Gannett Awards 2012

Some years ago I offered a yearly sermon series called “the annual vulgarity awards.”  I would rant a little about four or five egregiously ugly or corrosive aspects of our common culture.  But I tired of that series; and I also felt, I was, ironically, contributing to a toxic social climate.

So I flipped the series 180 degrees and developed a yearly sermon series on what I find to be excellent in our common life.  I immediately named this new series The William Channing Gannett Awards in honor of the first minister of this congregation, whose signature phrase “domestication of the infinite” suited my sense of the source and result of excellence.

Mr. Gannett was a remarkable man with an impeccable Unitarian pedigree.  His father, the Rev. Ezra Stiles Gannett, was the first President of the American Unitarian Association, 1825.  Ezra Stiles Gannett was also the associate minister at the famed Federal Street Church in Boston, where the saintly founder of American Unitarianism William Ellery Channing was for senior minister.  Dr. Channing was William Channing Gannett’s godfather, hence the middle name Channing.

Mr. Gannett was a modernist compared to his godfather and father, who were Christian Rationalists.  Young William was influenced by Transcendentalism’s more expansive vision of religion; and when he made his way west, he joined the Unity Men of the Western Unitarian Conference, whose motto “the unity of all things” summarized their broad view of religion.  The Unity Men also promoted ethics as the proper focus of religion, in which character (ingenuousness) blended with what we now call social justice.

William Channing Gannett wrote the great compromise, “The Things We Hold in Common” that allowed the Christians and the emergent not-just or more-than Christian liberals to stay in one Unitarian denomination.    His essay, “The House Beautiful,” inspired the magazine of the same name thanks to the efforts of his good friend Frank Lloyd Wright.  And his plan for our Church-Home has shaped generations of Hinsdale Unitarians over one hundred, twenty years.

Before I present this year’s awards, I want you to think about Mr. Gannett’s signature phrase “domestication of the infinite.”  The ideals we recognize (and you might see them in terms of the great categories of the good, the true, and the beautiful), if they are our ideals, are necessarily compelling—so compelling that we must implement them in our self and our world.  This is a process of domestication—of household and home infusing our larger world.  The doors open in and welcome the worthy; the doors then open out and infuse the world with the warmth, intimacy, and values of the home and the home-like.

I’ve been greatly influenced by William Channing Gannett, through his writings and through his sculpture in wood, brick, and stone, this Church-Home, that he was instrumental in designing.  In his honor and memory I once again lift up the excellent in our common world.

The Hyde Park Neighborhood

This year, I focus upon the South Side Chicago neighborhood of Hyde Park.  Some of you know Hyde Park quite well, having lived there or perhaps attended the University of Chicago, the area’s indisputable anchor.  The University by itself, is worthy of a thoughtful and attentive stroll.  It’s a tribute to American capitalism, since it was originally endowed by John D Rockefeller on land donated by Marshall Field.  It rose in 1890 from a failed Baptist College of the same name.  Its neo-gothic (Victorian and Collegiate Gothic)  style of architecture, particularly the great conceit called Rockefeller chapel, is noteworthy.  It also has buildings of significant architects, Wright, Saarinen, and Mies van de Rohe.  The Midway Plaisance, a long rectangular park separating the north from south campuses, was a site of the famous World’s Fair--the Columbian Exposition of 1893--that announced the arrival of Chicago as a world city.  If you read Devil in the White City, you might be able to imagine the elegance of the architectural/landscape vision of Daniel Burnham as well as the serial murder spree of  infamous Dr. H. H. Holmes, as you gaze down the Midway. The U of C claims 87 Nobel Laureates, including several economists of what is often called the Chicago School of Economics.  In the early years of the 20th century it was a major football power under Amos Alonzo Stagg.  Under its 5th president Robert Maynard Hutchins who took office in 1929, the University abandoned football and instituted a core curriculum based on a collection known as the Great Books and the teaching style of the Socratic Method.  The first sustained atomic reaction took place within the confines of the old football field. It has a small undergraduate student body of a mere 5,000 students. Among its adjunct institutions are a number of theological schools and seminaries. Until last year the UU Meadville Lombard Theological School had its own building on 57th and Woodlawn, adjacent to First Unitarian Church, yet another neo-gothic structure.

So when you visit my Gannett Awardees from Hyde Park, be sure to include a stroll through the tightly contained old campus north of the Midway known as the Quadrangle, particularly if you heading toward my first awardee, The Oriental Institute.

The Oriental Institute

Similar to the University itself, The Oriental Institute raises mixed feelings.  Its collection dates from the era when outside concerns went on archeological digs in the Middle East and returned to their own countries with what was essentially plunder.  The era ended in the 1930s.  Its core collection dates from that time. The Museum of the Oriental Institute has artifacts from long ago digs in Egypt, Israel, Syria, Turkey, Iraq, and Iran.

The Oriental Institute is located on the corner of 58th Street and University Avenue in, if you can imagine, an Art Deco/Gothic building, dating it from the 1920s. The interior is spacious and, in my estimation, church-like. The collection provides ample stimulation to contemplation of the human condition and civilization--the latter, a veneer a scant 10,000 years thick, yet seemingly so ancient.  The modern nations whose long-ago ancestors created such stuff of monumental stature, bodily ornamentation, or everyday business, such as Egypt and Iran (once Persia), can rightly claim a very long perspective on world affairs.

For me, the museum and its plundered collection together make for one of the holiest places I’ve ever visited.  Such a place with its collections cannot be replicated today or ever again.

My first Gannett 2012 goes to the shrine of ancient civilization known as the Oriental Institute.

Nuclear Energy by Henry Moore

Still on campus, on Ellis Avenue between 56th Street and 57th Street, in the midst of a stark plaza is a large bronze sculpture, nearly fourteen tall, a bronze statue by Henry Moore. Perhaps it’s meant to suggest a human skull or perhaps it represents a mushroom cloud from a nuclear explosion, or both. It marks the site of the first sustained nuclear reaction beneath the abandoned football stadium. That reaction, an effort of the famed Manhattan Project and headed by Enrico Fermi, was one of the most important scientific accomplishments, boding evil, as well as good in the human experience.

Thirty years later from the actual event, the sculptor Henry Moore remembered: “It’s a rather strange thing really but I’d already done the idea for this sculpture before Professor McNeill and his colleagues from the University of Chicago came to see me on Sunday morning to tell me about the whole proposition. They told me (which I’d only vaguely known) that Fermi, the Italian nuclear physicist, started or really made the first successful controlled nuclear fission in a temporary building. I think it was a squash court - a wooden building - which from the outside looked entirely unlike where a thing of such an important nature might take place. But this experiment was carried on in secret and it meant that by being successful Man was able to control this huge force for peaceful purposes as well as destructive ones. They came to me to tell me that they thought where such an important event in history took place ought to be marked and they wondered whether I would do a sculpture which would stand on the spot.”

The enigmatic but evocative bronze was dedicated in 1967, exactly to the minute, twenty-five years after the actual event.

My second Gannett Award of 2012 goes to the gestalt of this incredible and historic event with the monumental sculpture by an important 20th century sculptor.

The Fountain of Time by Laredo Taft

Speaking of sculptures, a third Gannett Award 2012 goes to a truly monumental work, one hundred twenty-six feet long, The Fountain of Time, by the turn of the century Illinois based sculptor Laredo Taft. Time, as it is often called, resides at the west end of the Midway Plaisance.  An oversized figure, twenty-six feet tall, shrouded in a robe and with a scythe, Father Time, presides over a hundred figures that progress in an historical, three dimensional diorama and human life span, progressing before him.  It was intended to fit into a larger landscape design for the Midway that did not happen.

Taft worked on Burnham’s great White City design of the1893 Exposition. Time followed in the grand Beaux Arts style of Burnham’s great success. The sculpture was finished in 1920 and dedicated in 1922.  Taft, for reasons of economy, had settled on the medium of reinforced concrete.  The Beaux Arts representational style was no longer in favor by the time the sculpture was finished. The medium proved to be susceptible to the weather—cracking, pitting, and crumbling.

Thirty years ago, when I first encountered it, it was a crumbling, neglected, very sad site. It bordered the areas to the south and west that were transitional neighborhoods. Then, I found it an ironic statement of the very subject matter it portrayed—the inevitable progress of time, that leaves in its wake decay and yes, death.

I’m sure that this wasn’t what the artist intended.  But unintended consequences added a patina of deeper truth.  One commentator justly observed: “(Perhaps Time felt that Taft’s ambition was impertinent and wanted to team him a lesson.)  In any event, the leading Chicago newspaper soon labeled the outdated sculpture one of the city’s ‘pet atrocities.’ Resentful at the way styles had passed him by, Taft became a leading spokesperson for conservative sculpture and lectured against the evils of modernism (demonstrating that he had learned absolutely nothing about the inevitably of time).”

In this context, the sculpture is doubly richly. In the late ‘90s and in the early years of this century, the sculpture has been restored.  (Remembering last week’s sermon, for me, this has always been a place for memento mori—to think about time and mortality, evoked by a Beaux Arts style that reminds me of the so called War to End All Wars, which I’ve always suspected influenced the artist’s design.)

The Nile

My annual Gannetts usually include a food place.  Hyde Park has many to choose from including Morry’s Deli, opened fifty years ago by Suze Orman’s dad.  Another likely place is the student and neighborhood standard called the Medici, which I’ve long seen as essentially U of C.  However, I’m recommending that you try out a Middle Eastern restaurant The Nile at 1611 East 55th Street, with plenty of on-street parking. I’ve been eating there for at least a couple of decades.

It’s of a type, minimally decorated, bright to the point of harshness.  Behind a tall counter, the food is prepared, often taken from a glass display case. Since I can remember, a solitary Asian waitress has been the server. On the wall is a poster of the city of Jerusalem, the dome of the rock in the center.

The menu includes typical Middle Eastern fare at a very affordable price. It’s a good place to go with a group and share. The humus with a generous basket of warm fresh pita is outstanding.  My favorite is a falafel sandwich filled with freshly fried, sliced falafel, Jerusalem salad, and tahini sauce that oozes deliciously. I like it with a glass of hot tea.

The Fair Trader

Either before or after eating at The Nile, mosey down the street a half a block to 1623 East 55th Street to visit a shop The Fair Trader. Ellie and I were in Hyde Park several days ago. After eating at the Nile, I wanted to see what was new on the block and found this place with the slogan “where shopping makes a difference.” I recognized the women who ran it.  They belong to First Unitarian Church. They joke that this place is First Unitarian East. Stop in, tell them you’re a Hinsdale Unitarian, and that I recommended the store to you. They are celebrating their fifth year of business (an accomplishment in this economy). They might even give you a little celebration gift, a handmade glazed pendant on a chord, as they gave to both Ellie and me. Ellie bought a large bead bracelet and a couple of cards; perhaps you’ll find something to support this business, as well as assist far away laborers struggling to earn a living.

For putting their UU values into practice, for making a difference in their community, for their enthusiasm and perseverance and their entrepreneurial chutzpah, I give Evelyn Johnson, Madeiria Myriekes, and Cindy Prado—the three proprietors of The Fair Trader—a fifth and final Gannett Award 2012.  They are making our larger world more home-like.

That’s what my ten years of awards have honored: people and places that have domesticated the infinite, making our common world more home-like.

Then Comes Marriage

A Daunting Project

Late last winter Skinner House Books, the UUA’s in-house press put out a denomination-wide call for proposals for a wedding guide.  In the brief call, they recommended my 1993 book In Memoriam: A Guide to Modern Funeral and Memorial Services as the sort of format they were seeking. (I was once told In Memoriam is Skinner House’s all time best-selling book.  I was pleased it and I were mentioned in regards to the proposed wedding guide.) Colleagues asked me if I were going to submit a proposal for the wedding book, out of deference I suspected, or not to waste their time if a decision had already been made—that  I might have an inside track.  I told them I didn’t intend to submit.  I was sincere, speculating, too, that Skinner House might want a new voice regarding the great rites of passage. (In addition to In Memoriam, in the last decade I produced four separate quote collections for the great rites of passage: birth, coming of age, marriage, and death.  Nevertheless, I did submit a proposal for a wedding guide, after receiving a personal request to do so from the acquisitions editor, whom I worked with on my previous six books.  I literally dashed off the proposal.)

In June, my editor asked me to work up a more detailed proposal for the review of Skinner House’s Editorial Board.  As she put it, my initial proposal was at the top of the pile of submissions.  I was a little surprised, especially since I’d not thought much about the project for a couple of months.  Of course, I was pleased, feeling for the first time enthusiasm for a UU wedding guide, thinking it would be an addition to my right of passage oeuvre—a capstone.

So in July, I spent considerable time working up a more detailed proposal.  To do so, I was aware of the political shoals of our Association, meaning sensitivity to the various communities that always need to be addressed: same sex, neo-pagan, non-theist as well as theist, traditionalists, and non-traditionalist, humanist, feminist, and so on.  I quickly realized that an inclusive UU guide to wedding ceremonies was a daunting project, particularly to please a scrupulous Editorial Board rife with UU political sensitivities.

As I strove to put together a proposal that might pass their review, I also focused on the institution of marriage itself, to get a handle on the meaning and purpose of a wedding ceremony leading to a legally binding marriage or that everything-but legal covenant between same sex persons, a Civil Union.  Civil Union ceremonies also had to be put into the proposal equation.  The whole project begged for inclusivity, clarity, relative simplicity yet expansiveness, poetic inspiration, and general marketability.

Whether or not my proposal results in a contract, I’m glad for the experience.  It caused me to thoroughly explore what marriage was and is and even speculate what it might become.  (If I do produce a wedding guide, I might shape the institution of marriage’s becoming.) Interestingly and not insignificantly, I did my work while spending the month with my 95 and 96 year old parents, married for 73 years.  And of course Ellie and I have 44 years of marriage.

A treacherous aspect of speaking to marriage as a theme (as in this address) involves dramatic changes that have taken and continue to take place in American society. It’s easy to offend one component or another, including the intentionally single.

Demographics Reveal the  Reality of the Institution of Marriage

Have you heard that the majority of Americans now live outside of so-called traditional marriage?  A review of the statistics from the 2010 census is revelatory, as chronicled in a 2011 NYTimes article, from which I now extensively quote.

“Married couples represented just 48 percent of American households in 2010, slightly less than in 2000, but far below the 78 percent of households occupied by married couples in 1950.

“What is more, just a fifth of households were traditional families — married couples with children — down from about a quarter a decade ago, and from 43 percent in 1950, as the iconic image of the American family continues to break apart.

“In recent history, the marriage rate among Americans was at its highest in the 1950s, when the institution defined gender roles, family life and a person’s place in society. But as women moved into the work force, cohabitation lost its taboo label, and as society grew more secular, marriage lost some of its central authority….

‘Today, traditional patterns have been turned upside down. Women with college degrees are now more likely to marry than those with just high school diplomas, the reverse of several decades ago.

“Rising income inequality has divided American society, making college-educated people less likely to marry those without college degrees. Members of that educated group have struck a new path: they marry later and stay married. In contrast, women with only a high school diploma are increasingly opting not to marry the fathers of their children, whose fortunes have declined along with the country’s economic opportunities….

“Married couples may be half of all households, but that does not mean that only half of Americans will ever be married. The overwhelming majority of Americans — with some exceptions — do eventually marry (though increasingly, working-class people do not stay married).

“Households are changing in other ways. Americans are living longer than ever, so households now include a growing number of elderly singles. Other factors have been the large influx of immigrants, who tend to be single people in their 20s and 30s, and the growing number of young people who live together without being married.

“There are 37 states, plus the District of Columbia, in which married couples make up fewer than 50 percent of all households, up from just 6 states in 2000.

“In all, 41 states showed declines in traditional households of married couples with children. In 2000, married couples with children were fewer than 20 percent of all households in just one state, plus the District of Columbia. Now they are fewer than a fifth in 31 states.

“The biggest change for the decade was the jump in households headed by women without husbands — up by 18 percent in the decade. The next largest rise was in households whose occupants were not a family — up by about 16 percent.”

Wow! In 1950, seventy-eight percent of the adult population was married. Today it is forty-eight percent, though a greater percentage has been or will be married sometime. The safest pronouncement regarding marriage is, it’s an option; but it’s no longer normative.  Yet as an option, particularly for the well-educated, so it seems, it answers particular personal needs and serves society.

Marriage’s Evolved Meaning

I’ve performed several hundred wedding ceremonies in my three and a half decades of liberal ministry. The larger portion by far involved couples outside the two congregations I’ve served.  Unless, asked, I don’t formally counsel the couple; but in an initial interview, I frame the event for them by drawing on insights I’ve cobbled together through the years. I may, in the actual ceremony offer a few words formally known as an “admonishment:” that a declaration of marriage is a serious but not solemn undertaking, from the Roman Church though the Anglican Book of Common Prayer.

I tell them that a marriage ceremony contains symbolic elements that connect to the medieval Catholic Church and cultures of Europe. I explain how the ceremony evolved into the generic Protestant outline I follow. 

I never neglect to mention that a wedding ceremony is a public event, with the invited guests serving as proxy representatives for all of society.  Society has a vested interested in committed relationships for the sake of its own survival.  In this regard, a marriage is foundational, a conservative element in our larger society.  So the words spoken on the couple’s behalf, as well as the words they say, have additional importance for the perpetuation of society.

Early on as a minister, I fell under the influence of an analysis called the Natural History of a Marriage.  In the light of this analysis, I sometimes caution the couple, in a loving way, of course, that they may be getting married for a cluster of wrong reason... In the throes of peer, family, and cultural influences, as well as the intoxication of early love, neither has a true sense of the other, yet.  So one day, when the proverbial honeymoon is over, one or both will wake up one morning, and find they married a figurative stranger.  Then, whether its seven months or seven years, the real work of creating a deep relationship will begin.  Here, I toss in a little of Martin Buber’s notion of an I/Thou, subject/subject relationship, when each part of the equation accepts the other in her and his fullness of being—as subject (or complete person) and not an object.  When this occurs, the Eternal Thou—God—is realized.

In more recent years I might tell a couple not to expect each partner to first and forever fill all the needs of the other.  The mere expectation is a recipe for failure.  No one person can fulfill another person’s needs.  Here I interject what Joseph Campbell called the myth of marriage, that the myth exists outside each partner; and a marriage succeeds when the couple first commit to the myth they share before committing to one another.

Anecdotally, the ceremonies I perform generally result in enduring marriages, perhaps because they are among those with college degrees, who have chosen to postpone marriage for career or in anticipation of just the right spouse.  Only a few that I know of have led to divorce.  This probably measures the relatively mature and thoughtful persons who seek me out, wanting to begin their life together with the sort of a personally meaningful ceremony properly conceived as a religious ceremony.

From what I understand, the state’s involvement in issuing so-called marriage licenses resulted largely from nineteenth century lobbying by evangelical Protestants, eager to impose their moralism on society.  Through the nineteenth century a preponderance of marriages were what we now call common law. …

Same sex marriage continues to be a controversial issue in the so-called, ongoing culture wars.  I come to Gay Marriage with some experience, as well as wide ranging knowledge of the evolution and meaning of marriage.

I favor same sex marriage as a matter of civil rights, including equal opportunity and protection, under the Constitution.  Btu even more I favor it for intimate, relational, and social reasons, which my longtime companion Ecclesiastes has helped inform.

My standard wedding meal blessing draws from Ecclesiastes, an ancient Old Testament work:  “Enjoy life with the one whom you love all the days of your life.  Whatever your hands find to do, do with all your might.  Eat your bread with gladness, and drink your wine with a merry heart, because your God has already approved what you do.”  [adapted]

Long ago I adapted the word “wife” to the phrase “the one whom you love,” to include the woman as well as the man.  Now, as I’ve come to realize that love, straight or gay, comes from the same impulses and has the same results, I’ve expanded my public intentions in saying “Enjoy life with the one whom you love, all the days of your life.”  If the one you love is of the same sex, I simply and emphatically say, “Yes and yes.”

A public ceremony (wedding) and a civil contract (license) together give a love relationship meaning and imprimatur, plus legal status, no less or more for a same sex couple, as for a heterosexual couple.

My Expression of Marriage’s Meaning

Eight years ago I had the distinct honor of presiding over my daughter’s wedding in California.  I wrote the following “Introduction” for the occasion, something of a summary of my understanding of marriage’s meaning.

Katie and Mike, this is your day.

You are about to declare your marriage to one another and to the world.  This is the day you’ve been arcing toward throughout your separate lives from the days you were born.

Today, before your families and friends, you will declare that you are married, that you are, indeed, from this day onward husband and wife—a relationship that is honored for its steadfastness and respected for its integrity.

There is no relationship like a marriage in which there is a giving of self—freely and gladly— and in which there is taking from the other –in desire or in need—as the occasion demands.

What allows such a relationship to succeed is not so much desires fulfilled or needs met, but a commitment to the marriage itself, which is greater than desire and need.  Your marriage will be outside of either of you, but possible only through both of you.

A marriage is a sacred undertaking.  It is the means to a new courage, a more resilient strength to make a larger world out your singular worlds, a sanctuary of comfort and peace, and a mutuality of desire fulfilled.  A marriage is a sacred undertaking born and reborn through the changes of your lives together.

Your marriage is a commitment to fashion a cup of meaning that holds children in its midst, seeking their nurture, that they may mature into capable and confident human beings.

Mike and Katie, this is your day.

Perched as you are on the threshold of your marriage, take pause to appreciate the declaration you are making.  Know the hope you have within you—a reasonable hope.   Imagine the richness that converges for you and opens to an even greater richness you may together create—richness expanding out of richness. 

As you pause and appreciate, make a silent, solemn, sincere vow that you shall keep your individualism, while not violating the individualism of your partner in your life together.  Let your personalities be greater than before, because you choose to be wife and husband to one another.   Thus you will grow in love, because you will continue to grow individually.

Katie and Mike, this is your day.

We,—your parents, your families, your friends,—we give you our enthusiasm and support for what you are undertaking.  We give you our love, of course; and when you seek the wisdom of our days, we will offer you our counsel.  Don’t hesitate, ever, to call on us. 

We are implicated with you in the sacredness of your marriage.  You extend, continue, and complete us.  We are more than witnesses, we are participants in this great occasion.

Mike and Katie, this is your day.

We give you our blessings, as well as our hopes on this momentous day

Teaching the World To Die: Unitarian Universalist Death Ways

click to AMAZON

For the last few summers, I’ve worked on a series of discrete projects with an eye to independent publication

•  in 2010, I journaled an extended meditation on the Book of Ecclesiastes, a reflective journey into an ancient wisdom tradition that I independently published as Wisdom for the Ages; 
• in 2011, I collected and edited my poetic meditations, sermons, and other writings  around the extended Holidays and independently published the collection If Only for the Season; 
• and this summer, I wrote an historical and opinion essay on UU attitudes about death, some 8,000 words, for publication as a Kindle edition I called “Teaching the World to Die.”

Before settling on the UU ministry, I’d studied and planned to be an historian, perhaps teaching and researching in the academy.  My area of interest was ante-bellum U.S. history, specifically popular intellectual history—the sort of trends and interests of the hoi polloi. For example, I studied the enthusiastic religions that followed the westward progress of the Erie Canal from the great revivals of Charles Finney, through the rise of Mormonism and other home grown religions, through the phenomenon of Spiritualism on the brink of the Civil War.  In graduate school, 1969-70, at Vermont during the Vietnam War and Kent State, I became interested in the roots of the American Peace Movement, discovering that the first American Peace Society was formed  in William Ellery Channing’s study.  That introduction to Unitarianism changed the trajectory of my life.

I’m still an historian at heart, with the gathering of information and its ordering into a narrative my essential approach, the narrative having a purpose and always open to reinterpretation.  I love history, yet maintain that any history is only one version of many possibilities.

History isn’t one story, but many stories.

The story I tell in “Teaching the World to Die” is about how we historic Unitarians and now contemporary Unitarian Universalists have greatly influenced American death ways.  I’m a player in this history.  Over the course of two centuries our tradition has humanized and domesticated death, resisting supernaturalism and its traditions, lifting up what is naturally transcendent and sacred about a human life.  It’s a grand story set in what, for many is still a morbid context.

The Rural Cemetery Movement

It begins in the 1830s around Boston, already the Athens of American and home to the Enlightenment religion freedom, reason, and tolerance known as Unitarianism.  There was a reform movement led by Unitarians that sought to take death out of the pallor of the church’s graveyard into the countryside and beneficences of Nature.  The movement had sanitary or health considerations, and cities, including Boston, were running out of burial space.  These Unitarian reformers looked to a classical ideal known as a cemetery (place of repose) in the countryside resulted in a cultural phenomenon in Cambridge known as Mt. Auburn, the first carefully landscaped rural or garden cemetery, a place for the living and for the dead in the context of Nature.  This picturesque place became a bona fide tourist attraction, the equal of sublime Niagara Falls. Soon similar suburban cemeteries became a national standard.

Cremation

Next, in the 1870’s, a radical Unitarian minister in NYC  Octavius Frothingham preached the first sermon advocating cremation, an option made possible by the recent technology of the crematorium brought to the US from Europe.  Frothingham’s arguments were really thinly veiled remonstrances against supernatural religions and the superstations they promoted. 

Cremation was slow to catch on, particularly in the face of an aggressive funeral industry grounded in embalming—one of the legacies of the Civil War, including the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.  His embalmed body took a slow journey from Washington to Springfield and was viewed along the route.

Memorial Society Movement

After World War II, an emergent Memorial Society Movement, in the name of the people, resisted the practices of the firmly entrenched funeral industry.  Cremation, somewhat dormant, then offered an alternative to an immediate and often costly funeral.  With cremation a memorial service at a later date was possible.  Many Unitarian congregations led the way in establishing local memorial societies.  In fact, the San Francisco Memorial society was organized in a Unitarian minister’s living room, attended by a small group that included Jessica Mitford’s attorney husband.  Ms. Mitford soon wrote one of the most influential books of the twentieth century, The American Way of Death that challenged the funeral industry’s practices and launched a larger consumer movement.

Celebrations of Life

Unitarian clergy also led the way in creating a new sort of final rite of passage, not a mournful funeral, rather a memorial service (often) that acquired the name of “Celebration of Life.”  My twentieth century colleagues became accomplished and renowned for speaking to the deceased life in a thorough, loving, and honest fashion.

I built on this tradition when in the early 1990s I published my innovative collection of memorial service templates in a Skinner House Book: In Memoriam: Modern Funeral and Memorial Services reissued in a 2000 second edition, now with an eye to a future third edition.  As I’ve mentioned before, In Memoriam is a best-seller and now considered a classic.

Through these four innovations led and supported by our forebears, the rural cemetery movement, cremation, the memorial society movement, and artful celebrations of life as a person’s final passage, I make a persuasive case for how our tradition has taught the world to die, not to shrink from death but to put it in a natural and human scheme.

This morning I can only sketch this little history.  I recommend that you take the time to read the essay that is available on Amazon as a Kindle.  Incidentally, you don’t need a Kindle device.  You can download a Kindle reader to your computer, easily, quickly, and without cost.  The cost of the essay is a modest ninety-nine cents.

I am proud to have personally played an important part in this ongoing reform movement.  Death is at the heart of human meaning, and religions seek to offer meaning. How we face death as a liberal religious tradition is one of our sterling marks. 

After we sing our second hymn, I’ll sketch our UU outlook about the keystone to Life’s meaning.

Death and Dying Among Contemporary Unitarian Universalists

Unitarians had an abiding interest in reforming American death ways. They significantly influenced, intellectually and practically, how the greater culture deals with the overarching reality of the human condition: mortality and death. Unitarian innovations and reforms cited in this essay served to domesticate death in the name of the universal human condition; challenged traditions and the supernaturalisms that supported those traditions; resisted the commercialization of death by a funeral industry; and lifted up the dignity and worth of the deceased through artful and meaningful “celebrations of life.”

There is a palpable Unitarian Universalist way for meeting death, though that way is not prescribed. Remember, Unitarian Universalism is non-creedal, as well as progressive. Its ethos has continually encouraged the proving of all things while holding on to that which is good. This search for truth has been tempered, humanized, by love. To seek the truth in love is an enduring mantra. That notion of love has many dimensions, ranging from love of self and others like one’s self to a love of Life and its often-inscrutable ways.

Here are markers of Unitarian Universalism’s contemporary, convergent attitudes and understandings regarding death.

Death should not be invisible. Death is a hard reality both to accept within one’s own mortality and to experience through a beloved. The American culture has devised strategies of denial. Yet death is a pathway to living fully, even joyfully, in the moment. The ancient philosophers, the Stoics in particular, counseled memento mori to be regularly reminded that living is dying, not obsessively, but now and again to give living context and perspective.

Think of Unitarian Universalist ways in terms of the domestication of death, coming to a certain intimacy with death through a variety of attitudes, behaviors, and strategies: memento mori, including contemplation of mortality in a garden cemetery or similar setting, not sequestering the aged or dying, leaving the body in a natural (unembalmed) state, tangibly commemorating the deceased, and through subsequent years remembering.

Death should be conditioned by Nature.  This might be literal, that is, interring the body, or cremation remains in a garden cemetery or similar natural setting. Cremation allows many options, including scattering at a meaningful site or several sites. Unitarian Universalist churches may have a carefully designed cremation garden or more informally include the ashes in a planting, the tree or shrub serving as a living memorial. Furthermore, death should be construed as part and parcel of Nature’s cycles of Life continuing through the generations—a natural phenomenon. Being natural, death is right and fitting in Nature’s scheme. Nature inspires a richer living through acceptance of mortality’s place in the Web of Life.

Death of a loved one, friend, or member of a community should be observed in an artfully crafted funeral or memorial service. In this service, a formal eulogy or a series of individual remembrances speak with loving truth of the life that the deceased chose to live, the influences that played on her or him through the years, how she or he shaped our common world, and what of that person endures in us. With a dignified service and the promise to remember, the deceased have has a blessed assurance that in death and repose there might be a peace said to pass understanding.

Unitarian Universalist ministers should be, and generally are, well prepared to plan and conduct funeral and memorial services, entrusted by their congregations and a larger community to navigate the complexities of end of life concerns and rituals. This includes grief-counseling skills. A Unitarian Universalist minister seeks to express transcendent meanings, such as the continuing influence of love that the deceased brought into the world—a love that endures and is passed on through the generations.

The funeral and memorial service should address the varied grief that the family and gathered community are experiencing. This includes a continuing promise to remain steadfast for those who grieve, acknowledging that grief is an extended process, unique to each person who grieves.

Death should be planned for. This planning has certain aspects. Every individual should leave instructions about final wishes. This includes the practical and existential, what is often included in a Living Will, regarding the parameters of medical procedures to take or not to take in one’s final days. A Living Will often designates a trusted person to have Power of Attorney for Health Care, charged to make ultimate decisions. Such a directive often is accompanied by a designation of the same or other person to have a fiscal Power of Attorney. Of course, a legally drawn will alleviates hindrances and complications of the deceased’s estate. Valuable, too, are instructions regarding final rites; this includes disposition of the body, burial or scattering. Instructions might include memorialization, such as cemetery plot and monument, but also designated charities for contributions in the deceased’s memory. It is good to memorialize in tangible forms; and for those who survive, it is good to visit memorials, respecting and remembering. Also important are directives for the funeral or memorial service: music, readings, participants, officiant, location, and the like, again in consultation with family and clergy.

It is good to do such planning in conversation with family and perhaps clergy. This models how to confront death, honestly and compassionately, letting genuine feeling have its full day. Such planning has benefits when death comes with grief in its wake.  

Such planning addresses considerations around consumer concerns regarding funeral providers. A valuable resource is the not-for-profit  Funeral Consumers Alliance (FCA) successor to the memorial society movement’s national organization. The FCA declares, “We are the only 501(c) (3) nonprofit organization dedicated to protecting a consumer's right to choose a meaningful, dignified, affordable funeral. We offer education and advocacy to consumers nationwide and are not affiliated with the funeral industry.” The FCA website has many valuable resources to inform and guide.

Typically, after a house and car, a funeral is a person’s third greatest life expenditure. End of life arrangements should not be undertaken during duress, when circumstances are pressing and emotions are vulnerable to compliance techniques. All involved should counsel together about desired arrangements before death comes.

Hospice care, often at home, has become an increasing choice for Unitarian Universalists. This fits earlier considerations regarding the domestication of death.

An emerging option among Unitarian Universalists is green burial, allowing the unembalmed body, often in a simple shroud, to decompose naturally in a natural setting. This reflects scruples about cremation’s effects on the environment, particularly the energy required to fire the crematorium. Green burial also looks to the body’s constituent parts leaching back into Nature. (In advocating for a rural cemetery in the early nineteenth century, Unitarians cited a dramatic example of Nature’s embrace of the body. When the body of Major John Andre was exhumed in 1821, his skull was held and pierced by roots of a peach tree. For those advocates of the taking death into the countryside, this offered a romantic and compelling example of “Nature’s embrace.”) Today, green burial resonates to the Unitarian Universalist seventh principle: “respect for the interdependent web of existence of which we are all a part.”

There is no doubt that the first principle of Unitarian Universalism, “the inherent worth and dignity of every person,” summarizes, as well informs this liberal religion’s attitudes regarding its death ways. Through two centuries Unitarian Universalists have increasingly emphasized the personal and universally human, especially above traditional dogma and theology. 

Unitarian Universalist reforms and innovations around death and dying emphasize essential human dignity. Unitarian Universalists find the human condition transcendent and sacred.

As I intoned in In Memoriam:

A human life is sacred.
It is sacred in its being born.
It is sacred in its living.
And it is sacred in its dying.

   

These Feet Were Made for Walking

When I retire, and that horizon rushes toward me, I intend to cultivate certain pursuits: I want to write in a style that I once did more regularly in my callow years—a pithier, more poetic way, losing words to meanings. I want to shape my surrounds in accord with the Japanese aesthetic of wabi sabi. And I want to cultivate walking for the sake of health and psyche. Each of these, to a lesser or greater degree have been part of my life, but I want them to be more so, more often.

Today, this Sunday before our summer hiatus, I will explore the art and discipline of walking. In part, I hope to inspire your summer activities. Perhaps you might try out a form of walking that you find appealing, making it a habit.

Many years ago, when first learning Unitarian lore, in a biography of Theodore Parker by Henry Steele Commager, my imagination was stimulated by an account of a trek that Parker took with a few Transcendentalist cronies in September 1840.

The Road to Groton

“It was in mid-summer of 1840 that this queer assortment of Millerites and Come-Outers had gathered at the little town of Groton, some 30 miles north of Boston, and Parker determined to go and see for himself what it was all about. Ripley wanted to go along; perhaps these unlettered men and women, so simple and sincere, could teach them something about the problems of society and the church. So they started out from West Roxbury, and on their way we picked up the young irrepressible, Cranch, whose interest was artistic rather than philosophical. Famous walkers, all of them, they gave themselves two days for the walk, so that they might loiter on the way, know the feeling of the earth, get into tune with nature and natural man. The first day they stopped off, and paid their respects to old Doctor Ripley, who warned the young men not to be 'egomites,' and they took tea with Emerson who looked, said Parker, "as divine as usual." But Emerson was a disappointment, all the same; he could talk of nothing but the Dial, and to no one but the Ripley, and even in the Dial he admired all the wrong things. The next morning along came Bronson Alcott, never too busy to attend a convention of reformers, and the little company proceeded on their way, their transcendental banners fluttering in the breeze, their high talk drifting in the dust across the open fields.” [Henry Steele Commager]

Let me tell you a little about the circumstances and the players in this walk to Groton to convey why it beguiles me so. The convention was inflamed by a frenzied popular belief that according to the Bible, the world would end in 1844—so the followers of William Miller, the Millerites, believed. (Tens of thousands of Adventists sold their properties and donned white “ascension gowns” on the appointed day climbing to the peak of buildings or seeking high ground.) George Ripley by the end of the year would organize New England’s great adventure in Utopianism, Brook Farm, subsequently satirized by one of its backers, Nathaniel Hawthorne, in the Blithedale Romance. Bronson Alcott also soon co-founded a short-lived, only 7 month, experimental community name Fruitlands—where a vegan diet ruled and leisure was balanced with work. (Did any of the Unitarian cronies ask Alcott on the road to Groton, “And, Bronson, what about your precocious daughter, Louisa May? Does she still write stories?”) Theodore Parker would become the most controversial Unitarian minister of his generation for his theology and his activism. He was a polymath and avid abolitionist who gathered around him the largest church in America by the end of the decade. Christopher Pearse Cranch was already an accomplished artist, painting in the sublime Hudson River style. And imagine having tea, but being disappointed, yes disappointed, in Ralph Waldo Emerson for being distracted by the fortunes of the Dial, the famous magazine of the Transcendentalists.

In his journal, Parker wrote a line that forever haunts me: “The route is beautiful, and talk of various kinds beguiled its length.” The journey surely exceeded the destination.

How might we categorize this thirty-mile walk from West Roxbury to Groton, MA? It reminds me some of what is arguably the most famous walk in English literature, Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, which was actually a pilgrimage to a holy shrine. But I’m not sure the" “Road to Groton” was a true pilgrimage, given the destination.

Pilgrimage

Within traditional spiritual disciplines, a pilgrimage has status. Among the famous Christian destinations is Santiago de Compostela in northwest Spain. For many centuries, Pilgrims have taken various routes from throughout Europe converging at the cathedral dedicated to St. James at Compestela, in the region where legend reputes that James preached the gospel following Jesus’s crucifixion. In recent decades, this has become a surprisingly popular undertaking, with upwards of a 100,000 and more walkers making the journey, often of 700-800 kilometers. The journey requires considerable endurance and perseverance; the modern rewards are the countryside, the regional food, and most of all companionship. It also seems walking with others leads to conversation of a special kind.

I think of walk-and-chat, when I see walkers in groups of two, three, or even four on the sidewalks of our contiguous suburbs. They are of a sort, wearing sporting clothes, often with a cup of coffee, and perhaps a dog on leash which moves from side to side sniffing the berm. Since I live within two blocks of downtown La Grange, such walkers walk past my house and I hear snatches of their peripatetic conversations from my front porch. I suspect this is a sort of friendship/therapy.

Sauntering

There are solitary walkers of course, including one of the most famous and Unitarian, Henry David Thoreau, who spoke of sauntering in a celebrated essay “Walking:

"I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks,—who had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering: which word is beautifully derived from “idle people who roved about the country, in the Middle Ages, and asked charity, under pretense of going à la Sainte Terre,” to the Holy Land, till the children exclaimed, “There goes a Sainte-Terrer,” a Saunterer, a Holy-Lander. They who never go to the Holy Land in their walks, as they pretend, are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds; but they who do go there are saunterers in the good sense, such as I mean. Some, however, would derive the word form sans terre, without land or a home, which, therefore, in the good sense, will mean, having no particular home, but equally at home everywhere. For this is the secret of successful sauntering. He who sits still in a house all the time may be the greatest vagrant of all; but the saunterer, in the good sense, is no more vagrant than the meandering river, which is all the while sedulously seeking the shortest course to the sea. But I prefer the first, which, indeed, is the most probable derivation. For every walk is a sort of crusade, preached by some Peter the Hermit in us, to go forth and reconquer this Holy Land from the hands of the Infidels".

Thoreau was an extreme walker. In that same essay, he wrote:  "I think that I cannot preserve my health and spirits, unless I spend four hours a day at least,—and it is commonly more than that,—sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields, absolutely free from all worldly engagements. You may safely say, A penny for your thoughts, or a thousand pounds. When sometimes I am reminded that the mechanics and shopkeepers stay in their shops not only all the forenoon, but all the afternoon too, sitting with crossed legs, so many of them—as if the legs were made to sit upon, and not to stand or walk upon—I think that they deserve some credit for not having all committed suicide long ago."

Thoreau favored walks in Nature. He didn’t advocate the road less travelled. He advocated no road at all. And he advised rumination, which means active thinking.

The Flâneur

In contrast to sauntering and ruminating in Nature is urban walking—what is known as the flâneur. Flâneur, a French word meaning something like sauntering, became popular in the late nineteenth century. Being urban and French, the term contains a soupcon of decadence; the urban stroller is part of, yet at the same time intellectually, detached from the urban landscape and bustle. The flâneur takes it in with detachment, the sort of detachment one has with a photograph. (Photography was coming into vogue.) But with the detachment, there is an ironic sense of self-involvement. The critical mind is critical of self. Still the flâneur is attracted to the city’s many stimulations. The flâneur experiences and appraises.

Susan Sontag, made an astute connection between the photographer and the flâneur: "The photographer is an armed version of the solitary walker reconnoitering, stalking, cruising the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes. Adept of the joys of watching, connoisseur of empathy, the flâneur finds the world 'picturesque.'"

Chicago is a great setting for a contemporary flâneur, the urban stroller perhaps armed with a good digital point and shoot camera that will allow you to see with the particular focus of a camera’s eye. When I moved here 30 years ago, I sauntered through many of the neighborhoods. It was a great pleasure then and educated me regarding what this city represents in the scheme of evolving history.

An admonition for fellow suburbanites, you can’t really know your place here in the suburbs without knowing what I’ll call the complex soul of Chicago. That soul’s landscapes stretches from Roger’s Park in the north to the neighborhood to the south around where the South Shore Works once made steel, from Austin in the west to the Miracle Mile on the Lake.

Mindful Walking

Thoreau spoke of rumination while walking. A flâneur has a certain consciousness—a hyper awareness. One of the important spiritual guides of our day, Thich Nhat Hanh has long advocated mindfulness in all pursuits, but makes a special appeal for walking mindfully. He has written:

"Walking meditation is one of the ways to contemplate peace, and today we are going to walk together, generating the energy of peace, solidity, and freedom.

"I suggest that when you breathe in, you make three steps. Bring your attention to the soles of your feet, and become aware of the contact between your foot and the ground. Bring your attention down from the level of the brain to the soles of your feet.

"Breathing in, we make three steps, and we may tell ourselves with each step, 'I have arrived. I have arrived. I have arrived.' And breathing out, we make another three steps, always mindful of the contact between our feet and the ground, and we say, 'I'm home. I'm home. I'm home.'

"Arrived where? Where is our home? According to the teaching and the practice of the Buddha, life is available only in the present moment, in the here and the now. And when you go back to the present moment, you have a chance to touch life, to encounter life, to become fully alive and fully present.

"That is why every step brings us back to the present moment, so that we can touch the wonders of life that are available. Therefore, when I say, "I have arrived," I mean I have arrived in the here and the now -- the only place, the only time where and when life is available, and that is my true home.

"The Buddha said that the past is already gone, and the future is not yet here. There is only one moment for us to live, and that is the present moment."

Healthy Body Mind

Conventional wisdom declares that walking has multiple benefits of body and mind. New research provides evidence that this is so. A bestselling book (The First 20 Minutes) by Gretchen Reynolds) posits that of all forms of exercise, walking may well be the most beneficial. “Humans,” she writes, “are born to stroll. When strolling becomes an exercise habit, it has health results similar to running with one extra benefit. A runner will inevitably injure her or himself. A walker most likely won’t.

Our body has evolved so that we might walk. (An infant’s great developmental passage is moving from crawling to standing and, hallelujah, walking. The foot is a complex appendage, comparable to our marvelously complex hands, with a structure of bones, tendons, and muscles that contribute to our ability to maintain an upright balance while traversing through a varied landscape. Touch your nature and your nature will touch you.

We are constructed to navigate our world, not to sit for hours on end in front of a computer. Remember Thoreau’s comments about the workers of his day, suffering similar conditions.

Those of us who are abled might contemplate that our fate, if we live long enough, is that we will be increasingly less-abled—muscles atrophy and the brain center for balance deteriorates. We might be particularly mindful, then, of the incredible gift that our ability to walk is. Appreciating that ability can lead us to liberally exercise that ability and be grateful.

I’ve offered a few ways of being intentional in your walking, giving walking a spiritual fillip. A little or a lot and with whatever attitude you walk, is better than not.

Become a saunterer in the sublime spirit recommended by Thoreau: "For every walk is a sort of crusade, preached by some Peter the Hermit in us, to go forth and reconquer this Holy Land from the hands of the Infidels."

Habits

Know Thyself

There is a new book, The Power of Habit:  Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business, by a New York Times staff writer Charles Duhigg.  It’s garnering significant popular interest.

The book’s theme of habit, as it is being understood in the light of the new sciences—neuroscience and evolutionary psychology in particular—both encourages me and worries me.  I’m encouraged that according to the author’s reporting, it is possible for each of us to break bad habits and to establish more beneficial habits.  But I’m worried by a new generation of marketers who are tapping into and exploiting our habit-making tendencies. 

Setting the encouragements and worries aside, this portal into the power of habit is one more tool for self-understanding offering special insight into the conundrum of free-will.

Free-will

Free-will is the keystone of Unitarianism.  In the latter years of the Enlightenment, c. 1800, when the liberals of the New England Church were applying reasonable inquiry into the established religious tradition of the Puritan worldview they inherited, emerging liberals came up with a number of realizations centered on notions of

1.       the inherent goodness of humankind — in the image of God
2.       and the essential freedom of the individual to choose her or his way—salvation by character. 

This patently optimistic outlook long defined for me what being a Unitarian embodies. 

However, I’ve never been totally comfortable with declaring the inherent goodness of the human condition.  There are certainly exceptions to the goodness rule: I’ve looked evil in the face of a few my fellow kind.  And in the broader theological context, the Christian tradition, especially the Protestant redactions, rebellion and sinfulness are central to the various systems of reconciliation.  (According to the New England Primer, the Puritan text for teaching children, A is for Adam: ‘In Adams fall we sinned all.”)  A frequent criticism of liberal religion is its lack of understanding evil and sin.

As a Unitarian preacher through several decades, I’ve lifted up freedom.  I maintained that we are essentially in control of our own lives.  We cultivate the free mind to know what is true and accordingly we form our actions.  Such is our nature and with nurture we can be virtuous, living out a noble and purposeful life, while shaping a just society. So I've long declared.

Recently, I’ve been changing my understanding of the nature of the human condition, rethinking, at the very least, the old theological dichotomy between innate depravity and inherent goodness.  We need new terms or categories that can incorporate the insights of the new sciences regarding the human condition. 

My thinking began to change two decades ago when neuroscience and socio-biology, as it was then called, began to reveal how we are hardwired and respond so often from instincts that have assured our species survival.  Tom Wolfe, a favorite writer/public intellectual, in a 1996 article in Forbes magazine declared dramatically “Sorry, Your Soul just Died.”  He was referring to the results and promise of the new sciences that were influencing me, too.  In a reductionist way, he declared the mind/psyche/soul conjunction a temporary result of electro-chemical reactions in the brain.  Wolfe correctly declared that the new sciences not only eroded the traditionalist construct of immortal soul, it altered the liberal belief in the concepts of freedom and free-will.  The ox of science gored in two diametrically opposed positions.

Recently, I’ve been shaken out of my complacent attitudes—what a friend once called those goddamned Unitarian platitudes—by a leading evolutionary psychology, Jonathan Haidt, who points out that one per cent of the human population is psychopathic—outside by the “normal’ instincts of empathy and compassion.    I’ve also pondering brain imagery findings that we act before we think—that our actions come from the unconscious after we instantly rationalize what we do.

I am sobered by this, and yes, also humbled.

The Power of Habit further sobers and humbles me about the human condition.  Research suggests that much of what we do, 40-45 per cent of our behavior, is conditioned by habit, and for good reason, as explained by the book’s author Charles Duhigg in a recent New York Times Magazine article.

“An M.I.T. neuroscientist named Ann Graybiel told me that she and her colleagues began exploring habits more than a decade ago by putting their wired rats into a T-shaped maze with chocolate at one end. The maze was structured so that each animal was positioned behind a barrier that opened after a loud click. The first time a rat was placed in the maze, it would usually wander slowly up and down the center aisle after the barrier slid away, sniffing in corners and scratching at walls. It appeared to smell the chocolate but couldn’t figure out how to find it. There was no discernible pattern in the rat’s meanderings and no indication it was working hard to find the treat.

“The probes in the rats’ heads, however, told a different story. While each animal wandered through the maze, its brain was working furiously. Every time a rat sniffed the air or scratched a wall, the neurosensors inside the animal’s head exploded with activity. As the scientists repeated the experiment, again and again, the rats eventually stopped sniffing corners and making wrong turns and began to zip through the maze with more and more speed. And within their brains, something unexpected occurred: as each rat learned how to complete the maze more quickly, its mental activity decreased. As the path became more and more automatic — as it became a habit — the rats started thinking less and less.

‘This process, in which the brain converts a sequence of actions into an automatic routine, is called “chunking.” There are dozens, if not hundreds, of behavioral chunks we rely on every day. Some are simple: you automatically put toothpaste on your toothbrush before sticking it in your mouth. Some, like making the kids’ lunch, are a little more complex. Still others are so complicated that it’s remarkable to realize that a habit could have emerged at all.” […]

“The process within our brains that creates habits is a three-step loop. First, there is a cue, a trigger that tells your brain to go into automatic mode and which habit to use. Then there is the routine, which can be physical or mental or emotional. Finally, there is a reward, which helps your brain figure out if this particular loop is worth remembering for the future. Over time, this loop — cue, routine, reward; cue, routine, reward — becomes more and more automatic. The cue and reward become neurologically intertwined until a sense of craving emerges. What’s unique about cues and rewards, however, is how subtle they can be. Neurological studies like the ones in [the] lab have revealed that some cues span just milliseconds. And rewards can range from the obvious (like the sugar rush that a morning doughnut habit provides) to the infinitesimal (like the barely noticeable — but measurable — sense of relief the brain experiences after successfully navigating the driveway). Most cues and rewards, in fact, happen so quickly and are so slight that we are hardly aware of them at all. But our neural systems notice and use them to build automatic behaviors.

“Habits aren’t destiny — they can be ignored, changed or replaced. But it’s also true that once the loop is established and a habit emerges, your brain stops fully participating in decision-making. So unless you deliberately fight a habit — unless you find new cues and rewards — the old pattern will unfold automatically.”

Putting Habits to the Test

Cue.  Routine.  Reward.  These are the three parts of habit-building that the author applied to his own life.  He had been putting on weight, in part by having an afternoon cookie break.  So he began to analyze the cue, routine, and reward aspects of this behavior.  He kept something of a journal and tried experimental behavior.   Everyday around 3:30, he’d leave his work station and mosey over to the cafeteria where he’d eat a cookie in the company of his fellow journalists.  The cue was 3:30.  He came to realize, however, that the cookie wasn’t the reward, but the routine.  The actual reward was socializing with colleagues and friends.  With that realization he was able to eventually omit the cookie.

Reading this, I wondered if church-going here at UCH works like this: The cue, 10:30.  The routine, sitting through an hour or so of words and music structured as a worship service.  The reward, coffee hour and its connection/reconnection with kindred spirits. 

Like a marketer, I mused about the ways habit forming strategies might be a way of building and sustaining a congregation.  One of the author’s examples of corporate-like habits is the very successful/influential  Saddleback Church in Riverside, Califorinia.

It’s marketing, based upon “how companies learn our secrets,” that raises the specter of an Orwellian landscape that we much traverse almost in every moment.  One of the best companies in this habit building area is the merchandiser TARGET.

The example the author uses relates to pregnant women and data mining.  The marketers wanted to identify that a woman was pregnant in her second trimester, then to send her via whatever channels available, coupons and incentives to get her into the store and begin to use it for a variety of purchases.

Here’s the drill, as described by the author in the aforementioned New Times Magazine article:

“[A] fictional Target shopper named Jenny Ward, who is 23, lives in Atlanta and in March bought cocoa-butter lotion, a purse large enough to double as a diaper bag, zinc and magnesium supplements and a bright blue rug. There’s, say, an 87 percent chance that she’s pregnant and that her delivery date is sometime in late August. What’s more, because of the data attached to her Guest ID number, Target knows how to trigger Jenny’s habits. They know that if she receives a coupon via e-mail, it will most likely cue her to buy online. They know that if she receives an ad in the mail on Friday, she frequently uses it on a weekend trip to the store. And they know that if they reward her with a printed receipt that entitles her to a free cup of Starbucks coffee, she’ll use it when she comes back again.

“In the past, that knowledge had limited value. After all, Jenny purchased only cleaning supplies at Target, and there were only so many psychological buttons the company could push. But now that she is pregnant, everything is up for grabs. In addition to triggering Jenny’s habits to buy more cleaning products, they can also start including offers for an array of products, some more obvious than others, that a woman at her stage of pregnancy might need.

“[Target] applied [t]his program to every regular female shopper in Target’s national database and soon had a list of tens of thousands of women who were most likely pregnant. If they could entice those women or their husbands to visit Target and buy baby-related products, the company’s cue-routine-reward calculators could kick in and start pushing them to buy groceries, bathing suits, toys and clothing, as well.” …

“In other words, if Target piggybacked on existing habits — the same cues and rewards they already knew got customers to buy cleaning supplies or socks — then they could insert a new routine: buying baby products, as well. There’s a cue (“Oh, a coupon for something I need!”) a routine (“Buy! Buy! Buy!”) and a reward (“I can take that off my list”). And once the shopper is inside the store, Target will hit her with cues and rewards to entice her to purchase everything she normally buys somewhere else. As long as Target camouflaged how much it knew, as long as the habit felt familiar, the new behavior took hold.

“Soon after the new ad campaign began, Target’s Mom and Baby sales exploded.” 

My counsel today is “be informed and aware,” so you can 

1.  change undesirable habits
2.   not be exploited by marketers.  

 On a more existential level, habit is grist for the “know thyself” mill: “ponder what it means to be free.”

I conclude with a poem by W. H. Auden.  Written in 1940, it  resonates in 2012.

The Unknown Citizen
by W. H. Auden
(To JS/07 M 378 This Marble Monument Is Erected by the State) He was found by the Bureau of Statistics to be One against whom there was no official complaint, And all the reports on his conduct agree That, in the modern sense of an old-fashioned word, he was a    saint, For in everything he did he served the Greater Community. Except for the War till the day he retired He worked in a factory and never got fired, But satisfied his employers, Fudge Motors Inc. Yet he wasn't a scab or odd in his views, For his Union reports that he paid his dues, (Our report on his Union shows it was sound) And our Social Psychology workers found That he was popular with his mates and liked a drink. The Press are convinced that he bought a paper every day And that his reactions to advertisements were normal in every way. Policies taken out in his name prove that he was fully insured, And his Health-card shows he was once in hospital but left it cured. Both Producers Research and High-Grade Living declare He was fully sensible to the advantages of the Instalment Plan And had everything necessary to the Modern Man, A phonograph, a radio, a car and a frigidaire. Our researchers into Public Opinion are content That he held the proper opinions for the time of year; When there was peace, he was for peace:  when there was war, he went. He was married and added five children to the population, Which our Eugenist says was the right number for a parent of his    generation. And our teachers report that he never interfered with their    education. Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd: Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard. Are you free?  Are you happy?