The Sexual Politics of Meat

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

Prove All Things

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

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

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

Ethical Vegetarianism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Feminist Critique

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And What About You?

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

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

How Free Are We, Really?

Sorry, Your Soul Just Died

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

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

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

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

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

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

First and Second Nature

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Soul Is Dead, But the Spirit Lives On

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Red and Green May Days

Red May Day

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Green May Day

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We are happy now because God wills it;

No matter how barren the past may have been,

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

We sit in the warm shade and feel right well

How the sap creeps up and the blossoms swell;

We may shut our eyes, but we cannot help knowing

That skies are clear and grass is growing;

The breeze comes whispering in our ear,

That dandelions are blossoming near,

That maize has sprouted, that streams are flowing,

That the river is bluer than the sky,

That the robin is plastering his house hard by;

And if the breeze kept the good news back,

For other couriers we should not lack;

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

And hark! how clear bold chanticleer,

Warmed with the new wine of the year,

Tells all in his lusty crowing!

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

Sense of Wonder: Easter Sunday 2011

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Their Fruits

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

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

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

A Catholic Youth

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Unitarian in Training

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

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

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

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

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

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

The New Quest for the Historical Jesus

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

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

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

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

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

Where I Expect to Find Jesus the Christ

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

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

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

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