What’s Happened to Feminism?

Tuesday afternoon I met with a half dozen colleagues who comprise the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice, Illinois. It’s something of a remnant organization of a national organization, RCRC that is itself retrenching because of cutbacks by major institutional donors.

Historically, RCRC has been a pro-abortion umbrella organization drawing together a number of liberal religious institutions, including our Unitarian Universalist Association. But in recent years it has added initiatives for reproductive health (particularly women) generally, comprehensive sexual education, and anti-domestic violence. It‘s an organization that has evolved. Its shifting, actually expanding, interests reflect the course of contemporary feminism in the context of an unsettled American culture.

I looked around the table. Presiding was a sixty-something, salt of the Chicago South Side, Dominican nun who’s been advocating for the ordination of women for more than a quarter of a century. She’s also an unrepentant Catholic for Choice, meaning she’s in favor of legal abortion. (Of course her church’s recent attempts to corral feminist demands within the Catholic Church has gotten her in trouble.) There was an American Baptist minister, who once headed a theological school, and in retirement is a consummate social justice operative. He works with SEICUS (Sexuality Information and Education Council of the U.S.), a national organization dedicated to comprehensive sex education, is the so-called resident theologian for the Chicago based, four square Protestants for the Common Good, and has strong ties to the Chicago ACLU. There was a youngish Methodist lay woman from Aurora and an older Jewish woman, a member of the National Council of Jewish Women, from Olympia Fields. Rounding out the gathering was a newly minted black lawyer interning at the Chicago office of ACLU and a mid-life black woman, who also works at the ACLU, but whose primary identity for our group relates to the large South Side black church where she is a volunteer youth worker. (Other interesting colleagues who were absent included a fellow UU, a black woman from First Unitarian in Chicago, a long time activist for adolescent and young women, particularly in the Chicago schools.)

RCRC IL has been seeking a focus in recent months, and we’ve been planning a relevant program in October. We’ve looked at sexual and physical violence perpetrated on school age girls, coerced sex and date rape. We’ve thought about a panel discussion by representatives of pro-choice and anti-choice positions on the shared topic of how to reduce unplanned pregnancies. This week we’ve settled on working with an ad-hoc coalition of Catholic woman gathering in Chicago in September who seek to reform their church, adding to their gather a co-sponsored public meeting to look at reproductive health and choice, violence, comprehensive sex education, and other front burner concerns.

At the Tuesday meeting I was also thinking about this sermon on contemporary feminism, musing on how this little gathering provided in its midst and in light of its broad interests a window into the past two generations of evolving feminism. What a change feminism has wrought and what changes in feminism are taking place!

First Wave Feminism

In looking at feminism in the American experience commentators have adopted a three part scenario, often called first, second, and third wave feminism. (Some prefer to use the term post-feminism instead of third wave.)

First wave feminism refers to a relatively long span, from the late 18^th century and the publication of Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Women through the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment of the Constitution, after World War I, giving women the right to vote. This hundred plus years of activism began with opposition to chattel marriage (the ownership of women and children by the husband) and generally included issues of equal contract and property rights for women. By the end of the nineteenth century the suffrage movement, seeking the political equality of women, had become the primary issue. In the American Experience on the suffrage road, the famous Seneca Falls Woman’s Convention of 1848 was an epochal event. We are now familiar with mid-century feminists such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucy Stone, Lucretia Mott, and Susan B. Anthony, though their histories (herstories as the radicals feminists said in the 1960s and 1970s) had to be recovered from the cultural dustbin when the Second Wave transformed American Society a hundred years after Seneca Falls.

Second Wave Feminism

In the 1920s through World War II the image of an independent, career minded “New Woman” had cachet. Think of the movies roles c. 1930 sometimes played by Katherine Hepburn or Rosalind Russell—the wise cracking newspaper reporter or imperious business executive.

However, after the War, at least to the analysis of the emerging second wave feminists, American women had adopted a consistent persona, so cogently characterized by Betty Friedan, in arguably the most influential nonfiction book of the second half of the twentieth century, The Feminine Mystique, published in 1963. Ms. Friedan, wife and mother, graduate of Smith College 1942, and famously a resident of suburban Peoria where she had been raised and where she spent her married life, had intended to write an article (she was a freelance journalist) about the happy lives of fellow Smith graduates—well-educated and capable women who’d happily lived a well adjusted domestic life, wife and mother, in the suburbs 15 years after graduation. Her initial interviews, however, revealed “a nameless, aching dissatisfaction” that she called the “problem that has no name.” She gave it a name that reverberates through forty plus years: the feminine mystique. Here’s an excerpt from the book.

The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States. Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night — she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question — "Is this all?"

For over fifteen years there was no word of this yearning in the millions of words written about women, for women, in all the columns, books and articles by experts telling women their role was to seek fulfillment as wives and mothers. Over and over women heard in voices of tradition and of Freudian sophistication that they could desire no greater destiny than to glory in their own femininity. Experts told them how to catch a man and keep him, how to breastfeed children and handle their toilet training, how to cope with sibling rivalry and adolescent rebellion; how to buy a dishwasher, bake bread, cook gourmet snails, and build a swimming pool with their own hands; how to dress, look, and act more feminine and make marriage more exciting; how to keep their husbands from dying young and their sons from growing into delinquents.

In the fifteen years after World War II, this mystique of feminine fulfillment became the cherished and self-perpetuating core of contemporary American culture. Millions of women lived their lives in the image of those pretty pictures of the American suburban housewife, kissing their husbands goodbye in front of the picture window, depositing their stationwagonsful of children at school, and smiling as they ran the new electric waxer over the spotless kitchen floor. They baked their own bread, sewed their own and their children's clothes, kept their new washing machines and dryers running all day. They changed the sheets on the beds twice a week instead of once, took the rug-hooking class in adult education, and pitied their poor frustrated mothers, who had dreamed of having a career. Their only dream was to be perfect wives and mothers; their highest ambition to have five children and a beautiful house, their only fight to get and keep their husbands. They had no thought for the unfeminine problems of the world outside the home; they wanted the men to make the major decisions. They gloried in their role as women, and wrote proudly on the census blank: "Occupation: housewife.

Ms. Friedan was among the founders of the National Organization for Women in 1966 and was NOW’s president through 1970. This period in retrospect seems the high tide of what is now called second wave feminism. It ebbed through the 1980s. The objectives of Women’s Liberation, as the movement was often called, sought to attain equal social, political, legal and economics theretofore granted to men. Its unfulfilled goal was the passage of an Equal Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, introduced by Congress in 1972 and failed 3 states short of ratification, in 1982.

A mantra of second wave feminism was: “The personal is political.” The larger objective, once again, involved righting cultural and political inequalities.

Second Wave feminism suffered from several judgments by different groups, including a new generation of women. First, Women Libbers were considered to be strident and uncompromising, bitter spirited, men haters who denied the traditionally feminine roles of wife and mother. Second, the essentialist vision, that all women were the same and suffered equally, began to lose solidarity. Third, an easy criticism saw the second wave feminist leaders as representing the classist views of middle class, white, heterosexist suburban women. Neglected were women of color, working class women, and the lesbian community. Yet there was a popular belief that radical lesbians had hi-jacked the movement. Fourth, in addition to the culture war issue of homosexuality there was also the even hotter issue of abortion. Certainly there was no lock-step by American women regarding the moral issue of abortion.

A second generation, removed from Mothers who’d championed woman’s equality and succeeded in making considerable gains, by the 1980s began to balk at the designation of feminist. Recognizing a shift and even rift among younger women, Betty Friedan began to write and talk about a “second phase” to the revolution she’d started that took into account a woman’s child-bearing and child-raising interests. In a 1982 NY Times article, 20 years after The Feminine Mystique, Ms. Friedan wrote, “But the power of this desire to have a child—when women no longer need to have a child to define themselves as women—seems to be as great as or even greater than ever.”

The reality c. the mid-1980s through today is clear. Second wave feminism changed the cultural landscape forever; and there’s no going back. That landscape certainly includes political rights and economic justice. (That women have entered the workplace in unprecedented numbers and position of power [the glass ceiling notwithstanding] is one of the abiding and great cultural changes of contemporary American society.) It also includes undeniable sexual freedom, since the spectrum of woman’s control over her biological destiny in the 1960’s and 1970’s was transformed by the birth control pill and abortion on demand throughout the first trimester.

Third Wave Feminism

So, in response and through evolution, post-second wave women have a new model of feminism, usually called third wave. There is less solidarity as a group, as well as perhaps a lack of appreciation of the struggles by an earlier generation that gave newer generations assumed rights. Third wave feminists claim that women are now individually free to incorporate their attitudes and values into a unique understanding of what it means to be a woman in contemporary culture. If third wave is a valid moniker, perhaps it only applies to the youngest women who have grown up in a feminist culture and who do not see themselves in terms of their mothers and yes, grandmothers, and assertive ways for political, economic, and cultural rights.

Here are characteristics of third wave feminism that help clarify where our society is now (from an article on suite101.com)

• Third Wave feminism celebrates women’s multiple and sometimes contradictory identities in today’s world. Third Wave feminists are encouraged to build their own identities from the available buffet, and to not worry if the items on their plate are not served together traditionally. Women can unapologetically celebrate a plate full of entrée choices like soccer mom, career woman, lover, wife, lesbian, activist, consumer, girly girl, tomboy, sweetheart, bitch, good girl, princess, or sex symbol.
• Third Wave feminism encourages personal empowerment and action. Third Wave feminists like to think of themselves as survivors, not victims.
• Although Third Wave feminists do not reject political activism, the emphasis is more on using one’s personal empowerment as a starting point for societal change.
• Third Wave feminism celebrates emotions and experiences that traditionally have been labeled as “unfeminine.” Women are invited to be angry, aggressive, and outspoken.
• Third Wave feminism celebrates women’s sexuality and encourages women to explore sexual options and express themselves in whatever ways they feel comfortable. The double standard and titles like “slut” are discarded. The female characters from Sex and the City can be seen as Third Wave feminist icons who do not apologize for their sexual relationships and adventures.
• Third Wave feminists celebrate diversity. The Women’s Liberation Movement often was criticized for focusing too narrowly on the experiences of middle-class, white, heterosexual women.
• As is characteristics of Generation X and Generation Y, Third Wave feminists express themselves through popular culture and use it in their personal journeys to define identity. They look for women, images, and musicians who represent their own struggles. They also take ironic pleasure in outrageously sexist or sexualized representations, like Paris Hilton or reality shows like America’s Next Top Model.

Since my remarks are more of a review and status report, I really have no great conclusion to offer other than how incredibly fast and transformative has been the impact of women’s self-understanding since 1963, the publication of The Feminine Mystique and the beginning of second wave feminism. No one here has remained unaffected in our day to day lives and in our common life. The American Experience has been and will continue to be transformed.

Here in this church of the human spirit we are still learning what the human spirit is—as it ranges across a spectrum from female to male, with no normative single measure of what is human.

We’ve come a long way. The journey continues.

Look at your daughters and granddaughters with awe; and yes, wonder at their possibilities. And don’t neglect to celebrate the successes of the grandmothers and mothers who made their way!

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.”

++++++++

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.