenue near I 55 where the Des Plaines River curves to merge into the Ship and Sanitary Canal and didn't give it much thought. I'd never even ventured into the parking lot. But at least I was visually aware of the massive, sharply angled, modern, steel sculpture of Marquette and Joliet rusting in an empty concrete moat in a forlorn and often litter strewn parking lot: an odd monument in an unimpressive location best suited to clandestine assignations and underage drinking.

My friend persuaded me to tag along by his enthusiasm for what he touted as a really significant place. "Not many person know about this place, but those who do want to lift it up from neglect. This place has so much meaning and potential," he'd proselytized. "You've got to see it!"

It was a hot and muggy mid morning. After the small group had assembled and introductions were made, we walked across a shaggy meadow into the surrounding woods. Mosquitoes rose from the damp grass to nip any bare skin. Mud from the deer trail we traced into the woods, adhered to the souls of our shoes. The woods were scruffy. At first I wasn't seeing/feeling/experiencing what made this place special- NOT AT ALL!

As we walked, though, the guide made his case, patiently explaining how this was the area where the natives passing between Des Plaines River running down from what is now Wisconsin and a VAST swampy area once known as Mud Lake that gave access to Lake Michigan, portaged their canoes. "You're perched near the Continental Divide," the guide told us as we approached a curving hummock that dropped into what appeared to be the dry course of a small river. The guide plucked a small green spike with a nondescript white flower at its tip. "Smell it, " he commanded. He passed it around: "Crush its stem. It's nodding onion. This plant gave Chicago its name. The Native Americans called it Chicagou, meaning something like what we mean by the words stinking or odiferous. It was a food that the Natives could always rely on, even in the worst times. It only grows in well-drained soil. It wouldn't have grown along the once muddy shores of Lake Michigan. The natives valued this plant that grows only here and in a few other places around here. This, my friends, is likely the place where Chicago was born and got its name."

The idea that cities possess a soul was common among the ancients. The Romans spoke of "genius loci," meaning the special spirit of a place. Indeed, until the 18th-century Enlightenment, when the sacred was severed from the secular in Western culture, cities were often built on foundations of myth and religion, and were thought to be watched over by gods and goddesses, nature spirits, saints, and angels. Belief in a city' s mysteriously personal character lives on in the colorful images that arise when we think of certain places: Los Angeles is the city of angels and dreams of stardom. New Orleans is jazz and black magic. Boulder is breathtaking mountain views and spiritual exploration. Boston, founded by austere Puritans, is symbolized by the lowly bean. Even when they're repeated ad nauseam in travel brochures, these images connect us with the underground wells of myth that water a city's soul.

As the guide talked and I perspired, swatted mosquitoes, and inhaled from my fingers the persistent pungency of the nodding onion, I had an unexpected realization- a flashing moment of complex understanding, a genuine religious experience: A Southwest Airlines jet that had taken off from Midway Airport was climbing in the sky overhead. Automobiles and trucks whined along nearby I 55. A freight train lumbered on the tracks that arched over the Des Plaines River- a river that drained a great area reaching northward. The Sanitary and Ship Canal, not far away, the rechanneled Des Plaines River, connected the Great Lakes to the Mississippi River. And the old route of the mythic American highway connecting Chicago to Los Angeles, Route 66, ran along a street only a few hundred yards distant.

Nature conspired and humankind for millennia had responded, and we were still responding today. Here was the reason for Chicago. I was standing smack-dab on it--the pivot of one of the great cities of the world--the Heartland metropolis of North America. Had I been alone, or less self-conscious, I might have stretched out my arms and turned circles in the throes of ecstasy, -the miraculous majesty of a continent' s resources and beneficence converging on the place where I stood, --an ecstasy of wonder and gratitude, of joyful harmony.

In that unexpected moment of sure religious experience, I imagined I was filled with the spirit that Ron Engel had identified in his fine book, Sacred Sands, about the Indiana Dunes that curve around Lake Michigan to the east of Chicago. In Sacred Sands Ron tells how that area came to embody/express the spirituality of Chicago. I flashed how Ron had described that area where the great eco-systems of the North American continent-north and south, east and west- meet and create successions of miniature ecosystems contained in a relatively small area. To convey the spiritual significance, Ron used terms associated with the influential University of Chicago professor of comparative religions, Mircea Eliade: axis mundi,-the pivot on which he world turns, a sacred center,-God's navel.

In that moment of religious experience, I also flashed the title of an influential book, Nature's Metropolis by William Cronon that has helped to recast contemporary environmental history. Mr. Cronon' s analysis alerted me to the role that the great riches of the American hinterland-the diverse bounties of Nature-played in Chicago's evolution into an ever greater and grander city and how Nature was in turn affected. Thanks to Mr. Cronon's analysis, whenever I drive into the city I look up to the Art Deco rendition of the ancient goddess of grain, Ceres, who, claims her dominion over the city from a fitting throne at the top of the Board of Trade building at the head of La Salle Street in the heart of the city's financial district. I pay her silent homage-not the famous gleaming aluminum image, but the forces of Nature she mythologizes.

But does anyone today really care about the souls of our cities? Like giant urban gods fallen from their pedestals, they lie dying of neglect, buried beneath asphalt and artless architecture, crushed by the weight of overwhelming social problems, their inhabitants often blind to the fact that their own souls are shaped, for better or worse, within the city's larger reality. We ignore the magic of a place-hidden beyond the real estate deals, the political squabbles, and numbing commutes-at our own peril.

I embarked on my own quest to uncover the soul of Washington, D.C., as a way to quell my distress after moving here. It dawned on me recently that if I can succeed in a city renowned for its hollow-hearted power-mongering and inside-the-beltway narcissism, then anyone anywhere could do the same.

Chicago didn't happen by chance. Its reason for being is rooted in a tangible primal reality- in Nature. Its subsequent greatness is secondary to, or conditioned by, Nature's greatness. What's true for Chicago, I say is true for every city. Cities result from the seamless reality where Nature and human nature conspire to serve human ends and each affects the other.

Every city has a primary reason for being that's a matter of Nature-a convergence of geographic fact. I say with a conviction that comes from first hand experience of living in a half dozen urban areas, I say with the passion of a dedicated seeker: SPIRIT resides in the places where cities inevitably take shape. Every city has its genius loci . This is to say, cities, even before they are inhabited but certainly after, and surely forever are sacred places. Our human work in building them, and transforming them, and sustaining them, and reforming them doubles the holiness- heaping human meaning and purpose on top of Nature's inherent meaning and purpose.

As you do the work of this conference, never forget that you are engaged in a religious endeavor. In my estimation, you are giving yourself to a natural sacredness-however you construe The Source of the sacredness--even as you acknowledge and seek to make human life more sacred, through your various Justice activities. You are doing holy work- honoring and expanding holiness across the land in already sacred places, in particular lives, and in our common world. The double sacredness of which I speak-Nature's meaning/reality and human meaning/reality- is your strength and your inspiration; it is also a vision toward which you strive.

Ironically, commitment to saving the souls of our cities might lead to greater protection of wilderness. As James Hillman has frequently pointed out, Americans tend to see their cities as the place where the innocent become corrupted and where soul is lost, rather than found. He has argued passionately on behalf of reversing this trend, thus protecting nature from too much human contact and reanimating our cities from within. For to seek soul only in nature, or within ourselves, is to miss the wondrous natural creation that is a city- a convergence of community, commerce, street life, history, nature, geography, politics, art, and people that offers a perpetually renewing source of life.

We all know what happened to many American cities in the last half century, particularly in the ' 80s and '90s in the rust belt regions. Factories closed down forever or moved south. Business headquarters retreated to the suburbs, where millions of middleclass families had already emigrated. New schools, malls, and recreational areas rose in the suburbs, too. Left behind were mostly the underclasses and the unempowered. The urban infrastructure deteriorated and contributed to a concentration of despair.

I experienced all of this, and more, in my first church, the First Unitarian Church of Youngstown, Ohio, where I began in 1977. My contract started on the city's most infamous day, immediately given the moniker of "Black Monday," when the heart and soul steel mill, Youngstown Sheet and Tube, of what was once the world's third largest steel producing district, closed. Within a few years all major mills had folded. Six years later, when I left Youngstown for my current church, Youngstown had the highest unemployment in the nation, nearly 25%; and workers who had the wherewithal headed elsewhere. In those first six years of my ministry I worked to keep an urban UU church alive that had nearly destroyed itself a decade earlier; and I worked to maintain a city that had its traditional economy destroyed, whose population was shrinking. In many ways, in the sweep of my 25 years of ministry, these were "the best of times," when circumstances made unmistakable what needed to be done and even small accomplishments had measurable significance.

Youngstown most definitely had a soul forged in great mills by a host of East European immigrants and later African Americans from the South. Maybe more than most other cities, Youngstown had deeply institutionalized but hidden-beneath-the surface peculiarities-organized crime being the most insidious and corrosive- that forged its soul. Its soul seeped into my soul; for a least a year after leaving it remained my instinctive reference.

The soul of a city is as unique as the spirit that "creates" a city in the first place. A city's soul is a complex evolution that relates to all that human doing has wrought. Chicago has a soul. I've spent 18 years prowling its many neighborhoods experiencing its complexity. There's ample meanness and even evil, side-by side with all the positive accomplishments and culture to be found here.

By all appearances, American cities seem to be reforming. The decades long trend of moving out of the city is reversing. Middle class folk are moving back in-- mid-life, empty-nester, baby boomers as well as young adults fleeing the sterility of the suburbs. The evidence of this-which is good news for some and bad news for others-is escalating urban real estate prices across the country. And those who stayed seem to have found a renewed enthusiasm- Youngstown being an apt example,--as courageous citizens have rallied to fight deeply entrenched organized crime.

This renewed interest in the city generally makes this an opportune time for promoting the spectrum of progressive Justice issues: race, class, ecology, gender, economy, and more. It's my current experience that cooperative liberal (if not progressive) faith groups are in the vanguard of reforming the city-perhaps not so much in the turn-of-the-last-century's aesthetic vision of the City Beautiful, but in a contemporary variation- the City Just.

All cities have problems, though they are often unacknowledged. While it' s usually difficult and politically risky to draw attention to shortcomings, especially in a place that prides itself on being a city that "works," ignoring them perpetuates a state of soulnessness. In Santa Fe, for example, conflicts arise between the economic bonanza of tourism and its rich historic, Hispanic character. The influx of wealthy Anglos purchasing vacation homes has come at the expense of indigenous residents- the Native Americans and Spanish-who can no longer afford to live where their grandparents and great-grandparents lived.

Race, of course, is an issue affecting most American cities. Almost every person I've talked with in Washington mourns the racial divide between blacks and whites; some people describe it as a city of "two souls." To drive past abandoned buildings with the U.S. Capitol looming in the background, to see how dramatically the pollution-choked Anacostia River contrasts with the cleaner, suburban Potomac River, is to witness a visible tear in the city's soul.

Volunteering at a shelter for the homeless, throwing yourself into a political reform movement, getting to know down-and-out neighborhoods, speaking out about community ills all can help you find the soul of your hometown, as well as contribute to healing it.

The twentieth century popular philosopher Lewis Mumford remains a favorite voice of the humanist/naturalist orientation to which I resonate. He had much to say about the city-its place in history and its possibilities. In his 1938 book, The City, Mr. Mumford waxed mythopoetically about the meaning of the city. He wrote, "The city is both a physical utility for collective living and a symbol of those collective purposes and unanimities that arise under such favoring circumstances. With language itself, it remains [hu]man[kind's] greatest work of art"

Yes, love the city as a work of art-its natural genius transformed through human aspiration and striving. More specifically, love your city. Be infused by the spirit- the convergence of nature and humanity that creates and recreates it. Explore your city's soul. Be intimate with its malevolence as well as its glory. Dare to let your soul seep into your city, even as your city' s soul seeps into you. Do Justice, that the spirit of the city might be honored, the soul of the city rectified, and perhaps your soul saved for the only end that matters in our democratic, egalitarian society- for the sake of all the people in service of all that you hold sacred.

Instinct and Odyssey

I’ve got an itch to write a new book. I want it to be commercial, that is, marketable beyond the narrow confines, however friendly, of Unitarian Universalism.

I’m envisioning a hybrid work, something like a scrapbook, something like a catalog, and something like a workbook suitable to the postmodern sensibility, a sensibility shaped so much by the Internet, as well as the contemporary visual media. And I want it to be a capstone of my three decades as an active and public intellectual thinker in the realm of religion—one who’s had the rare privilege of being a free-range forager as only a UU minister can be. For years I’ve noodled around with what I call Natural Religion—an expansive perspective true to Nature and Human Nature.

I’ve had a working title for at least twenty years: Instinct and Odyssey.

Instinct signifies that we’re all hardwired when it comes to belief and morality. In the broader strokes we’re all more alike than not. Odyssey signifies that each of us has a personal journey. In close-up, sharp focus each of us is unique. Instinct and Odyssey, the universally human and the intimately individual, suggests one of the paradoxes that dot the Religious Landscape.

How I look at the Religious Landscape is informed, even inspired, by my chosen faith, Unitarian Universalism.

Channing: Freedom of the Mind

The Unitarian way, rooted in freedom of the mind and freedom of the will, has shaped my outlook regarding the proper understanding of Religion. In this morning’s responsive affirmation we revisited a foundational and continuing source, what William Ellery Channing called the Free Mind.

It was Channing, the leading light of a group of religious liberals, who in 1819 announced that there was a new group in the old New England Congregational Churches, a group infected by the Enlightenment who valued Reason and Free Will. Channing argued that God was a Reasonable/Rational God and humankind was created with an agile mind to apprehend God. In the 1819 sermon in which Channing announced the emergence of the Unitarians, he preached from a text from 1 Thessalonians: “Prove all things, hold fast that which is good.”

The text implies freedom, the proving of things by Reason and Experience cannot be fettered. It was for this reason that Channing set a standard that Unitarians have scrupulously kept for two centuries: that there be no creed, for time has revealed progressing truths. Progress will continue. New truths will emerge. As it used to said, “Revelation is not sealed.”

The Free Mind (Conscience, too) and Free Will, along with No Creed give Unitarians a unique perspective on Religion.

Parker: Absolute Religion

Another important influence of the Unitarian Way is often identified with a second generation Unitarian minister, Theodore Parker who significantly set Unitarianism free from narrow Christianity, the Christianity of sects and doctrines. He too did it with a sermon, The Transient and Permanent in Christianity, preached in 1841. It was a remarkable sermon preached before unreceptive colleagues in which Parker, the iconoclast, dismissed forms of religion in favor of the substance of Religion. He said, “To turn away from the disputes of the Catholics and the Protestants, of the Unitarian and the Trinitarian, of Old School and New School, and come to the plain words of Jesus of Nazareth, Christianity is a simple thing; very simple. It is absolute, pure Morality; absolute, pure Religion; the love of man; the love of God acting without let or hindrance.”

Parker recommended that what Jesus manifested, in word and deed, is possible in every person, that what we recognize in Jesus is our own reflection and that in this we might grow. And he was so audacious as to declare, “So if it could be proved … that the gospels were the fabrication of designing and artful men, that Jesus of Nazareth had never lived, still Christianity would stand firm, and fear no evil. None of the doctrines of that religion would fall to the ground; for if true, they stand by themselves.”

There’s so much going on in this remarkable sermon. For this morning’s purposes I lift up Parker’s insight that each of us has the means to discern what is true—we resonate to truth when we see it. Truth is universal. It does not depend on time, place, or person.

Parker was a scandal in his day, shunned by the Boston Unitarian establishment that saw Parker as an infidel relative to Christianity. More than anyone else, Parker moved Unitarianism toward an ever open and increasingly eclectic outlook and an indelible trust in self. Theodore Parker is one of my heroes.

What encouragement we have in this unique Religious Way:

• To use our most treasured resource, the human mind to process and understand.
• To seek in utter freedom, meaning and purpose.
• To resonate to truth, as well as beauty and goodness, wherever/wheneve encountered.
• To infuse our world, personal and collective, with meaning, while fulfilling personal purpose.
• To respect the self and that self in all others.
• To self-actualize perhaps, but even more to self-transcend.

Surly Bonds

Two weeks ago, in talking about my experiences at McGill where I studied theology, I used the phrase “surly bonds,” relative to getting beyond my own cultural biases and moving toward a more cosmopolitan outlook. (Of course, someone in the congregation recognized the source of the phrase, from a famous poem called High Flight by John Gillespie Magee, Jr.) The phrase also suits my experience through Unitarian Universalism as I’ve soared in the realm of Religion. The poem captures a spirit of Freedom in Religion that I’ve experienced and you can, too.

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I've climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds, — and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of — wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov'ring there,
I've chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air. . . .
Up, up the long, delirious burning blue
I've topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace
Where never lark, or ever eagle flew —
And, while with silent, lifting mind I've trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.

Strategies to Live Successfully: Transforming Self, Others, and Our Common World

Faculty of Religious Studies; McGill University

I studied at McGill University in Montreal. Here’s how I got there.

We were living in Ottawa when I decided I wanted to be a UU minister. The first requirement was a theological degree. I considered either the University of Toronto or McGill. So, one weekday, Ellie, Katie (who was two), and I took the train to Montreal. I showed up at McGill’s Faculty of Religious Studies unannounced. The professor who headed the program I was interested in graciously gave me his time and walked me through the venerable Faculty building at the edge of the campus. At the end of the interview he said, rather casually, “And, oh, if you enroll, you can become a member of my College of the United Church of Canada and we will pick up your tuition.” (The United Church, the Presbyterians, and the Anglicans who’d once owned the Building, had given the property to the University and in exchange had so many “free” enrollments in perpetuity.) Talk about the kindness of strangers! It was an offer I couldn’t refuse.

Religious Studies at McGill, was rich with, of course, world-class Christian scholars. It also had relationship with a Hindu Institute as well as an Islamic Institute whose founding director was an important scholar of comparative religions: Wilfred Cantwell Smith. He was unassuming in appearance (very professorial in a tweedy way) but a radical scholar, and something of a post-modernist before that descriptive was devised, who emphasized how Western biases skewed scholarship. (Incidentally, his most influential successor in comparative religion studies is Karen Armstrong, whom I featured last Sunday.)

It was in his Introductory courses on Islam, attended by a host of Muslims from around the world, that I slipped the surly bonds of my own cultural background and became freely, gladly eclectic and relatively cosmopolitan. I began to acquire and assimilate bits and pieces of what I now call “natural religion:” a religion of realities, tested by reason and experience, open to all the disciplines, not merely theology. In fact, I found theology relatively poor. (Dr. Smith once said, "Interdisciplinary studies are a ladder to get out of a hole into which the true scholar never falls.")

The Science of Satyagraha

It was during my McGill years that I encountered Gandhi’s notion of satyagraha: truth force, meaning the strategy of non-resistance to overcome oppressors.

The McGill neighborhood had wonderful restaurants and shops, including two major department stores. It was spring, and a storefront bookstore had a table of discounted books on the sidewalk. I bought a small volume with flecked, brown fragile pages, published in India, quotations by Gandhi about satyagraha. Many of the quotations spoke of the science of truth or the science of love.

Now the word science intrigued me, because it implied that satyagraha, as developed by Gandhi, had been tried out and found successful—first in South Africa at the turn of the century and at mid century in India. It also recommended, as with hard science, that the strategy be tried and tried and tried—generally, that any life strategy, or ethic, was up for constant experiment.

As a true committed Unitarian, I follow the piece of Scripture attached to Channing’s 1819 sermon that announced Unitarianism to the world: “Prove all things, hold fast to the good.” This isn’t science in the purest empirical sense, but it is a science of ideas, knowledge, truth. The proof is in the testing.

My McGill years took place in the early ‘70s. For nearly forty years, thirty-one as a practicing UU minister, I’ve devised a coherent and meaningful understanding of how to navigate through life. I’ve framed this understanding in terms of Religion—a Religion open to and accountable to all disciplines. Regarding Religion I like what my long ago mentor Wilfred Cantwell Smith said at the end of his distinguished career: "I'm not saying that religion is a good thing. I'm saying that it's a great thing. It can make you better or it can make you much worse. But it means that you take the question of how to live seriously." And I add, Religion should take seriously meaning as well and be reasonable, resulting in a satisfying, successful life.

So, I began with Gandhi and satyagraha. Gandhi established strict attitudes and actions that the practitioner of the science of truth needs to embody. One of the guiding principles maintains that the means and the ends must be compatible, that is, the ends never justify destructive means. Satyagraha seeks to break the cycle of violence begetting violence. Indeed, in human relations, as well as in international relations, I have long seen that violence, in every manifestation—verbal, emotional, physical—has as a reflexive response of commensurate violence from the opposite party.

The Tao Te Ching

Now, about the same time I encountered Gandhi and his science of satyagraha, I began to read the Tao Te Ching, an ancient and brief Chinese text attributed to the philosopher Lao Tse, the mythical founder of philosophical Taoism. (When Buddhism met Taoism, Zen Buddhism resulted, so you can better appreciate the enigmatic, mystical nature of Taoism.) The Tao Te Ching was written to advise a ruler how to rule, yet survive in office and keep his life. (It is the polar opposite of Machiavelli’s The Prince, with its ruthless self-interest.) The Tao Te Ching often translates as The Way and Its Power. In The Tao Te Ching, the ideal for the ruler is not to be recognized as the ruler. Metaphor illustrates such a counterintuitive strategy. For example, a wheel has many spokes, but it is the space where there is nothing on which the wheel turns. The TaoTe Ching speaks often of water that always seeks the lowest level but over time wears down the most adamant of courses. In private affairs if you seek to safe from thieves, don’t acquire possessions that others may covet. These and other metaphors are more or less absurd yet they have an underlying, intuitive truth, especially when it comes to breaking the cycles of oppression, violence, and retaliation/revenge. Through the years, I’ve returned to reflect on the enigmatic advice of the Tao Te Ching and in an idealistic way, it has seemed increasingly true. It tangentially confirms Gandhi’s assertions about how to break the circle of violence.

Gandhi also declared that the satyagrahi (as a practitioner of satyaygraha is known) must search her or his intentions, first to affirm that the goal is honorable and truthful. However, the satyagrahi never acts out of disdain, hatred, anger or similar negative emotions/motive. Truth and love are the criteria by which to judge one’s motivations and intentions. The force of truth and love result in respect, yes, but even more they set in motion a power that transforms the oppressor.

Through the decades, I’ve come across various texts asserting the transformative power of truth or love. Gandhi drew on the Bhagavad Gita from his Hindu tradition, the teaching of Jesus, Thoreau, and Tolstoy. Martin Luther King was explicit about what he called the soul force that he derived from his Christian roots. Dr. King was indebted to Gandhi, once saying: “Like most people, I had heard of Gandhi, but I had never studied him seriously. As I read, I became deeply fascinated by his campaigns of nonviolent resistance. I was particularly moved by his Salt March to the Sea and his numerous fasts. The whole concept of Satyagraha (Satya is truth which equals love, and agraha is force; Satyagraha, therefore, means truth force or love force) was profoundly significant to me. As I delved deeper into the philosophy of Gandhi, my skepticism concerning the power of love gradually diminished, and I came to see for the first time its potency in the area of social reform. ... It was in this Gandhian emphasis on love and nonviolence that I discovered the method for social reform that I had been seeking.”

The Power of Love: A Parable

Dr. King harnessed the power of love in most remarkable transformation of America, politically and socially, the Civil Rights reformation of the 1960s. In the Science of Truth or Love this is for me a lesson—call it a proof—that always fills me with awe when I look at it in context.

One of my favorite expressions about the power of love is a parable penned by the founder of the Ethical Culture movement, Felix Adler, in his 1905 classic Essentials of Spirituality: It’s often called a parable of how to deal with oppressors:

“There is a story told of two brothers, sons of the same father, who grew up in the same home and were deeply attached to each other. It happened that the older wandered away and fell into the power of an evil magician, who changed him into a ravening wolf. The younger mourned his loss, and treasured in his heart the image of the brother as he had been in the days before the wicked spell fell upon him. Impelled by his longing, he at last went out into the world to find his brother, and if possible to redeem him. One day as he passed through a lonely forest, a hungry wolf set upon him. The horrid, brutal face was near to his, the hot breath breathed upon him, and the fierce eyes flamed into his own. But by the might of his love, the younger brother was able to detect beneath the wolfish disguise the faint outlines of the brother whom he had long ago lost, and by the strength of his gaze, which saw only the brother and refused to see the wolf, he was able to give shape and substance to that faint outline. The outer frame of brutishness gradually melted away, and the human brother was restored to his senses and to his home. This is a parable of the spiritual attitude toward oppressors, toward those who oppress the people in public, as well as toward those who oppress us in our private lives. We must liberate them from the brutal frame in which they are inclosed; we must give them back their human shape!”

Truth and Reconciliation

In this vein, I’ve recently become attracted to the process known as “truth and reconciliation.” It's a process that was used in South Africa following the fall of apartheid and the establishment of a new republic with Nelson Mandela as president. Bishop Desmond Tutu was also a significant influence. Reconciliation is a theological term associated with the Christian notion of sin and forgiveness. (In the Catholic tradition, the sacrament of reconciliation involves confession, repentance, and communion.) In the South African experience, the concern by the leaders was how to break an ugly cycle of violence—how might those who suffered at the hand of oppressors get justice and lead to a lasting peace?

The final report provided the narrative of the testimony (truth telling) of some 20,000 witnesses who had suffered under apartheid’s brutalities of body and spirit since 1960. In some instances the perpetrators/oppressors sought forgiveness, no matter how many sought forgiveness (the number was relatively small, but all were given the opportunity to confess.

The truth telling had good effect, perhaps of a therapeutic or cathartic nature, or perhaps it was a consequence of a “truth force” that operates through human nature and transforms self and others.

Bishop Tutu who chaired the commission wrote this in the preface to the commission’s final report: “We have been privileged to help to heal a wounded people, though we ourselves have been, in Henri Nouwen's profound and felicitous phrase, ‘wounded healers’. When we look around us at some of the conflict areas of the world, it becomes increasingly clear that there is not much of a future for them without forgiveness, without reconciliation. God has blessed us richly so that we might be a blessing to others. Quite improbably, we as South Africans have become a beacon of hope to others locked in deadly conflict that peace, that a just resolution is possible. If it could happen in South Africa, then it can certainly happen anywhere else. Such is the exquisite divine sense of humour.”

To a truly remarkable degree, as credited by Bishop Tutu, the Truth and Reconciliation process undermined retaliation—a bloodletting.

This morning I’ve introduced you to what I’ve found throughout my four decades of looking into the human spirit and human nature—that includes the way of individuals and the way of nations. It involves the way of what Gandhi called Truth or Love—they are in this use synonymous. I recommend each of you reflect on and experiment with Power/Force of Truth/Love. It is a transformative strategy. It will change you and it will change where you touch our common world.

I maintain this is the deepest current within what we commonly call Religion.