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.

O Is for Ornament ("The Christmas Pickle")

(My Christmas Eve service featured"The Holidays A to Z," encompassing in 26 vignettes the breadth of the  Season.)

Ornaments  festooning the Christmas Tree are among the most beloved of  Holiday traditions.  Ornaments represent  all sorts of things that fill our lives and offer meaning.  Or they are simply colorful, shimmering baubles that delight the eye. They rest in the green branches of a symbolic Tree of Life—the Christmas Tree.

One of my favorite ornaments is known as “the Christmas pickle”  The legend of the pickle ornament maintains it’s an old German custom.  According to the legend, it is the last ornament placed on the tree, well hidden in the midst of other ornaments, lights,and tinsel.  Children are challenged to be the first to find it, the winner earning a special gift.  However, Christmas pickle debunkers (Yes Virginia, there are Christmas pickle debunkers) claim it’s a bogus legend.  They wonder, could it be a scheme of German ornament makers to sell more ornaments?  

Like many of the Christmas legends, there are those who believe and those who don’t believe the legend of the Christmas pickle ornament. In this regard the "Christmas pickle" legend represents many of the Holiday legends that rise from a twilight of truth and over time become tradition.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                

Peace on Earth

A Christmas Irony

The director’s remarks regarding the film “Joyeux Noel” (Merry Christmas) and the hymn we just sang “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day” based on the Longfellow poem “Christmas Bells” illuminate the timeless irony of the mythic angels’ blessing to the shepherds keeping watch with their flock: “Peace on Earth."

Longfellow, while anxious and grief-stricken for his gravely injured son during the Civil War, clearly articulated the irony: “And in despair I hung my head, there is no peace on earth I said, for hate is strong and mocks the song of peace on earth, goodwill to men.”

We are at war, once again, this Christmas Season. Since 2001 we’ve been engaged in an ambiguous world wide war against Islamic terrorism. But there’s no ambiguity regarding the two hot war we’re engaged in: a war in Afghanistan we’ve been fighting since October 2001; a war in Iraq we’ve been fighting since March 2003. The War in Afghanistan seeks to root out the terrorist organization Al Qaeda. Al Qaeda promotes a worldwide Muslim holy war and masterminded the September 11, 2001 terrorists attacks. The War in Afghanistan coincidentally seeks to diminish the Taliban regime that harbored Al Qaeda. The War in Iraq was ostensibly begun because Saddam Hussein’s regime possessed considerable weapons of mass destruction that were an imminent threat to America following

Both wars seek to implant freedom. George W. Bush, President at the onset of the War in Iraq, often spoke of the mission in Iraq in terms of introducing freedom and democracy into the Mideast to bend Muslims and their nations toward these Western Ideals. The War in Afghanistan has the moniker Operation Enduring Freedom. Among the names for the War in Iraq is Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Since 2003 on Christmas Eve, I’ve included in the service a meditation I wrote regarding Peace. I call it “An Audacious Light.” I vowed to reprise it on Christmas Eve as long as we’re at war.  I'll read it again this week on Christmas Eve.

I LIGHT A SOLITARY CANDLE

It casts only a small sphere

of light,

But beyond this little sphere

the flame reaches toward

and reflects in each our eyes.

This fragile, yes fragile flame,

is nevertheless audacious:

It is an audacious light

in its brightness,

It is an audacious light

in its piercing of the darkness,

It is an audacious light

in seeking out our eyes.

Let this flame

Signify

An Audacious Peace.

Peace may elude nations.

(Tonight our Nation

is at war and

our spirits are troubled.)

But Peace is reflected

in our eyes...

IN OUR EYES…

This is where Peace

begins;

IN OUR EYES…

This is where Peace

lives;

IN OUR EYES…

This is where Peace

swells—

An audacious glint,

reflecting from person to person.

Look into one another’s eyes

and see a reflection, that glint,

of Peace.

Pass the reflection on.

As Peace is in our eyes,

Then let there be Peace

in our families and among our friends.

Let our sense of who is our Family

and who are our Friends

expand across the earth.

And then there

might be

Peace on Earth

Among Persons

Of Goodwill.

Then the pride and folly

of nations

Will dissolve into our shared

humanity and our common cause.

Barack Obama and a Just War

We’ve recently experienced yet again another illustration of the irony of war and peace, one which we’re complicit as a self-proclaimed peace-seeking-nation-at-war. The occasion was the acceptance by President Barack Obama of the Nobel Prize. Mr. Obama readily and coherently in his acceptance speech that he came to Oslo “filled with difficult questions about the relationship between war and peace and our effort to replace one with the other.”

After a brief disclaimer regarding the controversy over his selection, Mr. Obama began his speech with remarks regarding a so-called “just war.” He spoke to a proud American legacy forged from World War I through the end of the Cold War: “the ideals of liberty, self-determination, equality and the rule of law have haltingly advanced.” And without using the term he alluded to the Pax Americana (the American Peace) after World War II.

Contemporary wars are different he said. Today wars are often within nations rather than between nations and kill a disproportionate number of civilians in the process. And of course terrorism proposes a unique threat whereby a handful can wreak havoc on multitudes. War and peace must be rethought. And he declared “There will be times when nations—acting individually or in concert—will find the use of force not only necessary but morally justifiable.”

Immediately after certain wars morally justifiable, he invoked the idealism of King and Gandhi and their pronouncements of non-violence in the name of love. Mr. Obama declared that he personally is than “living testimony to the moral force of non-violence.”

Yet he is a head of state sworn to protect and defend his nation.

So he has a huge dilemma and offered his rationale/justification in solving that dilemma of ideals and vision versus responsibilities and realities.

With incredible efficiency he sketched the basis of what is called “moral realism:” evil exists and sometimes force against it is necessary given history, human imperfection and the limits of reason. Now friends, this analysis bows to a mid 20th century theology articulated by the Protestant thinker/clergy Reinhold Neihbur who was instrumental in reviving a modern notion of original sin and wrote passionately, and for some persuasively, about the immorality of nations and societies. Moral Man and Immoral Society, one of his influential books, power, not reason, reigns supreme in the affairs of nations, societies, and social classes. (Mr. Obama in a 2007 interview with David Brooks called Reinhold Neibhur one of his favorite philosophers.)

But, and the but has many components, there are ways and means of morally conducting war when war is necessary. These standards must be articulated and adhered to.

He also outlined ways and means to avoid war by building a just and lasting peace. It was in this section that Mr. Obama spoke of advocating worldwide human rights, in accord with the dignity of every individual. Here he iterated economic security and opportunity. He invoked, without saying, the name and the spirit of Franklin Roosevelt. “For true peace is not just freedom from fear but freedom from want.” So the expansion of human rights and opportunity is one of the means for finding lasting peace.

Many thoughtful commentators have already cited Mr. Obama’s Oslo Speech as his most brilliant, threaded with strands of high morality and worldly realism, hence the judgment that it reflects the stance of “moral realism.”

Hearing it as it was being delivered, my first reaction was disappointment at his “just war” proclamations that serve to promote a status quo of dubious origins and specious motives. I understand the responsibilities of his office and the politics of the moment he had to reconcile to principles. Still, I wanted more principle, yes, more of the ideals of love and non-violence he associated with King and Gandhi and less of a so-called “moral war,” because the Oslo platform was the most bully pulpit Mr. Obama will ever stand behind..

A Doctrine of Human Security

And I’ve recently become an advocate of a relatively new strategy for attaining world peace. (Power vs. power, violence, as Dr. King said “never brings peace…solves no social problem.” Interestingly, Mr. Obama referred to this new strategy I’m liking when he spoke of human rights, particularly freedom from fear and want. This emerging, new, people centered approach for meeting conflict both within and between nations, is being called the doctrine of human security. This emerging doctrine emphasizes human rights and dignity, and is associated with Franklin Roosevelt’s famous speech at the beginning of World War II known as “The Four Freedoms:” freedom from fear, freedom from want, freedom of speech, and freedom of religion.”

I’ve become an advocate of human security in preference to national security, especially in regards to world peace. We should bend our considerable efforts and treasures to effecting human rights at home and in the world. I’m glad Mr. Obama spoke to human rights in his Oslo Speech; but I want human rights to have been at the center, because it is a cause that is also an effect.

I think the philosopher/psychologist William James got it right, both practically and idealistically a century ago, in a quotation I’ve used before. (Remember, Pete Seeger has it painted on the side of his barn.) ”I am against bigness and greatness in all forms, and with those invisible, molecular moral forces that work from individual to individual, stealing in through the crannies of the world like so many soft rootlets, or like the capillary oozing of water, which, if given time, will rend the hardest monuments of man’s pride, if you give them time”

In closing I ask you to remember the gist of my reflection on peace, “An Audacious Light:”

Look into one another’s eyes

and see a reflection, that glint,

of Peace.

Pass the reflection on.

And so an “invisible moral force” working from individual to individual may transform our world.  I envision no other way that doesn't sow the seeds of violence time and time again than this doctrine of human security.  Pass on human rights.

Interrogating My Stuff

This morning’s overarching theme is stuff—the stuff in our lives.

It is also a reflection about the Holidays, Christmas in particular, and the double edged conundrum of giving and getting.

Each year we have new insight into the perils, including the excesses of gifting. This year a Wharton School professor Joel Waldfogel, author, of Scroogenomics: Why You Shouldn't Buy Presents for the Holidays is making the rounds of the talk show circuit. He is arguing that we generally value the gifts received considerably less than what they cost the giver. He says, “On the average gifts generate 20 percent less satisfaction than items we buy for ourselves.” He recommends, unless we know the person very well it’s better to give cash, in the guise of a gift card, that is, if you want your gift to be appraised by the receiver for what you spent on it.

Generally, I’ve observed that we have a love/hate relationship with material things, henceforth referred to simply as stuff, that inhabit our lives. (Stuff’s other name is legion, by the way.) I’m also using the verb inhabit intentionally. Does it seem to you as it does to me that we wake up to an infestation of stuff, like the mice who come into my home every autumn and multiple secretly but leave tell-tale markings in every odd corner and upturned dish. Unless I’m vigilant stuff cyclically but always astonishingly, in its mocking way, gets out of control.

I know that regarding the stuff in my life, it seems I can’t live with it and I can’t live without it. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve resolved to pick through, sort, and toss the stuff that accumulates around me. I’ll get a start, but another, more pressing project comes along, and well, you now the results…. Remember my mice analogy. With mice and stuff a thorough rooting out has to take place or the infestation starts anew.

Some years ago, in keeping with the then au current themes of “voluntary simplicity” and “your money or your life” I cobbled together a sermon on Minimalist Living. I used as an illustration a woman of a certain age featured in a Tribune article of the day who lived alone in a fashionable condo downtown and was a consummate minimalist when it came to stuff. For example, she had just a couple a pair of shoes and a few outfits. (That they were interchangeable parts and she had great taste made her rather chic, nonetheless.) What made her unique was her vow, which she kept religiously, to toss an old piece of clothing whenever she acquired a new piece. (That she could live like a Vogue monk probably owed a great deal to her single status, as well as her age. The early years’ urge to acquire and keep ebbs in the third stage of a lifetime the Hindu tradition describes as RETIREMENT.)

Though a minimalist, it seemed clear to me that she was still a materialist. The stuff she possessed and where she lived mattered. She had not attained the ideal of the final traditional Hindu stage of NONATTACHMENT.

Minimalism (voluntary simplicity) is the best we American materialists might reasonably hope to attain.

Thanks to yet another manifestation of the Reality Show genre we have an example of the minimalist’s opposite: the hoarder. The A&E network has a popular show called “Hoarders.” It features persons’ and their beyond clutter habitations who suffer from OCD—obsessive compulsive disorder. (It’s something of a carnival geek show.)This series allows the viewer to peer voyeuristically into houses of squalor and, perhaps self-righteously, realize that their cluttered and /or disorganized houses are by no means as bad as one’s own. Yet there is also the tinge of guilt. Mea culpa we realize when we look around our own abodes.

I recommend that we live somewhere along the spectrum of stuff between the two poles of Minimalism and Hoarding. Now and again it’s worthwhile to examine where we fall on the spectrum and explore our motives,.

I asked Carolyn Healy to read her delightful essay “Interrogating My Stuff” because she offers a sound strategy of three questions to deal with the stuff of our lives: 1) What do I need you for? 2) What do you say about me? And 3) Would I buy you today? Each question has sub questions, and I’m offering a flyer with the details for you to take home.

In accordance with these questions we ask our stuff there are several options. It can be kept out in the open because it has use, it might be stored (in the box called Museum of Things I Can’t Stand to Get Rid of But Don’t Need to See Every Day), or it can be recycled/given away.

Carolyn’s process has practical results—decluttering and with that decluttering a modicum of freedom from the tyranny of materialism in a consumer. (As a measure of said tyranny just keep a log of advertisements/commercials that wash over you in a typical day.)

Carolyn’s process also honors what stuff represents—the practical value for sure, but also the intangible “value added” of meaning. Here, I’ve long loved Antoine de St-Exupery’s adage: “We live not by things, but by the meaning of things.”

The Jean Shepherd story, his memory trip ("The Return of the Smiling Wimpy Doll") stimulated by the box of gewgaws of his boyhood, teases out how meaning attaches itself to a thing. His box of gewgaws is a very personal Museum of Days Gone By.

So my counsel regarding stuff, beyond being a wise consumer—especially in this Season of gift giving and receiving,—is to thoughtfully measure the meaning of stuff in your life. This approach, measuring the meaning of material things, is pure, unadulterated Unitarianism and connects us with our Puritan roots and a long history of scrupulosity. We UUs are voracious meaning seekers, meaning demanders, and meaning makers.
Make de St -Exupery’s adage an endless mantra and even a constant admonition: “We live not by things, but by the meaning of things.”

This Holiday Season put meaning in what you give; find meaning in what you receive.

Imagine: If Christ Were in Christmas

I find the annual contention over crèches, crosses and Christmas versus holiday trees to be shallow concerns from the Christian side—an idolatry of forms over substance. And I muse, What would Christmas be if the historical Christ were truly at the center of the midwinter festival? It would be something radically different from what in our time and place is essentially a commercial holiday.

One of the most controversial aspects of Jesus’s brief ministry was the healing and comforting of the sick. Surviving sources leave no doubt that Jesus gave special attention to the afflicted of body and spirit. Translated to modern times, his example should move a believer to attend to the infirm, the ill, and the emotionally distressed in every circumstance. Certainly it would lead to direct acts of service, including charity for specific groups, which has become a seasonal custom.

But for those of fullest vision, Jesus’ example would also include universal health care. It would be unacceptable for any individual to be excluded from quality medical care because of economic or social circumstance. Followers of Jesus wouldn’t judge who is and who isn’t entitled to full medical care. They would be adamant that all are entitled, and they would seek reform.

Charity would abound in a Christ centered Christmas, but instead of an emphasis on giving downward, from those who have to those who don’t, there would be an emphasis on egalitarianism. The biblical scholar John Dominic Crossan has pointed out that Jesus ate at the same table with the dispossessed of his day, including women. It is one thing to work at a soup kitchen or hand out vouchers for food and meals. It is something else to share a meal, accepting those with whom you eat as fellow human beings through love rather than pity.

Such a radical outlook would awaken a strong sense of those “isms” that keep us apart—racism, classism, sexism, agism—and would ultimately look to correcting injustices and oppressions through what we’ve come to call social justice. Deep Christians would examine and seek to rectify a social and economic system that results in us-versus-them distinctions between the poor, the homeless, the unemployed, the undereducated, the hungry and the rest of "them." Like Jesus, Christians would be social revolutionaries, working for systemic change, always from a universal love that knows no distinctions.

Women in particular would have special focus at Christmas. That Jesus consorted with and lifted up women, relative to the practices of his place and time, would translate in our own place and time into a recognition of women’s full humanity. This wouldn’t be “woman on a pedestal”—mythologized and imbued with virtues that the traditional culture does not or cannot practice. There would be equal participation by women in the family, in the community, in government, in the workplace.

A Christ-centered Christmas would surely confront the endemic violence that marbles our culture. “Peace on earth” wouldn’t be a once-a-year slogan; it would be a motivating principle centered in the teachings of Jesus, internalized with such passion that all acts of individual, community, and state would be inspired by the ideal of nonresistance. Instead of a temporary state, as when warring armies put down their arms on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, peace would be the permanent, expected, normal state motivating all activities.

In a Christ-centered Christmas, the ultimate criterion for judging the motivation of any act would be whether it is done in the expansive spirit of love, which Jesus once declared was the great law. Each Christian would be compelled to look within and rectify her or his heart with the expansive love that Jesus not only taught but lived. Christmas would be a time of reflection and perhaps of corrective change—a time of humility and confidence in the power of love to transform the individual and society and make peace real.

Kingdom Come

In short, Christmas would be radically different from the commercial Christmas we now know. Jesus was an itinerant minister, so he acquired scant possessions. There would be no Black Friday the day after Thanksgiving, with frenzied shoppers lined up for deep discounts and hard-to-come-by products. There would be few if any presents under the Christmas tree (if there were a Christmas tree)—certainly no extravagances. A materialist Christmas would be more than vulgar; it would be sinful.

What there would be, I suspect, would be the fellowship and the natural levelings of the common table: good food and drink, including wine. But the purpose would be not so much to feast and drink as to gather together in gladness and joy—to be true companions. No one would be lonely or hungry on Christmas Day. And, most important, Christmas Day wouldn’t be one day—a brief interlude in a materialist and market culture—it would be every day. The Kingdom would then truly come, as Jesus once prayed it might.