tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-133992542024-03-08T20:02:11.319-05:00Free and Responsible SearchF&RS is the philosophical/religious blog of Doug Muder. Its title comes from "a free and responsible search for truth and meaning," the 4th principle of Unitarian Universalism. You can find Doug's weekly political summary at The Weekly Sift and his longer political articles at Open Source Journalism. He also writes on a number of group blogs under the pseudonym Pericles.Doug Muderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04666144843949850394noreply@blogger.comBlogger144125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13399254.post-46080155747381987622023-11-13T10:33:00.000-05:002023-11-13T10:33:14.281-05:00My Humanist Afterlife<p style="text-align: right;"><u>Presented at the Unitarian Church of Quincy, Illinois<br />12 November 202</u>3<br /></p><p>In the traditional wheel of the year, fall is when things come to a conclusion. You can see different aspects of that theme in the season’s two major holidays: Thanksgiving is about harvest, and Halloween is about death.<br /><br />The great UU preacher and author Forrest Church once summed up all of religion as “our human response to the dual reality of being alive and having to die”. That’s what I want to talk about today.<br /><br />Most of us deal with that challenge, at least in part, by practicing denial. Yes, we’ll die, but let’s not think about that right now. <br /><br />This is the attitude Don Juan cautioned Carlos Castaneda against when he told him to “use Death as an advisor”. Simply by living, we use up a finite resource. When we deny Death or ignore it, we lose sight of that finiteness. And so we might be tempted to fritter time away. Death would advise us value our time more highly.<br /><br />A second kind of denial is embedded in many religions, which teach that death is not as real as it looks: The body that dies is not important; it’s just the housing for a soul, which lives on eternally. In Christianity, that eternal life happens in Heaven or Hell. In many Eastern religions, the soul traverses a series of incarnations as anything from an insect to a god. <br /><br />As I’ve mentioned in previous talks, I grew up at St. James [Lutheran Church in Quincy] with a very literal Christian theology, and my parents maintained that faith for their entire lives. <br /><br />In 2011, my mother’s funeral was held at Hansen Spear [a local funeral home]. When <a href="https://www.uuworld.org/articles/my-mothers-funeral" target="_blank">I wrote about it later for UU World</a>, I confessed how isolated I had felt as I listened to the minister’s description of Heaven, that perfect place where Mom now was and where we would all someday join her. Because as appealing as that story can be, and as much as I might want to believe it, I simply could not. Trying to assemble that vision in my mind was like building a house of cards that kept falling apart as fast as I could construct it. <br /><br />Something I never wrote about is a very sad and difficult conversation I had with my father a year and a half later, shortly before his death. Dad knew he was dying, and in fact looked forward to it, because he believed he would see Mom again, along with his parents, sisters, and many old friends. My sister still practiced the Lutheran faith, so he was confident she also would arrive in Heaven eventually. <br /><br />But as Death approached, he was now facing the fact that I probably would never get there. So he needed to say good-bye to me, and it was hard for him.<br /><br />It was hard for me too. First, because no one wants to be included in his father’s list of dying regrets. And second, because my religion is something I take pride in, and to his final breath, Dad never understood.<br /><br />As Dad was saying his good-byes to me, I think that he came as close as he ever would to having the Universalist epiphany, a religious awakening that Christians here and there have been experiencing since the earliest days of the faith: the realization that Heaven can’t truly be a place of perfect bliss if anybody you care about is missing. And if everybody is loved by somebody, then the only Christian salvation that makes sense is universal salvation. If we don’t all make it to Heaven, it can’t really be Heaven.<br /><br />But Dad never crossed over into Universalism, and I did not push him, and he died.<br /><br />That UU World column I mentioned implied a question that I don’t think I’ve ever answered in public: If I can’t believe in the Christian afterlife I was taught at St. James, what do I believe? Have I come to some alternative vision? Or have I made peace with the idea that Death is final and there’s nothing more to say? Or do I just try not to think about it?<br /><br />Well, the first thing I want to say is that since I’ve been a Unitarian Universalist, I’ve heard several theories of what persists after Death. And I have to confess, that if the goal is to help me make peace with my own death, I haven’t found them particularly helpful.<br /><br />For example, I often hear that we live on in the effects of our actions, and particularly in the influence we’ve had on the lives of others. And while that’s certainly true, if you find it comforting, you have way more confidence in the efficacy of your good intentions than I have in mine. <br /><br />How many of us can say with any confidence what the ultimate consequences of our actions will be, or if, when they’re all are added up, the sum total will be positive or negative. That kind of assessment is a Judgement Day I don’t think I want to face.<br /><br />I also hear that we live on in the memories of those we leave behind. Now, I appreciate that this thought comforts survivors, and helps us get past that period when grief seems overwhelming. It encourages us to hang onto our memories of those we have lost, even through that period where those memories are most painful. As President Biden has said, “There will come a day, I promise you, when the thought of your son, or daughter, or your wife or your husband, brings a smile to your lips before it brings a tear to your eye.“<br /><br />But as I look ahead to my own death, the thought of living on as a memory is not that consoling. For one thing, the people who know me best may not live much longer than I do. <br /><br />And as for the others, let me put it like this: Do you ever overhear people talking about you? Whether they’re saying good things or bad things, how accurate is it? The thought that similar conversations might still be happening ten, twenty, fifty years after your death — how satisfying is that?<br /><br />When I floated this topic on Facebook this week, I heard a third idea that I hadn’t even thought about: the satisfaction of letting your corpse dissolve into the Earth, so that its elements can be taken up by new life. <br /><br />Those comments were a lesson to me in how different people find meaning in different places. Because I don’t really care what happens to my corpse. I’m with Socrates on this: According to Plato, when Crito asked Socrates what to do with his body, he replied: “Do whatever you want, as long as you don’t imagine that it is me.”<br /><br />In short, if the point is to make peace with being alive and knowing that I’m going to die, I’m going to have to look for that peace somewhere else. But where?<br /><br />Before I start trying to answer that I need to lay down some ground rules. First, I can’t just try to talk myself into believing something because it’s pleasant and I want to believe it. If that was going to work for me, I’d still be a Lutheran.<br /><br />And second, I believe in Occam’s Razor. So I’m not going to postulate whole realms and forces and choirs of angels unless something in my lived experience suggests they exist.<br /><br />Now, that said, I differ from a lot of humanists in having a fairly loose definition of what counts as experience. So if you’re like Ezekiel, and you’ve been granted a vision of going up to the throne of God and being shown what’s what, I wouldn’t tell you to ignore it. But nothing like that has happened to me, not even in dreams. So I’m limited to constructing my vision out of fairly mundane materials. <br /><br />My final prior consideration concerns how humanists tend to go wrong when we reason about spiritual matters. Too often, we don’t back up far enough. We take the questions traditional religion asks, and we try to answer them within that established framework, but using only the evidence humanly available. And so the answer usually winds up being “I don’t believe in that.” — which may be honest, but is seldom very helpful. <br /><br />So if you let the question be “What happens to the soul after the body dies?”, and if the possible answers are “It dies too”, or “It reincarnates”, or “It moves on to some eternal realm”, then I’ll probably wind up saying “I don’t believe in a soul”. And how does that help?<br /><br />So I think I need to start further back. What the heck is a soul supposed to be anyway?<br /><br />Your soul, if you listen to the people who believe in such things, is the essence of who you are. It stays with you, or more accurately, it <i>is</i> you, all the way from birth to death. <br /><br />Try to think, for a moment about the totality of your life: all the changes, all the relationships, all the roles, all the careers, all the responsibilities, all the activities and interests that dominated your attention for some period of time and then were replaced by something else. Does it feel like there’s been an essence to all that? Do you really feel like you’ve been the same person, all the way from birth to the present moment?<br /><br />Personally, I don’t. I find myself agreeing with Joan Didion, who wrote: “I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be.” <br /><br />The narrator of Robert Penn Warren’s novel <i>All the King’s Men</i> describes an even more fragmented experience of identity: Travel, he says, is a frail thread that connects “the you which you have just left in one place and the you which you will be when you get to the other place. You ought to invite those two you’s to the same party, some time. Or you might have a family reunion for all the you’s with barbecue under the trees. It would be amusing to know what they would say to each other.”<br /><br />I wonder the same thing sometimes. At age 14, I wanted to be a baseball pitcher. In high school, I was on the chess team and spent all my free time working on my game. For a time, I thought I would be a novelist. My first career was as a mathematician, and for years math was as all-consuming as any interest I’ve ever had. <br /><br />I don’t do any of that stuff now. So am I really the same person? If any of those past versions of me could look into the future, would they feel vindicated or fulfilled by the person I am today? I’m not so sure. More and more, I suspect that there is no essential Me that has been present through my full 67 years. <br /><br />That lack of identification explains why both reincarnation and Heaven fall flat for me. Suppose that someday after my death a baby is born who remembers nothing of my life, the people I loved, or the things I tried to do. In what sense could that baby possibly be me reincarnated? That eternal essence we supposedly share is so abstract that I can’t identify. <br /><br />I also have trouble identifying with myself in Heaven. Think back over your life and consider the extent to which you have been shaped by imperfections, both in yourself and in the outside world. <br /><br />Maybe you spent much of your life overcoming a disability, or trying to win the approval of a difficult authority figure, or fighting addiction or depression, or living up to unrealistic expectations, or competing with a brother or sister, or dealing with poverty, or believing that you’re ugly or unlovable, or facing the consequences of mistakes you made, or battling society’s bias against people like you. <br /><br />Your whole life has been shaped by imperfection: the imperfections of your body, your character, the people you lived with, or the society you lived in. How you dealt with those challenges is a big part of who you are today.<br /><br />Now imagine yourself transported to a perfect place, where none of that matters. All your questions have been answered. Your conflicts with others are now just misunderstandings that have been resolved. Your physical or psychological wounds are healed, and so on. Who are you, in that world? Is that really somebody you can identify with? Is that really <i>you</i> living on?<br /><br />So I could stop here. But if I did, this would be another one of those typical nay-saying humanist talks: A bunch of people believe in X, Y, and Z, but I don’t. And the unstated implication would be that if you do believe something and it gives you comfort in the face of Death, then I think you’re just wrong. The end. Sing the closing hymn.<br /><br />But instead, let’s take a step further back and see if we can still solve the original problem somehow. Remember: I’m supposed to be responding to the dual reality of being alive and having to die. I’ve been working with the idea that my soul is some kind of eternal essence, and trying to imagine how this essential Me can transcend Death. </p><p>And I haven’t done very well with it. So I could just say, “That’s it. I’m done. Death is Death. Deal with it.” But what if we think of the soul differently? “OK,” I imagine you saying, “but different how?”<br /><br />I want to introduce my soul model with an anecdote that’s meant to be amusing: A man takes his son aside and says, “I want you to have this; it’s your great-greatfather’s ax. Your grandfather replaced the head. And I replaced the handle.”<br /><br />Now, you may notice that those two pieces are the whole ax. So not a single atom of what the man is handing down actually belonged to the boy’s great-grandfather. And yet, there is also some kind of continuity that goes back that far.<br /><br />In philosophy, this conundrum is known as the Ship of Theseus. Plutarch tells us that the city of Athens preserved the ship on which Theseus returned from Crete after his adventure with the Minotaur. But rather than let it rot in a museum, they kept it seaworthy by replacing pieces as they wore out. Over the centuries, probably every plank of it had been replaced at one time or another. So in what sense was it still the Ship of Theseus?<br /><br />See where I’m going with this? What if I think of my soul not as an eternal essence, but as a Ship of Theseus? It’s more or less the same from one day to the next, but pieces are constantly wearing out and being replaced. So while there’s continuity all the way back to my first breath, if I look back twenty years or forty years or sixty years, I barely recognize myself. <br /><br />That feels more right to me somehow. It fits with how I experience my life and think about my past. But how does it help?<br /><br />A few minutes ago I talked about the experience of looking back at moments in my life and not identifying with them. And I projected forward, imagining futures beyond my death and how I would have a hard time identifying with them as well.<br /><br />But now let’s talk about the opposite experience. There are people who are not you at all. But when you see them, and what they’re going through, you identify completely. Say there’s a new kid at school who doesn’t know anybody and doesn’t fit into anything yet. And you’re not a new kid. You know lots of people and feel at home in all sorts of situations. But you remember when you were the new kid, and you feel a strong connection.<br /><br />Or maybe you’re older and your children are grown and out of the house, but you talk to a young parent who feels overwhelmed in exactly the way you felt overwhelmed. Or you’re a teacher, and you see a student touched for the first time by a piece of great literature, just like you were. Or someone’s mother has died, and you remember how it felt when your mother died. Or you’re at a wedding (maybe of a couple you don’t even know, because you’re just somebody’s plus-one), but you savor the bittersweet memory of imagining a whole life stretching out in front of you with all those possibilities. </p><p>You know what I’m talking about. Those people are not you. And yet, in some significant way, they are. <br /><br />Or maybe, in some small way, they’re somebody else, somebody important to you. Someone you’ve lost. You see a smile or a gesture, or hear a tone of voice, and — just for a moment — it’s your old friend, your brother, the girl you took to the prom. It’s a small thing. And yet, it’s not.<br /><br />My Ship of Theseus may be a unique collection of parts. But <i>a lot of those parts were mass produced</i>. I can look around and see them in other people’s ships. When I see another ship with one of my parts, or maybe a part I replaced long ago, I feel the connection.<br /><br />That’s how I’m hoping to live on.<br /><br />What doesn’t work for me in the traditional notions of an afterlife is that they promise to preserve my uniqueness. And that doesn’t feel credible to me, because I see my uniqueness as just an idea, an abstraction. What connects me to that baby born 67 years ago is so ephemeral, it barely matters to me. And if that thin thread somehow stretches into the infinite future, I’m not sure I care.<br /><br />But what I believe <i>is</i> going to live on, and what I <i>do</i> feel strongly about, is my commonality, the ways that I am like other people. The challenges that shaped my life — people will go on facing those challenges. Some of them will rediscover the same responses I came up with. And some will do better. Probably right now, there are people out there somewhere facing situations that I screwed up, and they’re fixing my mistakes. There’s something satisfying about that thought. <br /><br />The things I have been, other people will continue to be. The battles I have fought, other people will continue fighting. The relationships I have had, other people won’t have exactly those relationships, but they’ll have similar ones. My closest, most special relationships, maybe they won’t turn up that often. But they are part of the broad range of human possibility. And sometime, somewhere, other people will stumble down that same path. <br /><br />When that happens, will I be looking down from some eternal realm, sharing their moment? Maybe not. But I don’t think I need that. <br /><br />What I need, if I’m going to make peace with Death right here and right now, is to imagine those people, to be aware of my similarity to them, and to feel a sense of connection stretching out into the indefinite future. That connection seems real to me in a way that Heaven or future incarnations don’t seem real. <br /><br />And you may feel differently. But for me, right now, it’s enough.<br /></p><h3 style="text-align: left;">Closing words</h3><p>The closing words are from <i>The Grapes of Wrath</i>:<br /><br />Well, maybe like Casy says, a fella ain’t got a soul of his own, but on’y a piece of a big one — an’ then …<br /><br />Then it don’ matter. Then I’ll be all aroun’ in the dark. I’ll be everywhere — wherever you look. Wherever they’s a fight so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there. Wherever they’s a cop beatin’ up a guy, I’ll be there. <br /><br />If Casy knowed, why, I’ll be in the way guys yell when they’re mad an’ — I’ll be in the way kids laugh when they’re hungry an’ they know supper’s ready. An’ when our folks eat the stuff they raise an’ live in the houses they build – why, I’ll be there. <br /><br />See?</p>Doug Muderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04666144843949850394noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13399254.post-81755181479149338772023-03-29T15:56:00.000-04:002023-03-29T15:56:58.648-04:00"You Must Have Learned Something in 20 Years": reflections on two decades of blogging<p style="text-align: center;"><u>presented at the Unitarian<i> </i>Church of Quincy, Illinois<br />March 26, 2023<i><br /></i></u></p><p style="text-align: center;"><i>When an ostrich buries its head in the sand as danger approaches, it very likely takes the happiest course.</i> - Charles Sanders Peirce</p><p><br />One of the things I learned growing up in Quincy is that news happens somewhere else. <br /><br />Years later, I heard ESPN anchor Kenny Mayne capture the experience perfectly with a twist on an old sports cliche. On paper, he said, it was obvious who would win the upcoming game. “But football games aren’t played on paper, they’re played inside TV sets.”<br /><br />That was my experience of the news: It all happened inside a TV. The images on the screen might be of DC or New York or some city on the other side of the world, like Saigon or Tel Aviv. Occasionally they might show a small town somewhere. But almost never this small town. Because news happens somewhere else.<br /><br />After I left Quincy I lived in a number of places, and then in 1996 I moved to New Hampshire. I got there too late for that year’s presidential primary. But in the 2000 cycle, I began to understand the magic of living in the land where presidential campaigns begin: Big name politicians wander the streets trying to get your attention. <br /><br />Most of that cycle, I was a day late. I’d read in the local newspaper that Vice President Gore had been shaking hands in a restaurant a few blocks from my apartment. Or Senator Bradley had talked to 15 voters in somebody’s back yard. <br /><br />Yesterday.<br /><br />But I did manage to see John McCain, because everybody saw John McCain. He was everywhere. No venue was too small and no question too trivial. The man was amazing.<br /><br />On the night of the primary, the big news was McCain’s landslide victory over Governor Bush, who had spent a lot of money on advertising, but almost never let ordinary people touch him or talk to him.<br /><br />So I’m watching returns come in on TV, and they cut over to a reporter at the McCain victory party, where excitement was building and the candidate was expected to appear soon. It was in a hotel about three miles away, so I said to Deb, “Let’s go.” And we did. We walked in the door, elbowed our way into the crowd, and got there in time to hear McCain’s victory speech. <br /><br />Some of you may have been watching that night, and you may have thought that speech was happening inside a TV set. But it wasn’t. I was on the floor, and when I looked up there it was: news.<br /><br />The next day, all the candidates and cameramen packed up and forgot about us for another three years. But in 2003, the cycle was starting up again. And this time I was determined to do it right. I found the web page where the Manchester Union Leader kept track of which candidates were going to be where, and I decided I was going to see everybody. Best of all, I was going to see them early, when even the front-runners would be begging for attention.<br /><br />And while I was at it, I thought I’d participate in the latest trend on the internet, and invite my friends to join me on a vicarious journey. Facebook and Twitter didn’t exist yet, but I planned to write up an account of every candidate I saw and email it to anybody I thought might be interested. <br /><br />My project began on April 3, 20 years ago next week, which I now regard as the anniversary of my blogging career. John Kerry was speaking at the public library in Peterborough, about 45 minutes away. His speech was full of exactly the kinds of information an undecided voter needed: He told us about himself and his qualifications, talked about what he wanted to do as president and how he would be different from President Bush. <br /><br />And then he opened the floor for questions. I had always wondered whether the questions at events like this are real or planted, and I found out: I got to ask Kerry about his vote for the Patriot Act, which I doubt he wanted to discuss. He gave an answer that I didn’t totally agree with, but I could respect it. And that was the general impression I wrote to my friends: Kerry probably wouldn’t be my first choice, but I could be OK with him as president. <br /><br />When I had envisioned this project, I thought the only value my emails would add was immediacy: My friends could read about the same events in newspapers, but the accounts would seem more real coming from someone they actually knew. I didn’t expect to see completely different events from the ones that got reported nationally.<br /><br />But I did. <br /><br />You see, somewhere in the middle of his talk, Kerry made a quip. The Bush administration had used the phrase “regime change” to describe its goal in Iraq, and Kerry turned that around, saying that we needed some regime change right here in America. <br /><br />It was a cute line, but there wasn’t much substance to it, so I ignored it. Rush Limbaugh didn’t. Somehow Rush heard that line and told his radio audience how unpatriotic he thought it was. Several Republican congressmen picked up that attack: This decorated Vietnam veteran was unpatriotic because he had characterized an incumbent president losing an election as “regime change”. So now it was on. Kerry had to strike back, saying that he didn’t need lessons in patriotism from the likes of Rush Limbaugh. It went back and forth for days. So if you heard anything about the Peterborough speech, that quip was what you heard. But if you had been in the room, it would have gone right past you.<br /><br />Then I heard Howard Dean speak in a room above my local brewpub. The media had been describing Dean as the antiwar candidate. And yes, he said a few things against the Iraq War. But mainly he talked about his record as governor of Vermont, with particular emphasis on healthcare and education. The next morning, though, the major newspapers only quoted what he said about the war, as if that had been his whole speech. <br /><br />It happened again and again: I saw one event, and then I read about a completely different one. <br /><br />I had trouble wrapping my mind around what I was seeing. I felt like the campaign speeches were being covered badly, but it didn’t match any recognizable model of bad news coverage. The articles weren’t lying. No one was being misquoted. The omissions didn’t seem to favor one candidate over another. But I was coming at these events from the point of view of a voter trying to decide what kind of president these candidates would make. And apparently, that made me different from just about everyone else who was covering the campaign. <br /><br />My project had started out as a lark, a fun thing to do and share with my friends. But as I got into it, I started to think that it was actually important. And that was my first step towards becoming a blogger.<br /><br />Now, the theme of this talk, other than me getting nostalgic, is what twenty years of blogging has taught me. And so the first lesson I’ll pick out goes back to that beginning: <i>The media doesn’t have to lie in order to do you a disservice. </i><br /><br />Journalists may report what they’re seeing and hearing with perfect accuracy. But if they’re coming to those events with a mindset that isn’t your mindset, and if they’re trying to answer questions that aren’t your questions, then they’re not going to tell you what you really want to know. Nobody has to be a villain in this story, but your interests are not being served. So no matter how many articles you read, and how much time you put into following the issues you care about, you can’t be sure you’re being well informed.<br /><br />This lesson sits in the background of <a href="https://weeklysift.com/" target="_blank">my Weekly Sift blog</a> every Monday. Because the hardest work I do on the Sift actually is not gathering the information or crafting the text. The hardest work is discernment: I’m trying to be a responsible citizen of a democracy, and I assume the same about my readers. Given that basic mindset, what issues should I — and by projection, you — being paying attention to? And of all the things that were said and done this week relating to those issues, which ones are genuinely important?<br /><br />From the primary campaign, I branched out. That November, the Massachusetts Supreme Court found that same-sex couples had a right to marry. The news media focused on reactions to the ruling — who was for it or against it — but I wanted to know what the judge had said. I found the text of the opinion, and discovered that it was easier to understand than I had expected. So I wrote about it.<br /><br />Periodically, I was noticing things about the Iraq War or the War on Terror that weren’t getting the attention I thought they deserved. So I wrote about them too.<br /><br />Distribution by email turned into a web page anyone could access, and then in 2005 became a blog. I got into the habit of starting each week by posting a list of articles I had found worthwhile the previous week. Later I began adding short comments on those articles, and in 2008, I spun that Monday-morning summary off into its own blog, The Weekly Sift. I’ve posted something there almost every Monday since.<br /><br />So that’s the second thing to learn from my experience: <i>Once you start something, you never know where it’s going to go.</i> Something that begins as a lark may turn into a project that lasts 20 years.<br /><br />And when you do something for 20 years, the world changes around you. When I started blogging, the problem I saw was that a dominant media narrative might be out of touch with what ordinary people need to know. And I saw the internet as a tool for fixing that problem. <br /><br />So along with much better known writers like Ezra Klein, Digby, Josh Marshall, and Amanda Marcotte, I became part of the movement that made independent blogs more influential. Then came Facebook, Tik Tok, podcasts, and social media as we have come to know it. And now we have the opposite problem, which is arguably worse: people can create echo chambers that responsible journalism never penetrates. And they can support each other in believing whatever they want to believe, independent of the facts.<br /><br />So today, if you want to believe that your candidate won an election he actually lost by seven million votes, or that a vaccine that has saved millions of lives is part of a sinister plot to control you, you can. Maybe the people trying to save the world from climate change are actually conspiring to enslave us all in a global socialist dictatorship. Who can say? There is no Truth to be reported. There’s only what you want to believe, and how many people you can find who agree with you.<br /><br />What’s even more disturbing to me is that so much of the rhetoric that justifies that disinformation sounds like what I was saying 20 years ago: You can’t always believe what you’re told. You shouldn’t be afraid to ask questions. You need to look behind the curtain and do your own research.<br /><br />In some ways I feel like the Clint Eastwood character Dirty Harry. In the first movie, he’s a police detective who refuses to be bound by procedural niceties that let guilty people go free. But in the second, he sees what happens when that attitude goes too far. This time, the villains he has to track down are a cabal of cops who take it on themselves to assassinate anyone they identify as a bad guy. Late in that film Harry says what to me is the most memorable line of the whole series: “A man’s got to know his limitations.”<br /><br />And so today, as the internet takes away the power of experts in all fields to make us look at truths we’d rather ignore, <i>we all need know our limitations</i>. I <i>can</i> write about anything, but I’m not a universal expert. I’m not a climate scientist or an epidemiologist or a military strategist. My life experience doesn’t tell me much about being Black or female or poor or trans. The world is full of people who know things I don’t. Important things. True things. And so, over the years, the Sift has had to become more balanced: It’s not just about what to doubt, but also who to trust, and what I believe we can rely on.<br /><br />The final and most important lesson I want to draw this morning centers on an issue that never comes up explicitly in the Sift, but hovers constantly in the background. The roots of this actually go back further than 20 years. <br /><br />In the spring of 2000, CNN was intensely following several stories that had little to do with my daily life, but that I got hooked on: A court was deciding whether to break up Microsoft. Elian Gonzalez’s mother had drowned bringing him to the United States, and now his father in Cuba wanted him back. There were a couple of other major stories that, truthfully, I can’t even remember now. But following them took up a huge amount of my time, not just watching reports on them, but also arguing in my head with people who took the other side of those issues.<br /><br />So one day I was walking through a park next to the Nashua River, while in my mind I raged against some wrongheaded person I had just seen on TV. And I was miserable, in that particular way that I get when I’m afraid my side is going to lose an argument that we really deserve to win. (Maybe you know that feeling.)<br /><br />And then something happened. A theist might say that God’s grace shone down on me for a moment. But whatever caused it, my consciousness suddenly took a step backwards and I got a longer perspective. And I began to laugh at myself. Because here I was on a beautiful spring day, in a lovely spot, at a moment when my life overall was going pretty well, and I was miserable. <br /><br />I was miserable in that unique way that addicts are miserable. I was filled with anxiety and tension and fear and rage — and a yearning for relief from those feelings. But I was looking for relief in something that was actually going to make it all worse: more news coverage. The latest details on those stories, more talking heads arguing about them — that’s what I felt like I needed. It was crazy.<br /><br />So I went cold turkey on the news for a couple weeks, and I did indeed get better. I was once again able to experience the ups and downs of life as they came, without an ever-present background anxiety, and a desperate grasping after experiences that would make that anxiety worse.<br /><br />But of course, ignoring the news is not an answer either, any more than it’s an answer for an alcoholic to live the rest of his life in a rehab center. I am a voting citizen in a democracy, and I live in a society that faces real issues of justice and injustice. Closing my eyes to everything bigger than my personal life might be necessary from time to time, but long term it can’t be the right response. <br /><br />So there’s one central question that always hangs in the background of The Weekly Sift: <i>What is a right relationship to the news? <br /></i><br />Over time, the central mission of the Weekly Sift, at least as I see it, has become modeling that right relationship — staying aware of the news, thinking about it, even reacting emotionally to it at times, but not sliding into a destructive obsession with it, or letting it depress me to the point that I can’t enjoy my personal life.<br /> <br />A lot of that right relationship has to do with pace. And that’s why I stay disciplined about keeping the Sift weekly rather than interrupting your life with updates whenever something happens. Because you ought to think about the news regularly, but you don’t need to be thinking about it all the time. If you <i>are</i> thinking about it all the time, particularly if you’re thinking about it in an anxious, needy way that makes you keep turning on your TV or picking up your phone thinking “What’s new? What’s new? What’s new?” — that’s a sign of addiction. Back up. Go walk in the sunshine. The world can survive without you for a few days.<br /><br />Even weekly is too frequent for many issues, so you’ll notice that I don’t try to cover every issue every week. I don’t write about racism every week. I don’t write about climate change. It’s not that those issues aren’t important, but they’re playing out over decades, and the struggle against them is a marathon, not a sprint. You need to keep tabs on those issues, and if you think of yourself as an activist, you should probably review your strategy occasionally: Are you doing enough? Is your work effective? What might you do differently? <br /><br />Having that conversation with yourself several times a year is probably healthy. But if you’re having it several times a day, you’re probably just driving yourself nuts. That’s a pretty good rule of thumb for thinking about the news: Thinking deeply about an issue now and then is generally better than rehashing the same few thoughts over and over.<br /><br />Once you start thinking about the news as a possible source of addiction, you may begin to notice how that addiction works. One of the main mechanisms for getting us hooked is through speculation. Once you believe that you know what’s going to happen next, good or bad, then you have to keep checking to see whether it <i>has</i> happened. If you anticipate something hopeful, then you are plagued by the fear that it won’t happen. And if you anticipate something fearful, you still keep hoping that it won’t happen. Either way, you feel like you need to know.<br /><br />The business model of the news media relies on keeping you hooked, so they do their best to feed speculation. Imagine a news anchor saying:“Nothing much happened today, so you can take some time off from the news. Watch a movie, tend your garden, call an old friend. You can check back tomorrow.”<br /><br />Of course they’re not going to say that. If nothing much happened today, then they need to keep you focused on all the things that <i>might</i> happen <i>soon</i>. Important things. Scary things. Things that might give you the thrill of victory or the agony of defeat. So you should feel about them, yearn for them, fear them.<br /><br />Getting ahead of the news can make sense if you need to be taking preemptive action or preparing for a quick response. If there’s a bill in the legislature, maybe you need to call your representative about it now, rather than waiting to see if it passes. If a change in government policy might hurt a certain group of people, maybe you should be thinking ahead about how you’ll help those people. <br /><br />But most of the speculation we hear isn’t like that. It’s a pure “I want to know what’s going to happen.” And the people telling you what’s going to happen typically don’t know.<br /><br />Take a Trump indictment, for example. All this past week, the media kept us on edge. It’s going to happen. It’s going to happen. Today — no, not today. Tomorrow then. These are the charges you can expect. Or maybe those. And his supporters will riot. Or they won’t.<br /><br />And what good has any of that speculating done us? How are we better off than the people who have been withholding their attention until something actually happens? Think about the hours we could have been spending appreciating life.<br /><br />In conclusion, I want to emphasize that no one else can tell you whether you have a healthy relationship to the news. It’s a matter for your own introspection and discernment. There’s no number of hours you should or shouldn’t be spending. It doesn’t necessarily matter whether or not you can pass some current-events test. <br /><br />There are really only two questions to focus on. First, what role do you want to be playing in our society and culture? Do you see yourself as an activist, as someone who helps in some way, large or small, in shaping opinion and plotting the course of our democracy? Are you well enough informed to play the role you see for yourself?<br /><br />Second, how is your experience of the news affecting your experience of life? Does staying informed make you feel more competent and effective? Or is it filling you with anxiety or depression or guilt? If it’s the latter, then I would urge you not to just take those feelings as an unavoidable response to the way things are. Instead, I encourage you to use those feelings to examine how you relate to the news, and to think about whether or how that relationship could change.<br /><br />The closing words have been attributed to the Sufi poet Hafez, and I think what he’s saying about fear could also apply to anxiety or guilt or depression: “Fear is the cheapest room in the house. I would like to see you living in better conditions.”<br /><br /><br /></p>Doug Muderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04666144843949850394noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13399254.post-37090722056035181902023-02-25T15:26:00.000-05:002023-02-25T15:26:05.121-05:00Delight in Each Other: Democracy as a Covenantal Relationship<p style="text-align: center;"> <u>a service presented at First Parish Unitarian Universalist Church <br />in Bedford, Massachusetts<br />February 19, 2023</u><br /></p><h3 style="text-align: left;">Opening Words </h3><p>The opening words are from the sermon John Winthrop preached on board the Arbella, to the colonists on their way to found the new town of Boston. </p><p>"We must delight in each other; make others’ conditions our own; rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, as members of the same body." <br /></p><h3 style="text-align: left;">Time for All Ages: Stone Soup </h3><p>One day a traveler came to a village, pulling a cart behind him. In the cart was an enormous cooking pot, and inside the pot was … nothing. </p><p>As he approached the village green, villagers came up to him, looked in the cart, looked in the pot, and said, “You don’t seem to have any food with you, so I think you may have come to the wrong place. This is a poor village in the best of times, and these are not the best of times. Many are hungry, and no one has extra food to offer you. You should just keep going, and maybe you’ll have better luck down the road.” </p><p>But the traveler said, “You mistake my purpose. I didn’t come to ask you for food. I am going to cook a wonderful soup in this pot, and offer a bowl to anybody who wants one.” </p><p>Well, there were indeed many hungry people in the village, so that offer drew their attention. “But what are you going to put in your soup?” </p><p>To which the traveler replied: “Watch and see.” </p><p>So the villagers watched him as he filled the pot with water from the village well, and gathered wood and started a fire.
And as the water began to heat, he took something out of his cloak and unwrapped it: a stone. </p><p>“This is a magic stone,” he said. “Exactly how I obtained it is a tale that perhaps I might tell some other time. But for now just let me tell you how the enchantment works: Whenever I am hungry (and I have to admit I am getting hungry now) all I have to do is boil this stone, and it produces stone soup, which is the most filling and nutritious soup I have ever eaten.
The stone will fill any vessel with soup, and that’s why I carry a pot so much bigger than I need for myself, so that I have plenty to share with others.” </p><p>The villagers weren’t sure what to make of this story, but they watched as the traveler stirred and sniffed and reminisced about all the wonderful times he had eaten stone soup. And as they listened to him, their mouths watered and their stomachs growled. </p><p>“All you need is that stone?” someone asked. </p><p>“Well,” admitted the traveler, “by itself stone soup is filling and nutritious, as I said. But if you add just a little cabbage, it becomes tasty as well.” </p><p>To everyone’s surprise, one of the village’s poorest women said: “I have a few cabbages hidden away.” </p><p>“These will do marvelously,” said the traveler as he cut them up and added them to the pot. Now the air was full of the smell of cooking cabbage, which drew all the rest of the villagers out to the green. </p><p>“Stone soup with cabbage is indeed quite tasty,” the traveler said. “But if it also has a few carrots, it becomes downright delicious.” </p><p>“I have a few carrots,” another villager offered. </p><p>Once the carrots were added, the aroma became irresistible, and the villagers began to volunteer. </p><p>“Do you think some potatoes would help?” </p><p>“I have just a bit of salted pork.” </p><p>“Corn,” offered another. “Salt and pepper.” </p><p>The traveler praised each offering as exactly what the soup needed, until one by one, every household in the village had added something to the pot. With each ingredient, his claims for the soup grew, until he declared that even the King himself would not enjoy such a fine soup that day. </p><p>When the traveler pronounced the soup done, he ladled out a bowl to each and every villager. And as he scraped out the last of the soup for himself, there at the bottom of the pot was the stone. He very carefully picked it up, cleaned it off, wrapped it in a cloth, and put it back in his cloak for the next time he might need stone soup. </p><p>And as the villagers ate, they all agreed that this was indeed the most wonderful soup they had ever tasted, and every word the traveler had said about it was perfectly true. </p><h3 style="text-align: left;">Readings </h3><p>I’m Doug Muder. As you might guess from my name, I’m of German ancestry. Large numbers of Germans were already coming to the American colonies in the 1700s, and my direct ancestors began arriving in the 1840s. And so, whenever people start debating who is or isn’t a “real” American, my status never comes into question. </p><p>If you are similarly privileged, I recommend this exercise: Page back to the era when people like you first started coming here, and see what was being said about them then. When I did that, I found this <a href="https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-04-02-0173">letter Benjamin Franklin wrote to Peter Collinson in 1753</a> about the threat that German immigration posed to the Pennsylvania colony. </p><p>“Advertisements intended to be general are now printed in Dutch and English; the Signs in our Streets have inscriptions in both languages, and in some places only German: They begin of late to make all their Bonds and other legal Writings in their own Language, which (though I think it ought not to be) are allowed good in our Courts, where the German Business so encreases that there is continual need of Interpreters; and I suppose in a few years they will be also necessary in the Assembly, to tell one half of our Legislators what the other half say; In short unless the stream of their importation could be turned from this to other colonies, as you very judiciously propose, they will soon so out number us, that all the advantages we have will not in My Opinion be able to preserve our language, and even our Government will become precarious.” </p><p>In time, though, Germans and a variety of other immigrants became acceptable. As far back as de Tocqueville, it has been observed that Americans are united more by a set of beliefs than by ethnicity or sect. The canon that defines that so-called American creed has never been codified, but I’ve collected a few texts that I think you will all recognize. </p><p>From the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” </p><p>The Preamble of the Constitution says a little more about why governments are instituted: “We the People of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.” </p><p>From the Gettysburg Address: “We here highly resolve that … this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” </p><p>The final reading is by Barack Obama’s Ambassador to the United Nations, Samantha Power, who, when she doesn’t have a job that takes her elsewhere lives in Concord. She may look and sound like a lifelong American, but she is an immigrant. She came from Ireland at the age of 8, and wasn’t naturalized until adulthood. </p><p>In her autobiography <i>The Education of an Idealist</i> she describes the ceremony like this: “During our collective Oath of Allegiance, we pledged, ‘I will support and defend the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic.’ </p><p>“Looking around the courtroom, seeing emotion ripple across the faces of those whose hands were raised, I was struck by what America meant as a refuge, and as an idea. All of us gathered that morning had reached the modern Promised Land. We weren’t giving up who we were or where we came from; we were making it American. </p><p>“I hugged an elderly woman from Central America on my left, and a tall man from Russia to my right. We were all Americans now.” </p><h3 style="text-align: left;">Sermon </h3><p>As many of you probably know, I write a weekly political blog where the topic of democracy often comes up. </p><p>One downside of looking at the news week-by-week, as I do, or day-by-day, as many cable news shows do, is that it’s easy to focus on the latest threats to democracy, whatever they happen to be: Say, election denial, or a violent attempt to overturn an election (like the one in Brazil last month or here two years ago), or a voter suppression law, or gerrymandering, or an assault on the free press. A short-term view tends to make us reactive: Democracy is under attack. How can we defend? </p><p>But this morning I want to take a longer view and think about the health of democracy. Not who is attacking it and how, but what do we need to shore up and rebuild? Not what is tearing democracy down, but what makes democracy work in the first place? </p><p>Health is often more mysterious than disease, and I believe that’s the case here. Some very important things about democracy aren’t well understood or appreciated, even by people who value it highly, like Unitarian Universalists. One big misunderstanding, I’m sorry to say, is embedded in our Fifth Principle, the one that commits us to affirm and support “the use of the democratic process within our congregations and in society at large.” </p><p>It’s the only mention of democracy in <a href="https://www.uua.org/beliefs/what-we-believe/principles">our principles</a>, and from it you might get the idea that the essence of democracy is process: holding elections, having a Congress, giving courts the power to uphold human rights. </p><p>That kind of thinking has led well-intentioned people astray time and time again, for a very simple reason: If you have military control over someone else’s land, as we did in Iraq and Afghanistan, and as the European powers did in their former colonies, then it’s not hard to impose a process.You can assemble a constitutional convention, guarantee that the first set of votes are counted accurately, and leave behind an elected government operating under a constitution that promises human rights and the rule of law. </p><p>Presto! You’ve created a democracy. </p><p>But again and again, those externally imposed democracies have failed, because the processes of democracy are empty unless a Spirit of Democracy animates them. Anyone with enough power can set up a democratic process. But only the people themselves can infuse that process with a democratic spirit. </p><p>That sounds a little mystical, so I should probably give a concrete example of a living democratic process I have experienced myself, and which you may have experienced as well. Several years ago I served on a jury in a criminal case. In the beginning I wasn’t thrilled to be there, and I doubt that my colleagues were either. Who is, really? I doubt many people get the summons and say, “Oh great! I get to do jury duty!” </p><p>But it didn’t take long for the ritual of the court to work its magic on us. Surprisingly quickly, it became real to us that in this particular time and place, we were the community. It was up to us to weigh the law’s just demands against the defendant’s rights. </p><p>None of us had a personal stake in the outcome. We didn’t know the defendant or anyone else connected with the alleged crime. If we had not caught the spirit, our deliberations might have become a rote performance. We might have listened to the witnesses half-heartedly and then just voted our preconceived opinions about crime or the kind of people who live in that neighborhood. We might have gone along with the majority just to get it over with. </p><p>But we did catch the spirit, and we did our job well. We listened intently, both to the evidence and to each other. We thought hard about the case, and as we discussed it, several of us changed our minds. And even though we voted to convict, if I am ever on trial, I hope I get a jury like us. </p><p>But whether we understand the importance of spirit or not, the people threatening democracy do. It’s striking how many of their attacks leave the processes standing, but hollow out their meaning. Russia, for example, still preserves the form of campaigns and elections, but any opposition leader who gets too popular, if he’s not just killed, may have to choose between exile and prison. Hungary still has the appearance of a free press, but nearly all the major news outlets have been bought by allies of the government. In a gerrymandered state like Wisconsin or North Carolina, voters can cast ballots however they like, but whatever they choose, the party that drew the maps has locked itself into power. </p><p>The worldview that underlies such empty democratic rituals is one of deep cynicism. Justice can’t be blind. Government is always corrupt. Science is fake. News is just propaganda. There is no shame in lying, because everyone lies. </p><p>And none of that is seen as the debasement of higher values; it’s just how life is. There are no real democracies, no common truths on which we might base our discussions, no shared principles that might guide our deliberations. Only children believe in such things. Only power is real. </p><p>Having invoked that cynicism, I’ll try to dispel it with a second positive example, this time from one more document out of the American canon, the Mayflower Compact, which bound together the pilgrims on their way to found the Massachusetts Bay Colony. </p><p>The Compact is pretty thin on process. The pilgrims promise “to enact, constitute, and frame, such just and equal laws, ordinances, acts, constitutions, and offices, from time to time, as shall be thought most meet and convenient”. In other words, they pledge to come up with some kind of process eventually. </p><p>But they do something else in this document, something no external power can make you do. The pilgrims “covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil body politic”. They promise that those processes they intend to establish someday will be “just and equal”, and work towards “the general good of the colony”. </p><p>What they’re are saying, in other words, is that we have decided to be a People together. Rather than submit to some external authority, we commit to govern ourselves. And rather than use that government to exploit each other, we pledge to treat each other as equals and seek the common good. </p><p>That’s what’s missing when the processes of democracy become empty: a covenantal relationship among people. Democracy is alive not when we are committed to freedom of the press or one man one vote or trial by jury. All those abstractions only come alive when we are committed to each other, and to all the people who share our covenant. Everything else flows from that. “Delight in each other,” John Winthrop told his flock. That’s where it starts. When we value each other, when we feel responsible for each other, and accountable to each other, then the Spirit of Democracy will animate our processes. </p><p>Today I’m mainly talking about American democracy and the American covenant. But an idea I want you to hold in the back of your minds is that this applies to First Parish too. For more than two years, Covid has really been doing a number on our ability to delight in each other. Our democratic processes have continued to function, but we’ve also seen how brittle they can become when they can’t be anchored in a larger consensus formed during coffee hours and potlucks and concerts, or while working together on an auction or a plant fair or a haunted house. </p><p>All that has been restarting lately, and just in time. In a little over two months, the search committee will be introducing us to a candidate to be our senior minister. Then we’ll have decisions to make, and maybe a new era to kick off. It will be an exciting time, and it will also be challenging. </p><p>But if we remember our covenant, stay true to each other, and take advantage of whatever opportunities we can find to delight in each other, then I’m pretty sure we’ll be OK. </p><p>So back to America. If democracy depends on its covenant, then we need to do some hard thinking about the American covenant and how to keep it strong. Fundamentally, a covenant is two things: a group of people, and the commitment they make to each other. And so the health of our democracy depends on finding the right answers to two foundational questions: Who is an American? And what is this “America” that we have come together to form? </p><p>The Samantha Power reading described our ritual of naturalization, through which we induct new people into our covenant. And as she makes clear, that ritual is not empty for the new Americans themselves. It’s also deeply meaningful for the people who preside; I could have offered any number of readings testifying to that. </p><p>But one of the primary avenues of attack on our democracy is to hollow that ritual out. Too often today, we hear people talk about “real Americans”, a group of people different from (and presumably much smaller than) American citizens as the law defines them. The definition of a “real American” changes from one speaker to the next. Maybe you have to be white. Maybe you have to be Christian. Maybe you have to be native-born, or speak English with a certain accent. You may become less “real” if you turn out to be gay or trans or socialist. </p><p>Once you accept this notion that some American citizens are not “real”, you are on your way to overthrowing democracy. Because how can an election be legitimate unless the legal voters make the same choice the “real” voters would make? And if they don’t, doesn’t it make sense to suppress the votes of the “unreal” Americans, or gerrymander them into districts that minimize their power, or find some loophole in the process that allows the “real” candidate to take office in spite of getting fewer legal votes? Ultimately, wouldn’t even violence be justified? </p><p>So to defend democracy, we need to stand up for the idea that naturalization is real, the birthright citizenship promised by the 14th Amendment is real, and nothing about your sexual preference or gender identity or political philosophy makes you any less real of an American. We need to hang onto that vision of Samantha Power hugging the Hispanic woman to her left and the Russian man to her right, because “We were all Americans now.” </p><p>To a large extent, that vision is true to our history. At the time of the Founders, the challenge was to get people to come here, not to keep them out. And so we barely had immigration laws at all until after the Civil War. </p><p>Some people like to claim that their ancestors came here “the right way”. But there was no wrong way for my ancestors to come in the 1840s. They just showed up and survived a few years, and then they were Americans. </p><p>What united Americans then, and has continued to unite us through the centuries, was not ethnicity or language or religion, but that vision expressed in Jefferson’s Declaration: Everyone comes to this world with equal worth and dignity. Everyone has the right to live, to steer their own course through life, and to try to thrive as best they can. Government power derives not from God or the ancestors or any other external source, but from the consent of the governed. </p><p>As President Washington told the Hebrew Congregation of Newport: “All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship. It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights.” </p><p>If you’re here, and you believe those things, and if you’re willing to cast your lot with the rest of us, to defend our lives and our rights the way we defend yours, then you’re as American as anybody else. </p><p>Last week, Lisa Maria mentioned some of the metaphors Americans have used to describe this joinable covenant: a melting pot, or (as she prefers) a patchwork quilt, where immigrants keep their prior identities, but (in Samantha Power’s words) “make them American”. In the same vein, I’ve also heard America described as a tossed salad. Personally, though, I see America as a stone soup. </p><p>Think about the mistake the villagers are making at the beginning of that story, the one the traveller tricks them out of. Each of them has a little food, but they all imagine that their own stash is the only one. And so they look at each other as mouths to feed, and not as people who might have something to offer. </p><p>Again and again, immigrants have come to our shores looking like they have nothing. But again and again, that has turned out not to be true. They brought their talents. They brought their culture. They brought their energy. And they made it American. We haven’t always treated our immigrants well. But America at its best has always eventually realized that these aren’t just mouths to feed. These are people with something they can add to our soup. </p><p>That unofficial American creed also goes a long way to answer the second fundamental question, to define the “America” our covenant is trying to form: a place of liberty and equality, where people have the opportunity to apply their talents and become whatever they have it in themselves to be. </p><p>And to that I would add one more idea, which I would trace back to George Washington’s Farewell Address: America is a kind and generous member of the community of nations — willing to help, standing with others who defend the same freedoms we want for ourselves, but not seeking empire or dominance. </p><p>But as I paint that patriotic picture, I can already hear the objections rising in your minds: How can we reconcile such a positive vision with the actual history of the United States? With the Native American genocide? With slavery and Jim Crow? With the oppression of women, of gays and lesbians, of a long list of groups who in one way or another have been labeled abnormal or unworthy? How do we reconcile it with the way we treat those who are coming to our border right now, looking for help because they have nowhere else to go? </p><p>Those questions point to the second argument we have to win, if we are going to defend democracy: The America that defines our covenant — we can’t look for it in the past. It is a goal for our future. There is no moment we can look back to and say, “That was America. Let us make America great again.”</p><p>The America that defines our covenant is an ideal and always has been. We have never lived up to it and we’re not living up to it now. </p><p>Who would know better than a black man in the midst of the Great Depression just how far the America of history has fallen short of the American ideal? </p><p>In 1935, Langston Hughes saw the vision of America as clearly as anyone: </p><p style="text-align: center;"><i>O, let my land be a land where Liberty<br /> Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath, <br />But opportunity is real, and life is free, <br />Equality is in the air we breathe. </i><br /></p><p>But he also lived the reality. “America,” he wrote, “never was America to me.” </p><p><a href="https://poets.org/poem/let-america-be-america-again">His poem</a> laments not just his own oppression, but all the people America has failed. And yet he does not give in to cynicism, or reject the ideal of America in scorn or disgust. For Hughes, our repeated failures only reinforce his commitment that someday we must succeed:
“</p><p style="text-align: center;"><i>O, let America be America again—
<br />The land that never has been yet—
<br />And yet must be—the land where every [one] is free.
… <br />America has never been America to me,
<br />And yet I swear this oath: "America will be!" </i><br /></p><p>We fulfill the vision of America today in many ways that we fell short two hundred years ago, fifty years ago, or even ten years ago. Our highest hope is that future generations will be America in ways that we never have been, that they will look back on us not as the good old days, but as an era only slightly less benighted than the ones before it. </p><p>Summing up, to keep our democracy healthy, we need to renew our commitment both to each other and to the ideal America we want to create. But how? Every day, whether you get your news from the Left or the Right, you are reminded how divided we are, how polarized. So how can we renew our covenant, even with people on the other side of the partisan gap? “Delight in each other,” John Winthrop said. That seems so distant now. </p><p>In his recent book <i>The Persuaders</i>, Anand Giridharadas describes the work of a Russian internet troll farm that created countless fake American social media identities in order to influence American politics and culture. Their goal was not to convince us to support Russia, but rather to turn us against one another. </p><p>“The troll farm … had encouraged the view, already on the rise, and not without roots in reality, that the basic activity of democratic life, the changing of minds, had become futile work. … [It] wanted Americans to regard each other as immovable, brainwashed, of bad faith, not worth energy, disloyal, repulsive.” </p><p>That belief is easy to find today on both sides of our political divide: Our opponents are not just wrong, they are irredeemable. But I want to close by pointing out that this hardened attitude violates our Universalist tradition, which refuses to write people off just because they don’t see what we see. </p><p>Leaders may act in bad faith, but many follow them in good faith, believing what they have been told. The solutions they ask for may be misguided, but the problems they see in their lives may still be real, and deserve our compassion. </p><p>I know how hard it can be to look past the name-calling, trolling, and bullying to try to understand the genuine disappointments and hurts fueling that behavior. But no matter how frustrating and annoying such people may be, they are Americans, and we are in covenant with them. </p><p>If we’re going to renew our covenant and preserve our democracy, we need to hold onto our Universalist faith that no one is beyond redemption. And that — no matter how stubborn they are or how many times they have been hoodwinked — no one is completely incapable of seeing Truth. </p><h3 style="text-align: left;">Closing Words </h3><p>The closing words are by Langston Hughes </p><p style="text-align: center;"><i>O, let America be America again— <br />The land that never has been yet—
<br />And yet must be
</i></p>Doug Muderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04666144843949850394noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13399254.post-25903269442964585742022-11-02T06:53:00.000-04:002022-11-02T06:53:16.146-04:00Democracy as a Religious Principle<p style="text-align: center;"><i>presented at the Unitarian Church of Quincy, Illinois<br />October 30, 2022</i><br /></p><p><br /><b>Opening words</b><br />“We no longer claim that a genuinely religious government can be democratic, but that it cannot be otherwise.” - Abdolkarim Soroush<br /><br /><b>Responsive reading</b> </p><p>#594 “Principles and Purposes for All of Us”<br /><br /><b>Readings</b><br />I thought I’d start by reading you some criticisms of democracy and party politics from other times and places.<br /><br />The first known usage of the phrase “Vox populi, vox dei” (The voice of the people is the voice of God.) comes from a letter the Saxon scholar Alcuin of York wrote to the Emperor Charlemagne in 800 AD, <br /><br />“And those people should not be listened to who keep saying the voice of the people is the voice of God, since the tumult of the crowd is always close to madness.’<br /><br />In <i>Gulliver’s Travels</i>, which Jonathan Swift published in 1726, a Lilliputian explains local politics:<br /><br />“for about seventy moons past there have been two struggling parties in this empire, under the names of Tramecksan and Slamecksan, from the high and low heels of their shoes, by which they distinguish themselves. <br /><br />“It is alleged, indeed, that the high heels are most agreeable to our ancient constitution; but, however this be, his majesty has determined to make use only of low heels in the administration of the government, and all offices in the gift of the crown, as you cannot but observe; and particularly that his majesty’s imperial heels are lower at least by a drurr than any of his court… The animosities between these two parties run so high, that they will neither eat, nor drink, nor talk with each other.” <br /><br />Another Lilliputian political division could not be tolerated at all.<br /><br />“It is allowed on all hands, that the primitive way of breaking eggs, before we eat them, was upon the larger end; but his present majesty’s grandfather, while he was a boy, going to eat an egg, and breaking it according to the ancient practice, happened to cut one of his fingers. Whereupon the emperor his father published an edict, commanding all his subjects, upon great penalties, to break the smaller end of their eggs. <br /><br />"The people so highly resented this law, that our histories tell us, there have been six rebellions raised on that account; wherein one emperor lost his life, and another his crown. These civil commotions were constantly fomented by the monarchs of Blefuscu; and when they were quelled, the exiles always fled for refuge to that empire. <br /><br />“It is computed that eleven thousand persons have at several times suffered death, rather than submit to break their eggs at the smaller end. Many hundred large volumes have been published upon this controversy: but the books of the Big-endians have been long forbidden, and the whole party rendered incapable by law of holding employments.”<br /><br /><br />Around the turn of the 20th century, journalist Lincoln Steffens toured America’s biggest cities and described the corruption of their political machines in articles that got reprinted in his 1904 book <i>The Shame of the Cities</i>.<br /><br />“When I set out on my travels, an honest New Yorker told me honestly that I would find that the Irish, the Catholic Irish, were at the bottom of it all everywhere. The first city I went to was St. Louis, a German city. The next was Minneapolis, a Scandinavian city, with a leadership of New Englanders. Then came Pittsburg, Scotch Presbyterian, and that was what my New York friend was. ‘Ah, but they are all foreign populations,’ I heard. The next city was Philadelphia, the purest American community of all, and the most hopeless.”<br /><br />Steffens found that he could not blame political corruption on any particular group, or even the politicians, who were just businessmen of a sort. The problem was the voters. <br /><br />“If we would vote in mass on the more promising ticket, or, if the two are equally bad, would throw out the party that is in, and wait till the next election and then throw out the other party that is in — then, I say, the commercial politician would feel a demand for good government and he would supply it.”<br /><br />But the electorate wouldn’t do that, leading Steffens to this conclusion: “The misgovernment of the American people is misgovernment by the American people.”<br /><br /><b>Message</b><br />An election is coming up, and I’m a political blogger. So you can imagine how much I’m tempted to launch into a rabble-rousing campaign speech. I have opinions, I have a podium — it just seems obvious. <br /><br />But I’m going to try to restrain myself, not because there’s anything wrong with talking politics in church — I’ve certainly done it before — but because I believe that religious institutions are at their best when they offer us a chance to step back from our habitual arguments and examine issues from a broader perspective. Not just “What are we going to do these next ten days?”, but “What are we doing with our lives and why?”<br /><br />So today I want to talk not just about this election, but about democracy. <br /><br />Unitarian Universalism has made a religious principle out of democracy. Our Fifth Principle commits us to “The right of conscience and the use of the democratic process within our congregations and in society at large.” The responsive reading we did elaborated on that: “We believe that all people should have a voice and a vote about the things which concern them.”<br /><br />Such a principle may not be unique among religions. You heard in the opening words that even some Muslims more-or-less agree. But it is unusual. <br /><br />Most American Christian churches make at least some claim to patriotism, so around the Fourth of July their ministers may praise our democratic system of government. But they see democracy, at best, as a very human system far inferior to living under God’s direct supervision. So the Christians who long for Jesus’ earthly return expect him to rule a Kingdom of Heaven, not ask for your support in a Republic of Heaven. They say “Jesus is Lord”, not “Jesus for President”.<br /><br />That’s in line with a view of government that goes back to the earliest empires, in which legitimate authority descends from Heaven like a lightning bolt, and hits the highest point: the King, who then transmits authority down the social pyramid. <br /><br />St. Paul, a Roman citizen, wrote: “Let everyone be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established.” European kings claimed to rule by the grace of God, and Chinese emperors by the will of heaven. Some rulers, like the Pharaohs, were gods themselves. <br /><br />Churches have been similarly hierarchical, and many still are. God’s wisdom is revealed to a Pope or Prophet, who transmits it to bishops and priests, who pass it down to the people.<br /><br />Then Gutenberg happened. <br /><br />So yes, my local pastor might be one conduit for God’s wisdom to reach me. But if Bibles are cheap enough, and ordinary people can read, then we could also learn from Moses or read the words of Jesus himself. By meditating silently in my own home, I might ask God to inspire me directly, without any middleman.<br /><br />Before long, Protestant sects were promoting personal communion with God as the ideal, and hearing God’s message from someone else as a second-best alternative. In time, many denominational bureaucracies have become more administrative than spiritual. They publish hymnals, vet ministers, and support missionaries in distant lands, but they don’t mediate between the individual and God.<br /><br />Hierarchical political models were undermined as well. So the Declaration of Independence says that the Creator endows everyone with rights, and “to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed”. <br /><br />In other words, what comes down from Heaven isn’t like a lightning bolt that energizes one specially privileged point, but more like rain that falls everywhere. And from the fertile soil of the People, leadership springs up.<br /><br />But the down-the-pyramid model of authority has never gone away, even in America, and there’s still one obvious exception to democracy: children. We don’t let children vote, and their parents are allowed to carry them kicking and screaming out of candy stores. The consent of the governed is not required.<br /><br />That exception may make practical sense. But it also creates a loophole: You can justify ruling people without their consent by arguing that they are like children to you. So slavery and colonialism were justified by the claim that non-white races are childlike, and it is the white man’s burden to look after them. Women were also seen as childlike, requiring the oversight of their fathers or husbands. Monarchy styles itself as a father-and-children relationship, which is why kings are called “sire”. <br /><br />Because of these competing impulses extending the franchise to new groups of people has always been contentious. On the one hand, men without property, or non-whites, or women were clearly being governed, so the government should be seeking their consent. But the powers-that-be always argued that the people in question were insufficiently wise or mature or educated or committed to the nation or to the common good. So adding them to the decision-making class would produce worse outcomes for everyone. <br /><br />At times, even Americans have believed that we had taken democracy too far. Way back at the Constitutional Convention, Roger Sherman argued: “The people, immediately, should have as little to do as may be about the government. They lack information and are constantly liable to be misled.”<br />Smithsonian curator Jon Grinspan’s recent book The Age of Acrimony describes the late 1800s as a time of crisis and self-doubt for American democracy, full of riots, assassinations, lynchings, corruption, and elections with dubious results. One author he cites from that era is Francis Parkman, a historian so distinguished that the Society of American Historians still awards the Parkman Prize for the best history book of the year. In 1878, not long after the disputed presidential election of 1876 had to be decided by a congressional commission, Parkman wrote an essay called “The Failure of Universal Suffrage”:<br /><br />“When a man has not sense to comprehend the questions at issue, know a bad candidate from a good one, or see his own true interests — when he cares not a farthing for the general good, and will sell his vote for a dollar — when, by a native instinct, he throws up his cap at the claptrap declamation of some lying knave, and turns with indifference or dislike from the voice of honesty and reason — then his vote becomes a public pest. Somebody uses him, and profits by him.”<br /><br />Present-day Americans say it with less flourish, but I often hear the same sentiments, sometimes coming out of my own mouth: “How can so many voters be taken in by such an obvious conman? How can they believe such ridiculous claims? Can we really trust our fellow citizens to make decisions that affect us?” <br /><br />Someone is using them, and profiting by them.<br /><br />So, understanding those concerns, how can we revere democracy as a religious principle?What does our principle even mean?<br /><br />Let’s start with what it doesn’t mean. It doesn’t mean that we worship democracy. The voice of the people is not the voice of God. So no matter how big a majority a president or party assembles, those leaders are not infallible.<br /><br />The Founders were not prophets, and the Constitution is not a holy document. We had to amend it to abolish slavery and give women the vote. And there are parts I would still like to change. <br /><br />In short, Democracy in general, and American democracy in particular, is a human institution subject to human failings. <br /> <br />Recognizing that fact is not an indictment of democracy, because the same is true of every form of government. A king or a dictator can be foolish — look at Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. An aristocracy can be corrupt, and is often oblivious to suffering in the lower classes. A board of the most qualified experts can get something wrong and refuse to acknowledge its mistakes. <br /><br />Unitarians understand that every form of government is fallible. As Winston Churchill said: “No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government — except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”<br /><br />Democracy has religious significance not because it is perfect, but because the very idea of government presents a moral problem: If some of us are going to make decisions that are binding on the rest of us, that power has to be justified in some way. It’s not enough for the decision-makers to be stronger than everyone else, or to point to a divine command no one else can hear or verify. If government is going to be binding on all of us, then our own voices and our own judgment have to be engaged somehow. “All people should have a voice and a vote about the things which concern them.”<br /><br />Now, I have to do an aside here, because libertarianism offers an alternative response to the moral problem of government: Maybe all government is immoral, so we should have as little as possible. Libertarians achieve that minimization by shrinking the mission of government to the protection of life and property. And they present that option as if agreeing to the current distribution of wealth and property were not such a big thing to ask. <br /><br />I’ll just point out one thing: I own no beachfront property, so every beach in the world belongs to someone else. When did I consent to that? <br /><br />More seriously: Every day, people are born into the world who have no claim on any part of this planet we supposedly share. And yet, they are supposed to respect whatever property the rest of us claim. Why should they? <br /><br />I believe that if we expect people to respect the property system, we owe them some stake in that system. Many years ago I described that debt to you in more detail, in a talk called “Who Owns the World?” I still don’t see any way to make good on that debt without a government far more extensive than a libertarian would countenance.<br /><br />So democracy remains the best solution we have to the moral problem of government. That’s how our religious movement has wound up committed to an institutional structure that we know has flaws. <br /><br />Through our other principles, we’re also committed to the value of each person, to justice, equity, and compassion, and to truth. So we don’t get to deny democracy’s flaws, or to paper over the bad things that get done in the People’s name. When Japanese-Americans are sent to detention camps, or Jim Crow laws force Black children into inferior schools, we don’t get to ignore those injustices. We don’t get to say “All the boxes of democratic process were checked, so too bad for you.”<br /> <br />When confronted with all the ways that democracy can lead to immoral government, our response shouldn’t be “That can’t happen” or “Too bad if it does”, but “Let’s see that it doesn’t.”<br /><br />In other words — and I consider this the single biggest thing I want you to remember from this talk — our devotion to democracy commits us to a program far beyond elections and voting. Understanding the ways democracy can fail, we need to do everything we canto make sure that it does not fail.<br /><br />Some safeguards are already built into the Constitution. Democracy can fail through the tyranny of the majority, when 51% of the people feel empowered to treat the other 49% however they like. The Founders anticipated that problem, so the Constitution limits the powers of government, and the Bill of Rights, at least on paper, protects the smallest minority of all, the individual. <br /><br />Democracy also fails when the majority is thwarted, when people are prevented from voting or made to jump through unnecessary hoops. Or when their votes are gerrymandered into districts that produce predictable outcomes. Or when places like the District of Columbia or Puerto Rico are denied representation because their voters are the wrong color or speak the wrong language.<br /> <br />Those are not just political issues, they are moral issues.<br /><br />Democracy fails when large numbers of people feel that they have no stake in the system and no chance to better their lot in life. So let’s see that everyone gets a stake and a chance. <br /><br />Democracy fails if the People are ignorant, the problem Francis Parkman pointed to. So let’s see that they aren’t. That’s how our commitment to democracy turns into a commitment to education. <br /><br />And not just any kind of education. Imagine you lived in a monarchy, and someone had entrusted you with the education of the future king. Would you be content to fill his head with facts, so that he could pass a multiple-choice test? Or would you teach the future sovereign to think clearly, to understand what a fact is and what it really means to know something? To tell the difference between truths supported by evidence and shapes that someone points to in the clouds? Of course you would. And if the People are to be sovereign, then that’s the kind of education we should want for everyone. All of us.<br /><br />Democracy fails when the People lose faith that their hopes and fears matter or that anything can be done to address them. We can see that now in our young people, who regularly see students just like themselves gunned down in school hallways and are told that nothing can be done. Or when they foresee the potentially devastating effect climate change will have on their future and are told that it’s not a priority.<br /><br />So we must not be afraid to envision bold projects and we also must not be too proud to accept achievable compromises rather than do nothing. We need to take the steps we can while never losing sight of where we need to go.<br /><br />Democracy fails when the People become cynical, when they see corruption in high places and think, “That’s just how things are. If we elected someone else it would be no different.” That’s what Lincoln Steffens was pointing to in The Shame of the Cities. Officials were corrupt because their voters aimed no higher, and thought the best they could hope for was to get a share of the spoils. <br /><br />We see that today, when evidence of crimes is presented in prime time, but many voters shrug, because they have convinced themselves that the other side commits crimes too. So we must always aim high, refuse to spread accusations we know are false, and never be content to wink at wrong-doing because our side benefits. Whether or not our opponents trust us, we should be trustworthy. <br /><br />And yes, I recognize the temptation to do unto others what we feel has been done to us. But we also need to appreciate that democracy is not a zero-sum game. Every time moral standards slip, the cynics are proven right, and democracy itself suffers.<br /><br />Finally, and most difficult of all in today’s environment: Democracy fails when the people divide into tribes, when what matters is not “What is true?” or “Who has the best plan?” or “What is our best path forward together?”, but “What side are they on?” Are they white or black? Christian or Jew? Republican or Democrat? Do they wear their heels high or low? Break their eggs from the big or small end?<br /><br />I don’t mean to trivialize the differences between our political parties, which are real and important. I voted before I left Massachusetts, and all for one party. But it’s also important that our parties not become like the parties of Lilliput, who “will neither eat, nor drink, nor talk with each other”. <br /><br />That doesn’t mean we have to compromise on what is true or false, right or wrong. It doesn’t mean saying “Maybe you’re right” when we don’t believe it, or ignoring crimes in high places simply to avoid riling the other side. But it does mean that we need to remember our Universalism, and refuse to write people off simply because they don’t see what we see. We need to hold onto our faith that no one is beyond redemption and that — no matter how stubborn they are or how many times they have been hoodwinked — no one is completely incapable of seeing Truth. <br /><br />Leaders may act in bad faith, but many follow them in good faith, believing what they have been told. The solutions they ask for may be wrong, but the problems they see in their lives may still be real, and deserve our compassion. <br /><br />I know how hard it can be to look past the name-calling, trolling, and bullying to try to understand the genuine disappointments and hurts fueling that behavior. I’m not always up to that task myself. We all have our limits and must protect ourselves from abuse. But when we close off those connections and harden our boundaries, democracy suffers. <br /><br />In ten days, we’re going to have an election. It is an important election, and (as much as anyone) I hope that my side wins. But I also hope that we never lose sight of the longer view: that for democracy to succeed, ultimately the People must win. <br /><br />All of us.<br /><br /><b>Closing words</b><br />“The greatest way to defend democracy is to make it work.” — Tommy Douglas</p>Doug Muderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04666144843949850394noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13399254.post-66277621970494860152022-04-24T18:12:00.002-04:002022-06-10T07:32:40.174-04:00Where Christianity Went Wrong<p style="text-align: center;"> <i>presented at the Unitarian Church of Quincy, Illinois<br />April 24, 2022</i></p><div style="text-align: left;"> <i>Listen to the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMMwSMy8ogs">audio</a>.</i><br /></div><h3 style="text-align: left;">Opening words: Eugene Debs</h3><p style="text-align: left;">Every robber or oppressor in history has wrapped himself in a cloak of patriotism or religion, or both.<br /></p><h3 style="text-align: left;">Wisdom story</h3><p style="text-align: left;">This is a story Jesus told, modernized a little.<br /><br />A king called some of his subjects to a meeting, and as they came in, the King’s people carefully directed some to one side of the room and some to the other. Then the King turned to the group on his right and said: “I wanted to bring you here to reward you for all the good things you’ve done for me.”<br /><br />Now, these were ordinary people who seldom had interactions with the King, so one of them said, “Your majesty, it’s wonderful that you’re pleased with us, but what have we done for you?”<br /><br />And the King said. “Many things. When I had no friends, you sat with me. When I had nothing, you shared with me. When I was being lied about and no one else would defend me, you did. And when bullies had made me afraid, you walked home with me.”<br /><br />Of course no one interrupted the King while he was saying this. But all the while they were trading looks with each other that said: “Do you know what he’s talking about? I don’t know what he’s talking about.” <br /><br />So one of them spoke up and said, “Your majesty, when were you ever friendless or poor or undefended or afraid, that we could have done these things for you?”<br /><br />And the King answered: “Many people in this land are friendless or poor or undefended or afraid. Some of them are so beaten down that they may never be in a position to return the favors you do them. But they are my people, and when you are kind to them, I take it personally, as if you had been kind to me. So when you go through that door, my assistants will reward you in the ways that you deserve.”<br /><br />While this was happening, the people on the other side of the room were looking at each and whispering, “The King’s in a good mood. This is great.”<br /><br />But then the King turned to them with an angry expression, and he said, “I brought you here today to call you to account for the ways that you have mistreated me.”<br /><br />One man was so surprised that he couldn’t restrain himself. So he said. “Your majesty, you’ve got me all wrong. I don’t know about the rest of these people, but I’ve never mistreated you. I’ve got an ‘I Heart the King’ bumpersticker on my truck. When people complain, I tell them that if they don’t appreciate living in the greatest kingdom in the world, they should move somewhere else. Nobody is as good a king’s man as me.”<br /><br />But the King said, “When I had no friends, you treated me like I was invisible. When I had nothing, you made fun of me. When people spread lies about me, you retweeted them. And when bullies made me afraid, you egged them on.”<br /><br />And the man said, “But you’re the King. You were never friendless or poor. You were never bullied or lacked for defenders. How could I possibly have done those things to you?”<br /><br />And the King said, “Even the lowliest people in the kingdom are still my brothers and sisters. When you mistreat them, I take it personally, as if you had mistreated me. So when you go through that other door, my assistants will call you to account for what you have done.”<br /><br /> </p><p style="text-align: left;">Like most of Jesus’ stories people interpret this one in different ways. Some think the King is Jesus himself, and that when he comes back to Earth he will be King of the World and deal out justice in exactly that way. <br /><br />Others think the story is about the afterlife. The King is God, and the two doors are Heaven and Hell. <br /><br />I also think the King represents God, but I give it a different spin. I think the story is telling us that even the people you least expect have a piece of God inside them. It may be easy to recognize God the King. But I think the story also wants us to recognize God the Immigrant, God the Invalid, and God the Beggar. <br /><br />If we could do that, and if we could treat everyone accordingly, with respect and consideration, then maybe we wouldn’t have to wait for the end of the world or for the afterlife to experience the Kingdom of God. We could live in the Kingdom of God right here, right now.<br /></p><h3 style="text-align: left;">Reading from “If God is Love, don’t be a Jerk” by John Pavlovitz</h3><p style="text-align: left;">If you want a good laugh, google the phrase, “You had one job.” The results are a hilariously tragic parade of seemingly impossible fails, unfathomably poor planning, and facepalm-inducing human error: a piece of melted cheese on top of a fast-food burger bun, the word “STOP” misspelled on a street crossing, a “Keep to the Right” sign with its arrow facing left, a toilet lid inexplicably installed below the seat itself. …<br /><br />As a long-time Christian by aspiration (if not always in practice), I often envision an exasperated Jesus coming back, and the first words out of this mouth to his followers as his feet hit the pavement being “You had one job: Love. So, what happened?”<br /></p><h3 style="text-align: left;">Sermon</h3><p style="text-align: left;">If you devote much of your time to trying to make the world a better place, you’ve probably noticed a paradox. On the one hand, some of your most dedicated co-workers are probably Christians. You may not have realized it right away, because they’re not the kind of Christians who say “Praise the Lord” whenever something good happens. Rather than ask you if you’re saved or try to lead the group in prayer, they just show up and share the work: ladle the soup, stuff the envelopes, hammer the nails, make the phone calls. <br /><br />Only after you spend some down time talking do you start to understand what motivates them: They think some guy named Jesus had some pretty good ideas about healing the sick, feeding the hungry, and welcoming the stranger.<br /><br />But at the same time, if you pay attention to the news, it’s hard to escape the idea that Christianity is your enemy. If someone is loudly and obnoxiously working to make the world harsher, crueler, and less forgiving, chances are they’re waving the cross. There’s nothing subtle about it. All their rhetoric is about what God wants, what God hates, and the “Christian values” that the law should impose on Christians and non-Christians alike.<br /><br />And strangest of all, those “Christian values” seldom have anything to do with healing the sick, feeding the hungry, or welcoming the stranger. The name of Jesus shows up in every paragraph of their rhetoric; his teachings, not so much.<br /><br />Now, this talk derives from a <a href="https://weeklysift.com/2022/03/14/how-did-christianity-become-so-toxic/" target="_blank">blog post</a> I wrote a month or so ago, which goes into a lot of detail about the contrast between the Sermon on the Mount and the issues currently being pushed by the Religious Right. But I think most of you already see that. So I’ll just sum that part up by pointing back to the wisdom story: The King in that story wasn’t interested in people’s sexual activities, or which bathroom they used. He judged people according to who they helped, and especially, how they treated people who had nothing to offer in return.<br /><br />So how did “Christian values” become a code phrase for being anti-gay, anti-trans, anti-immigrant, anti-public-health, and refusing to fix (or even talk about) the continuing racism in America? How did the teachings of a man who owned nothing, and who often told people to give their possessions away, turn into a “prosperity gospel”, where God is expected to make his followers rich? How did Christian churches become hotbeds of the most malicious and baseless conspiracy theories? How did those churches become the political base for one of the least Christlike leaders this country has ever had?<br /><br />Now, those are great rhetorical questions. They stir the blood and make us feel righteous just by contrast. But this morning I’m going to try to answer them. How did this happen? What is it about Christian theology, Christian habits of thought, and how Christian history has played out, that has made that faith vulnerable to such a complete reversal?<br /><br />I’m going to identify seven specific points of vulnerability. But before I do that, I want to give one example that can serve as a paradigm for everything that goes wrong. The Gospel of John quotes Jesus making a very enigmatic statement: “The Father and I are one.” He doesn’t elaborate, so it’s hard to be sure what he meant. <br /><br />But theologians hate to say “I don’t know.” So that one line has led to centuries and centuries of theorizing about the nature of the Trinity. At times the arguments over those theories have been so bitter that they caused violence. For example, Unitarianism’s most famous martyr, Michael Servetus, was burned at the stake in 1553 for having written a book called “On the Errors of the Trinity”. In short, people got so lost in the mystery of that one line, that they completely lost sight of loving their neighbors. <br /><br />More generally, Jesus did not leave us tomes of philosophy or political theory or sociology. He never laid out a worldview or a theology. Instead, he told stories. The imagery in those stories looks like it was designed to upend the way his disciples were thinking. But he never told them step-by-step how they <i>should</i> think.<br /><br />Mustard, for example, was the scourge of Mediterranean gardeners, because once mustard got into your garden you never got rid of it. But in one of Jesus’ stories, the Kingdom of God is a mustard seed, a weed in other words. In another story, an employer paid everyone the same, no matter how many hours they worked. A priest and a Levite could be bad neighbors compared to some nameless Samaritan. It was all pretty confusing.<br /><br />And Jesus hinted that he didn’t expect people to understand right away. The Kingdom of God, he said, is like yeast; it works on you invisibly. His images and stories are supposed to sit in the back of your mind and ferment, not proceed logically from principles to conclusions.<br /><br />And while that is a fine one-on-one spiritual teaching technique, it leaves an opening for people who do lay out systematic theologies and worldviews, and do tell people what to think. Over the centuries that opening has been exploited. A conservative worldview has built up around Jesus’ teachings and has almost completely sealed them off.<br /><br />“The Father and I are one” started out as a mystery to meditate on. But eventually it led to a dogma that people killed for.<br /><br />So here are my seven weaknesses of conservative Christian theology and practice that have left Christianity vulnerable to the corruption we see today.<br /><br /><b>The first weakness is the Devil.</b> The Devil may seem Biblical, but he really isn’t. The Bible tells us about the serpent in the Garden, the adversary of Job, the rebel angel, the tempter of Jesus, the chief of the demons Jesus casts out, and the antiChrist of Revelation. But it calls them by different names. Much later, theologians following the dualistic example of the Zoroastrians, unified those diverse characters into one single Prince of Darkness, a being powerful enough to compete with God.<br /><br />In the current era, that construction has an unfortunate side effect: It makes just about any conspiracy theory plausible. Reasonable people assess a conspiracy theory by asking a series of questions: How many conspirators does the theory require? What motivates them? How did they come together? What keeps them cooperating rather than ratting each other out?<br /><br />Those questions sink most conspiracy theories. But not if you believe in the Devil. The Devil doesn’t need any ordinary motive; he conspires just for the evilness of it. And the Devil has minions whom he has beguiled into fervent loyalty. They also do evil for its own sake.<br /></p><p style="text-align: left;">Once you’ve imagined a cast of characters like that, motivated by nothing more than the desire to do evil, there is no conspiracy theory that you can’t make work. And since a well-selected conspiracy theory can explain or explain away just about anything, you’ve given yourself license to believe whatever you want.<br /><br /><b>The second weakness is Hell.</b> Universalism envisions a unitary afterlife: We’re all going to Heaven. Various Eastern religions picture a unique afterlife for each being: You might reincarnate as anything from an insect to a god.<br /><br />But the dualistic afterlife of Heaven and Hell is much more problematic than either of those alternatives for two main reasons: First, it encourages us-and-them thinking, Humanity isn’t all in the same boat. We’re in two boats one headed for Heaven and the other for Hell. </p><p style="text-align: left;">And second, Hell makes punishment an end in itself. In the usual vision of Hell, the suffering of the damned serves no reforming purpose. Damnation is eternal, so no matter what you may learn, or how you might change, you’re never getting out. It’s punishment for punishment’s sake. <br /><br />No wonder, then, that conservative Christians offer the same solution for every social problem: Identify the bad people and punish them, preferably with extreme harshness.<br /><br /><b>The third weakness is the End Times.</b> Polls have shown that 3/4ths of Evangelicals believe we’re living in the End Times, the period just before Jesus’ second coming at the end of the world.<br /><br />Sometimes I wish the Romans had invented polling, because I suspect that if we had the data, it would show that some very large percentage of Christians have always believed they were living in the End Times. Two millennia ago, the Book of Revelation ended by quoting Jesus saying “Yes, I am coming soon.”<br /><br />At its root, believing that we live in the End Times is a way of puffing ourselves up, of making our era seem uniquely important. Great stories are written about the days when the prophecies are finally fulfilled. Nobody wants to believe that they belong to one of those hundreds and hundreds of forgotten generations that pass between the prophecy and its fulfillment.<br /><br />The big downside of belief in the End Times is that it justifies suspending normal reasoning processes. And this again feeds conspiracy theories. Most of us discount interpretations of events that depend on wild coincidences. But End Times believers approach the news the way the rest of us approach the final chapters of a novel. <i>They expect diverse plot threads to start coming together.</i> Wild coincidences are almost required.<br /><br />What’s more, as the final battle of Good versus Evil approaches, the two sides should become easier to identify. So of course there’s an international conspiracy of blood-drinking pedophiles. How could there not be?<br /><br /><b>The fourth weakness is individual judgment.</b> Supposedly, on Judgment Day, each of us will each stand alone, to meet our up or down fate according to our individual actions and beliefs. These individual rewards and punishments are supposed to right the scales of justice, once and for all. <br /><br />It’s a short leap from that vision to the belief that evil is fundamentally individual. So an idea like systemic racism, or any kind of systemic injustice, has no place to take root. For believers in individual judgment, any discussion of injustice is always going to raise the question: Who is the bad person in this situation, and how should they be punished?<br /><br />That’s why it’s almost impossible to have a reasonable discussion of racial justice or gender justice or oligarchy. Because the only thing Evangelicals will hear is that you want to punish White people or men or the rich. Similarly, discussions of the social roots of crime go astray, because all they hear is that you want rapists and murderers to escape punishment.<br /><br /><b>The fifth weakness is tradition.</b> This one is not unique to Christianity. All over the world, traditional religion is more about tradition than about religion. Over time, the local religion (whatever it is) gets coopted to defend the privileges of the powerful, and to justify the local customs (whatever they are): We do what we do because God wants us to, and the people on top are there because God favors them. The old time religion inevitably becomes the religion that fights change.<br /><br />In American history, slave owners quoted the Bible to protect their right to own other humans. Men used it to keep women in their traditional places. The lower-court judge who upheld Virginia’s law against interracial marriage wrote that the Lord God created the races and intended them to stay separate. <br /><br />Today, people say “Christian values” when they really mean “traditional values”. White supremacy, male privilege, persecuting gays, insisting on binary gender roles — those are very traditional in America. But they’re not Christian, at least not if Christianity is defined by the teachings of Jesus.<br /><br /><b>The sixth weakness is autocracy.</b> Jesus never wrote down his political theory, and we’re still arguing over what he meant by “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s.” But Christianity is full of royal imagery. God is King of the Universe, and when Jesus returns he will be King of the World. Jesus’ disciples imagined that he would restore the Kingdom of David, and they argued about who would get the top jobs.<br /><br />Democracy and human rights are not part of that vision. They are human institutions that will be swept away in the next world. So why not sweep them away sooner? God knows better than any human being, so why shouldn’t we all be ruled by men who know what God wants?<br /><br /><b>The seventh weakness is denial.</b> Christianity and science had been skirmishing for centuries. But by the beginning of the 20th century, many Christians thought the situation was dire. Geology had discovered that the world was far older than Genesis implied, and evolution directly contradicted the Genesis account of God shaping Adam from dust. <br /><br />It was time to draw a line in the sand, and that line was fundamentalism: The Bible was literally true in every detail, and any evidence otherwise had to dismissed somehow.<br /><br />But there’s a problem with that strategy: Genesis really is wrong, and the more you study the scientific evidence, the more obvious it becomes. There’s no way to defend Genesis as a literal account of scientific facts while maintaining your intellectual integrity. <br /><br />So fundamentalism jettisoned its integrity. I saw this first-hand growing up at St. James and for years afterwards. I’m still seeing it today. The most absurd pseudo-scientific arguments have been written into pamphlets and textbooks, and if they come to the “right” conclusion — that Genesis is true — fundamentalists are supposed to believe them.<br /><br />When people compromise their integrity, they rarely think they’re setting a precedent, but they usually are. Here, the precedent was that Christians could support each other in believing something blatantly false if they wanted to believe it badly enough. It’s OK to twist facts and logic any way you need to in order to reach the desired result.<br /><br />Now, I want to point out that this kind of denial is different from having faith in events that don’t fit inside a scientific model, like Jesus walking on water. The problem here isn’t that fundamentalists believe in something that science can’t explain. It’s that science actually explains the situation quite well, but fundamentalists don’t want to believe it. <br /><br />Once you make that OK, you’ve built a hole into your reasoning processes. And it’s naive to think that you’re going to control what passes through it. <br /><br />A hundred years later, we can see the results. Intellectual and political hucksters and flim-flam artists of all sorts have taken advantage of fundamentalists, often in ways that have little to do with the Jesus or the Bible. Fundamentalist churches have become centers of climate-change denial and Covid denial, as well as hotbeds of Q-anon conspiracy thinking.<br /><br />Right here in Quincy, over on Broadway, a billboard says that a fetus has a heartbeat at 18 days. <a href="https://drjengunter.com/2016/12/11/dear-press-stop-calling-them-heartbeat-bills-and-call-them-fetal-pole-cardiac-activity-bills/" target="_blank">No it doesn’t</a>, and it’s not at all Christian to lie like that.<br /> <br />Rose-colored views of American history — where the Founders are latter-day prophets, slavery wasn’t really so bad, and the Native American genocide shouldn’t be examined too closely — have become articles of faith among White Evangelicals. None of it stands up to scrutiny, but they want to believe it, so they do.<br /><br />The <a href="http://freeandresponsible.blogspot.com/2022/01/renewing-my-unitarian-universalism.html" target="_blank">last time I spoke to this group</a>, I told you that Unitarians are precisely the people who can’t believe whatever they want. This is what I meant. Like all humans, we are tempted by motivated reasoning and fooled by confirmation bias. But we don’t get to deny science and logic outright, and we don’t get to patch the holes in our beliefs by making up conspiracy theories.<br /><br />When you hear a list of vulnerabilities like the one I just gave, you might wonder why we’re talking about Christianity at all. What good can come from it? Maybe we should just write the whole religion off, and close our minds whenever someone mentions Jesus or the Bible. <br /><br />But then I come back to the kinds of Christians I mentioned at the beginning, the ones who find in Christianity the motivation to keep doing the work, like Jimmy Carter still pounding nails for Habitat well into his 90s.<br /><br />I’m not entirely sure how that motivation works, but I suspect it has little to do with Heaven and Hell, or the end of the world, or tradition, or the idea that Genesis teaches good science. <br /><br />When I try to find something motivating or inspiring in the faith I was raised in, I keep coming back to that enigmatic phrase: the kingdom of God.<br /><br />I don’t think all the odd things Jesus said about the kingdom of God explain anything, but they are evocative, at least to me. What they evoke is not hope for some future theocracy, or for a better life after death, but for a different kind of common sense here and now.<br /><br />The metaphor I use is the sound barrier. Air flows differently on the other side of the sound barrier. There’s nothing magical about it, it’s just that the air-flow equations have a second solution, one we hadn’t known about before. <br /><br />Maybe common sense also has a second solution, one that doesn’t revolve around scarcity, anxiety, and conflict. Maybe it could be common sense to treat each other with respect and kindness, to offer help freely, and to trust that help will be there when we need it. Maybe that second realm of common sense exists wherever two or more people decide to deal with each other according to its odd logic. Maybe that realm could become much, much larger.<br /><br />And that possibility, I find, really is like yeast. If you let it sit in the back of your mind, who knows what might rise? <br /></p><p> </p>Doug Muderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04666144843949850394noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13399254.post-91619474163363898002022-01-25T19:37:00.007-05:002022-01-27T13:12:24.180-05:00Renewing My Unitarian Universalism<p style="text-align: center;"> <i>presented in a Zoom session of the Unitarian Church of Quincy, Illinois<br />January 23, 2022</i><br /></p><h3 style="text-align: left;">First Reading<br /></h3><p><u>In his 1915 novel <i>Of Human Bondage</i>, William Somerset Maugham wrote:</u> </p><p>A Unitarian very earnestly disbelieves in almost everything that anybody else believes. And he has a very lively sustaining faith in he doesn’t quite know what.<br /></p><h3 style="text-align: left;">Second Reading<br /></h3><p><u>In 2012, April Fools Day fell on a Sunday. So Rev. Erika Hewitt preached a <a href="https://www.uusm.org/the-jokes-on-uus" target="_blank">sermon on UU jokes</a>. She started out by telling a few:</u><br /><br />Each religion has its own Holy Book: Judaism has the Torah, Islam has the Koran, Christianity has the Bible, and Unitarian Universalism has Roberts' Rules of Order.<br /><br /><u>But eventually she raises the same issue Maugham had poked at almost a century before:<br /></u><br />Our tolerance – or penchant – for ambiguous theology intersects with what I believe is the most egregious UU stereotype: that we are a faith with no core religious message. <br /><br />When it comes to defining who we are as an Association and what we believe as individuals, our answers rarely satisfy.<br /></p><p style="text-align: center;">Question: What happens when you cross a UU with a Jehovah's Witness?<br />Answer: They knock on your door, but they have no idea why!</p><p>We’re even mocked on “The Simpsons.” On one episode, the Simpson family attends a church ice cream social, where Lisa is impressed by the choice of ice cream available. “Wow,” she raves, “look at all these flavors! Blessed Virgin Berry, Command-Mint, Bible Gum....”<br /> <br />“Or,” Reverend Lovejoy says, “if you prefer, we also have Unitarian ice cream.” He hands Lisa an empty bowl. “There’s nothing here,” says Lisa. “Exactly,” says Lovejoy.<br /><br /><u>But by the end of her sermon, Hewitt isn’t laughing any more:</u><br /><br />There comes a point, for me, at which jokes like these cease to be funny by virtue of their volume and ubiquity — and the truth that they hold. Isn’t it so, after all, that we continue to define ourselves by who we aren’t rather than who we are? Isn’t it true we’re rendered tongue-tied when friends or co-workers ask us, “What do UU’s believe?” … <br /><br />I don’t want our distinguished liberal religious movement to be portrayed as an empty bowl. … I don’t want to belong to a faith where you can believe anything you want, and change your mind anytime you need to. Our beliefs will change throughout our lives; we’re never “done” learning. But religious faith is not disposable. I don’t want to be laughed at; I want to co-create a faith that garners respect.<br /></p><h3 style="text-align: left;">Third Reading</h3><p><u>One sign of old age is when you start using your own writings as readings. It’s an admission that your past has become so distant that your own memory of it should no longer be trusted. If you wrote something down at the time, that’s probably more accurate.<br /><br />This reading is taken from a column I wrote for UU World called “<a href="https://www.uuworld.org/articles/my-mothers-funeral" target="_blank">At My Mother’s Funeral</a>”. My mother died in 2011. The funeral was at Hansen-Spear, and I came back to Quincy for it. Mom had chosen all the elements of the service herself, so it reflected her Christian belief that death is just the beginning of eternal life in Heaven. I had trouble relating to that. <br /><br />Here’s what I wrote afterwards:</u><br /><br />Whether anyone else in the room was harboring secret doubts or not, I felt alone in facing the possibility that death is final, that I will never see my mother again, that our interrupted conversations will never be finished, and that all the things we didn’t understand about each other will never be understood.<br /><br />Somewhere in the middle of those reflections, I almost laughed at myself: “Wait a minute,” I thought. “I’m the Unitarian Universalist in the room. I’m supposed to be the one who can believe whatever he wants!”<br /><br />Over the years I’ve probably heard a dozen UU ministers’ explanations of why the old saw “Unitarian Universalists can believe whatever they want” isn’t quite right. But until that moment at Mom’s funeral, I had never grasped how exactly backwards it is. Unitarian Universalists are precisely the people who <i>can’t </i>believe whatever they want. <br /><br />The image of Mom in heaven — young and vibrant again, seeing everything, hearing everything, skipping gaily about on two perfect legs — how could anyone not want to believe that?<br /><br />The vision of heaven itself — a perfect place where all loved ones will reunite, and all pains and doubts and disagreements will be revealed as the illusions they always were: I don’t want to reject it, I just can’t sustain it. Like a multistory house of cards, it always collapses before I can get it finished. …<br /><br />The old religious authorities taught … [that] people needed someone or something to keep their beliefs in line. Otherwise they’d believe all kinds of frivolous, self-serving, and wish-fulfilling things. <br /><br />But is frivolity, self-service, and wish fulfillment what Unitarian Universalism is about? Is that what I was doing at the funeral?<br /><br />No, quite the opposite. Today’s Unitarian Universalists continue to be free of external discipline, but the point is to be self-disciplined, not un-disciplined. We’re the people who take responsibility for disciplining our own beliefs.<br /><br />Like any other responsibility, religious responsibility is a two-edged sword. On the one hand, my beliefs feel more straightforward and authentic because I haven’t twisted them to fit some external authority’s template. But on the other, I am cut off from the comforts of frivolous, self-serving, and wish-fulfilling beliefs, because no one can authorize them for me.<br /></p><h3 style="text-align: left;">Sermon</h3><p><b>Coming of Age. </b>Every year, if we have enough interested kids of the right ages, my church (First Parish in Bedford, Massachusetts), offers a "Coming of Age" class. Starting in September, our teens explore what it means to be a Unitarian Universalist. They learn UU history, do service projects, hear what famous UUs have said about the big questions, and interview members of the congregation. And then in May, the program culminates in a service that turns the traditional Protestant confirmation ritual upside-down. <br /><br />When I was confirmed at St. James in 1970, my classmates and I had to demonstrate that we understood the teachings of the Lutheran church, and in the spring we solemnly affirmed to the whole congregation that we agreed with them.<br /><br />A UU coming-of-age service, by contrast, focuses on the young people’s beliefs, not the congregation’s. One by one, they stand in the pulpit and present a personal credo. In other words, they preach to us about their deepest convictions. <br /><br />It’s always an engaging service, largely because there’s no predicting what you’ll hear. One of the teens might believe in reincarnation, another is inspired by Zen, and a third is a hard-core rationalist. Some are optimists and others pessimists. Some think the purpose of life is to pursue happiness, while others focus on serving others. Some want to create beauty; others want to acquire knowledge and solve problems.<br /><br />My Lutheran confirmation was about pledging to remain steadfast in the common faith, a promise that I was unable to keep. If anyone had realized at the time how much my beliefs would change in the next few years, and keep changing for decades after, I imagine that thought would have depressed them. It would have undermined the meaning of the whole ritual.<br /><br />But the adults who attend our UU coming-of-age service look back on our own religious journeys, and anticipate that the beliefs we’re hearing will change. Ten years down the road, the young man who tells us about reincarnation may not remember why he said that. The young woman who intends to center her life on pursuing happiness may someday come to a place where happiness seems impossible. She may need to find inside herself a grit and determination that has little to do with happiness, but that will see her through to a time when happiness once again becomes a viable goal. <br /><br />But anticipating those changes doesn’t make the service any less moving or inspiring, because we understand the commitment that the young people are really making. They aren’t pledging to believe these things for the rest of their lives, a promise they would almost certainly break. Rather, they’re committing to take responsibility for their beliefs. <br /><br />Alone up there in the pulpit, they can’t hide behind their parents or the church or a creed or a holy book or even God. They are announcing: “At this moment, this is how I choose to approach my life. And if those choices have consequences, they’re on me.” </p><p>It’s a brave thing to do.<br /><br />Watching young people construct their own version of Unitarian Universalism always makes me want to reconstruct mine. And that’s what I want to talk about today: How my own beliefs have had to change, not just until I became a UU, but since I became a UU.<br /><br /><b>Freedom and responsibility. </b>Probably the most significant thing I’ve had to reevaluate about my faith is the centrality of freedom. Our Fourth Principle affirms “a free and responsible search for truth and meaning”. But when I was becoming a UU in the 1980s, freedom got way more emphasis than responsibility. The most important feature of UUism then wasn’t a presence, it was an absence: No one would tell you what you had to think. (That’s why we might have appeared from the outside to have a lively, sustaining faith in we know not what.)<br /><br />That emphasis made sense for the kind of world I grew up in, where my family, my church, the teachers at St. James school, and American culture itself were all trying to imprint Christianity on me. To me, the outside world seemed like a unified oppressive force trying to squelch my capacity for independent thought. <br /><br />Saying “no” to that, saying “I am going to live by the faith I actually have, rather than the faith everyone tells me I ought to have” was a revolutionary act. And I saw that revolution as a precondition for everything else. Until I had staked out and defended my spiritual and intellectual independence, it didn’t even matter what I believed in my heart of hearts. Because if I’m going to spend my life reciting the Apostles Creed, and pretending to believe it, who even cares what I really think?<br /><br />But the kids in our coming of age classes don’t live in that world. And while some young people do still grow up in oppressive religious environments, that’s no longer the general experience of American society. <br /><br />Yes, conservative Christians still aspire to dominance, and try to make laws that impose their faith on the rest of us. But that effort gets increasingly desperate every year. They need the power of government now, and especially the power of unelected judges, because they lost the battle for the larger culture long ago. <br /><br />For most young Americans today, and particularly for those who have grown up UU, the outside world does not feel like a monolithic force trying to control their minds. It’s more like a desert or even a vacuum. The threat outside the walls of the church is not that some Eye of Sauron will dominate them, it’s that they will wander out there and get lost in the trackless waste where nothing is true and nothing is known and nothing is more important than anything else. When you find yourself in a trackless waste, no one needs to remind you that you are free to go any direction you want. What needs to be affirmed is that there are places worth going, and some hope of getting there. <br /><br />In the current environment, it can actually be dangerous to tell people that they can believe whatever they want, because look around — lots of people are doing precisely that, to an extent that the UUs of the 1980s never imagined. <br /><br />Do you want to believe that your candidate won the election when every method of counting the votes says that he lost? Go for it. Do you want to believe that Covid is a global conspiracy? Why not? Do you want to believe that your political opponents are blood-drinking, child-abusing Satanists? Or reptilian aliens? It’s up to you. There are no facts, just “I want to believe this and you want to believe that.”<br /><br />That kind of freedom isn’t what Unitarian Universalism is about, or has ever been about. When our kids consider what they mean by the word “God”, and discuss whether such a God exists, they’re doing something very different from the QAnon folks who assure each other that JFK Jr. is going to return from his apparent death and lead them in a bloody counter-revolution. <br /><br />The difference is in the responsible part of our free and responsible search. Our beliefs aren’t just for our own entertainment. If we hold our beliefs responsibly, they change how we live. And if we live actively, the effects of those beliefs go out into the world, benefiting some people and perhaps harming others. And we’re responsible for those benefits and harms. It’s on us. <br /><br /><b>Wanting to believe. </b>Think about climate change. Do I <i>want</i> to believe that the planet is getting warmer, and that rising temperatures will have devastating effects unless we all make serious changes? Of course not. If I could snap my fingers and make that not be true, I would. You all would. <br /><br />Am I <i>free</i> to deny global warming? I suppose so. If I say it’s all a hoax, and start living as if burning fossil fuels isn’t a problem, nobody’s going to punish me. But I’m not just free, I’m responsible. Living that way has consequences, and I have to take those consequences seriously.<br /><br />Or think about privilege. I benefit from a long list of privileges. I’m White, male, heterosexual, cisgender, native born, neurotypical, English speaking, and professional class. I’m not just educated, I got my education at a time when it was cheaper, so I didn’t have to pile up student debt. <br /><br />Do I want to acknowledge all those unearned advantages? Not at all. I want to say that everything I have comes entirely from my own talent and hard work. And I’m free to say that. But to the extent that I promote the myth that the world is already just, the continuing injustice becomes my responsibility.<br /><br />In a world dominated by oppressive belief systems, the most important thing about Unitarian Universalism is the freedom it offers to develop your own conscience and pursue your own goals. But in American society as I see it today, the most important thing to emphasize is the responsibility of our search.<br /><br />By contrast, much of what passes for religion in America today enables irresponsibility. Too many churches are like money-laundering banks. They shield their members from the ugly consequences of self-serving beliefs. <br /><br />Imagine, for example, that I am a young man looking for a wife. If I tell the women I meet that I intend to dominate, and that after we are married, I will decide what she can and can’t do with her life, I sound like a jerk. <br /><br />But suppose I say instead that my church believes in the traditional family. God has a plan for us all, and that plan has separate lanes for men and women. The content and consequence of those beliefs are exactly the same, but my responsibility for them vanishes. Now I’m not a jerk, I’m a man of faith. And if being dominated doesn’t make you happy, don’t blame me, blame God. <br /><br />Or suppose that I want to persecute gays and lesbians, or maintain White supremacy. I don’t have to account for damage those ideas do. I can find a church that holds those beliefs for me, one that emphasizes the parts of the Bible I like, and interprets them in ways that please me. And suddenly I am no longer hateful, I’m just devout. I make the choices, but God bears the responsibility. <br /><br />Unitarian Universalism doesn’t provide that service. It won’t launder the dirty consequences of your ideas and leave you spotless. If your beliefs cause harm in the world, that’s on you. It’s not the church or some prophet or priest. It’s not a creed or a holy book, and it’s certainly not God. It’s you. This is a faith for people who take responsibility.<br /><br /><b>On the elevator. </b>One of the exercises we always have the coming-of-age students do is to write an elevator speech. The idea is that you’re on an elevator when someone asks you what your religion is all about. What can you manage to say about UUism before the doors open and you go your separate ways?<br /><br />UUs are particularly bad at this exercise, because we always want to include a few more caveats and nuances. In all the times I’ve been involved with coming of age, I’ve never come up with an elevator speech I liked.<br /><br />Until now. Here it is: </p><p style="text-align: center;"><i>Unitarian Universalists take responsibility for disciplining our own beliefs so that they are factual, reasonable, just, and kind. We will not stop learning, growing, and changing until we become the people the world needs. </i><br /></p><p><b>Credo. </b>Having come this far, I might as well close by completing the coming-of-age exercises and presenting my credo. So far I’ve mainly talked about <i>how</i> UUs believe, and haven’t said much about the content of my personal beliefs. <br /><br />So here it goes: This what I believe.<br /><br />I believe that the Universe is far bigger and more intricate than human minds can grasp, and that we deal with that deficiency by telling stories. But the Universe is not a story, so we will never get it completely right. Nonetheless, I constantly try to improve my stories by testing them against observable facts, and changing them when they conflict.<br /><br />I judge right and wrong by human standards. Things are good or bad according to how they affect people and other conscious beings, and not because some book or institution says so. <br /><br />I give precedence to the things I know, rather than the things I merely imagine. So while I sometimes have intuitions about higher intelligences or what might happen after death, I hold those beliefs so lightly that they have little effect on my actions. <br /><br />I believe meaning is something that stories have, and so I look for a meaningful life by striving to tell a meaningful life story. A meaningful story has to be credible, which is why integrity is so important; I believe in trying to be the person I say I am. <br /><br />A good story evokes awe and wonder, so it is important that I find and create beauty in my life. The variety of beauty I personally resonate with most is the beauty of knowledge and ideas, which is why I put so much effort into understanding what is happening around me. Other people resonate primarily with other forms of beauty, and that’s fine. We don’t all need to be the same.<br /><br />A story is more convincing when it is shared, when many people tell similar stories about similar things. And so it is important that I not be the only significant character in my story. I want to share my life with others, and to live in a community of people who care about and appreciate each other. </p><p>Nothing undoes the beauty of a story quite so effectively as a sense of hidden evil, of questions that we dare not ask and doors that we dare not open, lest all that hidden ugliness spill out. And so I believe in justice. I believe in looking squarely at the evil in the world and trying to fix it, rather than hiding it away and pretending it’s not there.<br /><br />And finally, I believe I’m going to die, probably at some unpredictable moment, and that everyone I care about will die someday as well. Any organizations I might join will someday fail. Cultures will change. Civilizations will collapse. And ultimately the Universe itself will go cold. So the satisfaction invoked by my life story can’t depend on a happy ending.<br /><br />Fortunately, it doesn’t need to. I don’t need a story that lasts forever, I only need one I that stays meaningful until I die, and that is not undone by the prospect of my death. In other words, I need my story to be part of a larger story that will continue past my death in the stories of others, in the story of my community, and in the larger story of the struggle to understand the world and achieve justice. That is the kind of life I am trying to live and the story I am trying to tell.<br /><br /><b>And you? </b>That’s me. But this is Unitarian Universalism, so you are free to disagree with any of that. Nonetheless I invite and encourage all of you to examine your own lives, your own stories, and your own beliefs. <br /><br />Deciding who you’re going to be is not just a job for teen-agers. Periodically throughout our lives, I think, we need to renew our sense of who we are, how we’re going to live, and what we think about the world we live in.<br /><br />I wish you well in your free and responsible search for truth and meaning.<br /><br /></p>Doug Muderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04666144843949850394noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13399254.post-28603906277873378462021-09-29T08:44:00.009-04:002021-10-01T12:26:21.216-04:00A Brief Observation On Genesis and Gender<p>If you google up a survey of conservative Christian condemnations of transgenderism or gender fluidity, you'll notice that they pretty much all go back to the <a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis%201&version=NIV">creation story in Genesis 1</a>: </p><p></p><blockquote><span class="text Gen-1-27" id="en-NIV-27">So God created mankind in his own image,</span><span class="indent-1"><span class="indent-1-breaks"></span><span class="text Gen-1-27"> in the image of God he created them;</span></span><span class="indent-1"><span class="indent-1-breaks"></span></span><span class="text Gen-1-27"> male and female he created them.</span></blockquote><p></p><p></p><p><span class="indent-1"><span class="text Gen-1-27">That's the approach, for example, of the Focus on the Family article "<a href="https://www.focusonthefamily.com/uncategorized/a-biblical-perspective-on-transgender-identity-a-primer-for-parents-and-strugglers/">A Biblical Perspective on Transgender Identity</a>". </span></span></p><blockquote><p>Those of us committed to the Christian worldview base our view of gender and sex on <a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=gen+1%3A27-28&version=ESV" rel="noopener" target="_blank">the biblical book of Genesis</a></p></blockquote><p><span class="indent-1"><span class="text Gen-1-27">The Christian Q&A site "<a href="https://www.gotquestions.org/transsexualism-gender-identity-disorder.html">Got Questions</a>" gets a little more precise: It admits the Bible doesn't cover nonbinary gender issues specifically, but invokes Genesis as the best it can do: </span></span></p><blockquote><p><span class="indent-1"><span class="text Gen-1-27"></span></span>The Bible nowhere explicitly mentions transgenderism or describes anyone
as having transgender feelings. However, the Bible has plenty to say
about human sexuality. Most basic to our understanding of gender is that
God created two (and only two) genders: "male and female He created
them" (<a class="rtBibleRef" data-purpose="bible-reference" data-reference="Gen 1.27" data-version="esv" href="https://biblia.com/bible/esv/Gen%201.27" rel="noopener" target="_blank">Genesis 1:27</a>).
All the modern-day speculation about numerous genders or gender
fluidity—or even a gender “continuum” with unlimited genders—is foreign
to the Bible.</p></blockquote><p>Both articles (and all the others I've found claiming that the Bible mandates exactly two genders) share an interpretative choice: "male and female" is read as prescriptive, not expansive. Male and female, in other words, aren't examples of the breadth of God's creation, they define the limits of it. That's the choice Got Questions is making when it says "and only two". Once you make that choice, you can claim that anyone talking about some possibility outside the male/female duality is going against God.</p><p>Here's my brief observation: <i>That's a weird interpretation.</i></p><p>In particular, that's not how anybody reads similar poetic forms in the rest of the creation story, or in the Bible in general. In Genesis 1:11, for example, we read: </p><p></p><blockquote><span class="text Gen-1-11" id="en-NIV-11">Then God said, “Let the land produce vegetation: seed-bearing plants and trees on the land that bear fruit with seed in it, according to their various kinds.”</span></blockquote><p></p><p><span class="text Gen-1-11" id="en-NIV-11">While 1:24 says: </span></p><p><span class="text Gen-1-11" id="en-NIV-11"></span></p><blockquote><span class="text Gen-1-24" id="en-NIV-24">And God said, “Let the land produce living creatures according to their kinds: the livestock, the creatures that move along the ground, and the wild animals, each according to its kind.”</span></blockquote><p>Think about those. After God says "vegetation", does God then intend to <i>legislate</i> that plants must produce seeds? <a href="https://mosslovers.com/how-does-moss-reproduce-the-life-cycle-of-moss/">Mosses</a> don't. Neither do ferns; they rely instead on a <a href="https://www.fs.fed.us/wildflowers/beauty/ferns/reproduction.shtml">complicated two-generation reproductive cycle</a> that involves spores. Are they in violation of the divine command? For that matter, were human agronomists subverting God when they produced <a href="https://www.watermelon.org/the-slice/where-does-seedless-watermelon-come-from/">seedless watermelons</a>?<br /></p><p>What if an animal species fell somewhere between the categories of "livestock" and "wild"? (Cats, for example.) Would they be abominations? What about animals that move primarily through the trees rather than "along the ground"?<br /></p><p>Now back up and take a wider view: Isn't the whole creation story an elaboration of the idea that God created everything? But the list in Genesis 1 doesn't include <a href="https://answersresearchjournal.org/fungi-from-the-biblical-perspective/">mushrooms</a> or <a href="https://www.oneplace.com/ministries/creation-moments/read/devotionals/todays-creation-moment/god-created-insects-11804306.html">insects</a>. Should we then assume they are unholy creatures that come from somewhere else? </p><p>Of course not.</p><p>In every phrase but "male and female", we read Genesis 1 as expansive and celebratory. The point is to stretch our imaginations by suggesting the breadth of creation, not to restrict creation down to the entries on a list. </p><p>"Male and female he created them" should be read the same way. <br /></p><p><br /></p><p></p><p><span class="text Gen-1-11" id="en-NIV-11"><br /></span></p>Doug Muderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04666144843949850394noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13399254.post-18391752382957342122021-07-29T11:45:00.002-04:002021-07-29T11:53:18.508-04:00Return to Krypton<p style="text-align: center;"> <i>My 2010 UU World article needs an update.</i><br /></p><p>Like many people not considered essential workers, I experienced the pandemic as an ambiguous gift of unexpected free time. With both responsibilities and diversions blown away, I often didn’t know what to do with myself. </p><p>Some people used that time better than others. Maybe they learned a new language, or finally got around to writing their novel. Some read great literature, or worked their way through lists of movie masterpieces.</p>
<p>I ended up watching a lot of super-hero TV shows: the various incarnations of X-Men cartoons, <i>The Gifted</i>, <i>Cloak and Dagger</i>, <i>Titans</i>, <i>Doom Patrol</i>, <i>Young Justice</i>, <i>Arrow</i>, <i>Runaways</i>, <i>Superman and Lois</i>, <i>WandaVision</i>, <i>The Falcom and the Winter Soldier</i>. I could go on. </p>
<p>Superhero fiction was not a new vice for me. In fact, back in 2010 I wrote a <a href="https://www.uuworld.org/articles/reclaiming-krypton">cover article for UU World</a> about what Unitarian Universalists could learn from the changes the superhero mythos had been going through in the previous decades. </p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://assets.uuworld.org/sites/live-new.uuworld.org/files/styles/scaled_480_wide_no_upscale/public/issues/issues/2010_winter_cover.jpg?itok=_SKk3T3K&timestamp=1614103299" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="620" data-original-width="480" height="554" src="https://assets.uuworld.org/sites/live-new.uuworld.org/files/styles/scaled_480_wide_no_upscale/public/issues/issues/2010_winter_cover.jpg?itok=_SKk3T3K&timestamp=1614103299" width="429" /></a></div>And while I can't claim I set out to learn anything from my pandemic video binge, in fact I did: My article needs an update.
<p></p><p><b>Then. </b>Back in 2010, I was looking at this sea change: When I had been introduced to superheroes in the 1960s, everybody was an orphan: Spider-Man’s parents were dead. Batman’s parents were murdered in front of him. Superman’s whole planet blew up. Having no parents was almost a prerequisite for getting into the superhero club. You had super powers and no one to tell you how to use them.</p>
<p>It made a certain amount of sense that the Boomer generation (the one that grew up vowing not to trust anyone over 30) would have an orphan fantasy. Older people, and the institutions they tried to force us into, were sources of oppression. So John Lennon envisioned a future where institutions largely went away: “Imagine there’s no country … and no religion too.” Corporations, universities, governments – they all just wanted to wrap us up in ticky-tacky so we’d all look just the same. </p>
<p>Screw that. Superman may not have appreciated how lucky he was to come from a planet that no longer existed, but we did.</p>
<p>If you fast-forward a few decades, though, everything changes. The X-Men of the 1970s had a mentor, Professor Xavier, and by the 90s, almost every new hero was the inheritor of a legacy that some wise elder could initiate them into. Buffy belonged to a long line of vampire slayers. Witchblade-wielders, Jedi knights, and Star Fleet captains also had storied histories for successive generations to live up to, and if you were lucky a Giles or a Yoda would show up when you needed one. The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles had their sensei. The Power Rangers had Orson. The age of making your own way, free from adult supervision, was over.</p>
<p>Even the older superhero mythologies adjusted. Alfred became more parental to the young Bruce Wayne, and the Kents of Smallville got ever more credit for how well their boy turned out. In <i>Batman Beyond</i>, the cowl of Batman became a legacy like the mantle of Elijah.</p>
<p>Again, this made sense: Gen-X and the early Millennials didn’t grow up with a father who “knows best”, and many of them probably wished they did. As I put it in UU World: “Needing to figure out how to save Metropolis from scratch, with no received wisdom to build on, isn’t a fantasy anymore. It’s a nightmare.”</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://assets.uuworld.org/sites/live-new.uuworld.org/files/styles/scaled_1040_wide_no_upscale/public/heroman_29.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="674" data-original-width="800" height="345" src="https://assets.uuworld.org/sites/live-new.uuworld.org/files/styles/scaled_1040_wide_no_upscale/public/heroman_29.jpg" width="410" /></a></div> <p></p><p>My advice in 2010 was that older UUs needed to stop pitching their faith as a refuge for orphans, and instead become mentors of a noble legacy (which we happened to have). If young people came to our churches looking for something they could build on, they weren’t going to be impressed be our assurance that they could believe and think and do whatever they thought best.
</p><p>Freedom they already had. A little bit of direction might go a long way.</p>
<p><b>Now. </b>So what has been happening in the superhero world since 2010? <br /></p><p>The heroes I saw in my latest binge certainly weren't orphans, but they also didn't need to go looking for a legacy. Instead, parents have become ambiguous figures whose inescapable influence is both good and bad. The forces that shape you almost always also screw you up as well. Nobody makes it to adulthood unmarred.</p>
<p>Again and again, young heroes are realizing that they can’t simply reject their parents, but they also can’t follow them. In <i>Runaways</i>, teens discover that their parents are a child-sacrificing cult. Ultimately, though [spoiler alert], the parents themselves are not the villains; they are in thrall to an evil force that they need their children’s help to escape.</p>
<p>The central conflict of <i>Titans</i> is 20-something Dick Grayson’s (i.e., Robin’s) struggle to make peace with the upbringing he got from Bruce Wayne (Batman). Unsurprisingly, he suffers from unachievable standards, relentless self-criticism, an inability to walk away from trouble, and a disturbing propensity towards violence. He can leave his costume in its case, but if he isn’t the protege of Batman any more, who is he? </p>
<p>Grayson’s attempts to mentor younger people with powers (Beast Boy and Raven) eventually lead him to make peace with his own history: Bruce, he decides, did what he knew how to do. Some of it gave Dick his virtues, and some left him with problems to overcome. He tries not to make the same mistakes with his charges. But his very urge to want to help them, to “take in strays” as one character puts it, is a positive inheritance from Bruce Wayne.</p>
<p>Raven, in turn, is the daughter of a demon that she has to banish to another dimension before he destroys the Earth. Beast Boy’s powers come from an experimental cure worked by the semi-benevolent/semi-abusive Dr. Caulder of <i>Doom Patrol</i>. One Titans character seems particularly on point: Superboy, who is an escaped science experiment with DNA from both Superman and Lex Luthor. He is largely a blank slate, but knows he has it in him to be either a great hero or a great villain.</p>
<p>Where the 90s' <i>Batman Beyond</i> was about struggling to live up to a legacy, the recent <i>The Falcon and the Winter Soldier</i> is about struggling with the legacy itself: What does it mean to be the new Captain America? Can a Black man carry that tradition forward? Should even he want to, given America’s history with his race? What is there about America that a Black man would want to embody?</p>
<p>In short, if the heroes of the 90s wanted to <i>reclaim</i> a legacy, the heroes of today want to <i>redeem</i> a legacy they didn't choose but can’t escape.</p>
<p>Again, it’s not hard to tie that theme to current headlines. What is the debate over so-called “critical race theory” (a.k.a. teaching accurate American history) other than a conflict over legacy? Is America the vision of “all men created equal”? Or is it the reality of slavery and racism? Or both?</p>
<p>Where will you find a bigger bundle of virtues and vices than Thomas Jefferson, who not so long ago figured prominently as a famous Unitarian? He wrote the Declaration of Independence, drew the line between Church and State, founded the University of Virginia, designed Monticello, sent Lewis and Clark to explore the Louisiana Territory he had just bought from France, and (along with the other early presidents) built the tradition of a lawful Republic where power is transferred peacefully. </p><p>But he also raped his slave and enslaved their children. What do you do with that?
</p><p>What do you do with American democracy? It favors the rich. It tilts towards minority rule. Changing anything is incredibly hard. And given recent history, who can say with certainty that the skewed and gerrymandered electorate will not ultimately install some form of fascism?</p>
<p>What do you do with capitalism? It has created a level of abundance the world has never known before. And it’s destroying us. Not one or the other. Both.</p>
<p>We live in a world that has the DNA of both Superman and Lex Luthor. What do we do with it?</p>
<p>Again, the answers of previous generations won't do. “Whatever you want” is not good enough. Returning to our legacy, making America “Great Again”, is also inadequate, because America was never truly great. All the way back, you’ll find nothing but alloys of virtue and vice – never fully good, never fully evil.</p>
<p>Like the Runaways, we are inheritors of a corrupt tradition. Our powers come from tainted sources, and yet they are all we have. There is no singularly virtuous place to stand, and yet we must move the World in a better direction. </p>
<p>What is needed right now is not zeal alone, but also discernment. The redemption of our various inescapable legacies requires an essentially alchemical operation: They need to be reduced to their constituent elements and recombined anew. I revere <i>this</i> Jefferson; I revile <i>that</i> one. <i>This</i> America is the base on which we will build; <i>that</i> one belongs in history's dumpster.</p>
<p>So what should a UU church be in this era? Not a place of perfect freedom for the last sons of dying planets, and not a heroic order whose oath you can take and whose mantle can be passed down to you. In the 20s, a UU church needs to be an alchemical athenor, a crucible where we melt our legacies down to their elements and rework them into something better. We need to account both for what has been done <i>to</i> us and what has been done <i>for </i>us. We need to be both critical and grateful.<br /></p>
<p>Our ancestors did what they knew how to do and left us here, with this collection of strengths and wounds, this ledger of assets and debts. We can’t start from scratch and we can’t go on like this. But we can (and we have to) start from here.</p>Doug Muderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04666144843949850394noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13399254.post-30747033424384213832021-05-23T11:33:00.000-04:002021-05-23T11:33:07.163-04:00Musing on God<p>I just listened (over Zoom, of course) to my church's annual Coming of Age service, where the teens tell us what they believe and what Unitarian Universalism means to them.</p><p>Every year, this service sets me musing about some aspect of my own beliefs, and sometimes I crystalize something that I have been sort-of thinking for some while. <br /><br />Two things hit me this year. First, the idea that UUs can "believe whatever we want" has it backwards: the underlying truth is about responsibility, not freedom. Unitarian Universalism teaches that we are all responsible for what we believe, and that no book or authority or creed can take that responsibility away from us. <br /><br />Second, I thought about God, where my beliefs are not as simple as theism or atheism. </p><p>I believe that God can be a useful concept if you hold it the right way. In day-to-day life, we all live inside a story that we tell about the world, as if we and all the people we run into were characters in that story. We live with the purpose of making the story come out "right", according to some notion of rightness.<br /><br />But the world and the people in it, ourselves included, are so much more than what our story captures. Occasionally that more-ness breaks through, and for a short time we are without a story, without a self, and without boxes to put other people into. This is both wonderful and terrifying, but without those moments we would never grow. <br /><br />Used artfully, "God" can be a word in our story reminding us that our story is incomplete, and that its incompleteness makes it brittle. This kind of God points to the great mystery, the great more-ness, of the world. In times of crisis, when our stories fail, God can be a reassurance that new stories are possible, and that chaos is not the final word. <br /><br />But used badly, "God" can serve the exact opposite purpose. This kind of God is just one more character inside the story we tell, and God lives in a box as confining as any other character's. We have God defined and mapped out; we always know what God wants. </p><p>Worse, this God may be an authoritarian character who mainly wants all the other characters to stay in their boxes. If you notice something odd about your story, something that makes you wonder if you have it right, God will shout you down and tell you to ignore whatever it is you thought you saw. And if you ever try to set the story aside for a moment and look at the world beyond, you are going against God. </p><p>So I believe in the God who breaks us out of our stories, not the God who holds us in them.<br /></p>Doug Muderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04666144843949850394noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13399254.post-5467608650317756152021-01-25T14:29:00.002-05:002021-01-25T14:29:34.899-05:00Did We Inaugurate a New Era, or Just a Person?<p style="text-align: right;"> from a Zoom service of First Parish in Billerica, Massachusetts<br />January 24, 2021</p><h3 style="text-align: left;">Opening Words</h3><p style="text-align: left;">The opening words are by Pheidippides, the Athenian messenger who ran all the way from the plains of Marathon to the Acropolis. Just before collapsing and dying from exhaustion, he announced the outcome of the battle against the Persian invaders: “<i>Nike! Nike! Nenikekiam!</i>” Victory! Victory! Rejoice!<br /><br /></p><h3 style="text-align: left;">Meditation</h3><p style="text-align: left;">Imagine that it is a year ago — January 2020. We are gathered in your beautiful, historic sanctuary. I’m standing at Ralph Waldo Emerson’s pulpit, when suddenly I am overcome by the spirit of prophesy. And I tell you that one year hence, we will have inaugurated a new president, who will receive a record number of votes and win by more than seven million, even flipping states like Arizona and Georgia. For the first time in American history, a woman of color will be vice president. The new White House will be backed up by majorities in both houses of Congress.<br /><br />Now imagine that you all believe me. After the service, we go downstairs to share that wonderful spread of food you always assemble. Listen to the room as it burbles with optimism and idealism and we envision all the wonderful things the new administration might accomplish.<br /><br /></p><h3 style="text-align: left;">Responsive Reading</h3><p style="text-align: left;">“<a href="https://www.uua.org/worship/words/reading-responsive-reading/it-matters-what-we-believe" target="_blank">It Matters What We Believe</a>” by Sophia Lyon Fahs<br /><br /></p><h3 style="text-align: left;">Reading</h3><p style="text-align: left;">Excerpts from: “<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/17/technology/qanon-meme-queen.html" target="_blank">A QAnon ‘Digital Soldier’ Marches On, Undeterred by Theory’s Unraveling</a>” by Kevin Roose. <br /><br />Every morning, Valerie Gilbert, a Harvard-educated writer and actress, wakes up in her Upper East Side apartment; feeds her dog, Milo, and her cats, Marlena and Celeste; brews a cup of coffee; and sits down at her oval dining room table.Then, she opens her laptop and begins fighting the global cabal.<br /><br />Ms. Gilbert, 57, is a believer in QAnon, the pro-Trump conspiracy theory. Like all QAnon faithful, she is convinced that the world is run by a Satanic group of pedophiles that includes top Democrats and Hollywood elites, and that President Trump has spent years leading a top-secret mission to bring these evildoers to justice. ...<br /><br />These are confusing times for followers of QAnon. They were told that Mr. Trump would be re-elected in a landslide, and that a coming “storm” would expose the global pedophile ring and bring its leaders to justice.<br /><br />But there have been no mass arrests, and Mr. Trump is leaving office on Wednesday under the cloud of a second impeachment. Many prominent QAnon followers have been arrested for their roles in this month’s deadly mob riot at the U.S. Capitol. They are being barred by the thousands from major social networks for spreading misinformation about voter fraud, and law enforcement agencies are treating the movement as a domestic extremist threat.<br /><br />These setbacks have left QAnon believers like Ms. Gilbert hoping for a last-minute miracle. Her current theory is that Mr. Trump will not actually leave office on Wednesday, but will instead declare martial law, declassify damning information about the “deep state” and arrest thousands of cabal members, including President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. ...<br /><br />What attracts Ms. Gilbert and many other people to QAnon isn’t just the content of the conspiracy theory itself. It’s the community and sense of mission it provides. New QAnon believers are invited to chat rooms and group texts, and their posts are showered with likes and retweets. They make friends, and are told that they are not lonely Facebook addicts squinting at zoomed-in paparazzi photos, but patriots gathering “intel” for a righteous revolution. ...<br /><br />Q, who once sent dozens of updates a day, has essentially vanished from the internet in recent weeks, posting only four times since the November election. ... But Ms. Gilbert isn’t worried. For her, QAnon was always less about Q and more about the crowdsourced search for truth. She loves assembling her own reality in real time, patching together shards of information and connecting them to the core narrative. ... When she solves a new piece of the puzzle, she posts it to Facebook, where her QAnon friends post heart emojis and congratulate her.<br /><br />This week, when Mr. Biden becomes president and Mr. Trump leaves the White House, it will be a huge blow to QAnon’s core mythology, and it may force some believers to acknowledge that they’ve been lied to. Many will cope by spinning the development as a win, or saying it proves that Mr. Trump is playing the long game. Others will quietly ditch Q and transfer their enthusiasm to a new conspiracy theory. A few might be jolted back to reality.<br /><br />But Ms. Gilbert is undeterred. She trusts Q’s plan, at least for a little while longer, and she wants [others] to trust it, too.<br /><br /></p><h3 style="text-align: left;">Sermon</h3><p style="text-align: left;">I want to start by standing up to show you my t-shirt. It says “<a href="https://www.greatdemocracytees.com/product-page/democracy-i-survived-2020" target="_blank">Democracy & I Survived 2020</a>”. I had it made because in spite of Wednesday’s inauguration, 2020 felt less like a triumph than like something to get through. <br /><br />The reason I had the meditation take you back to a year ago, and then imagine forward how we might have felt then if we had foreseen this outcome, is that it contrasts so strongly with how I and so many of the people I know actually do feel right now. <br /><br />If I’d convinced you of that prophecy a year ago I think we really would have buzzed with excitement. But to be honest, I’m not doing a lot of buzzing and burbling these days. Because I didn’t get to jump straight from last January to this one. Like everybody else, I had to make that journey one day at a time, and it wore me down. Maybe it wore you down too.<br /><br />All the unnecessary death. All the senseless partisan conflict about basic public-health practices like masks and social distancing. All the things we had to give up: restaurants, travel, concerts, aimless shopping, hanging around reading in coffee shops and libraries. Deb and I missed the funeral of my brother-in-law in Tennessee, and broke a decades-long tradition of spending Christmas with our friends.<br /><br />I’m sure each of you has your own list of missed events and broken habits -- habits that probably turned out to mean more to you than you had ever realized. Worse, maybe the virus took someone close to you. Maybe you had a rough time with your own health. Maybe you lost your job or had to close your business. Or maybe you kept your job because you are an essential worker who has to deal with the public, but every day you wonder whether some customer or client is going to infect you.<br /><br />This has also been a hard year to live through politically. It started and ended with an impeachment. George Floyd was murdered, touching off weeks of protests both peaceful and violent. <br /><br />The big question in the election turned out not to be who the voters would choose, but whether our choice would even matter. After he lost, the president did everything he could to hang onto power, and every time the issue seemed to be settled, it wasn’t. There was always one more thing he could try, one more weak spot in the system that he could push on, all the way up to gathering a mob and inciting it to attack Congress as it counted the electoral votes. Not until the inauguration Wednesday could we really be sure that democracy had held.<br /><br />So rather than bursting with optimism and excitement, I think many of us arrive at this moment feeling as exhausted as that Athenian messenger. <i>Nike! Nike! Nenikekiam! </i>2021! The Biden administration! We made it; now we can collapse.<br /><br />But if there’s one message I want you to take away from this morning, it’s that this is not the time to collapse. And I’m directing that message as much at myself as at the rest of you. What I would like to have offered you this morning is a visionary, energizing message about all the possibilities of this moment. I would like to have sparked that classic Unitarian optimism you can hear in the hymns. “These Things Shall Be” — the Future is coming, and won’t it be wonderful.<br /><br />Instead, what I can find it in myself to tell you is that the Future needs us. It needs us active, it needs us engaged. Because if we pull back now, if we say, “I voted. Now let Joe do it” then all that Wednesday will mean is that we inaugurated a man. But we will not have inaugurated the new era our country needs.<br /><br />The old president may be gone, but simply replacing the people in power does not produce real change in a democracy. Because real change doesn’t come from the top down. Democracies only transform when those at the top respond to a genuine hunger for change that bubbles up from the People. Without that popular demand, even well-intentioned government loses momentum. The big financial interests, the people who benefit from the status quo — they never go away.They never stop asking for what they want. They never tire of spreading disinformation and corruption. <br /><br />If those are the only voices our leaders hear, it won’t matter how many good intentions they had when they took office. Eventually, they’ll once again end up explaining to us how they want the same good things we do, but it’s just not possible. Change is never possible unless the People demand it. <br /><br />But if the Future needs our engagement as citizens, I think it needs even more our participation as Unitarian Universalists. Because I believe that Unitarian Universalism has something very special to offer this nation and the world at this moment in history. <br /><br />It’s not hard to make a list of the challenges we face: not just the pandemic and the economic problems it has caused, but also the less immediate but far less tractable challenge of climate change. The long history of systemic racism demands our attention. Growing economic inequality. The rise of authoritarianism around the world. The millions of people who are here without legal status and the millions of others who would like to come. Working out a world order that finds a place for China, but is not dominated by it. I could go on.<br /><br />But no matter which of those challenges you feel called to address, you’re going to run into the same obstacle: Our society, our culture, is losing its respect for Truth. More and more all the time, our national conversation is corrupted by the idea that if you don’t want believe something, you don’t have to. We’ve lost sight of the fact that there is a Reality out there that can only be denied for so long. <br /><br />Look at the pandemic. For nearly a year, our recently departed president tried everything he could think of to conjure it away. He told us the virus wouldn’t come here, that it would fade away by magic, that it would be gone when the weather got warm, that it was just the flu, the common cold, it wasn’t serious, people weren’t really dying, the numbers were exaggerated, and on and on. Wednesday morning, before he boarded Air Force One for the last time, he spoke of the pandemic in the past tense, as if hadn’t been at its peak at that very moment. But all that denial, all that distraction, couldn’t make it go away.<br /><br />Or think about global warming. The reality is simple: Burning fossil fuels increases the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas; it reflects back to Earth infrared radiation that otherwise would escape into space. So the planet gets warmer. </p><p style="text-align: left;">It would be nice if that weren’t true. I see the attraction of a world where we all keep driving, keep flying, keep drilling, keep mining, keep living the way we feel entitled to live — and nothing bad happens. So I understand the temptation to say "It’s all a hoax." "It isn’t that bad." "God controls the weather, not us." "The climate is always changing." And so on. <br /></p><p style="text-align: left;">But there’s a real Earth out there, and it really does keep getting hotter. All the denial in the world isn’t going to stop that process.<br /><br />Our former president didn’t like the fact that he lost the election, so he said he didn’t lose. He said it loud, he said it often. He got other people to say it with him, because they also didn’t like the truth about the election. Some of them came together in a violent mob and invaded our Capitol. People died. If events had played out just a little differently, some of our elected representatives might also have died. But there are real ballots with real marks on them, and when you total them up, he did lose.<br /><br />Whatever challenge you choose to take on, you’re going to have to battle that plague of wishful thinking. Like: "Racism ended in the 60s." "Evolution is just a theory." "People wouldn’t have to be poor if they just worked harder." "Sexual orientation is a choice." "Whatever the problem, we won’t have to make any hard choices because technology will save us."<br /><br />If there’s one thing that the world needs right now across the board, it’s a rededication to Truth. Not even just a reluctant resignation to dismal facts, but an active fascination with what is real, the pursuit of Truth with passion, with a religious fervor. At its best, that’s what Unitarian Universalism offers. <br /><br />All religions talk about Truth, but what most of them really want is to convince themselves and others that the beliefs they already have are true. Unitarianism is one of the few traditions on Earth that is committed to following the Truth wherever it leads. If you look back at the pillars of that tradition through the generations: Channing, Emerson, Theodore Parker, James Freeman Clarke, John Dietrich, James Luther Adams, Thandeka — you won’t find much consistency in the specifics of their theologies. <br /><br />William Ellery Channing’s Christianity sounds quaint to me when I read it now. But what rings as clearly today as it did in the 1820s, what shines through in the work of that whole succession of giants I just listed, is a commitment to use the full power of their minds and all the knowledge available in their eras to follow the Truth wherever it leads. That’s the kind of commitment the world needs right now. It doesn’t just need you as a person, or a citizen, or a political partisan. The world needs you as a Unitarian Universalist.<br /></p><p style="text-align: left;">I say the world needs you particularly now. But of course, wishful thinking is not new. It’s a very human trait; we are all tempted by it. But there’s something different in this current era of social media. Today, if there’s something about reality you don’t want to believe, you can easily find an entire community of people who also don’t want to believe it. And then you can support each other in saying that it’s not true. You can make up the most outrageous fantasies and believe in them together. (That’s why I included that QAnon reading.) </p><p style="text-align: left;">Today, if you want to believe something badly enough, you can. You don’t have to do it by yourself. You can find thousands and thousands of people to believe it with you. Your belief won’t stop Reality from being what it is, but by joining together with others, you can remain comfortable in your denial for a long, long time. <br /><br />And that temptation, I think, is the biggest problem in the world right now. All our other problems are harder, because so many people believe that they can just imagine a different reality and live there instead of here. If we can’t come to terms with that temptation, I think it’s going to get us all killed someday.<br /><br />Some people may find it amusing that I offer Unitarian Universalism as an antidote to the problem of people believing whatever they want to believe. Because that’s usually what people say about us. We aren’t bound to follow a leader, a creed, a catechism, or a holy book. That’s the free part of our free and responsible search for truth and meaning. So outsiders imagine our freedom must mean that we all just believe whatever we want.<br /><br />But people who make that criticism have missed the “responsible” part of the free and responsible search. Because not having an external authority <i>over</i> us also means that there is no authority for us to hide <i>behind</i>. <b>We are responsible for what we believe.</b> If our beliefs, or the actions that we take based on those beliefs, hurt other people, or promote injustice, or bring about an environmental catastrophe, that’s on us. We can’t blame those consequences on our church or on God.<br /><br />One major way religion does harm in the world today is when it shields people from responsibility for their beliefs. Don’t blame <i>me</i> for these beliefs, religious people say, because I got them from my minister, from my church, from our holy book, from God. So <i>I</i> have nothing against gays and lesbians, but <i>my church</i> teaches that they are sinners, and that marriage is reserved for one man and one woman. <i>I’m</i> not trying to keep women in their place, but <i>the Bible</i> tells wives to submit to their husbands. 1 Timothy 2:12 says “I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man, but to be in silence.” That's the Word of God.<br /><br />Very often, if you push on those statements, you’ll discover that people are not so much submitting to authority as finding an authority to excuse them for believing and doing what they want. Consider this analogy: Maybe you remember how, during the Iraq War, President Bush would claim that he was following the advice of his generals. But if a general gave him advice he didn’t like, he’d fire that general and get another one. So who’s advice was he really following? <br /><br />Well, something similar goes on with churches. Sometimes, if you question people who simply claim to be following the teachings of their church, you’ll discover that they used to belong to some other church, but left it because it liberalized, and began to tolerate things they didn’t like. When it stopped justifying their particular bigotry, they traded it in for the church they attend now. So who is really responsible there?<br /><br />Many people who claim to follow the Bible have found ways to get around its inconvenient passages. Matthew 19:21 says “sell all you own and give to the poor”. Who does that? <br /><br />Leviticus 19:34 says: “The stranger who resides with you shall be to you as one of your citizens; you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” Quote that to a fundamentalist who wants to deport all the undocumented immigrants, and he will uncork a whole bottle of interpretation to explain why that passage doesn’t mean what it so obviously does mean. Because that’s how the game is played: When the Bible tells you what you want to hear, then it is the Word of God and must be followed no matter what. But when it tells you something you don’t want to hear, it needs interpretation. Who takes responsibility for that? <br /><br />Unitarian Universalists don’t play those games. We are responsible for what we believe. We are responsible for what we do. Not our ministers, not our theologians, not the books we read, not even God. We are responsible.<br /><br />If you take it seriously, that kind of responsibility can be a hard thing to shoulder. And that’s why we do it together. While others may choose a community that supports them in believing what they want to believe, we have chosen a community that keeps us honest. We help each other to carry our responsibility, not to make excuses for putting it down.<br /><br />And so, if from time to time you fool yourself into forgetting or discounting the crises I listed, or any of the other aspects of Reality it would be pleasant to ignore, count on someone here to remind you before too much time goes by. If you start living inside a self-serving fantasy that harms others and excuses your sense of entitlement and privilege, you can hope to find the kinds of friends here who will call you on it. <br /><br />After the recent Capitol riot, the UU minister <a href="https://www.uua.org/braverwiser/finding-our-way" target="_blank">Kristin Grassel Schmidt</a> wrote: “Here’s a deep truth: it is only through real, sometimes very tough accountability that some people will understand that they’ve lost their way. Being held accountable has helped me to learn, and to be and do better, so why would I hold that blessing back from others? Sometimes helping people find their way to truth, love, and justice means insisting that truth is truth — even if it isn’t polite; even if it leads to argument. We may even need to say ‘I love you, but I will never agree to disagree on this. Truth is too important to set aside just because it challenges and upset you’.”<br /><br />That’s how we roll.<br /><br />At this particular moment, there’s something else that we need from each other, something I wish I could have brought to you this morning: a sense of the wonder and possibility of this moment. I’m afraid I have painted Reality only as harsh and demanding, because that’s how I’ve been experiencing it recently. But I think that’s more of a symptom than an observation. My reason tells me that <a href="http://digitalemerson.wsulibs.wsu.edu/exhibits/show/text/the-american-scholar" target="_blank">Emerson</a> was right long ago when he wrote: “This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it.”<br /><br />Reality can be harsh and demanding sometimes, but it also has a depth and complexity that gives it a beauty no fantasy can match. In the long run, time and effort spent trying to grasp and deal with what is really going on — in personal life, in a laboratory, or on the world stage — is always more rewarding than arranging the components of a fantasy to get the outcome you want. There are unexpected dangers and disappointments, but also unexpected opportunities. <br /><br />And the kind of betrayal that QAnon followers are experiencing now — Reality doesn’t do that to you. You have to meet Reality on its own terms, but it is always there for you.<br /><br />And finally, I want to point out that if you do have an appreciation of the wonder and possibilities of this moment, then you have special gift to offer. You have something that is in short supply right now, and I encourage you to be generous with it.<br /><br />But even if, like me, you are feeling tired and worn down these days … Yes, you should take care of yourself. You should do whatever you need to do to stay healthy, both mentally and physically. But at the same time I hope you remember that the world needs Unitarian Universalists right now. It needs us maybe more than it ever has.<br /><br /></p><h3 style="text-align: left;">Closing Words</h3><p style="text-align: left;">The closing words were written by Pascal in the 17th century: “Truth is so obscured nowadays and lies so well established that unless we love the truth we shall never recognize it.”<br /></p>Doug Muderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04666144843949850394noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13399254.post-18804426880192036092020-12-01T19:36:00.000-05:002020-12-01T19:36:24.837-05:00OK, the Election's Over. Now What?<p> <br /></p><p style="text-align: center;"><i>a service at First Parish in Billerica , Massachusetts</i><br /></p><p style="text-align: center;">November 29, 2020<br /></p><p><br /></p><h3 style="text-align: left;">Reading</h3><p><u>From “Who Will We Be Without Trump?” by New York Times columnist Frank Bruni.</u><br /><br />A friend was all worked up about the possibility of Trump 2024.<br /><br />“I can’t go through this again!” she cried. But what I heard was that she couldn’t stop going through this. Her contempt for Donald Trump is too finely honed at this point, too essential a part of her psyche. Who would she be — conversationally, politically — without it?<br /><br />Another friend sent me an email in which he’d worked out the economics of a web-only Trump news channel of the kind that Trump may — or may not — start. With minimal investment, Trump could rake in millions and millions!<br /><br />We were supposed to be breathing a huge sigh of relief about Joe Biden’s victory. But instead he was finding a fresh source of outrage about Trump.<br /><br />And here I am writing about Trump — again. It’s a tic, not one I’m proud of. But I’m surrendering to it now to acknowledge that I can’t continue doing so. None of us can. …<br /><br />On Jan. 20 — praise be! — his presidency will be over. But his hold on us may not end as quickly and cleanly. And his departure from the White House will be more disorienting than some of us realize, posing its own challenges: for Democrats, for news organizations, for anyone who has grown accustomed over these past four years to an apocalyptic churn of events and emotions. …<br /><br />I … worry that in the wake of Trump’s presidency, which both reflected and intensified the furious pitch of American politics, melodrama may be the new normal. I worry that while Americans are exhausted by it, we’re also habituated to it; that we’ll manufacture it where it doesn’t exist … [and] I worry that my worry is part of the problem. <br /><br /></p><h3 style="text-align: left;">Sermon</h3><p>Back in the 90s, my wife Deb was battling breast cancer. I think I’ve told that story here before, so I won’t go into a lot of detail. But for months at a time, I was worried that she might die. <br /><br />It never got to the point where I expected her to die in the next few days, but she was also never entirely in the clear. Surgery is always risky. And when high-dose chemotherapy had wiped out her immune system, I knew that any infection could proceed pretty quickly. And of course there were constant tests, any one of which might tell us that things had taken a bad turn. Treatment went on for a very intense nine months.<br /><br />And then it was over. Microscopic cancer colonies might still be in there somewhere, the doctors told us, but maybe not. Come back in six months.<br /><br />So she was home. She went back to work. We saw our friends, went to restaurants, took vacations. We could make plans now and not worry so much about needing to cancel them. Life could be more or less normal. Though we continued to be nervous, we were relieved, and happy that things were working out so well. <br /><br />But we also didn’t know what to do with ourselves. For most of a year, we had lived with a sense of desperate intensity, constantly afraid that terrible news was coming, constantly worried that we might make some wrong decision and only later discover its horrible consequences. <br /><br />And then that intensity was gone, and we had to recalibrate all our standards. Now, “bad news” meant that the movie we wanted to see was sold out. A “bad decision” meant buying the wrong pair of shoes, or misjudging rush hour traffic and being late. That comparative triviality took some getting used to.<br /><br />Soldiers back from war often report something similar. Suddenly, “screwing up” doesn’t mean somebody is going to die. It just means that you’ve burned dinner, or that the project due Friday won’t get done until Monday. It can be hard to adjust, hard to take seriously the drastically smaller ups and downs of your new life.<br /><br />In 2011, a New York Times reporter interviewed soldiers returning from Afghanistan and noted the difficulty of “dialing back the hypervigilance that served them well in combat.” A sergeant told the reporter: “The hardest part for me, I guess, is <b>not</b> being on edge.”<br /><br />People who escape dysfunctional social relationships are often drawn back in. Abused spouses go back to their abusers, ex-members of cults return to the fold, and so on. Bad as they can be, those relationships are intense. Everything that happens in them feels terribly important. Healthier relationships -- where conflict still happens, but shouting and crying are rare, and no one ever winds up in the emergency room -- can seem flat by comparison.<br /><br />You may wonder where I’m going with this. <br /><br />Almost a month ago, we had an election. By a margin of more than six million votes, we told Donald Trump to pack his bags. It’s over. At noon on January 20th, he’ll be gone from the White House. There’s a counter on the internet that will tell you to the second just how much longer we have to wait.<br /><br />When I signed up to do this service, I didn’t know how the election would come out. So I had several possible sermon topics in mind. <br /><br />If Trump had gotten re-elected, I was planning to do a keep-the-faith talk, about how to maintain hope and endure four more years of a government so hostile to Unitarian Universalist values. <br /><br />Another possibility was the Great Blue Wave — not just a new president, but a new Congress open to the kind of structural change American democracy needs. That outcome called for a visionary talk. Instead of tinkering around the edges of the status quo, let’s sit down with a blank sheet of paper and think about what we really want for this country. <br /><br />What actually happened was somewhere in between. In some sense, the Great Blue Wave did roll in. Turnout was enormous, and Joe Biden got more votes than any presidential candidate in American history, over 80 million. <br /><br />And yet, the turnout on the other side was also impressive. Trump’s losing campaign netted 74 million votes, which is millions more than Barack Obama got in his 2008 landslide, and 11 million more than Trump himself got in 2016. Unless Democrats sweep the runoffs in Georgia, Mitch McConnell will retain control of the Senate, and Nancy Pelosi’s majority in the House will be smaller, not larger. So if there was a Blue Wave, a lot of the red power structure survived it.<br /><br />To me, the shock of this election was those 74 million Trump voters. I could almost understand people who voted for him the first time: Maybe they didn’t like Hillary Clinton. Maybe they believed that a businessman could run the government more efficiently. Maybe they were just generally frustrated and thought, “What the hell? He’ll shake things up. How bad can he be?”<br /><br />But by now we’ve had four years to answer that question. We’ve seen Covid kill a quarter million of our fellow Americans. We’ve seen our nation inflict pointless cruelty on helpless people who come to our border looking for asylum — including separating families and then deporting the parents without giving their children back. In hundreds of cases, we’ve even lost the connection between them. We could find Osama bin Laden, but somehow we can’t find these kids’ parents. <br /><br />We’ve seen the Justice Department protect allies of the President who commit crimes, and heard him demand that the attorney general arrest his rivals based on conspiracy theories rather than evidence. We’ve seen unprecedented levels of corruption, including millions of dollars of government money flowing into the President’s businesses. We’ve heard no apologies from him when mass shooters repeat his rhetoric to justify slaughtering Hispanics or Jews. <br /><br />And after all that, 74 million Americans got their ballots and said, “That’s good. I want four years more.” I found that not just surprising, but unsettling. And for a week or so I thought this talk would focus on that issue: How can I come to terms with what the election has demonstrated about my fellow citizens? Because for UUs this is more than just a political challenge. It goes to the heart of our religion. <br /><br />Our Unitarian principles commit us to democratic process. But democracy has to mean more than just majority rule. Real democracy involves forming a common vision of ourselves as a people, respecting one another, and developing some common core of facts on which to base our national conversation. When either party says to the other “We outnumber you, so we’re just going to vote you down” that isn’t the kind of democracy we’re looking for. So when President-elect Biden talks about healing America by reaching across the partisan divide, he’s speaking our language.<br /><br />At a more personal level, our Universalist values tell us that no one is irredeemable. No one should be written off as unworthy of consideration. No matter how many times a person refuses to see the light as we see it, or to recognize what seem to us to be undeniable facts, we can’t stop trying to communicate or trying to understand.<br /><br />And that’s a challenge right now, because our efforts to understand or communicate meet with so little reciprocity. Monday, Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson suggested a reading list for conservatives who want to understand “the opaque and inscrutable Joe Biden voter”. He was, of course, making fun of the mainstream media’s four-year long effort to understand white working-class Trump voters. <br /><br />After 2016, he writes, “Reporters and researchers swarmed what seemed like every bereft factory town in the industrial Midwest, every hill and hollow of Appalachia, every windswept farming community throughout the Great Plains. I’m pretty sure television crews did, in fact, bring us reports from every single diner in the contiguous United States — at least, those where at least one regular patron wears overalls.”<br /><br />“Logically, then, we should put aside those dog-eared copies of J.D. Vance’s <i>Hillbilly Elegy</i> and subject ‘the Biden voter’ to the same kind of microscopic scrutiny. Venture out of your bubble, Trump supporters, and try to understand how most of America thinks.”<br /><br />Robinson was writing tongue-in-cheek, of course, because he knows that project will never be undertaken. Fox News reporters are not going to hang out at black barber shops in Detroit, or interview white suburban UUs to find out why so many church-going professionals voted against what regular Fox viewers must see as our self-interest.<br /><br />The situation is quite the opposite, in fact. A popular slogan on Trump campaign merchandise, one repeated at rallies by Don Jr. himself, was “Make Liberals Cry Again”. For many on that side, our distress and disappointment is not an unfortunate byproduct of achieving their positive vision for America. It’s a goal in itself. Making us cry is something to celebrate. How should we respond to that?<br /><br />I thought that theme might make a good talk, one that I probably need to write even more than you need to hear. I still think so, and maybe it will happen someday. But try as I might to assemble that talk, the voice of inspiration just wouldn’t speak to me; I couldn’t make it come together. And that was my first clue that maybe I was skipping over an important step in the process. Maybe the healing of America needs to start somewhere else. <br /><br />My second clue came from the post-election media coverage. Ordinarily, when an opposition party wins the White House, the president-elect and the new administration instantly become the center of all attention. Who’s going to be the chief of staff? Who’s going to be in the cabinet? What's the first issue on their new agenda? <br /><br />Usually, it’s like the Eagles sang: “There’s a new kid in town. Everybody’s talking about the new kid in town.” <br /><br />But not this time. And like Frank Bruni, I find that I am part of that phenomenon. I write a weekly politics blog, and week after week, even after it became clear that Trump had lost, it’s been hard to talk about anybody else: Why won’t he concede? Would he ever let the Biden transition begin? What’s going on with all those absurd lawsuits? And with his calls to local election officials and Republican legislators in states Biden won? Why is he replacing the leadership in the Pentagon? Is he staging a coup? Can it possibly work? Who’s he going to pardon? Will he try to pardon himself? Will he resign so that Pence can pardon him? On and on and on.<br /><br />But wait. Isn’t there a new kid in town? Of course there is. And he’s doing the kinds of things presidents-elect typically do. For example, he quickly rolled out his team to deal with our most pressing problem: the pandemic. <br /><br />But by the standards of the last four years, that event was missing a certain pizzazz. His team was all doctors and public health experts. Not a quack or a charlatan in the bunch. Not even somebody from Biden’s family. <br /><br />And what did those well-qualified experts tell us to do? Stuff we’d already heard: wear a mask, wash your hands, stay out of crowds. There’s a vaccine coming, and it’s going to work, but it’s not going to be a miracle. Distributing it will be an enormous logistical problem that takes months. They’re going to do the best they can.<br /><br />Then Biden got up there and repeated the same things. He didn’t promise the virus was going to go away by magic. He didn’t offer us a miracle cure or suggest that we inject bleach. He didn’t yield the podium to the My Pillow guy or some other campaign donor with something crazy to say. <br /><br />That’s news, I guess. But what can I write about that will grab my readers’ attention? And more important: What am I supposed to feel? If government becomes sane and sensible, where’s my next jolt of adrenaline going to come from?<br /><br />Eventually it dawned on me: For five years now, pretty much since he came down the escalator in 2015, I’ve been in an abusive relationship with Donald Trump. <br /><br />Day after day, I have approached my news sources by armoring myself against attack. I have expected that each day I will somehow be insulted or threatened by my President. Or he will do or say something that will make me feel ashamed of the country I love and want to take pride in. In my name, he will attack the environment or harm innocent people or involve me in some other sin that I can never make right.<br /><br />I came to expect that again and again, he would abuse his power in some way I didn’t see coming, because I had taken the norms of American democracy for granted. I had imagined that somehow the laws and the Constitution would enforce themselves, without any human process that could be disrupted or ignored. <br /><br />Day after day I would think, “He can’t do that” only to realize that yes, he can. He can set up concentration camps on our border. He can create a masked federal police force and unleash it on the streets of cities where the mayor and the governor don’t want it. He can slow down the Post Office to keep mail-in ballots from arriving in time to be counted. He can threaten to take federal emergency money away from states whose governors aren’t nice enough to him, and foreign aid away from countries that refuse to do him political favors. He can trade pardons for the silence of his co-conspirators. He can shrug off responsibility when his supporters mail pipe bombs to his critics or plot to kidnap the governor of Michigan. <br /><br />Yes he can.<br /><br />And because I have so often failed to anticipate what he can do, I have lived for years with a constant sense of dread. What else haven’t I thought of? <br /><br />That’s what has made his attempts to overturn the election results so riveting. I didn’t see how it could possibly work. But what if I was missing something? What if I was taking for granted some boundary that he could just step over, as he has stepped over so many others?<br /><br />So for years, I have lived with unrelenting feelings of fear and outrage and shame. An alarm bell has been constantly ringing in my head, telling me that I need to do something, but I don’t know what. <br /><br />It has been a difficult, terrible four years. But at the same time, it has also been very, very intense. <br /><br />So after all this, can I really just go back to normal? Or have I gotten, in Frank Bruni’s words, habituated to melodrama. Do I need that regular jolt of adrenaline? If there is no daily outrage, where will my sense of mission come from? What happens to the dragonslayers after the dragon is gone?<br /><br />On a more mundane level: What’s going to happen to my blog when my readers realize that they don’t need to watch politics as closely as they’ve been doing? When they realize that they can let down their guard for weeks at a time, trusting that the administration will do more-or-less the right thing most of the time? What am I going to write about when the drama of the rise of fascism is replaced by the day-to-day slog of good government?<br /><br />What we’ve been seeing from the Biden transition these last few weeks is what normal governance is supposed to look like: Presidents choose qualified people, who then say and do sensible things. But watching a well-run government closely is an acquired taste. It’s not the kind of circus we’ve gotten used to. <br /><br />So it’s a real question: What am I going to do after January 20th, when my emotions are my own again? When my buttons are not repeatedly being pushed? When I am not constantly being trolled? When I can approach the news every morning without already knowing how it’s going to make me feel?<br /><br />On the one hand, that sounds wonderful. And I believe that eventually it will be wonderful, in more ways than I currently appreciate. That ongoing abuse has probably done me more damage than I realize. And defending myself against it probably has been weighing me down more than I knew.<br /><br />But on the other hand, experience tells me that this adjustment is going to be a harder than it looks. The psychological wear and tear of the last four years isn’t going to repair itself instantly on Inauguration Day. <br /><br />President-elect Biden is totally right when he says that America needs to heal its partisan divide. And as a UU, I hope that someday soon I’ll be ready to pitch in and work on that project. But I’m not there yet, and I’m not going to pretend that I am. Before there can be healing between people, I think there needs to be some healing within people. <br /><br />People like me.<br /><br />At least that’s where I intend to start.<br /></p>Doug Muderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04666144843949850394noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13399254.post-20071513616986901132020-06-26T14:36:00.001-04:002020-06-26T14:36:04.607-04:00Hope and Realism in Difficult Times<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i>This talk was delivered on June 21 over Zoom to a combined service of Quincy Unitarian Church of Quincy, Illinois and the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of La Crosse, Wisconsin. The video above is the dress rehearsal I did earlier that morning.</i><br />
<br />
A couple months ago, at the height of the lockdown, someone I follow on Twitter wondered how doctors can diagnose depression these days.<br />
<br />Think about it: Ordinarily, if you went to your doctor and said, “I hardly ever leave the house. Some days I don't even bother to get dressed. When I do go out, I stay as far away from other people as I can. I wash my hands obsessively, and I worry constantly about getting sick.” in no time, you’d have a prescription for Prozac or Zoloft or some other anti-depressant. But now the doctor would probably say, "That's normal. That's how we all live."<br />
<br />And that's one way to look at it. Normal life is just different now. But another way is to recognize that normal life has started to resemble depression.<br /><br />
In his memoir <i>Darkness Visible</i>, William Styron describes the inner experience of depression as a constant sense of loss. And that too seems familiar, because we are all suffering losses day after day. Even if you haven’t had the virus yourself, you may have lost a parent, a spouse, a child, or some friend you had imagined growing old with. Maybe you’ve lost a job or a business; many people have.<br />Nearly of us have missed events that we had been looking forward to: maybe the birth of a grandchild, or a semester studying abroad, or a big June wedding with all the trappings. <br /><br />
On a smaller scale, think about church services. This talk was originally supposed to happen last month in Quincy, as part of my annual spring road trip from New England back to my hometown. That trip usually kicks off with lunch at my favorite diner in Connecticut. There's a museum I like in Columbus, a brew pub in Indianapolis, and a bookstore in Champaign. In Quincy, I see old friends, wander through old haunts, and maybe spend a lazy afternoon on a boat in Mark Twain Lake. <br /><br />
But not this spring. And probably not in the fall. And beyond that, who can say?<br /><br />
Stryon says that the most damaging losses are the ones that we never adequately mourn. But opportunities to mourn are another part of what we’ve lost. Often we can’t be there when our loved ones die. We can’t gather our community together for a funeral where we hold each other’s hands or dry each other’s tears.<br /><br />
Some of our losses have gone unmourned because they snuck up on us. Many high school seniors were happy, at first, to get a couple unexpected weeks off school. They were less certain how to feel when they got a few more weeks. And then there was no prom, no graduation, no real chance to say goodbye to people who might be passing out of their lives now.<br /><br />
And the virus, the lockdown, and the ensuing economic troubles are not the only challenges we’ve had to face. We’re in a period of major social unrest that calls attention to our persistent lack of progress against racism. The checks and balances of our government are under unprecedented stress, and I am probably not the only person here who wonders whether this fall's election might be America’s last chance to avoid the kind of authoritarianism that has already replaced democracy in countries like Russia and Hungary and Turkey.<br /><br />
For a lot of reasons, then, it’s been difficult to stay hopeful.<br /><br />At Valley Forge, General Washington read his troops the Thomas Paine pamphlet that begins, "These are the times that try men's souls." Paine was using "try" in the old sense of “test”, the way an assayer might test a nugget of ore by dropping it in acid. Hard times, Paine was saying, tell you what you're made of.<br /><br />
Hard times also test our religions. Just about any belief system is good enough when things are going well. But in hard times we have to ask: These principles, these beliefs and ideas that we've built our lives around, do they work? Do they stand up to the challenge?<br /><br />
These particular hard times motivated me to revisit what I’ve said and written about hope. I was surprised to discover just how much there is and how far back it goes. I wouldn’t have said that hope is a major theme of my work, but apparently it is. <br /><br />
Satchell Paige advised, “Never look back. Something might be gaining on you.” It’s always risky to review your past writings. You may discover that you were just dead wrong, or that the various things you said here or there don’t assemble into any coherent view at all. It happens.<br /><br />
But fortunately, not this time. I think my various discussions of hope do assemble into a single message, and I find I still believe it. So today I thought I would try to pull it all together. <br /><br />As so often happens, the way to start is to get the definition right, and in this case that means not confusing hope with optimism. Hope is a way of approaching the present moment, a belief that here and now striving for better things is worthwhile. Optimism, on the other hand, is a claim to know something about the future: that it's going to be OK. <br /><br />
The opposite of optimism is pessimism, which claims to know that the future will go badly. But the opposite of hope is despair, a belief that, in this moment, striving for better things is pointless.<br /><br />
Despair is often a reaction to defeat, and so in December of 2016, a lot of UUs were despairing about the political situation. So I spoke about hope at the UU Church of Palo Alto. I don't think I can improve on this example, so I'll just quote it.<br /><br />
"Pessimism is going to the plate in the ninth inning when your team is behind, assessing the situation, and concluding that you’re probably going to lose. Despair, on the other hand, would tell you not to bother taking your turn at bat, or if you do step into the batter’s box, to let the pitches go by without swinging. Because what’s the point? What difference could it possibly make?”<br /><br />
Being a hopeful batter, on the other hand, doesn’t imply that you know anything one way or the other about how it’s all going to come out. You just go up there and swing, and whatever happens will happen.<br /><br />
It’s true that despair is often associated with excessive pessimism. Whatever you propose doing, a person in despair can explain to you why it won’t work. And so, faced with someone in despair, you may find yourself arguing for optimism. But those arguments usually miss the point, because a depressed person's pessimism is an effect, not a cause. The cause is despair, their intense conviction that striving can't possibly make things better.<br /><br />
Responding to despair by committing yourself to optimism can lead to self-delusion and denial. For example, what if you had believed all the happy things the president has told us about the virus? It won’t come here. Or it will go away, like magic. Soon the economy will recover, and before long, we’ll be back to normal, as if the pandemic never happened. <br /><br />
You would have been disappointed again and again. Each new denial may provide a small jolt of energy, but it's a sugar high that fades as the world refuses to cooperate.<br /><br />
The human condition is that we can never really know what’s going to happen, or whether the future will be good or bad. <br /><br />
So in my view, the path away from despair is not to claim to know things we don't actually know. Instead, we should acknowledge, humbly and courageously, our uncertainty. Whether the subject is the pandemic, the economy, the election, racism, or something in our personal lives, we don't know what's going to happen, and that is precisely why we strive.<br /><br />Two of my Quincy talks have delved into my personal sources of hope. As you may have read in the newsletter, I write a weekly political blog. And as you probably have noticed for yourself, politics these last few years has not been a source of joy for people with UU values. So friends are always saying to me, "I couldn't immerse myself in the news the way you do, because it's just too depressing."<br /><br />
Both times, trying to address that comment eventually led me to talk about faith, which is a controversial topic to raise among Unitarian Universalists, because many of us do not hear the word “faith” gladly. (So if mentioning “faith” has already made you tense up a little, I’m going to ask you to bear with me for a minute or two, because this discussion of faith may not wind up where you expect.)<br /><br />
One of the things I observe when I examine my own hope, is that it has an irrational aspect to it. And I think that irrationality needs to be there. Because any really resilient hope has to keep you going even when it looks like you’re failing. <br /><br />
Like it says in the song “You Gotta Have Heart” from <i>Damn Yankees</i>.<br />
<blockquote>
When the odds are saying you’ll never win, <br />that’s when the grin should start. <br />First you gotta have heart.</blockquote>
<br />
It’s not an entirely rational thing.<br /><br />
If you look closely at just about great development in human history, I think at some point you'll find a person who by all logic should have quit, and just didn't. You may observe the same pattern in your own life. I know I can see it in mine. If I look back at any accomplishment I'm particularly proud of, there was almost always a moment when I was sure it wasn't going to work. And if I had quit then, it wouldn't have.<br /><br />
So we don’t just need rational hope. We need a certain amount of irrational hope. And irrational hope, I believe, needs to have roots in some kind of faith.<br /><br />
But there’s a common mistake here that explains why this whole line of thought has developed such a bad reputation among UUs. Usually what you’ll hear is: “My hope is rooted in my faith. So if you want to have hope too, you need to adopt my faith.” For example, a traditional Christian might say: “I live in hope, because I have faith in a loving God who will not let bad things happen to His people. So that’s what you need to believe.”<br /><br />
Now, I grew up in a religion like that, and trust me, I’ve looked everywhere inside myself to find that kind of faith. And I just don’t have it. <br /><br />
It turns out, you can’t choose to have faith in something just because it would be convenient. St. Paul said, "Faith is a gift of God." And when the Unitarian King John Sigismund of Transylvania proclaimed the Edict of Torda, the first guarantee of religious freedom in post-Reformation Europe, that was his justification: Faith is a gift of God. If God gave your neighbor a different faith than God gave you, you just need to accept that, because nothing can be done about it. If we’re talking about real conviction rather than pretending, other people can't just decide to believe what you believe. You can't force them and they can’t force you. <br /><br />
So rather than suggest that you take up somebody else’s faith and try to fake it until you make it, I recommend that you look deep inside yourself until you find the faith you actually have. Then you can plant your hope there.<br /><br />
The way I think you'll recognize that faith is that you <i>didn't</i> choose it. You can't; you're just stuck with it. "Here I stand," Martin Luther is supposed to have said. "I cannot do otherwise." That's what it feels like when you really find your faith: You're helpless. You can't not believe it.<br /><br />So those two talks consisted largely of me rummaging through the discard pile of faith and trying things on until I found something that fit me. In that spirit, let me suggest a couple of hope-nurturing faiths you may already have, even if you don't usually call it "faith". <br /><br />
One classically Unitarian faith is a social version of that traditional Christian faith I just mentioned. In other words, maybe you can't believe in a God who is going to make your personal story come out the way you want. But you do believe in something larger, in the progress of humanity, or in what Theodore Parker called “the moral arc of the universe” bending towards justice. To the extent that you can make your story part of that larger story, you can believe in your eventual triumph. <br /><br />
That's what's going on in Martin Luther King's Mountaintop speech, the one he gave the night before he died. He envisions his people arriving in the promised land of freedom, and says, "I may not get there with you. … But it really doesn't matter with me now, because I've been to the mountaintop.” <br />His personal story was going to end the next day. But even anticipating that possibility, he does not view his striving as pointless, because it has been part of a larger effort that he is sure will not fail.<br /><br />
At the 1980 Democratic convention, Ted Kennedy gave a speech that acknowledged the end of his personal presidential ambitions. That could have been a sad moment, but instead it was inspiring, because Kennedy invoked a vision larger than himself: “The work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die."<br /><br />
Maybe you have that faith. And if you do, that's a ground you can plant your hope in.<br /><br />There's also a classically Universalist kind of faith, which rests not so much on God or progress, but on people. Universalists believe that no one is beyond redemption, that there is in everyone, somewhere, at least some tiny spark of goodness that could be nurtured and grow.<br /><br />
In times that are dominated by fear, the goodness in people can be hard to see. That little flame of goodness inside you may become something that you hold closely and even hide away, for fear the winds of the world will blow it out. And if everyone gives in to that fear, then none of us can see each other’s goodness, and the world looks very dark.<br /><br />
But even in that darkness, miraculous things still happen. Because, as Michelle Obama put it, "History has shown us that courage can be contagious, and hope can take on a life of its own."<br /><br />
And so, in certain wonderful moments, one person decides not to be afraid any more, and stands there in front of a tank. And another person says, "I can't let her die by herself" and stands with her. And then there are ten people, and then twenty. And then somebody inside the tank says, "I can't just run over all those people." And now you have a revolution. <br /><br />
An oppressive ruler who seemed to have all the power in the world on his side, can fall, just like that, when the contagion of courage and hope gets rolling, and we all discover that the people around us have far more inside them than we had ever imagined. <br /><br />
Maybe you have that faith. <br /><br />When I introspect, I find that I have both of those faiths, most of the time. And most of the time, that’s enough to keep me doing what I do. <br /><br />
My tiny blog is just a small part of the larger movement of people looking for truth and sharing the kind of reliable information that allows a democratic society to govern itself. And whether I succeed or fail, that movement will continue and will ultimately triumph.<br /><br />
I believe that, most of the time.<br /><br />
Also most of the time, I believe in the goodness of my readers. I believe they want to understand.<br />
They want to be more involved. They want to be more idealistic, have more courage, and take more effective action. <br /><br />
So helping them do that is not just me shining my light into the world, it's uncovering their light, which will shine further and brighter than mine ever could. <br /><br />
And I believe that too, most of the time. But now and then, my skepticism overwhelms those faiths. And I think, "I don't really know which way the moral arc of the universe bends. And while I do believe in the hidden goodness of people, it’s kind of like dark matter. I'm not really sure there's enough of it to keep the Universe from flying apart."<br /><br />
I hate to admit that, because those are beautiful faiths. I miss them when they're gone. But I find I can't hang onto them, at least not all the time. And that's a problem, because a faith that you only hold most of the time will fail you at precisely the moments when you need it most. <br />So I had to look deeper. And when I did, I eventually found something that is maybe not as grand, but is much simpler: I believe that knowing is better than not knowing, that understanding is better than not understanding, and that if you can pass your understanding on to someone else, you've done a good thing. <br /><br />
In an objective sense, I don't know that those statements are any more convincing than the other faiths I've talked about. But they turn out to be the faith I have. Knowing, understanding, explaining -- those are good things. My skepticism can't touch that, because I can't not believe it.<br /><br />
I don't know where that came from. I understand why St. Paul described faith as a gift of God, because I don't remember anybody instilling that faith in me, and don't believe I ever chose it. I'm just stuck with it. Here I stand. <br /><br />
And it keeps me going, no matter what happens. <br /><br />So what point do I want you to take home from this? It's not that you should share my faith or share my hope or do what I do. But I do strongly recommend that you take your own journey of introspection, until you find the unique faith that you happen to be stuck with. That is a place where your hope can take root.<br /><br />
And one more thing: Hope doesn't just need roots, it needs branches. There needs to be something in your life, something you devote effort to, that expresses your unique faith and your unique hope.<br /><br />
Now, once you have that thriving hope with roots and branches, I wish could promise you that everything will turn out OK, that you'll necessarily succeed in what you do. Unfortunately, it doesn't work that way. You could still fail. All your efforts could come to nothing. You may swing hard at that last pitch, and not hit it.<br /><br />
But here's what I can promise. If you nurture a hope that's rooted in your own faith, whatever it turns out to be, and that expresses itself in your life, however you manage to do that, despair will have a hard time claiming you. And whether your efforts succeed or fail, I doubt you will ever be sorry that you tried.<i> </i>Doug Muderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04666144843949850394noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13399254.post-16288090891205728802019-12-18T07:28:00.000-05:002019-12-18T07:28:58.964-05:00Have Yourself a Very UU Christmas<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>presented at the Unitarian Church of Billerica, Massachusetts on December 15, 2019</i></div>
<h3>
Opening Words</h3>
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The opening words were said by Charlie Brown: “Isn’t there anyone who knows what Christmas is all about?”</div>
<h3>
Readings</h3>
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On the day before Thanksgiving, a piece called “<a href="https://www.huffpost.com/entry/atheist-gratitude-giving-thanks_n_5dd8094ae4b0913e6f6b9278" target="_blank">I am not blessed</a>” by Jennifer Furner appeared on the Huffington Post web site. Here’s a part of it:</div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Now that I’m in my 30s, I often reflect on who I’ve become and where my life is going. I’m lucky to be privileged enough to have the time and means to visit this beautiful property a few times a year to clear my head, do some writing and commune with nature.<br /><br />I wish to show my appreciation for everything I have and all the things I’ve learned so far. But how? And to whom or what do I give thanks?<br /><br />As I hike across the prairie, away from the stone chapel, I consider the upcoming holiday designated to giving thanks. I think of my family — my brother, our spouses, our children, and my mother — soon to be gathered around a table full of delectable foods.<br /><br />Our Catholic upbringing ingrained in us since childhood that dinner is off-limits until we hold hands, bow our heads and my mother recites “Bless us, O, Lord, and these, Thy gifts,” or my brother offers a freestyle list of how we have all been blessed by God. I hold their hands, but instead of bowing my head and closing my eyes, I simply wait. I appreciate that they are thankful, and I’m thankful for the same things they are. But sitting at the table, eyes open, mouth closed, I appear ungrateful to them.<br /><br />And then Christmas arrives soon after. Some people go out of their way to remind us that “Christ is the reason for the season,” and insist the proper way to greet people is with a “Merry Christmas” instead of the more inclusive “Happy Holidays.” Their insistence that all gratitude and celebration must be devoted to a Christian God excludes not only people of other faiths, but atheists like me; it inflicts a guilt of sorts on those who just want to enjoy the snow, the trees, the twinkle lights. They dismiss our perspective by telling us it’s not enough to wish each other a happy holiday season ― thanks are always owed to God.<br /><br />But my experience after leaving Catholicism proves otherwise.<br /><br />Even when God is gone, gratefulness remains.</blockquote>
<div style="text-align: left;">
The second reading is from an article that appeared three years ago in The Jewish Voice: “<a href="http://thejewishvoice.com/2016/12/28/you-are-the-light-you-are-the-miracle/" target="_blank">You are the Light, You are the Miracle</a>” by Rabbi David Bibi. It contained this interesting paragraph:</div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The Talmud teaches that Adam created in Late September noticed during the first three months of his life how the days slowly became shorter and shorter – He said: Woe to me, because of my sin the world is getting darker … and will return to a world of darkness and confusion. This must be my death sentence. Instead of accepting this imminent fate, Adam overcame his depression and took upon himself to fast, pray and repent. After eight days, Adam noticed that the days indeed had begun to lengthen. Realizing that this is ‘<i>minhago shel olam</i>’ [the way of the world or nature], he made a celebration for eight days giving thanksgiving to the Almighty. The next year, he made these days holidays. <br /><br />The Rabbis explain that Adam had good intentions when making these holidays; however his offspring turned them into holidays of … nature worship. The Talmud tells us that this is the origin of Saturna and Kalenda which we explained eventually became Christmas and New Years. </blockquote>
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<h3>
Sermon</h3>
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Christmas, as we all know, is a Christian holiday celebrating the birth of Jesus. <br /><br />But whether you consider yourself a Christian or not — and UUs vary widely in how we relate to Christianity —it’s also a holiday we can’t ignore. From Thanksgiving on, and perhaps even sooner, we are assaulted by Christmas from all sides: the music, decorations, office parties, Christmas-themed movies and TV specials, expectations about gifts and dinners. <br /><br />There is no getting away from Christmas. So what can we do with it?<br /><br />Christians often remind us not to let the holiday drift away from what they see as its original purpose. “Keep Christ in Christmas,” appears on billboards or church signboards or in public service announcements. “Jesus,” we’re told “is the reason for the season.”<br /><br />That message shows up in popular culture as well. When Charlie Brown, at the depth of his pre-holiday frustration, pleads “Isn’t there anyone who knows what Christmas is all about?” Linus responds by reciting Luke’s account of angels appearing to shepherds, announcing “tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, which is Christ the Lord”. The angels close with “Glory to God in the highest, and on Earth peace, good will toward men.”<br /><br />“That,” Linus concludes, “is what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown.”<br /><br />Without the birth of Jesus, the cartoon seems to say, Christmas is basically empty, and can only devolve into some kind of materialistic nightmare: commercial Christmas, with its greed for presents and the constant urging to buy more and more; or high-pressure Christmas, where there are too many things to do, too many people to see, too much food to cook, and the persistent feeling that there is a perfect Christmas, a way things are supposed to be, but that you are just not up to making it happen. <br /><br />It’s no wonder, then, that the Grinch hates Christmas, and believes he can bring an end to it if he steals all of Whoville’s presents and decorations and preparations for feasting. And though the Grinch is to that point the villain of the story, I wonder how many of the stressed-out parents who watch that cartoon with their children each year secretly feel the same temptation: to take every part and parcel of Christmas up to the top of Mount Crumpit to dump it. <br /><br />But at that point in the story something interesting happens, or rather, doesn’t happen: No one mentions Jesus. What turns the Grinch around, what makes his heart grow three sizes — presumably from unusually small to moderately large — is that the Whos down in Whoville, who have no presents, no decorations, and nothing to feast on, still come out of their homes, join hands, and sing. <br /><br />It’s not the chorus of angels that Linus describes, it’s the voice of the community. Not the promise of peace and good will in Christ’s millennial kingdom, but the offer of human good will, right here, right now. “Christmas Day is in our grasp, so long as we have hands to clasp.” <br /><br />So the Grinch is turned around not just “without packages, boxes, or bags”, but also without Jesus. How could it be so?<br /><br />The Grinch is far from the only example of a character whose Christmas miracle has little to do with Christianity. An angel appears in the Christmas classic “It’s a Wonderful Life”, but not to announce the birth of the Savior, or to assure George Bailey that the sacrifices he has made for others will win him a better life in Heaven. Instead, the angel shows George that his Earthly life has been meaningful in itself. There’s a profound difference between the Bedford Falls George loves and the hellish vision of Pottersville the angel shows him. But the cause of that difference isn’t Jesus, it’s George Bailey.<br /><br />And of course the patron saint of humanistic Christmas stories is Ebenezer Scrooge, whose tale has been told and retold in hundreds of different ways since Charles Dickens first imagined him in 1843. Again, there is a supernatural element to the story, but not a particularly Christian one. The message the ghosts bring to Scrooge isn’t the saving grace of Jesus Christ, it’s that death is coming one way or another, and that love is the best thing we can do with life while we have it. <br /><br />These stories are just part of large <i>humanistic</i> Christmas tradition that has built up over the last 200 years or so. Without a lot of fanfare, a meaningful humanistic holiday of Christmas has formed alongside the Christian holiday, to the point that it is now possible — in spite of what Linus says — to have a deep Christmas experience with or without Christianity.<br /><br />Today I want to talk about how that happened and why it works. And if I dive into this topic in a little more detail than might otherwise be necessary, it’s because I have an ulterior motive: I’m coming back here on Palm Sunday to talk about what UUs can do with Easter. <br /><br />I find Easter to be a far more difficult holiday than Christmas, largely because the secular culture has yet to humanize Easter the way it has humanized Christmas. There is no Scrooge of Easter, no Grinch, no wonderful life. In 1897, The New York Sun assured eight-year-old Virginia that Santa Claus exists “as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist”. But there is no comparable defense of the Easter Bunny, and it’s hard to imagine one. <br /><br />So while Easter can be a meaningful holiday for Christians and an enjoyable one for children, it’s much harder to say what message it has for the rest of us. How can Easter work with or without Christianity? That’s a hard question, which is why I want to take on the easier one first: How did we come to have the option of a meaningful Humanist Christmas?<br /><br />I think the example of Humanist Christmas teaches us three basic principles about how you build a new holiday inside an older one: First, <b>the new holiday shouldn’t fight the old holiday head-on</b>. Creating a humanistic version of Christmas didn’t involve building an anti-Christmas that debunks the story of Jesus or inverts the Christian message. <br /><br />Dickens’ “Christmas Carol”, for example, is quite the opposite of skeptical. I imagine that many Christians of 1843 saw it as an affirmation of their tradition, not the beginning of a rebellion against it. Similarly, Christians can feel their values affirmed, not denied, by the selfless life of George Bailey.<br /><br />But it would be hard to get away from the Christian nature of Christmas if every tradition for celebrating the holiday were tightly integrated with the Christian mythos and Christian theology. So the second principle of new holidays is to <b>recognize just how few of the old holiday’s traditions have any connection to what the holiday claims to be about</b>. Lacking that connection, those traditions can fit the new holiday just as well as the old one.<br /><br />For example, the Bethlehem story is fundamentally about a poor nuclear family spending the night in a stable because they are cut off from any friends or relatives who might take them in. And yet somehow the central celebration of Christmas is a great feast shared by the entire extended family. That bountiful Christmas dinner might be the one time all year when you see all the cousins and uncles and grandchildren in the same place. <br /><br />A gathering like that says more about our culture than it does about Christianity. We have that big family dinner not because Mary and Joseph did, but because that’s how we like to celebrate. Even if you were raised in a devout Christian family, chances are that most of the Christmas traditions you remember fondly — the foods you make, movies you watch, how you open presents, and so on — have very little Christian content.<br /><br />Many of the traditions now associated with Christmas date back to holidays that preceded Christmas. Ten years ago, the journal History Today published an <a href="https://www.historytoday.com/archive/did-romans-invent-christmas" target="_blank">article</a> with this first paragraph: “It was a public holiday celebrated around December 25th in the family home. A time for feasting, goodwill, generosity to the poor, the exchange of gifts and the decoration of trees. But it wasn’t Christmas. This was Saturnalia, the pagan Roman winter solstice festival.” <br /><br />The poet Catullus referred to Saturnalia as “<i>optimo dierum</i>”, literally “the best of days”, or, translating more loosely “the most wonderful time of the year”. Similarly, the Yule log and evergreens come from a Teutonic winter holiday. I could go on, but you get the idea.<br /><br />The Christian mythos extended itself to capture and explain these traditions — we give presents to commemorate the gifts of the Magi, the star of the top of the tree is the star of Bethlehem, and so on — but often the traditions were there before Christianity came along to explain them. So nothing should stop us from re-interpreting these traditions in new ways that harmonize with our beliefs and are meaningful to us.<br /><br />The third principle of new holidays is that <b>most holidays have their roots in shared human experiences that go back much further than any recorded history. The new holiday can tap into those primordial roots just as authentically as the old holiday does.</b> In the case of Christmas, Saturnalia, Hanukkah, the Feast of Saint Lucy, and many other December holidays, it’s clear what that primordial experience was: the Winter Solstice. <br /><br />Perhaps you were amused by the Talmudic myth in the reading, of Adam experiencing the shortening days of Autumn for the first time, and fearing that the Sun would go away forever. But if you put yourself back into the mindset of hunter-gatherer tribes, that is not such a crazy thought. <br /><br />We spend so much our lives indoors that it is hard to recapture ancient peoples’ experience of the sky and the Sun. The Sun was not just their source of light and warmth, it was their compass and their timepiece. They would have paid great attention to its path across the sky. In particular, each Fall they would have noticed how that path was sinking. <br /><br />In mid Summer, when the Sun is strongest, it climbs high into the sky and passes almost directly overhead. But as Fall progresses, the Sun seems to get increasingly feeble. It rises later and sets sooner. Its path across the sky gets closer and closer to the horizon, as if it no longer had the strength to climb all the way up.<br /><br />At some point, just about every intelligent child must have had the same thought as Adam: Is the Sun’s path going to keep sinking? In another few weeks, will the Sun just vanish over the horizon and be gone forever?And the answer to those questions could not have been very satisfying. Remember, at this point no one knows how the tilt of the Earth’s axis causes the seasons as the planet orbits the Sun. No one communicates with people in the opposite hemisphere, who can verify that the Sun is still quite strong where they are. And to the primitive eye, there is no obvious reason for the Sun to turn around where it does. It’s not like it bounces off some visible barrier.<br /><br />No, the only answer available at that point in history is that the Sun will start climbing higher in the sky again because it always does. The Winter Solstice has never failed before. We’ve got it timed out; we know when it’s supposed to happen. Wait and see.<br /><br />But given that the question is whether all of life will end in cold and darkness, an answer like “It’s never done that before” is only reassuring up to a point. There’s a first time for everything, after all.<br /><br />So I imagine that at this time of year, even the oldest, wisest people in the village, the ones who had seen Winter Solstice arrive on schedule dozens and dozens of times, would study the sky with a certain anxiety. It’s one thing to know that it always happens this way. But to see that it actually <i>is</i> happening yet again — that the Sun has already started to gain strength and move higher in the sky than it did yesterday — that must have been a tremendous relief. Of course you’d have a big celebration. <br /><br />It’s striking to realize just how many of the themes of Christmas are already baked in to the ancient experience of the Winter Solstice. That the Sun turns for no reason we can see, that it stops moving away from us and starts coming back, can only be described as a miracle. And so the Winter Solstice reaffirms the possibility of miracles. The season of the Solstice becomes a time of magic, a time when anything might happen.<br /><br />The turning of the Sun easily becomes a symbol of all the other things we wish would turn around. Things that have been getting worse for a very long time may, for no reason that we can see, turn around and start getting better. If the Sun can turn around, who knows what else might turn around? And so the Winter Solstice becomes a season of hope.<br /><br />And let’s picture that hope in a little more detail. Because while the Solstice may be the darkest time of the year, it usually isn’t the coldest or most dire. January and February will be colder, and very end of Winter, when the harvest surplus is long gone, the slow animals have already been caught, and every bush and tree in the forest has been picked over — that will be the time of greatest peril.<br /><br />But through those trying times, the Sun will give people hope. Because however difficult the rest of Winter might be, the days will slowly but steadily get longer. The Sun is gaining strength, and that’s how you know that the hard times will not last forever. Eventually the Sun will win, and there will be Spring and Summer and the harvest. <br /><br />What is celebrated on the Solstice then, is not that we are saved from Winter immediately, but that the process of our salvation has begun. So if your religion includes a myth of the Divine Child, the one who cannot save us yet, but who will save us when he is grown, there is a natural time for that child to be born. To the Romans, December 25 was the feast of Sol Invictus, the invincible Sun. Mithras, the Persian savior/god who became the central figure of a mystery cult popular among the Roman legions, was born on December 25. The Bible does not say when Jesus was born. But when the early Christians decided to celebrate a birthday, it was clear what day that had to be.<br /><br />Those three principles put us in a position to list the content of a humanist Christmas, and to see how it comes to have that content authentically — not stealing it from Christianity, but harvesting it from the same sources. <br /><br />Humanist Christmas is a time of celebration. It is a time for gathering together family and friends, for feasting and decorating and exchanging gifts. It is a time of generosity, both materially and spiritually. It is also a time of hope, and a time to make one more try at something, not because you’re sure it will work, but because you never know. Sometimes things turn around for no reason that you can see, so it’s worth creating the opportunity.<br /><br />In particular, it’s worth sending out one more invitation and making one more phone call, even if you think the answer will be no. It’s worth trying to heal divisions, because the people who seem lost to you, the ones who have been estranged from you or the family or the community for a very long time, might, this time, turn around and start coming back. No one expected the Grinch to carve the roast beast. Scrooge’s nephew Fred never stopped inviting the old man for Christmas, and then one year he came, and kept coming every year after. Dickens doesn’t tell us whether Fred ever understood why.<br /><br />Or perhaps you are the one who has been estranged for too long. Perhaps it is you who needs to turn around, and, this year, come home for the holidays.<br /><br />And finally, Humanist Christmas is also a time to think big, to reach beyond what you know is possible and to dream of things that may or may not be possible. Saving the world. Peace on Earth. If the Sun can turn around, then maybe the human race can turn around too.<br /><br />I claim that is a complete holiday. Nothing is missing. There is no Jesus-shaped hole in it, unless you bring an expectation of Jesus with you.<br /><br />But if you do, that brings me around to my final point. The title of talk promised not a Humanist Christmas, but a UU Christmas, which is a bit different. Because one of the essential features of Unitarian Universalism is that you get to be exactly as Christian as you need to be. No more and no less.<br /><br />Our closing hymn, which we’ll sing in a few minutes, provides a good example of a 19th-century Unitarian being exactly as Christian as he needed to be, and using a traditional Christmas motif to say something that he believed the people of his day needed to hear. <br /><br />“It Came Upon a Midnight Clear” has become a Christmas standard. And if you only sing the first verse, you might think it’s yet another song about angels appearing to shepherds. But the music belies that interpretation, because it’s not celebratory, like “Hark the Herald Angels Sing” or triumphant like “Joy to the World”. Although the melody is lovely, if you listen carefully, you’ll hear a tinge of sadness that you won’t find in other Christmas carols.<br /><br />There’s a reason for that. The year was 1849, and the United States had just fought a war for territory, the Mexican War. To many, that war was a disappointing sign that America had lost its idealism and was on its way to becoming a war-fighting empire like all the other empires.<br /><br />And so, when the Unitarian minister Edmund Hamilton Sears sat down to write his carol, what he has in mind wasn’t to celebrate the birth of Jesus. It was to lament all the wisdom and all the chances for peace that humanity has squandered over the centuries. In short, Sears didn’t just rehash a Christmas tradition for its own sake, he made it work for him.<br /><br />That’s what we should do too. If it works for you to make Jesus the reason for the season, you absolutely should. If it honestly fills you with joy to sing that the Lord has come, then sing away. If your Christmas wouldn’t be complete without angels, and wise men and shepherds, by all means have angels and wise men and shepherds. If God feels closer to you at Christmas than at any other time of the year, then you would be foolish to ignore that feeling.<br /><br />But if, the other hand, you find the Christian aspects of Christmas to be meaningless, or even off-putting, then you can let them go without guilt or regret. Because there is plenty of holiday still to celebrate. <br /><br />A Unitarian Universalist Christmas means being exactly as Christian as you need to be, to have the fullest, deepest, most meaningful Christmas you can.<br /></div>
<h3>
Benediction</h3>
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In the words of Dr. Seuss: “Christmas Day is in our grasp as long as we have hands to clasp. Christmas Day will always be just so long as we have we.”<br /><i> </i></div>
Doug Muderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04666144843949850394noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13399254.post-83089917216059032322019-10-29T10:19:00.000-04:002019-10-29T10:19:26.400-04:00The Spirit of Democracy<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>presented at the Unitarian Church of Quincy, Illinois<br />October 27, 2019</i></div>
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<h4 style="text-align: left;">
Opening Words</h4>
The opening words are from the sermon John Winthrop preached in 1630 on board the Arbella, to the colonists on their way to found the new settlement of Boston.<br />
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We must delight in each other; make others’ conditions our own; rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, as members of the same body.</blockquote>
<h4>
Children's Story: Stone Soup </h4>
<span style="font-weight: normal;">One day a traveler came to a village, pulling a cart behind him. In the wagon was an enormous cooking pot, and inside the pot was … nothing.</span><br />
<span style="font-weight: normal;"></span><br />
<span style="font-weight: normal;">As he approached the village green, villagers came up to him, looked in the wagon, looked in the pot, and said, “You don’t seem to have any food with you, so I think you’ve come to the wrong place. This is a poor village in the best of times, and these are not the best of times. Many are hungry, and no one has extra food to offer you. You should just keep going, and maybe you’ll have better luck down the road.”</span><br />
<span style="font-weight: normal;"></span><br />
<span style="font-weight: normal;">But the traveler said, “You mistake my purpose. I didn’t come to ask you for food. I am going to cook a wonderful soup in this pot, and offer a bowl to anyone who wants it.”</span><br />
<span style="font-weight: normal;"></span><br />
<span style="font-weight: normal;">Well, there were indeed many hungry people in the village, so that offer drew their attention. “But what are you going to put in your soup?”</span><br />
<span style="font-weight: normal;"></span><br />
<span style="font-weight: normal;">To which the traveler replied: “Watch and see.”</span><br />
<span style="font-weight: normal;"></span><br />
<span style="font-weight: normal;">So everyone watched him as he filled the pot with water from the village well, and gathered wood and started a fire. And as the water began to heat, he took something out of his cloak and unwrapped it: a stone.</span><br />
<span style="font-weight: normal;"></span><br />
<span style="font-weight: normal;">“This is a magic stone,” he said. “Exactly how I obtained it is a tale that perhaps I might tell some other time. But for now just let me tell you how the enchantment works: Whenever I am hungry (and I have to admit I am hungry now) all I have to do is boil this stone, and it produces stone soup, which is the most filling and nutritious soup I have ever eaten. The stone will fill any vessel with soup, and that’s why I carry a pot so much bigger than I need for myself, so that I have plenty to share with others.”</span><br />
<span style="font-weight: normal;"></span><br />
<span style="font-weight: normal;">The villagers weren’t sure what to make of this story, but they watched as the traveler stirred and sniffed and reminisced about all the wonderful times he had eaten stone soup. As they listened to him, their mouths watered and their stomachs growled.</span><br />
<span style="font-weight: normal;"></span><br />
<span style="font-weight: normal;">“And all you need is that stone?” someone asked.</span><br />
<span style="font-weight: normal;"></span><br />
<span style="font-weight: normal;">“Well,” admitted the traveler, “by itself stone soup is filling and nutritious, as I said. But if you add just a little cabbage, it becomes tasty as well.”</span><br />
<span style="font-weight: normal;"></span><br />
<span style="font-weight: normal;">To everyone’s surprise, one of the village’s poorest and hungriest women said: “I have a few cabbages hidden away.”</span><br />
<span style="font-weight: normal;"></span><br />
<span style="font-weight: normal;">“These will do marvelously,” said the traveler as he cut them up and added them to the pot.</span><br />
<span style="font-weight: normal;"></span><br />
<span style="font-weight: normal;">Now the air was full of the smell of cooking cabbage, which drew all the rest of the villagers out to the green. “Stone soup with cabbage is indeed quite tasty,” the traveler said. “But if it also has a few carrots, it becomes downright delicious.”</span><br />
<span style="font-weight: normal;"></span><br />
<span style="font-weight: normal;">“I have a few carrots,” another villager said.</span><br />
<span style="font-weight: normal;"></span><br />
<span style="font-weight: normal;">Once the carrots were added, the aroma became irresistible, and the villagers began to volunteer. “Do you think some potatoes would help?”</span><br />
<span style="font-weight: normal;"></span><br />
<span style="font-weight: normal;">“I have just a bit of salted pork.” </span><br />
<span style="font-weight: normal;"></span><br />
<span style="font-weight: normal;">“Corn,” offered another. “Salt and pepper.” </span><br />
<span style="font-weight: normal;"></span><br />
<span style="font-weight: normal;">The traveler praised each offering as exactly what the soup needed, until one by one, every household in the village had added something to the pot. With each ingredient, his claims for the soup grew, until he declared that even the King himself would not enjoy such a fine soup that day.</span><br />
<span style="font-weight: normal;"></span><br />
<span style="font-weight: normal;">When the traveler pronounced the soup done, he ladled out a bowl to each and every villager. And as he scraped out the last of the soup for himself, there at the bottom of the pot was the stone. He very carefully picked it up, cleaned it off, wrapped it up, and put it back in his cloak for the next time he might need stone soup.</span><br />
<span style="font-weight: normal;"></span><br />
<span style="font-weight: normal;">And as the villagers ate, they all agreed that this was the most wonderful soup they had ever tasted, and every word the traveler had said about it was perfectly true.</span><br />
<h4>
Readings </h4>
<h4>
<span style="font-weight: normal;">Like many people who grew up in Quincy, my ancestry is almost entirely German. In most situations, that puts my American-ness beyond question. Nobody sees my presence in this country as a problem, or claims that my German background makes my loyalty dubious, or tells me to go back where I came from. <br /><br />Today, Pennsylvania Dutch — Dutch being a corruption Deutsche, meaning German — is a tourist-attracting species of Americana, and the entire town of Frankenmuth, Michigan is basically a Bavarian theme park. <br /><br />But it’s worth remembering that German immigrants weren’t always considered so benign and charming. In a letter to Peter Collinson written in May of 1753, Ben Franklin expressed his concerns about the cultural threat the rising wave of German immigration posed to the English Pennsylvania colony:</span></h4>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-weight: normal;">Advertisements intended to be general are now printed in Dutch and English; the Signs in our Streets have inscriptions in both languages, and in some places only German: They begin of late to make all their Bonds and other legal Writings in their own Language, which (though I think it ought not to be) are allowed good in our Courts, where the German Business so encreases that there is continual need of Interpreters; and I suppose in a few years they will be also necessary in theAssembly, to tell one half of our Legislators what the other half say; In short unless the stream of their importation could be turned from this to other colonies, as you very judiciously propose, they will soon so out number us, that all the advantages we have will not in My Opinion be able to preserve our language, and even our Government will become precarious.</span></blockquote>
<h4>
<span style="font-weight: normal;"><br />In time, though, Germans and a variety of other immigrants became acceptable, and de Tocqueville observed that Americans were united more by political ideas than by a particular ethnicity or religion. Those ideas have sometimes been called “The American Creed”. And though that creed has never been codified, It is expressed in some canonical documents that we all recognize. I have collected a few here.<br /><br />From the Declaration of Independence:</span></h4>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-weight: normal;">We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.</span></blockquote>
<h4>
<span style="font-weight: normal;"><br />The Preamble of the Constitution:</span></h4>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-weight: normal;">We the People of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.</span></blockquote>
<h4>
<span style="font-weight: normal;">From the Gettysburg Address:</span></h4>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-weight: normal;">We here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.</span></blockquote>
<h4>
<span style="font-weight: normal;"><br />
From “The New Colossus” by Emma Lazarus:
</span><div style="text-align: center;">
<i><span style="font-weight: normal;">“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she</span></i><br />
<i><span style="font-weight: normal;">With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,</span></i><br />
<i><span style="font-weight: normal;">Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,</span></i><br />
<i><span style="font-weight: normal;">The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.</span></i><br />
<i><span style="font-weight: normal;">Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,</span></i><br />
<i><span style="font-weight: normal;">I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”</span></i></div>
</h4>
Early chapters of Samantha Power’s autobiography <i>The Education of an Idealist</i> tell what it’s like to pass through that golden door. If you’ve ever seen her on TV, you may not have guessed that this former Ambassador to the United Nations is an immigrant, but she came from Ireland at the age of 8, and wasn’t naturalized until adulthood. She describes the ceremony like this:<br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
During our collective Oath of Allegiance, we pledged, ‘I will support and defend the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic.’ </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Looking around the courtroom, seeing emotion ripple across the faces of those whose hands were raised, I was struck by what America meant as a refuge, and as an idea. All of us gathered that morning had reached the modern Promised Land. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
We weren’t giving up who we were or where we came from; we were making it American. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
I hugged an elderly woman from Central America on my left, and a tall man from Russia to my right. We were all Americans now.</blockquote>
<h4>
The Spirit of Democracy</h4>
I don’t think it’s news if I tell you that democracy is in trouble. A wave of authoritarian populism is sweeping the world, undermining and ultimately ending democracy in all but name in countries like Russia, Turkey, and Hungary. Other countries, like Poland, are moving in that direction. Authoritarian parties centered on the old fascist themes of blood and soil, are increasingly competitive in places like France and Germany, where democracy once seemed solidly established.<br />
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This morning I want to take a different tack than I often do in <a href="http://weeklysift.com/" target="_blank">my weekly political blog</a>, which I know some of you read. Rather than focus on the immediate crisis, which often involves denouncing whatever the outrage of the week might have been, I want to take a longer view. This morning I want to call your attention not so much to what is attacking democracy as what has made us vulnerable to that attack, and what we will need to rebuild if we make it through the current challenge. Not what is tearing democracy down, but what makes democracy work in the first place?<br />
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In any organism, health is more mysterious than disease, and I believe that’s the case here. Some very important factors in the health of democracy aren’t well understood or appreciated, even by people like Unitarian Universalists who value democracy highly. <br />
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One big misunderstanding, I’m sorry to say, is embedded in our Fifth Principle, the one that commits us to affirm and support “the use of the democratic process within our congregations and in society at large.” It’s the only mention of democracy in our principles, and from it you might get the idea that the essence of democracy is process: Hold elections, pass laws, list some basic rights in your constitution, and you must be a democracy.<br />
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Again and again, that misconception has led the United States astray in our “nation-building” efforts overseas. The European powers made similar mistakes when they gave their colonies independence after World War II. <br />
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Because if you are powerful enough, you can step in from the outside and install a process in some foreign land. You can convene a constitutional convention, oversee an election, and guarantee that the votes are counted fairly. So when you leave, there is an elected government operating under a constitution that promises human rights and the rule of law. What more could anyone ask?<br />
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And yet, again and again, those externally established democratic processes have failed. Because processes are dead unless some spirit animates them. Without the spirit of democracy, the processes of democracy become an elaborate performance with no underlying reality, like a ritual to honor a god no one believes in.<br />
<br />
I don’t want to get too mystical about this, so I should give a concrete example of a living democratic process I have experienced myself, and which you may have experienced as well. Several years ago I served on a jury in a drug case. In the beginning I wasn’t that excited to be there, and I doubt that my eleven colleagues were either. Who is, really? I doubt many people get the summons and say, “Oh goody! I get to do jury duty!”<br />
<br />
But it didn’t take long for the ritual of the court to work its magic on us. Surprisingly quickly, it became real to us that in this particular time and place, we <i>were</i> the community. It was up to us to balance the interest of the state in enforcing its laws against the right of the accused not to lose his liberty without a good reason.<br />
<br />
We had no special reason to care. None of us knew the defendant or were victims of his alleged crime. But we did care, and we did our job well. We listened intensely, both to the witnesses and to each other. We deliberated seriously, and several of us changed our minds.<br />
<br />
But if we had not caught the spirit, it would have been easy to treat that trial as a meaningless performance. We might not have bothered to pay attention and instead just voted our preconceived opinions about crime or the drug laws or the police or the people who live in that neighborhood. <br />
<br />
We did not do that. And even though our verdict was guilty, if I am ever on trial, I hope that I get a jury like us. <br />
<br />
There are times when I believe that Vladimir Putin and the other new authoritarians understand democracy better than we do. Because they have very adeptly focused their attacks on the spirit of democracy rather than its processes. In countries where they take control, democratic processes aren’t swept away; they are hollowed out, and become empty rituals. <br />
<br />
The formalities of campaigns and elections continue, but without any genuine attempt to seek the consent of the governed. The news media remains in the private sector and looks independent, but all major outlets are owned by allies of the government. Rituals of justice are still performed, but investigators, prosecutors, and judges all owe their loyalty to the Leader rather than the law. <br />
<br />
If you give voice to the People’s frustration, you probably won’t be whisked away to a gulag in the dead of night. Instead, you will be investigated for corruption and sentenced to prison in an orderly fashion. You will experience all the trappings of justice, but not the reality. <br />
<br />
The worldview that underlies these empty rituals is one of deep cynicism: Politicians are all corrupt. Businessmen are thieves. Science is fake. News is propaganda. Justice is a fairy tale. Fair play is irrelevant; all that matters is who wins.<br />
<br />
Worst of all, none of this is seen as the debasement of higher values. It’s just how life is. There are no real democracies, no common truths on which we might base our discussions, no shared principles that might guide our deliberations. Only children believe in such things.<br />
<br />
Having invoked that cynicism, it’s time for another positive example, this time from a different document out of the American canon, the Mayflower Compact, signed by the first pilgrims on their way to found the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The Compact is pretty thin on process. The pilgrims promise “to enact, constitute, and frame, such just and equal laws, ordinances, acts, constitutions, and offices, from time to time, as shall be thought most meet and convenient”. In other words, they pledge to come up with some kind of process eventually. <br />
<br />
But they do something else in this document, something that usually doesn't happen in the doomed democracies defined by lines some colonial power drew on a map. They pledge to “covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil body politic”. They promise that those processes they intend to establish someday will be “just and equal”, as well as “meet and convenient for the general good of the colony.”<br />
<br />
What the pilgrims are pledging, in other words, is to be a People together. Rather than submit to some external authority, they commit to govern themselves. And rather than use that government as a way for some to exploit others, they pledge to treat each other as equals and seek the general good.<br />
<br />
That’s what’s missing when the processes of democracy become empty: a covenantal relationship among people. Democracy is alive not when we are loyal to freedom of the press or one man one vote or trial by jury. All those abstractions only come alive <i>when we are loyal to each other</i>, and to everyone who joins our covenant. Everything else flows from that. <br />
<br />
“Delight in each other,” John Winthrop told his flock. That’s where it starts. When we value each other, when we feel responsible for each other, and accountable to each other, then the spirit of democracy will animate our processes. <br />
<br />
And that’s where the attack of the authoritarian forces has been most intense. When Putin launched an information war against us, the stolen identities and fake social media accounts weren’t used to push his philosophy and his point of view, the way that the Soviets might have done a generation ago. Instead, all that influence was used to turn us against one another, to feed our prejudices and build our rage against our own countrymen. The point wasn’t that Russia is good and Putin is your savior. It was that other Americans are out to get you. They hate what you stand for, and they want to take what’s yours. <br />
<br />
The would-be authoritarians in our own country are trying to hollow out citizenship itself. That naturalization ceremony that felt so meaningful to Samantha Power, that made her hug the Central American woman and the Russian man because “We were all Americans now.” — they want to turn that into an empty ritual as well. <br />
<br />
So what if you have been naturalized? If you are the wrong color or religion, your American-ness will always be suspect. If you make too much noise, if you get in the way, you still might be told to go back where you came from. The birthright citizenship guaranteed by the 14th Amendment is “a loophole” for “anchor babies”. Our asylum laws aren’t really laws either, they are “loopholes” for obtaining residency. <br />
<br />
Some go so far as to claim that the United States should be an ethnostate for white Christians. Others aren’t willing to put it quite so bluntly, but they casually throw around terms like “real Americans”. Maybe in some technical sense you are a “citizen”. Maybe the law recognizes you as a “voter”. But are you a “real” American? <br />
<br />
And how can an election be legitimate if the legal electorate votes differently than the “real” Americans? Wouldn’t it then make sense to discourage the “unreal” Americans, the fake and phony beneficiaries of our empty citizenship rituals, from voting at all? Wouldn’t it make sense to limit their power by packing them into gerrymandered districts and making them wait in long lines to vote? And so the processes of democracy become hollow. <br />
<br />
Time for another positive example: This last year, I’ve had a fascinating new window into a living democracy. Deb and I recently moved to Bedford, Massachusetts, the town where we’ve been attending church for the last 25 years. Bedford is a town of about a third the size of Quincy, and it is a direct democracy. We have a professional town manager who runs the executive side of government, and a board of selectman to oversee that manager. But once or twice a year we hold a town meeting that any registered voter can attend. That meeting functions as the town legislature.<br />
<br />
And so we, the citizens, wield the political power — not theoretically, by voting for representatives who may or may not do what we want, but directly. If you wonder why the middle school needs a new furnace, or question why we replace police cars as often as we do — you show up and ask, and someone has to answer you. If you want to do things differently, you speak up. And if enough of your neighbors agree with you, it’s changed, right then and there. You don’t have to plead to some higher authority, you just have to persuade your equals.<br />
<br />
Typically, a few hundred people show up, and it usually takes a couple evenings to get through the town’s business. The discussions we have are very different from the ones in Congress or the state legislatures. There’s no point in posturing, because you didn’t win an election to gain this power and you don’t need to win another one to keep it. You just show up; it’s your right as a citizen. And while it’s easy to imagine parliamentary maneuvers that would screw the process up, nobody does them. Because we want to get done with our business, and because it’s a small town and we have to live together.<br />
<br />
The Unitarian churches I’ve belonged to also work by direct democracy, and in general I’ve observed that the democracy is working best when the process looks terrible. For example, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a contested election for the Board. The challenge is always on the other side: finding enough candidates to fill the slots.<br />
<br />
Imagine if the national government worked that way. You’d get a call in the middle of dinner and someone would say, “Do you want to be senator? I know it’s short notice, but Dick and Tammy don’t want to do it any more and we really need somebody.”<br />
<br />
Think about why we get away with that kind of process. When a church is working well, the members share a broad consensus about what the church is and what it’s trying to do. When you have that kind of consensus, it almost doesn’t matter who holds the offices. Ancient Athens filled some of its offices by lot, figuring that any random citizen would make more-or-less the same choices.<br />
<br />
So now I think I’m ready to start answering some of the questions I posed at the beginning: What does a healthy American democracy look like? What do we need to rebuild once we get through the current crisis? I think we need to renew our allegiance to our unwritten national covenant, to restore our sense of who belongs to that covenant and what binds us together as a people, and regain a shared sense of what America is.<br />
<br />
I don’t think we need to invent much to do this. Most of the answers are waiting to be recovered from the American canon.<br />
<br />
At the time of the Founders, the problem was to get enough people to come here, not to keep them out. And so we didn’t have immigration laws worth mentioning until after the Civil War. There was no such thing as documented or undocumented. If you showed up, obeyed the laws, and managed to survive a few years, you were in.<br />
<br />
We may not want to follow the Founders that far. But as of old, we need to recognize that Americans are united not by race or religion, but by a political creed that is already sitting there in Jefferson’s Declaration: Everyone comes into this world with equal worth and dignity. Everyone has the right to live, to steer their own course through life, and to try to thrive as best they can. The power of government derives not from God or the ancestors or any other external source, but from the consent of the governed.<br />
<br />
If you’re here, and you believe those things, and if you’re willing to cast your lot with the rest of us, to defend our lives and our rights the way we defend yours, then I think you’re as American as anybody else.<br />
<br />
By the way, you might have wondered why I picked “Stone Soup” for the story. Over the years, America has been described by various metaphors: a city on a hill, a melting pot, a tossed salad, and others. Well, I want to suggest that America is a stone soup.<br />
<br />
What each villager has been doing wrong in that story, what the traveler tricks them out of, is imagining that the only food left is their own personal stash. They’ve been looking at each other as more mouths to feed, and not as people who might have something to offer.<br />
<br />
That’s been the special magic that has set America apart from the other nations. We have always been open to the possibility that people might have something to offer, even if we can’t see right away what it is. We don’t want to lose that magic.<br />
<br />
The creed that unites us also goes a long way to define what America is: a place of liberty and equality, where people have the opportunity to apply their talents and become whatever they have it in themselves to be. And to that I would add one more idea, which I would trace back to George Washington’s Farewell Address: America is a kind and generous member of the community of nations — willing to help, standing with others seeking the same kinds of freedoms we want for ourselves, but not lusting after empire or dominance. <br />
<br />
But as I paint that patriotic picture, I can anticipate your objections: How can we Americans square such a positive self-image with our actual history? with the Native American genocide? with slavery and Jim Crow? with the oppression of women, of gays and lesbians, of a long list of groups who in one way or another have been labeled abnormal or unworthy? How do we square it right now with the way we are separating families who come to our border looking for help?<br />
<br />
And I answer that the America we envision, the one that commands our highest loyalty, does not live in history. There is no moment we can look back to and say, “That was America. Let us make America great <i>again</i>.” The America we envision is an idea and always has been. We have never lived up to it and we’re not living up to it now. <br />
<br />
Who would know better than a black man in the midst of the Great Depression just how far American history has fallen short of the American idea? In 1935, Langston Hughes saw the dream of America as clearly as anyone:<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<br />
O, let my land be a land where Liberty<br />
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath, <br />
But opportunity is real, and life is free, <br />
Equality is in the air we breathe.</div>
<br />
But he also lived the reality. “America,” he wrote, “never was America to me.”<br />
<br />
Even so, he did not reject the American dream in scorn. He did not retreat into cynicism. Instead he found his America in the future. Hughes believed that our repeated failures should not invalidate our vision, but instead should only reinforce our conviction that someday we must succeed: <br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<br />
O, let America be America again—<br />
The land that never has been yet—<br />
And yet must be—the land where every [one] is free.<br />
… America has never been America to me, <br />
And yet I swear this oath: “America will be!”</div>
<br />
We fulfill the idea of America today in many ways that we fell short two hundred years ago, or fifty years ago, or even ten years ago. Our highest hope is that future generations will be America in ways that we never have been, that they will look back on us not as the good old days, but as an era only slightly less benighted than the ones before it.<br />
<br />
And so, we do not need to look backward and whitewash our history, or pretend the continent was empty and the Native Americans were never here, or claim that slavery wasn’t really that bad, or pretend that America has always been a good actor on the world stage, or that our motives for going to war have always been always pure. We don’t need to airbrush the racism and plutocracy that are still here today. <br />
<br />
We can acknowledge all that, and yet look ahead with Langston Hughes and say: “America will be!”<br />
<br />
I’ve left the hardest question to last, because I don’t have a good answer yet. Given how polarized this country has become, how are we going to renew our covenant? How are we going to reach across our divides and reclaim our loyalty to one another? <br />
<br />
“Delight in each other,” John Winthrop said. That seems so distant now. And yet, even here our history must give us hope, because we have been in worse places before. At a darker time than this one, President Lincoln closed his first inaugural address like this:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.
</blockquote>
May that day come soon.<br />Doug Muderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04666144843949850394noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13399254.post-20908842573545392722019-03-01T07:50:00.000-05:002019-03-01T07:54:14.744-05:00Men and #MeToo<h4 style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-weight: normal;">Presented to the Unitarian Universalists of Lakewood Ranch on February 24, 2019. A <a href="http://uuquincy.org/talks/20180930.shtml" target="_blank">previous version</a></span> <span style="font-weight: normal;">was given at the Unitarian Church of Quincy, Illinois. </span> </h4>
<h4 style="text-align: center;">
READINGS</h4>
<i>All the King's Men</i> by Robert Penn Warren is a Pulitzer-prize-winning novel published in 1946. In this segment, which would have taken place some time in the 1920s, the narrator, Jack Burden, describes his high-school romance with the woman who becomes the love of his life, Anne Stanton.<br />
<blockquote>
Sometimes, when I stopped the car she wouldn't even open her eyes until I had leaned over to kiss her, and I might have to kiss her enough to stop her breath.<br />
<br />
Or again, she would wait till just the instant before the kiss, then open her eyes wide, all at once, and say, "Boo!" and laugh. Then she'd be all knees and sharp elbows and little short laughs and giggles and serpentine evasions and strategy worthy of a jujitsu expert when I tried to capture her for a kiss.<br />
<br />
It was remarkable then how that little seat of a roadster gave as much room for deployment and maneuver as the classic plains of Flanders and a creature who could lie in your clutch as lissome as willow and soft as silk and cuddly as a kitten could suddenly develop that appalling number of cunning, needle-pointed elbows and astute knees.</blockquote>
I read that to you to point out what's not in it. It apparently never occurs to Jack (either at the time or years later when he's telling the story) that maybe some nights Anne just doesn't want a to be kissed. That's not a possibility he thinks he needs to account for.<br />
<br />
David Wong is also a novelist and writes for the website Cracked.com. The second reading is from an essay he wrote in 2016 in the wake of Donald Trump’s “Access Hollywood” tape. It’s called: "<a href="http://www.cracked.com/blog/how-men-are-trained-to-think-sexual-assault-no-big-deal/" target="_blank">7 Reasons So Many Guys Don't Understand Sexual Consent</a>".<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Here's the first lesson I got on sexual consent. I was six years old. My hero and lifelong role model, Han Solo, approaches a woman who has told him at every opportunity that she's not interested. Han comes up from behind and presses his body against hers. She's a strong woman, a fighter, so she physically shoves him off. <br />
<br />
Undeterred, Han moves back in, grabs her hands, and starts rubbing them. She says, "Stop that," and looks nervous. When he doesn't stop, she clearly says it again. He still doesn't stop. Romantic music plays … and he kisses her. Note: Her head is pressed up against a metal wall and all of this occurs in a sealed spacecraft floating in the cold vacuum of outer space. Even if she wanted to leave, she couldn't. <br />
<br />
The result of this encounter is that she falls in love with this man.<br />
<br />
I'd estimate that 95 percent of the action movie cool guy role models of my youth molested women into loving them at least once. James Bond did it in ... every movie, I think. In <i>Goldfinger</i> (1964), he rapes Pussy Galore in a barn, which causes her to abandon her life of crime and join his side. <br />
<br />
In <i>The Mask Of Zorro</i> (1998), a woman tries to kill Antonio Banderas, and in response, he strips her naked with his blade and forces a kiss. As a result, they fall in love.<br />
<br />
Let's be clear: During my formative years, I was absolutely taught that rape was wrong, many times. But "rape" was defined as a man with a ski mask in an alley forcing himself on a stranger under the threat of violence.<br />
<br />
If someone had come in and told teenage me that "groping" a woman or forcing kisses was a form of sexual assault, I'd have been very, very confused. You just called most of the action heroes of my childhood serial rapists! "And what if it makes her fall in love with him?"<br />
<br />
I never, in any of my public school years, had a lesson saying you needed to wait for verbal consent before touching a woman. I saw the quarterback of the football team slap girls on the butt. I saw guys reach around and grab girls' boobs as a prank. I saw mistletoe hung over doorways and was told if you and a girl stood under it, she had to kiss you. One time when we were playing volleyball at the beach, Dr. Dre ran up and unhooked a girl's bikini top.</blockquote>
Wong goes on to say that he never did anything like that himself. At the time, though, he didn’t experience that as his gentlemanly virtue, but rather as his lack of boldness and virility. He just never felt cool enough to act like James Bond.<br />
<br />
He goes on: <br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Have I mentioned that yet how much shame I felt at the time for not being a "real man”?<br />
<br />
The point of this isn't to defend [insert subject of most recent scandal here], but to prevent people from insisting that guys like him are rare, incomprehensible monsters. <br />
<br />
They're not. <br />
<br />
Ridding guys of toxic attitudes toward women is a monumental task. I've spent two solid decades trying to deprogram myself, to get on board with something that, in retrospect, should be patently obvious to any decent person.</blockquote>
<h4 style="text-align: center;">
SERMON</h4>
<b>Seeing differently. </b>I sometimes wonder what kind of a slave-owner I would have been. <br />
<br />
I know that sounds weird, because by now we're so far removed from the era of slavery that the evil of it seems obvious. So it's hard to imagine that we wouldn’t have seen it at the time. If we had owned slaves, of course we'd have freed them and become crusaders for abolition. What else could we possibly have done?<br />
<br />
But among the people who really did own slaves, comparatively few saw the evil of it. So I have to wonder: Would I have seen it?<br />
<br />
Picture me growing up in an old Virginia family that has owned slaves for generations. I've been surrounded by slaves all my life. And then, when I go off to college my parents give me Ezekiel as a manservant - to carry my bags, take care of my clothes, start the fire on cold mornings, and do all those other things enslaved people do.<br />
<br />
And I develop this strangely bifurcated relationship with Ezekiel. On the one hand, he is my closest companion. I spend more time with him than with anyone else, and he probably knows me better than my white friends do. But on the other hand, he is a piece of my property, a legally inferior being. Does that seem wrong to me, or not?<br />
<br />
One reason it might not is that I've been taught all the self-serving myths of my slave-owning culture: that Africans wouldn't know what to do with freedom, that they're childlike and need us to watch out for them, that they were lucky to be brought here and introduced to Christian civilization.<br />
<br />
And rather than the wrongness of slavery in general, I've been taught that there are good and bad masters. Some are cruel, and of course that is wrong. But my family, I am sure, treats our slaves well. Not like human beings exactly, but like prized cattle. They are valuable, and we respect that. So we are good masters.<br />
<br />
Would I see through those myths? Would I understand that Ezekiel is a human being like I am, and that his life means as much to him as mine does to me? Would I set him free and start making my own fires in the morning? Or not?<br />
<br />
And even a decade or two after Emancipation, how do I look back on those days? Do I still think of myself as a good master because I never had Ezekiel whipped? Or do I see my memories through new eyes now? Do I recall all the times when I discounted his point of view, or ignored his discomfort or humiliation? <br />
<br />
I'd like to think that at least now I would feel some guilt or shame. But maybe I wouldn't have. A lot of masters never did.<br />
<br />
I’ve gone off on this long tangent to make a point: When you are surrounded by people who see the world in a particular way, it is hard to see it differently. It is genuinely difficult to be significantly wiser or better than the culture of your time and place.<br />
<br />
<b>How men have reacted to #MeToo scandals. </b>One reason to doubt that I would have been better then is that in my lifetime I have been part of a group that has mistreated another group. We had our own self-serving mythology that explained and justified that mistreatment. And for a very long time I did not see through it. <br />
<br />
I’m talking about the sexual harassment of women by men, the kind that has been described in such volume under the #MeToo hashtag. <br />
<br />
One thing I find discouraging is that no matter how many times a new high-profile accusation restarts the national conversation, the reaction of men never seems to change. We keep sorting ourselves into the same categories and saying the same things. <br />
<br />
The accused usually admit nothing. And rather than express regret, they portray themselves as the “real” victims. They rage about the false accusations that are destroying their lives.<br />
<br />
Invariably, quite a few men rally around them. Whenever there's a new scandal, they think: "Oh, that poor man" - as if being called a rapist or abuser or harasser is even more horrible than being raped or abused or harassed. They worry that if the public starts believing these women, then none of us will be safe from false accusations. So what-if-she-is-lying is a possibility that they imagine in great detail and with deep empathy. What-if-she-is-telling-the-truth, not so much. <br />
<br />
Another cohort of men think of themselves as sympathetic to women. They believe the accusers and denounce the crimes. But their highest priority is to draw a bright red line between good men like themselves and the small number of bad men who do these things. <br />
<br />
When women widen their outrage to encompass men in general or start talking about a "rape culture", these men feel wronged. (They have aired their grievances under the #NotAllMen hashtag.) And like any privileged class, they believe that their own offended sensibilities should go to the front of the line. So we can talk about sexual harassment, but only after everyone acknowledges that it has nothing to do with me.<br />
<br />
In the public discussion surrounding the Brett Kavanaugh hearings last September, I heard yet another point of view, one I hadn't noticed before: a what-if-he-did view. Kavanaugh had been 17 or 18 when he was supposed to have assaulted Christine Blasey Ford. It was a long time ago. He's a different man now. So why does it matter?<br />
<br />
Interestingly, that argument didn't go over so well among 17 and 18-year-olds, who like to believe that their actions really do matter. But men Kavanaugh's age and older - men like me - ate it up. To my generation, I think, the attractive idea wasn't just that people change, it was that the early 1980s was a different time. Men using force against women wasn't taken as seriously then. It's almost as if we didn't know it was wrong.<br />
<br />
What I rarely hear from men, and what I would like to hear more often, is not just that rape and assault and harassment are wrong, but also that the men who do these things are not (as the reading put it) “rare, incomprehensible monsters”. Their crimes do not come out of nowhere. They come out of a way of thought, a way of viewing men and women, that is widespread in our culture. What separates these men from most of the rest of us, I believe, is not a difference of kind, but rather a difference of degree. <br />
<br />
I realize that's a sweeping accusation. In order to justify it, I will need to claim my own piece of the problem, and explain a little about how I was raised to think about men and women. <br />
<br />
<b>The self-serving mythology of my generation. </b>Much like slave-owners in the Old South, men of my generation had a self-justifying mythology with just enough truth in it that if we didn't want to see through it we didn't have to. (I won't try to speak for younger men, but I believe that a lot of these notions are still kicking around.)<br />
<br />
The mythology goes like this: Society doesn't allow women to admit that they want sex, but they secretly do. So when a man suggests sex, a woman is socially obligated to say no, even if she doesn't really mean it. <br />
<br />
It follows, then, that a man shouldn't take that first no for an answer. Or the second. Or maybe the third. If you make a grab for a woman and she pushes you away, you make another grab just to see if she's serious.<br />
<br />
Again and again, we were told that this works. Force that first kiss on a woman, and even if she's a strong character like Princess Leia, she may decide that she likes it. Force works. Persistence works. Stalking works. Refusing to take no for an answer is how you show a woman that you're really interested. So you should never give up, no matter what she says or does.<br />
<br />
And women, we were told, like it that way. Older, more experienced men assured us of that, and sometimes they even put those words into the mouth of some female character. In <i>Oklahoma</i>, Ado Annie, the girl who can't say no, sings:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Other girls are coy and hard to catch,<br />
But other girls ain't having any fun.<br />
Every time I lose a wrastling match<br />
I have the funny feeling that I won.</blockquote>
Now, of course, those lyrics were written by a man, Oscar Hammerstein. But Oscar didn't invent that point of view either. It's been around for literally thousands of years. <br />
<br />
As best I can determine, the original how-to-pick-up-girls manual was <i><a href="http://fata.dk/141/OVID.pdf" target="_blank">The Art of Love</a></i>, written by the Roman poet Ovid in the year 2. He says:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Though you call it force: it’s force that pleases girls. What delights is often to have given what they wanted, against their will. She who is taken in love’s sudden onslaught is pleased, and finds wickedness is a tribute. And she who might have been forced, and escapes unscathed, will be saddened, though her face pretends delight.</blockquote>
So go ahead and use force, guys. Women like it, even if they can’t admit it. Everyone says so. Or at least men say so, and they're the ones whose words get remembered.<br />
<br />
Of course we all knew that some men push it too far, just as slave owners knew that some masters were cruel. But like slave owners, we concluded just that there were some bad individuals, not that the whole system - and our own participation in it - was wrong.<br />
<br />
<b>The Game. </b>What results from that mythology and that justification is a view of male/female interaction as basically a game: Men are supposed to try to get away with things, and women are supposed to try to stop them. So if you're a man and you get away with something, well then, points to you. You scored.<br />
<br />
That mindset filtered all the way down to age groups that didn't have any clear idea what sex was. Little boys would bedevil little girls in all sorts of ways, just to see what they could get away with. If you managed to see a girl's underwear, points to you. If you managed to sneak into the girls bathroom, points to you. It was all part of the game. Of course, we never asked the girls whether they wanted to play this game. That didn't seem important.<br />
<br />
David Wong described how that game continued into high school: Force a girl to kiss you -- points to you. Unhook her bikini top on the beach -- points to you. And if you're not accumulating those kinds of points, then shame on you. You should be more like James Bond or Han Solo.<br />
<br />
So it's a game. <br />
<br />
But what are games, really? A game is a simpler world that we descend into for a time, a world with fewer options and clearer goals. Inside a game, we voluntarily give up the full complexity of human life and become players, or even just tokens. To play chess is to agree, for a period of time, to become the white pieces or the black pieces. In Monopoly, for a few hours you put aside your complicated life and become the Top Hat or the Race Car or the Little Dog.<br />
<br />
Inside the game, our choices are confined to the ones the rules allow, and our motives are shaped by the definition of winning. Along the way, we may act out combat or greed or cruelty, depending on what kind of game we're in.<br />
<br />
Sometimes, escaping into a game may be just what we need. Our real lives can be so paralyzingly complicated, and our accomplishments so ambiguous and uncertain. At the end of most days, it seems ridiculous to ask, "Did I win?" I don't know. I did things. Things happened. Maybe some of them will turn out well eventually. Who can say?<br />
<br />
What a relief it can be, then, to sink into a simpler world, to be a player, to make simple decisions and see immediate consequences. In a matter of minutes or maybe an hour or two, it's over: you win, you lose. Next game.<br />
<br />
And that can be fine, as long as the games eventually end and you reclaim your full humanity. But there can be times when the very depth that makes human existence rich and fascinating can start to feel like a burden. And then it can be tempting to turn large chunks of life into a game. We can get lost in those games, and start to imagine that our game character is who we really are. <br />
<br />
So, for example, you can get lost in the game of materialism, and start thinking that you are what you own. You can get lost in the game of corporate advancement or social climbing, and think that you are your job title or your position in the community. In playing the game, you haven't just taken a break from being your highest self, you've lost track of it completely.<br />
<br />
<b>Imagining Kavanaugh. </b>When we first heard Dr. Ford's accusations against Brett Kavanaugh, that he and a friend had pushed her into a side bedroom, held her down and started trying to take off her clothes, I think most people thought: "How could he do something like that?" And they concluded either that he didn't and she was lying, or that he did and he must be some kind of monster. <br />
<br />
But I found it disturbingly easy to imagine how he could have done it. He could have been lost in the Game of Men and Women. He was trying to get away with something, and she was trying to stop him, like men and women do. In his mind at that moment, they might not have been complete human beings, souls of infinite worth. Maybe they were just players.<br />
<br />
And yes, putting a hand over her mouth to stop her from screaming was cruel and vicious. But I also might cruelly force the Top Hat into bankruptcy, or viciously destroy black's king-side defense. If it was all happening in the game, he might have lost track not just of her humanity, but of his own also.<br />
<br />
You might deduce from that speculation that I identify with Brett Kavanaugh. And you'd be right, I do. But I take that identification somewhere different than his defenders do. It's not that I believe I should feel sympathy towards Kavanaugh. But that I should feel shame about myself.<br />
<br />
<b>The missing piece. </b>Male shame has been the missing piece of the #MeToo phenomenon. When the #MeToo hashtag went viral in 2017, what was shocking about it wasn't any particular story of some man harassing or assaulting some woman. It was that almost every woman seemed to have a story to tell. <br />
<br />
What was eye-opening to men was to look around and realize that the women in their own lives - their friends and wives and mothers and sisters and daughters - had stories to tell. But very few men took the next step, and recognized that this can't just be the work of a few bad men. It has to be some large percentage of the male population.<br />
<br />
And what we definitely did not do in response was to tell our own stories. Women by the tens of thousands had opened up memories that not only raised anger they still weren’t sure what to do with, but that also made them feel vulnerable and dirty and ashamed. And men for the most part responded by shutting down, by saying "Not all men. Not me. There's a bright red line and I have lived my life on the right side of it."<br />
<br />
What if we hadn't done that? What if we had found our courage and told our own difficult stories, the ones that make us feel dirty and ashamed and vulnerable - not because we were victims but because we were in the wrong? It's not too late. I think we should. <br />
<br />
<b>Confessions. </b>The unfortunate thing about advocating those sorts of confessions is that you're then kind of obligated to get it started. So here I go.<br />
<br />
Like David Wong, I never thought I was cool enough to go the full James Bond, so I don't have any stories of rape or attempted rape to tell. But I don’t believe that puts some bright red line between me and the bad guys. If I had been cooler, if, say, I had come from a well-to-do family and been a football player at an elite high school, like Brett Kavanaugh, who can say what I would have felt entitled to do? <br />
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I will tell you a couple of the stories I do have, stories I’m not proud of.<br />
<br />
The first one was from when I was maybe 13, I don't remember exactly. My parents took me along when they visited their friends, who had a girl who was maybe 7. As usually happened, the adults stayed upstairs and the kids were banished to the basement. I probably resented that, so I decided to tease the girl by playing an I'm-gonna-get-you sort of game. The form of the game was "I'm going to pull down your pants." Like all I'm-gonna-get-you games, it involved a certain amount of chasing and wrestling. She resisted, and I let her win, so no pants were actually pulled down.<br />
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But what was I thinking? What would I think if I heard that story about a boy today? And worse, how did she experience that? I doubt she enjoyed it. Did she soon forget about it, or does it maybe still bother her from time to time? I have no idea.<br />
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In high school, I liked to make girls jump. If I saw a girl lost in a book or concentrating on some kind of work, I would sneak up behind her and startle her, either by making a noise, or, if I was really daring that day, poking her in some ticklish spot. Then she'd jump, and I thought that was funny. If any other boys were around, they'd think it was funny too. So: points to me. Some girls I did this to many times.<br />
<br />
At the time, it didn't seem like a big deal to me. But now I wonder what it meant to my victims, how it changed their experience to know that they couldn't sink too deeply into concentration or lose track of what was behind them. To what extent did I contribute to their impression that school - or the world - was just not a safe place?<br />
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But I didn't think about that then, because it was a game to me and we were all just players. I never asked the girls if they wanted to play my game, and none of them ever told me that they enjoyed it. But somehow that didn't matter, even though, as David Wong says, the fact that it mattered should have been patently obvious to any decent person.<br />
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<b>Game over. </b>So what's the point of making confessions like that? Why do I wish more men would do it? First, because, as long as men are holding back our own guilty secrets -- even if they happened a long time ago and may seem small compared to crimes like rape -- we are not going to be the allies that women need us to be.<br />
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Instead, whenever public attention turns to male misbehavior, some part of us is going to freeze up and hope somebody changes the subject. Rather than listen and respond with empathy, we’re going to want to defend that bright red line between ourselves and the bad guys.<br />
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But even more importantly, like the stories women have told, widespread male confessions would show the problem of harassment and abuse in its proper scale. Yes, a few men behave in spectacularly horrible ways. And justice does require that the Bill Cosbys and Harvey Weinsteins face public rejection and legal punishment. But that alone won’t solve the underlying problem. <br />
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As a culture, we have consistently treated women like players in a game that they never signed up for. By doing that, we have failed to recognize their sovereignty over their own bodies. And in far too many situations we have failed to grant them their full humanity. <br />
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That game is the problem that needs to be solved. It has gone on far too long. Men in general (and not just a few bad men) have kept it going through our lifetimes and taught the next generation how to play. <br />
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So it's far past time that we take responsibility for that game and join women in demanding that it stop.Doug Muderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04666144843949850394noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13399254.post-9640728153440707962018-03-18T16:49:00.001-04:002018-03-18T19:24:50.309-04:00Stewardship Sunday<p>Here’s what I said this morning at First Parish in Bedford, Mass.:</p>
<p>I am Doug Muder, representing the Stewardship Committee. Today is the beginning of the annual stewardship campaign, when we ask you to make a financial pledge to First Parish for the next church year. </p>
<p>This year’s theme is “Make it real.” What we’re trying to call attention to with that slogan is the difference between groups that have good intentions and groups that actually make things happen in the real world. </p>
<p>Fundamentally, that difference boils down to two factors: If you’re going to make real things happen, you need people who are willing to commit their time and energy, and you need money.</p>
<p>Money is what we can quantify, so that’s the number we ask for. But stewardship is really about a bigger question: What are all of us willing to do in the next year to make things real? How are we going to take the ideals and hopes and visions of this congregation and turn them into events and actions and things we can touch with our hands?</p>
<p>I can’t ask you for a number that sums up how much effort and creativity you’re going to contribute next year, or how far out of your comfort zone you’re going to be willing to push yourself to make things happen. But those also are questions we all ought to be thinking about during this campaign. </p>
<p>Over the next few weeks a number of parishioners are going to be up here doing what we call “Stewardship moments”. In other words, they’re going to explain in a few minutes what First Parish means to them and why they are committed to it. </p>
<p>Those moments have a deeper purpose than just to convince you to give more money. What they’re about is getting you to examine your own relationship to First Parish, what this community means to you, and what it could mean.</p>
<p>During my 23 years here and my 30 years as a UU, I’ve thought about my pledge in four very different ways. But what that’s really about is that I’ve experienced four very different kinds of relationships to my church.</p>
<p>The first time I pledged, I had what you might call a transactional relationship. I wanted to pay for what I used, so I tried to figure out what that would amount to. Coffee and cookies, my UU World subscription. I know it costs something to put on a service, so I invented a ticket price to cover that. I added something for all the other events I go to: classes and concerts and discussion groups. I like to talk to a minister once or twice a year about what I’m trying to do with my life and how it’s going, so I added a little more for that, and so on. Eventually I came up with a number that represented the transactional value I was getting from the church. If I contributed that much, I figured, then I was paying my way.</p>
<p>Before long, though, my relationship changed to what I call a charitable relationship. I started to believe in Unitarian Universalism as a movement, and I liked the idea of an institution spreading UU values in this community. So I wanted to support more than just what I used myself. </p>
<p>That kind of relationship means that I want this church to have good services even on Sundays when I’m not here, and I want them available to people who can’t afford that imaginary ticket. Even though I don’t have kids in RE, I like the idea of teaching UU values to the next generation. I want to support a broader array of social justice activities than I can work on myself. I want our ministers out there being a voice in the community, and I want them to be available to whoever needs them, not just to me. </p>
<p>That thinking led to a different pledge because it was a different relationship.</p>
<p>A few years after that, my relationship changed again, in a way that’s a little hard to describe. The best analogy I can think of is what happens to homeowners, when they stop evaluating improvements in terms of resale value, and start thinking: “This is my home. How do I want my home to be?”</p>
<p>In other words, I started to take ownership of First Parish: “This is my church. I want it to be a good church.”</p>
<p>So, for example, it’s not just that I want <em>some</em> church to give sanctuary to immigrants facing an unfair deportation order. I want <em>my</em> church to do it. Last year when I went to the Women’s March on Boston Common, it made a difference to me that I wasn’t just one more face out of 200,000. I was there with my people. The plan to make this building as close to carbon-neutral as we can get it — I supported it because that’s how I want my church to be.</p>
<p>That sense of ownership, of deep belonging, it led to yet another way of thinking about my pledge. </p>
<p>Originally, I was going to close with that, but as I was explaining those three relationships to my wife Deb, she pointed to a fourth: a legacy relationship.</p>
<p>There aren’t many things you do in life that leave a mark on the world, something that continues through the years, maybe even beyond your lifetime. Raising a child can leave a mark. Maybe something in your career will leave a mark. There are a few other places you might try to leave a mark, but there aren’t many. Most of what we do in life is stuff that evaporates almost as soon as we finish doing it. </p>
<p>But the people who started this congregation left a mark we can still see almost three centuries later. The people who built this meeting house in 1817 — we’re still benefitting from what they did. </p>
<p>And we’re continuing that work. I was pretty new in this church when I started seeing drawings of what would become the Common Room. Then we had a capital campaign, and we made those drawings real. That room will probably outlive all of us.</p>
<p>I’ve talked to older members who were on the search committee that decided that this young John Gibbons guy might do OK as our minister. What if you did something like that? You think you might still be proud years and years later?</p>
<p>First Parish is a place where you might try to leave a mark. That is a different relationship from paying your way or supporting UU values or even taking ownership. </p>
<p>So today we’re starting a stewardship campaign like we do every year. In a few days you’ll get a mailing that has a pledge card in it. We hope you’ll write a big number on it and send it back. In the coming weeks, you’ll hear all kinds of numbers from us: how many pledges we’ve received, what they total up to, and how much we still need to make our goal.</p>
<p>But through it all, I don’t want any of us to lose sight of the lesson of the stewardship moments: that numbers are just the surface of this campaign.</p>
<p>The deeper point is to get you thinking about the relationship you have to First Parish now. And even more important, thinking about the relationship you want to have.</p>
<p>And to leave you with a question: In the coming year, what might you do to make that relationship real?</p>Doug Muderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04666144843949850394noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13399254.post-84672511065796777092018-01-31T07:53:00.001-05:002018-01-31T08:37:16.539-05:00Owning My Racism<p style="text-align: center;"><em>a sermon given at First Parish Church in Billerica, Massachusetts on January 14, 2018</em></p>
<h3>Opening Words</h3>
<p>“In this country, American means white. Everybody else has to hyphenate.” - Toni Morrison</p>
<h3>First Reading: Huckleberry Finn</h3>
<p>I grew up in Illinois, in the next town up the Mississippi from Hannibal, Missouri, where Mark Twain grew up and where he set the novels Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn.</p>
<p>Twain continues to be a regional hero along that section of the river. Hannibal holds a Tom Sawyer Days festival each July, and you can tour a cave which is supposed to be the one in <em>Tom Sawyer</em>. If you just went to the festivals and never read the books, you might think Twain had written happy, nostalgic stories about pre-Civil-War Missouri. But in fact he portrayed his hometown fairly accurately, the good and bad alike. In particular, he didn’t sugarcoat the racism he grew up with, racism that was still echoing through that region more than a century later, when I grew up. For example: the belief that the suffering of black people doesn’t really count, because maybe they aren’t people at all.</p>
<p>In Chapter 32 of <em>Huckleberry Finn</em>, Huck is looking for his friend, the runaway slave Jim, when he wanders onto the farm of Tom Sawyer’s aunt and uncle, who haven’t seen Tom for years and mistake Huck for their nephew. Aunt Sally expects the boy to have arrived by steamboat and wonders why he hadn’t gotten there sooner, so Huck spins a story about the steam engine blowing a cylinder head.</p>
<p>“Good gracious!” Aunt Sally responds. “Anybody hurt?”</p>
<p>“No’m. Killed a nigger.”</p>
<p>“Well, it’s lucky, because sometimes people do get hurt.”</p>
<h3>Second Reading: Interview with Chris Rock</h3>
<p>The comedian Chris Rock was interviewed by Frank Rich in 2014. In this section of that interview, he attacks the idea that civil rights is a story of black progress.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I almost cry every day. I drop my kids off and watch them in the school with all these mostly white kids, and I got to tell you, I drill them every day: “Did anything happen today? Did anybody say anything?” They look at me like I am crazy.</p>
<p>… When we talk about race relations in America or racial progress, it’s all nonsense. There are no race relations. White people were crazy. Now they’re not as crazy. To say that black people have made progress would be to say they deserve what happened to them before.</p>
<p>So, to say Obama is [black] progress is saying that he’s the first black person that is qualified to be president. [Electing Obama isn’t] black progress. [It’s] white progress. There’s been black people qualified to be president for hundreds of years.</p>
<p>If you saw Tina Turner and Ike having a lovely breakfast over there, would you say their relationship’s improved? Some people would. But a smart person would go, “Oh, he stopped punching her in the face.”</p>
<p>It’s not up to her. Ike and Tina Turner’s relationship has nothing to do with Tina Turner[’s progress]. Nothing. It just doesn’t.</p>
<p>… My kids are smart, educated, beautiful, polite children. There have been smart, educated, beautiful, polite black children for hundreds of years. The advantage that my children have is that my children are encountering the nicest white people that America has ever produced.</p>
<p>Let’s hope America keeps producing nicer white people.</p>
</blockquote>
<h3>Sermon</h3>
<p>Tomorrow is the holiday that celebrates Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement in which he played such a central role. I am a white speaker addressing a mostly white congregation in a mostly white denomination. So what is a good and appropriate way for me to mark this occasion?</p>
<p>I have seen a lot of ways that I don’t want to do it. For example, some white politicians make MLK Day the celebration of a historical triumph, like Yorktown or D-Day. It marks the time, decades ago, when the civil rights movement for all practical purposes ended racism in America.</p>
<p>So that’s all over now, we don’t need to think or talk about it any more, and we can continue forward into our colorblind future. Thank you, Dr. King.</p>
<p>For other whites, MLK day is just another ethnic holiday, like Cinco de Mayo. Just as everybody is Irish on St. Patrick’s Day, everybody is black during the MLK weekend. So we should all eat soul food and sing the old slave spirituals, not because they mean anything, but because that’s just what you do. If you can sing “White Christmas” in Florida, then you can sing “Go Down Moses” on Wall Street or in Beverley Hills. Why not?</p>
<p>Some whites understand that the civil rights movement still has work to do, but they see it as a black thing that they don’t need to participate in. “You go, black people. Win your equality. We’ll stand here on the sidelines and cheer you on, because that’s the kind of socially conscious white folks we are.”</p>
<p>Some white speakers explain to blacks that we’d <em>like</em> to help you achieve justice, but you’re going about it all wrong, with your “Black Lives Matter” and kneeling during the national anthem and all that. “Let me give you the benefit of my Olympian white wisdom and explain what you ought to be doing. And when you start doing that, then I’ll pitch right in. You’re welcome.”</p>
<p>And finally there are the speakers I hesitate to criticize, because they’re right as far as they go. They talk about real, important issues: voting rights, mass incarceration, police who act more like an occupying army than like defenders of the community. They point to the growing acceptance of white supremacists in our national conversation, to the increasingly bold nostalgia for the Confederacy, and the slavery that defined it.</p>
<p>They observe how our leaders yell “Terrorism!” when a Muslim young man is influenced by jihadist propaganda on the internet and shoots up a nightclub in Orlando. But when a white young man is influenced by white supremacist propaganda on the internet and shoots up a black church in Charleston, that’s just mental illness. It doesn’t require any change in policy.</p>
<p>They point out how our president can describe whites chanting “Sieg Heil!” in Charlottesville as “very fine people”. But if you’re African, then he says you come from “a shithole country” and we don’t want you.</p>
<p>That’s all happening. It’s all real. There’s a serious political and social battle going on out there, and we do need to be part of it.</p>
<p>But if that’s all you say, you leave the unstated implication that the battle out there is the only important one. Good is fighting Evil out there somewhere, and all we need to do is pick the right side. If we vote for the right candidates, go to the right demonstrations, send the right letters to our representatives, and like the right pages on Facebook, then we’re OK. We’re the good white people, not the bad white people.</p>
<p>I don’t want to talk you out of any of those actions. There is a battle out there, and I do want you to be on the right side of it. And if you use Martin Luther King weekend as a time to re-energize and re-dedicate yourself to that struggle, that’s a fine thing to do.</p>
<p>But I think the reason to have this discussion inside a church rather than at a political rally is to recognize that the fight against racism, like any battle of Good and Evil, is not just something that happens out there. The struggle against racism also has to happen inside every individual — inside me, inside you. Because living in a culture of white supremacy — a culture that enslaved millions of people, that tolerated Jim Crow, and that continues to accept that the races have an education gap and an achievement gap and a power gap and a wealth gap — living in that culture has consequences. It has imprinted itself on all of us in all kinds of ways. If we don’t try to root that out, if we never introspect and take a critical look at our habits of thought and word and deed, then our instinctive responses will inevitably undermine our conscious intentions.</p>
<p>There can be no clearer example of this truth than the Unitarian Universalist Association. For the last several decades, you would have been hard pressed to find white people with better conscious intentions than the ones who were decision-makers at the UUA. And yet, last year a crisis erupted over the fact that the people the UUA hires, especially at the highest levels, are disproportionately white. That white dominance was not a goal that anyone set out to achieve. And yet it happened.</p>
<p>I feel particularly well qualified to lead a service on internalized racism, because the racism inside me is not that hard to find. Sometimes I hear young ministers who were brought up UU in the 1990s delve deep to give examples of their internal racism, and I confess that those talks can make me envious. “Really? That’s all you found?”</p>
<p>I was brought up racist. It got in there deep. It shaped some of the fundamental ways I perceive the world, and I’ve been trying to overcome it most of my life.</p>
<p>Whenever you make a confession like that in front of other white people, somebody is bound to ask, “Well, what do you mean by racism?” And whatever answer you give, they’ll tell you that you’ve got it wrong. Because that’s one of the primary ways whites distract ourselves from introspecting about racism: We argue endlessly about what the word ought to mean, and never get around to applying whatever definition we come up with.</p>
<p>I wrote a column in the Fall issue of <em>UU World</em> called “Of Course I’m Racist”. Not long after it came out, I was at my church in Bedford when one of the other parishioners came up to me and started a conversation by very authoritatively declaring, “You’re not racist.” I wanted to respond with something flip, like: “Thank you for clearing that up for me.” But instead I listened to his definition of racism and why it would leave me out.</p>
<p>I got various other odd reactions through social media. In the article, I had talked about growing up racist in a white working class neighborhood of that river town in the Midwest. I did my best to talk about myself and my own experiences. But some readers interpreted every adjective I used as a blanket indictment of the corresponding class of people: small towns, the working class, the Midwest, whites. In making my own confession, I apparently had accused them of something, and they felt offended. Because that’s another way whites divert the discussion and avoid examining ourselves: we take offense. “How dare anybody mention racism to me? I don’t hate black people. I never lynched anybody. I’m against the KKK. I’ve had friends who weren’t white. I even voted for Obama.”</p>
<p>Well, me too. That kind of stuff is not what I’m talking about. So what exactly am I confessing to? What do I mean when I apply the word <em>racist</em> to myself?</p>
<p>I mean this: In the environment that shaped me, <em>people</em> implicitly meant <em>white people</em>. (To this day, if a joke starts “A guy walks into a bar …” I picture a white guy. I don’t know what color his hair is, or whether he’s tall or short, fat or skinny, but I’m sure he’s white.)</p>
<p>Everything I learned about people — how to treat them, what to expect from them, what rights they have — was a lesson about whites. Black people might as well have been a different species entirely.</p>
<p>Of course I learned that all people are created equal … but <em>black</em> people? It didn’t follow; the question was still up for discussion. Of course the Golden Rule told me to treat others as I want to be treated. But what if the others were black? The answer was not obvious.</p>
<p>That’s why I shake my head at the whites who respond to “Black lives matter” not with “Yes, they do”, but with “All lives matter.” Yes, all lives matter. But do black lives matter? Because that logical deduction hasn’t always worked in America. Jefferson wrote “All men are created equal” and then went home to his slave plantation. That’s our history. We say “all” and then we leave blacks out of it.</p>
<p>So that upbringing created a racial distinction not just in my thoughts and opinions, but in my perceptions and instincts. I learned to see and respond to people and black people differently.</p>
<p>That’s what’s going on in that <em>Huck Finn</em> reading. The steamboat accident Huck tells about kills a black man, but no people. And Aunt Sally, who doesn’t know Huck is making the whole thing up, says that was lucky, because sometimes <em>people</em> get hurt.</p>
<p>That kind of talk wasn’t quite so explicit when I was growing up in the next century. But you could still hear echoes of it in the jokes we told.</p>
<p>I want to do an aside here about ethnic jokes. When I was growing up, almost everyone — even comedians performing in public — told ethnic jokes. And a lot of whites my age and older remember them as harmless fun that we can’t have any more in this humorless era of political correctness.</p>
<p>There is a sense in which that’s true, because a lot of the jokes weren’t really about the people they seemed to be about. To a large extent, the ethnic stereotypes were really just exaggerations of human failings we all share. Most of us, I think, understood that. An ethnic joke was a way of laughing at our own human weaknesses while also saying “Well, at least I’m not that bad.”</p>
<p>So if you heard a group of men joking about drunken Irishmen, you knew that probably all of them had gotten drunk at one time or another and had done something embarrassing. Even as you made fun of stereotypically greedy Jews or dumb Polocks, you knew that everybody is greedy sometimes and everybody does dumb things.</p>
<p>To a certain extent, what went around came around. Whatever group you belonged to, there were jokes about you too. The stereotype of my people, the Germans, was that you don’t dare put us in charge of anything, because then our inner Nazi will come out. One joke asked if you’d been to the new German-Chinese restaurant; the food tastes great, it said, but an hour later you’re hungry for power.</p>
<p>Some of the jokes acknowledged stereotypic strengths as well as weaknesses. One joke had it that in Heaven the Italians are the cooks, the Germans are the engineers, and the English are the police. But in Hell, the English are the cooks, the Italians are the engineers, and the Germans are the police. That kind of stuff really is mostly harmless fun.</p>
<p>But the jokes we told about blacks were different. A lot of them didn’t point to our common humanity, but instead relied on the idea that blacks were subhuman, so you didn’t have to have compassion for them. Their suffering didn’t count. In a joke about blacks, very often the surprise in the punch line was that something horrific was happening, something the set-up of the joke hadn’t led you to expect. So what we were laughing at wasn’t some universal human flaw that we had projected onto blacks and understood that we shared with them. Instead, we were laughing at our own cruelty, which it was OK to express, as long we were joking and the victim was black.</p>
<p>I debated long and hard about whether I need to tell such a joke this morning just to establish that I’m not exaggerating. You’ll probably be relieved to hear that I decided not to.</p>
<p>But I remembered those jokes when I heard about Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old black man arrested on a minor charge by Baltimore police in 2015. Witnesses described him being roughed up during the arrest. He was then thrown into a paddy wagon and not belted in properly. By some accounts, the police gave him what is called a “rough ride”, bouncing the van around intentionally. By the time the van arrived, he was in a coma. A few days later, he died.</p>
<p>I don’t know what really happened that day. I don’t know any of those policemen, or what any of them were thinking at the time. But I when I heard about Gray’s death, I had to wonder if, as the police were giving him his “rough ride”, they thought it was hilarious. One curse of my upbringing is that I can easily imagine how they might.</p>
<p>So where does that leave me? As I said already, the most extreme definitions of racism don’t apply to me. I don’t hate people of color. I don’t consciously seek to do them harm. Politically, I am on their side. I don’t see racial progress as something we must wait for blacks to achieve. It is a goal for our society, for our nation, and we all must do our part to bring it about.</p>
<p>In my personal life, I haven’t told racist jokes for many years. I don’t intentionally discriminate against anybody. Consciously, I try not to do anything that will make American racism worse.</p>
<p>And yet … still, now and then, when I look back on something I’ve just done or said or felt, particularly when I have reacted instinctively, without thinking about it, I realize that I’ve been racist.</p>
<p>When President Bush nominated Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court, I was concerned about his lack of qualifications even before Anita Hill went public with her accusation of sexual harassment. Only later did it occur to me that I had also known nothing about the qualifications of Bush’s previous nominee, David Souter. It just hadn’t bothered me.</p>
<p>You see, I often have an instinctive reaction of generosity, to make an exception and give the new guy a chance. But it rarely applies to anybody other than white men. If I don’t consciously correct for that, I will discriminate.</p>
<p>Over the decades, I’ve developed a long list of things I have to consciously correct for. A few years ago, I was staying at a hotel in Washington, D.C. that wasn’t near any obvious Metro station. So when I hit the lobby that morning, I was wondering how I was going to get where I was going. Next to the door, a tall black man in a very proper dark suit was standing in a very erect posture, and I thought, “Oh, the doorman.” So I asked him where the cab stand was.</p>
<p>He turned out to be a diplomat from an African country. So I had to make another rule for myself: Don’t be so quick to assume that black people are there to serve you.</p>
<p>That’s how my life has been. I pile rules on top of rules to make sure that I don’t discriminate or insult anyone or embarrass myself. But no matter how many rules I make, I never get to the heart of the problem: Instinctively, I see white people and black people differently. No conscious insight or decision has ever been able to change that.</p>
<p>So to this day, getting cut off in traffic by a black driver makes me angrier than if I’d been cut off by a white driver. If I get bad service from a white clerk or waitress, I might cut her some slack: It’s a hard job, it wears a person down. But if I get bad service from a black, I’m more likely to frame the problem as some moral failing like laziness or resentment. Most of the time, I see what I’m doing, and I catch myself before I respond in some way I’ll regret.</p>
<p>Most of the time.</p>
<p>You’ve all been very patient with me this morning. In settings other than a sermon, I seldom get this far into a description of my own racism. Other whites usually don’t want to hear it. “What is the point,” they want to know, “of talking about stuff like this? Are we supposed to feel guilty? What good does that do anybody?”</p>
<p>Usually that’s a rhetorical question. It’s meant to shut the conversation down. But actually it’s not a bad question to take seriously: What is the point of doing this kind of introspection? If you find racism in yourself and feel guilty about it, what good does that do?</p>
<p>So my final point is that when I consider those instinctive responses that were impressed into my mind in childhood, the ones that I have tried all my life to correct, and only succeeded up to a point, I don’t feel guilty. I feel damaged. Something about myself that I don’t know how to fix causes me to keep screwing up.</p>
<p>Guilt is a proper response to things that we say or do that hurt other people. It motivates us to make amends, and to correct our behavior in the future. So when some instinctive racist response slips past my rules and manifests as behavior, then yes, I do feel guilty. I try to correct myself and make amends.</p>
<p>But damage isn’t something to feel guilty about. It is something to recognize and work around. Recognized damage that you deal with strategically is far less likely to cause trouble for you or for others than unacknowledged damage that constantly has to be covered up or explained away.</p>
<p>Finding your own racism is like any other kind of self-knowledge: It isn’t always pleasant. But the point isn’t to feel guilty about it or to punish yourself for it. The point of knowing about it is that it’s real. Understanding it better equips you to deal with the reality of your own life.</p>
<p>If you do introspect about your own racism, I don’t know what you’ll find. You might find less than I do, or more, or maybe nothing at all. But I do think that given the culture we are all immersed in, it’s worth taking a look at least once a year.</p>
<p>So happy Martin Luther King Day.</p>
<h3>Closing Words</h3>
<p>The closing words come from President Lyndon Johnson, as he was introducing the Voting Rights Act to a joint session of Congress in 1965. If you’ve never seen the <a href="https://www.greatamericandocuments.com/speeches/lbj-voting-rights/">video</a>, look it up; it’s worth watching.</p>
<p>Johnson was not a great public speaker. He was clearly reading this speech, and most of the time his eyes looked down at his text on the podium. He read slowly and carefully, in a Texas drawl that could be painfully slow even when he wasn’t trying to be careful. And yet, somehow, all those imperfections combined to make the speech even more effective. Here’s part of what he said:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Rarely in any time does an issue lay bare the secret heart of America itself. Rarely are we met with a challenge, not to our growth or abundance, or our welfare or our security, but rather to the values and the purposes and the meaning of our beloved nation.The issue of equal rights for American Negroes is such an issue.</p>
<p>And should we defeat every enemy, and should we double our wealth and conquer the stars, and still be unequal to this issue, then we will have failed as a people and as a nation. For, with a country as with a person, “What is man profited if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?”</p>
<p>There is no Negro problem. There is no Southern problem. There is no Northern problem. There is only an American problem. … It is not just Negroes, but really it is all of us who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice.</p>
<p>And we shall overcome.</p>
</blockquote>Doug Muderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04666144843949850394noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13399254.post-87482647922609709492017-06-15T10:19:00.002-04:002017-06-15T10:19:41.187-04:00The Born-Again Unitarian Universalist<p style="text-align: center;"><em>Versions of this talk were delivered at the Unitarian Church of Quincy, Illinois on April 30, 2017 and at First Parish Church of Billerica, Massachusetts on March 26, 2017</em></p>
<h3>Opening Words</h3>
<p>"Our faith comes in moments; our vice is habitual. Yet there is a depth in those brief moments which constrains us to ascribe more reality to them than to all other experiences. For this reason, the argument which is always forthcoming to silence those who conceive extraordinary hopes of man, namely, the appeal to experience, is forever invalid and vain. We give up the past to the objector, and yet we hope." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson</p>
<h3>Meditation</h3>
<p>"Philosophy lives in words, but truth and fact well up into our lives in ways that exceed verbal formulation. There is in the living act of perception always something that glimmers and twinkles and will not be caught, and for which reflection comes too late." -- William James</p>
<h3>Readings</h3>
<p style="text-align: center;">from <em>The Varieties of Religious Experience</em> by William James, <br /><em>Life on the Screen:</em> <em>Identity in the Age of the Internet</em> by Sherry Turkle, <br /><em>Reality is Broken</em> by Jane McGonigal, <br />and “Oh, When I Was in Love With You” by A. E. Housman</p>
<p>When Modern Library selected the 100 Best Non-Fiction Books of the 20th Century, #2 on their list was William James’ <em>The Varieties of Religious Experience</em> from 1902. In that book, James was trying to break down the wall between psychology and religious studies. He wanted to claim religious experience as part of human experience, and expand the language of psychology to include it.</p>
<p>And so in this book he walks a narrow path, neither rejecting religious testimony outright nor accepting it at face value. He constructs what was then a new kind of objectivity, one that could listen to people’s accounts of experiencing God’s presence the same way that it listened to their accounts of falling in love or sliding into depression. People experience things, and describe them honestly but imperfectly. What, if anything, do we think actually happened?</p>
<p>The center of the book is James’ description of conversion experiences, when people report that God reaches into their lives and changes them top to bottom, so that they become, in essence, new people. He begins his explanation of this phenomenon by noting that we are all, in some unremarkable way, different people in different settings. Teddy Roosevelt, he imagines, is a different person on a hunting trip than in the White House.</p>
<p>Our primary identity, then, the person that we think we are most of the time, is not the whole of who we are, it’s just the center of a larger system. The ordinary experiences of life may change this larger system in ways that we do not always take account of, until our central identity doesn’t fit quite right any more, leading us to feel a vague wrongness about ourselves that we don’t really know what to do with.</p>
<p>Sometimes that sense of wrongness resolves itself suddenly, and we may feel as if some external force has changed us. In James’ account, though, the new identity forms not in the mind of God, but in the unconscious of the individual. Without us even realizing what is happening, who we are in some tiny sliver of our lives may be the model for who we become in a broader sense.</p>
<p>He writes: "Neither an outside observer nor the Subject who undergoes the process can explain fully how particular experiences are able to change one’s centre of energy so decisively, or why they so often have to bide their hour to do so. We have a thought, or we perform an act, repeatedly, but on a certain day the real meaning of the thought peals through us for the first time, or the act has suddenly turned into a moral impossibility. All we know is that there are dead feelings, dead ideas, and cold beliefs, and there are hot and live ones; and when one grows hot and alive within us, everything has to re-crystallize around it."</p>
<p>An example of how a new identity might incubate in one sliver of your life and then spread comes from a much more recent book, <em>Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet</em> by Sherry Turkle:</p>
<p>"My mother died when I was nineteen and a college junior. Upset and disoriented, I dropped out of school, I traveled to Europe, ended up in Paris, studied history and political science, and worked at a series of odd jobs from housecleaner to English tutor.</p>
<p>"The French-speaking Sherry, I was pleased to discover, was somewhat different from the English-speaking one. French-speaking Sherry was not unrecognizable, but she was her own person. In particular, while the English-speaking Sherry had little confidence that she could take care of herself, the French-speaking Sherry simply had to and got on with it.</p>
<p>"On trips back home, English-speaking Sherry rediscovered old timidities. [So] I kept returning to France, thirsty for more French speaking. Little by little, I became increasingly fluent in French and comfortable with the persona of the resourceful, French-speaking young woman. Now I cycled through the French- and English-speaking Sherry until the movement seemed natural; I could bend toward one and then the other with increasing flexibility.</p>
<p>"When English-speaking Sherry finally returned to college in the United States, she was never as brave as French-speaking Sherry. But she could hold her own. ...</p>
<p>"When I got to know French Sherry. I no longer saw the less confident English-speaking Sherry as my one authentic self." </p>
<p>Even more recently, computer-game designer Jane McGonigal’s book <em>Reality is Broken</em> has added one further twist: The part of life where your new and better self first manifests doesn’t even have to be real.</p>
<p>Sometimes gamers feel that their characters a virtual universe are closer to their true selves than the characters they express in everyday life. It is not unusual to hear someone say that their game character is simply a better person — bolder, more honest, more courageous, and perhaps even brighter and more creative — than who they are outside the game. McGonigal herself claims she sometimes envies her character in World of Warcraft. “If I have one regret in life,” she says, “it’s that my undead priest is smarter than I am.”</p>
<p>But a discussion of such transformations wouldn’t be complete without acknowledging that sometimes they don’t stick, as A. E. Housman noted in the following poem.</p>
<p style="text-align: center;">Oh, when I was in love with you, <br /> Then I was clean and brave, <br />And miles around the wonder grew<br /> How well did I behave. </p>
<p style="text-align: center;">And now the fancy passes by,<br /> And nothing will remain, <br />And miles around they’ll say <br /> that I am quite myself again.</p>
<h3>Talk</h3>
<p>A few months ago my wife and I drove to Florida and back, so we passed through a sizable chunk of the South, where we saw a number of billboards about Jesus.</p>
<p>What fascinated me about these Christian messages was the way they seemed intended to bring people up short, to stop an everyday thought-process in its tracks. “When you die,” said one, “you will meet God.” Others asked drivers where we were headed: not which exit, but towards Heaven or Hell?</p>
<p>Now, I’ll cut to the chase and tell you that I did not find Jesus and get saved on this trip -- I knew you'd be worried about that -- so the billboards failed in their direct purpose. But I grudgingly came to admire the underlying attitude: that religion ought to bring you up short. From time to time it ought to break through the hypnotic song of everyday life, the one that constantly keeps us focused a few exits or hours or days down the road: Who’s picking up the kids? What’s my next deadline at work? Where’s that TV series going? What’s Trump up to this time? And so on.</p>
<p>Too often, Unitarian Universalism just adds its own verses to that song: Should I make an announcement about that? Who do I want to talk to at coffee hour? Am I ready for my next committee meeting? A speaker may give you another issue to keep track of or another book to read. But your church experience usually doesn’t jolt you out of that focus on the near future.</p>
<p>It could, in either direction. Like a meditation practice, it might remind you of the irreplaceable richness of this moment, the glimmering, twinkling aspect of perception that you can only notice by being fully present here and now.</p>
<p>Or, like those billboards, it could call your attention to the larger story of your life. One of the many wise things Yogi Berra is supposed to have said is, “If you don’t change direction, you’ll probably wind up where you’re going.” So, where are you going? You don’t have to believe in a literal Heaven or Hell to realize that someday your life story will be complete. Are you satisfied with how it’s turning out?</p>
<p>It isn’t that UUs don’t ask questions like this. All people do from time to time. But we tend to have these thoughts someplace other than church. They show up, for example, on round-numbered birthdays. I turned 60 last fall: Is this where I thought I’d be? How do I feel about that? They also occur when somebody we measure ourselves against reaches a milestone: graduates or gets a promotion or retires or marries or has a child or grandchild. That’s where they are in their lives; where am I in mine?</p>
<p>And because these thoughts occur to each of us on our own idiosyncratic schedules, we tend to have them alone, when we’re waiting in line or awake in the middle of the night. If we’re lucky, some friend might listen to our concerns, but even then, the thoughts remain our own.</p>
<p>What we usually don’t do is get together as a community and admit that we all sometimes wonder where our lives are going, if we’re where we’re supposed to be, or if we need some kind of drastic change. Those questions are simultaneously intensely personal and very generically human.</p>
<p>One reason I think Christianity can get away with raising these kinds of questions, and even actively promoting people’s dissatisfaction with the course of their lives, is that Christians have a narrative of transformation. At the root of their worldview is a belief in sudden, sweeping change.</p>
<p>In an instant, the power of God could remake you completely. The Lord appears to Moses in a burning bush and calls him to save his people. On the road to Damascus, the voice of the risen Jesus speaks to Saul, the persecutor of Christians, and he becomes Paul, the greatest of the apostles. “Amazing Grace” claims that any sinner can go from lost to found, from blindness to sight — not through a long process of education and rehabilitation, but “the hour I first believed”. Grace comes into your life and blows away all the old obstacles.</p>
<p>In traditional Christianity, instant transformation goes all the way back to the Genesis Creation story, where there’s darkness, and then there’s light. The Sun and Moon, plants, animals, people — God says “Let there be” and there is, and it’s good. Just like that. By contrast, we tell the story of evolution, where progress is incredibly hard and takes forever. Generations live and die to mutate one little gene, so that over thousands or millions of years those tiny changes might add up to something.</p>
<p>Similarly, our church services are full of suggestions for change, but usually they are a thousand little changes: You should write your political representatives more often, and drive less, and recycle, and eat less meat, and stop using the language of the patriarchy, and boycott unjust corporations, and volunteer in soup kitchens, and register people to vote, and on and on and on. And nowhere in that story of being a good UU does otherworldly power infuse new energy into your life.</p>
<p>As a result, I sometimes come away depressed from talks that are supposed to inspire me. Rather than feeling fired up to go promote change, I sometimes think: “I have trouble getting taxes done and keeping the laundry from piling up. How am I going to do all that?”</p>
<p>Now imagine that someone starts talking about changing your whole life, and becoming a better person across the board. How? Without a belief in some kind of transforming power, bringing people up short and making them question where their lives are going is like a bad version of the old Listerine commercial: You persuade them that they have bad breath, but then you don’t have any mouthwash to sell them. Raising dissatisfaction without offering the hope of change on a similar scale is just cruel.</p>
<p>So I started to wonder if there might be some way to translate the Christian transformation narrative into Unitarian Universalist language. In other words: What would a born-again UU be like?How might a Unitarian life transform top to bottom?</p>
<p>Like William James, I went back and read a bunch of transformation stories out of the Christian tradition. And one of the first things I noticed is that the changes usually don’t happen as instantaneously as we sometimes think.</p>
<p>Moses isn’t listening to the burning bush one day and challenging Pharaoh the next. First he argues with God, then he meets with Aaron, then travels to get his father-in-law’s approval, then makes the 300-mile trek to meet with Jewish leaders in Egypt, and only then goes to Pharaoh. The Bible doesn’t tell us how long that took.</p>
<p>Saint Paul, similarly, has his experience on the road to Damascus, then continues into the city and waits three days before he’s healed of his vision-induced blindness. Then he spends time studying with the Christian community in Damascus, then goes to Jerusalem for another unspecified period, then sets off on the missionary voyages that eventually make him famous, and only then acquires his new name. The man whose authoritative voice we hear in the New Testament was many years removed from his supposedly instantaneous transformation.</p>
<p>But the story that really brings this point home is that of John Newton, who wrote “Amazing Grace”. His life did indeed transform. From a wild and rebellious sailor on slave ships, he eventually became a tea-totaling abolitionist Anglican priest.</p>
<p>Eventually.</p>
<p>Newton dated his conversion from 1748, after his ship survived a storm that he had been sure would kill him. But he continued captaining slave ships until 1754, when he had a stroke. Then he began studying for the priesthood and was ordained in 1764. “Amazing Grace” was published in 1779, and he wrote his first abolitionist tract in 1788, four decades after his conversion. So his transformation did not happen “the hour I first believed”, but played over the course of a lifetime.</p>
<p>Now, at this point it would be easy to stop and conclude that I’ve debunked the whole born-again idea, so we can ignore it and go on. But that’s not where I’m headed. Instead, I’d like to hone in on what exactly does happen in that first hour. Why do people like John Newton decades later still celebrate their “moment” of conversion, when they themselves must know just how many insights and how much hard work still had to happen? And the answer seems to be that while your whole life doesn't completely change in an instant, what you can do in an instant is turn around.</p>
<p>Moses did not become <em>Moses</em> the moment that he saw the burning bush. But after that experience, his life could never be the same. Suddenly he was on a new path, and eventually that path went somewhere.</p>
<p>This description fits with the testimonials you can hear today from people in 12-step programs. The traditional bottoming-out story, when the addict realizes that life can’t go on this way, resembles the Christian born-again testimonial in many respects. But the addict does not instantly transform. Quite the opposite, often the idea that change will be quick and easy is exactly what he needs to let go of. Part of turning around is realizing what a long, hard road now lies ahead.</p>
<p>It turns out that a major influence on the founders of Alcoholics Anonymous was William James’ account of conversion experiences. In particular, the vagueness of the “higher power” in 12-step programs comes from James’ observation that conversion experiences are universal, and depend barely at all on particular doctrines. The story of a spiritual crisis that resolves in a moment of renewal can be told in any religion.</p>
<p>In fact, if you listen to an atheist’s story of the moment when he escaped religion, you may well hear an affect that would otherwise be described as religious fervor. Whatever the content of the new belief system might be, suddenly there is a new way to look at life. Old barriers fall, old burdens can be cast aside, and new possibilities open up.</p>
<p>Unitarian Universalists also tell stories of crisis and renewal, but we don’t do it in any organized way. Former UUA President (and current interim co-president) William Sinkford has talked about finding unsuspected inner strength and spiritual depth while sitting by his son’s hospital bed, wondering if he would live.</p>
<p>In her book <em>Blessing the World</em>, UU theologian Rebecca Parker told of a crisis that led her to walk toward the waterfront late at night, planning to drown herself. What she found when she got there, though, was not the deserted lakeside park she had pictured, but a meeting of the local astronomy club with their telescopes, all eager to show her what they found beautiful and wonderful. “In a world where people get up in the middle of the night to looks at stars,” she writes, “I could not end my life.“ A central premise of all the essays in her book, it says in the introduction, is “that moments of despair can be opportunities for spiritual and theological breakthrough.”</p>
<p>In fact, modern Universalism begins in the 1700s with a series of born-again experiences that — from an Evangelical point of view — went astray. Trailblazers like George de Benneville and Hosea Ballou went through the spiritual crises that the fire-and-brimstone sermons of that era were supposed to ignite, but instead of leading to a sense of God’s personal love for them, and assurance of their own personal salvation, their crises resolved with an experience of God’s universal love, assuring the salvation of everyone.</p>
<p>Clearly, the Holy Spirit misfired.</p>
<p>But that bit of our history brings us back to the central question: For those of us who no longer share a belief in a God who takes direct action in the world, where can the energy to renew our lives come from? Is it also part of a naturalistic explanation, or are we left to either return to Christianity or gin up our own transforming power?</p>
<p>Here’s my hypothesis about one possible source of transformational energy: Dissatisfaction has a way of sneaking up on a person. You aren’t usually thrilled with your life one day and then in despair about it the next. So as the course of life slowly diverges from your hopes, one natural reaction is denial: Dissatisfaction, you tell yourself, is just a mood. Everything is fine. Life is under control, or soon will be. Any deviations from the ideal are temporary, incidental, and not my fault.</p>
<p>But as dissatisfaction grows, the denial of it has to grow as well. What begins as minor dissembling and a few omissions can turn into a 24/7 pretense of a happy life. And since part of pretending is pretending that you are not pretending, you can be completely unaware of just how much effort goes into maintaining that illusion. And when the things that are supposed to make you happy actually don’t, the natural reaction is to try harder. Maybe if I just did them right, did them perfectly, then everything would be OK. If I were just smarter, richer, more attractivemore vibrant, more lovable … then it would all work.</p>
<p>So when the crisis comes and pretense collapses, there is a hidden benefit: All the energy you have been putting into denial comes free again. Everything can just be what it is now, and doesn’t need to be explained away. Your castles in the air have fallen, but you also no longer need to hold them up.</p>
<p>In the period of despair that comes between the collapse and the beginning of renewal, it can be hard to notice that freed-up energy or appreciate the extent of it. I doubt Paul was feeling terribly energetic during those three days when he was sitting blind in Damascus. But once the process of renewal began, the energy to make a new life was available.</p>
<p>One final aspect of the born-again experience that I have yet to translate this morning is the one suggested by the word <em>grace</em>: the sense of being loved and nurtured and forgiven by some external power. When we are in denial, we often project the need for that denial onto the people around us. To the extent that we realize we are pretending, we tell ourselves that we do it for them. If the important people in our lives only knew what we are really like, if they suspected how unhappy, how angry, how depressed, how afraid, or how guilty we feel deep inside; if they knew what complete and total failures we really are, how little we resemble the people we pretend to be, they would drop us like a hot rock.</p>
<p>Or so we think.</p>
<p>But sometimes the exact opposite is what turns out to be true. The people who love us may be both better and smarter than we give them credit for. They may already see through us. They may already be rooting for us to confront our demons, to embrace our potential, and to become the person that is inside us waiting to come out. To the extent they cooperate in our denial, they may do so because we need it, not because they do.</p>
<p>The New Testament God, the loving all-knowing being who is patiently waiting to forgive us and welcome us back home if we would only ask, is both a symbol and a projection of that possibility. Accepting the perfect love of this divine archetype can be a step toward accepting the imperfect, human love of others, and ultimately, the deeply flawed love that we might someday have for ourselves. As Lewis the Dauphin says about his intended bridein Shakespeare’s King John, “I do protest I never loved myself till now infixed I beheld myself drawn in the flattering table of her eye.”</p>
<p>So, pulling this all together, I think Unitarian Universalism ought to be about more than a long list of small improvements we should make in our lives, or of projects that good people ought to contribute their energy and resources to. Now and then it ought to bring us up short, and ask us what — on the largest possible scale — we are doing with our lives. If we don’t change direction, we’re likely to wind up where we’re headed. Where is that? How do we feel about it?</p>
<p>And thinking outside of the box of our current identity, who could we be? Who have we thought about being, imagined being, wished we could become? Is there some tiny part of our lives in which we already are that better person? What’s stopping us from breaking down the barriers that keep our better selves from changing everything?</p>
<p>Changing everything is a big job. It doesn’t happen overnight. But if you start, if you turn around, you may be surprised how much energy suddenly comes free for the work of transformation, and how many people will support you in it. Those who love you, and who will love you, may have seen this truer, more authentic version long before you did, and have been waiting to meet you for a long, long time.</p>
<h3>Closing Words</h3>
<p>The closing words are by Sara Moore Campbell: "We receive fragments of holiness, glimpses of eternity, brief moments of insight. Let us gather them up for the precious gifts that they are, and, renewed by their grace, move boldly into the unknown."</p>Doug Muderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04666144843949850394noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13399254.post-63969801421138353552017-02-27T09:27:00.000-05:002017-02-27T09:27:04.694-05:00Why Be a Congregation?<p><em>Presented at the Unitarian Universalists of Lakewood Ranch, Florida on February 26, 2017.</em></p>
<p><b>First Reading: “Principles and Purposes for All of Us”</b></p>
<p>The next thing in the Order of Service is Responsive Reading #594, “Principles and Purposes for All of Us”. But before we read that, I like to say a few words about it.</p>
<p>I grew up in a Lutheran church where we recited the Apostles’ Creed every Sunday. So when I became a UU, at first I tried to interpret the Principles as some kind of Unitarian Universalist creed.</p>
<p>But that didn’t work very well. You see, when my old Lutheran congregation had said its creed, we were proclaiming that certain things were facts: The world was created by an almighty God, Jesus rose from the dead, Judgment Day was coming, and so on.</p>
<p>But the UU Principles aren’t facts. “justice, equity, and compassion in human relations” is not a fact. I wish “respect for the interdependent web” were a fact, but in the world I see around me, it isn’t.</p>
<p>So my second thought was that the Principles are opinions about how the world should be. But if what unites is is that we stand apart from the world and having opinions about it, that seems like a weak foundation to build a community around.</p>
<p>Eventually, I came to view the Principles as vision statements: They describe not the world that is, but the world that we are working together to bring into existence. So as we do this reading, I invite you to try on that interpretation: We’re not stating facts, we’re not just having opinions; we’re sharing a vision of the world we want to make.</p>
<p>We affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of every person.</p>
<p><em>We believe that each and every person is important.</em></p>
<p>We affirm and promote justice, equity, and compassion in human relations.</p>
<p><em>We believe that all people should be treated fairly.</em></p>
<p>We affirm and promote acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth.</p>
<p><em>We believe that our churches are places where all people are accepted, and where we keep on learning together.</em></p>
<p>We affirm and promote a free and responsible search for truth and meaning.</p>
<p><em>We believe that each person must be free to search for what is true and right in life.</em></p>
<p>We affirm and promote the right of conscience and the use of the democratic process.</p>
<p><em>We believe that all people should have a voice and a vote about the things which concern them.</em></p>
<p>We affirm and promote the goal of world community with peace, liberty, and justice for all.</p>
<p><em>We believe that we should work for a peaceful, fair, and free world.</em></p>
<p>We affirm and promote respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part. </p>
<p><em>We believe that we should care for our planet earth.</em></p>
<p><strong>Second Reading: “The Tilted Metronome”</strong></p>
<p>The next reading is from the essay “The Tilted Metronome” by Ian Carroll, who I know because we’re part of the same congregation in Bedford, Massachusetts.</p>
<p>One of the advantages of belonging to a congregation is that because you’re seeing the same people over and over again, ideas bounce back and forth. If you put something out there, somebody might improve it and give it back to you.</p>
<p>A few years ago I gave a talk where I compared a healthy spiritual life to a pendulum that swings back and forth between action and contemplation. One is not better than the other; they’re parts of a whole. We do inner work; we do outer work.</p>
<p>A few weeks ago, Ian took that metaphor and changed it a little. Being a musician, he turned my pendulum into a metronome. And he observed that if you put a metronome on a tilted surface, one side of the cycle is longer than the other: <em>tiiiick-tock</em>, <em>tiiick-tock</em>. </p>
<p>He used that to represent the idea that we all have natural inclinations that make us more comfortable on one side of the spectrum than the other, and yet we still need both to be complete.</p>
<p>Ian has always experienced himself primarily as a contemplative person, but as he looks at the current situation in the world, he is feeling the need to enter an active phase. And he closes with this lovely vision of how the members of a congregation balance each other. </p>
<p>“The week after the election, yes the one that ushered Donald Trump into the presidency, Rev. John spoke of the urgency of this moment in history, and of the need to immerse ourselves more deeply in beauty, art, nature, and creativity. But he also spoke of the need to be outraged, to protest, to fight for justice with greater intensity than ever before. </p>
<p>“Not surprisingly, I initially gravitated towards his encouragement to find more quiet and solace in our lives. That’s what I need, I thought. </p>
<p>“The more I’ve considered his words, though, the more I’ve realized I need to respond to his exhortation to act. I’m certain that others in the pews that day had the opposite reaction to me, and felt their hearts leap at the call to action. But like me, they too will feel, in time, their pendulums swinging the other way. </p>
<p>“If you’re one of those people, and you feel the need to take a step back, to regroup for a little while, there might be a vacant seat up in the rear of the balcony. Because I’ll be in a pew near the front. …</p>
<p>“I will always be a listener first and foremost. That’s how I feel most comfortable. Tiiiick, tock, tiiiick, tock, is the sound my metronome—my tilted metronome—makes. If you are a doer, yours may make quite a different sound. </p>
<p>“In this healthy, spirited community, we honor both. But the collective, beautiful weight of this congregation also challenges us, subtly shifting the ground on which we stand, altering the tilt of our metronomes. And so too does the ominous gravity of the present era.</p>
<p>“Now is a time for us all to seek comfort, but more importantly, to embrace discomfort as well. That’s precisely why I’ll be sitting near the front of our Sanctuary, and it’s also why you might drift to the back, for a time. </p>
<p>“There is a chorus of pendulums in motion around us, and one inside each of us, all swinging between their poles. Listen—can you hear them? From contemplation to action. From outer work to inner work. You protest, and I listen. I rise up, and you observe. </p>
<p>“Together we will make ourselves, and our world, better. As individuals and as a community, in this historic moment, we need to find quiet. And we will make noise.”</p>
<p><strong>Sermon: Why are we here this morning?</strong></p>
<p>It’s exciting to be here at such a young fellowship, because when something is this new, you never know where it’s going to go. Maybe this group will maintain its small, intimate character, where everybody has a chance to know everybody else. Or maybe it will grow by leaps and bounds, and someday become a congregation of hundreds or even thousands.</p>
<p>Maybe you’ll stick with the fellowship model, maybe you’ll evolve towards the traditional church model with a building and a staff, or maybe you’ll come up with something completely unique, so that years from now groups all over the country will say, “We’re following the Lakewood Ranch model.”</p>
<p>Nobody knows what the future might hold, and that’s always keeps things interesting. </p>
<p>One thing I can guess about the present, though, is that if you have friends who aren’t UUs, and if you happen to mention to them that you’re involved in starting a new Unitarian Universalist Fellowship, they probably look at you with a certain amount of confusion. Why would you do that?</p>
<p>Other religions give their followers very good reasons for joining a congregation, or even for starting new ones. But most of those reasons don’t apply to us.</p>
<p>In the church where I grew up, for example, we showed up on Sundays because one of the commandments says, “Remember the Sabbath Day to keep it holy.” Of course, we never considered observing the original Jewish Sabbath, but we had reinterpreted that commandment to mean that God was ordering us to go to church on Sunday.</p>
<p>My Catholic neighbors had even better reasons to go to church, because their place in Heaven was not determined by their personal relationship with God, it depended on rituals that could only be performed under the auspices of the Catholic Church.</p>
<p>A lot of sects teach that it is vitally important to believe the correct dogmas, and how are you going to know what those are unless you come and listen while some authority stands in a pulpit and tells you? Some teach that there is a cosmic battle going on between Good and Evil, and joining a church is how you pick a side. </p>
<p>All good reasons, but none that apply to us.</p>
<p>Universalists will tell you that everyone is already going to Heaven, no matter what they believe or where they spend their Sunday mornings. And UUs who don’t think of themselves as Universalists usually don’t have much to say about the afterlife. If we believe in it at all, we know so little about it that we can’t even guess how you might improve your prospects. So if it turns out there is a Judgment Day, and we get asked how faithfully we attended a UU church, I will be as surprised as anybody.</p>
<p>As for dogma, the person in the pulpit — today it’s me, next week it might be you. There’s no particular authority here. If a sermon makes sense or helps you figure out how you want to live, that’s great. But if it doesn’t, you should follow your own conscience rather than do what you’re told. Institutionally, the Unitarian Universalist Association doesn’t spell out how you should live or who you can love or what you have to eat or wear. </p>
<p>So what does a UU church do for you?</p>
<p>For a long time, a chief selling point of Unitarian Universalism was in all the things that it <em>doesn’t</em> do. It doesn’t ask you to check your brain at the door. It doesn’t make you feel guilty for asking questions or having doubts. It doesn’t dogmatize some pre-scientific cosmology or social prejudices that come down to us from the Bronze Age. It doesn’t set a clergy in authority over you. It doesn’t insist that you recite a creed you don’t really believe. </p>
<p>That less-is-more idea is summed up in a probably apocryphal story about Fanny Holmes, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. Supposedly, Fanny was talking to one of Oliver’s clerks, who knew that the old man wasn’t particularly religious, and so expressed some surprise when he discovered that they were Unitarians.</p>
<p>“Well,” Fanny explained, “we’re from Boston. In Boston you have to be something. And Unitarian is as near nothing as you can get.”</p>
<p>That argument made a certain amount of sense a hundred years ago, but it really doesn’t any more. Because today, you don’t have to be something. If you’re looking for a religion that’s near nothing, you can pick nothing. </p>
<p>A lot of people do, and more all the time. The Pew Research Center says that in 2014, 23% of Americans considered themselves religiously unaffiliated. That was up sharply from 16% in 2007. </p>
<p>Even the people who identify with a religion don’t necessarily belong to any congregation. In rough numbers, about a thousand American congregations affiliate with the UUA, accounting for about 200,000 people. But pollsters who ask people about their religions estimate that about 600,000 Americans call themselves Unitarian Universalists. </p>
<p>Now that makes for some head-scratching at the UUA. Think about it: We could triple the size of every UU congregation in the country without converting anybody. All we’d have to do is sign up all the people who already would tell a pollster that they’re UUs. </p>
<p>Nobody’s sure exactly who these other 400,000 are. Some are probably young adults who grew up UU, and never revolted against it, but didn’t bother to find a church of their own after they left home. Others might be older people who had a congregation up north, but never joined a new one after they retired and moved south.</p>
<p>Some are probably people who have heard of Unitarian Universalism and agree with it philosophically, but they’re just not joiners. Like Kurt Vonnegut, for example. When he gave the Ware Lecture at General Assembly in 1984, he said, “In order not to seem a spiritual quadriplegic to strangers trying to get a fix on me, I sometimes say I’m a Unitarian Universalist.” But as far as I can tell, he never signed anybody’s membership book. </p>
<p>I once made a project out of verifying one of those lists of “Famous UUs” you sometimes see on the internet. Dr. Seuss was a tough case to decide. He certainly would have fit in. I found a lot of resonances, a lot of very UU-sounding statements, but no specific congregation that claimed him. Maybe he just wasn’t a joiner. </p>
<p>A lot people aren’t. And why should they be? Like Fanny Holmes’ “You have to be something”, many arguments for joining don’t make sense any more. </p>
<p>If you’re looking intellectual stimulation, you could spend your Sunday morning reading <em>The New York Times</em>, or watching one of the news talk shows, or listening to a TED talk on YouTube.</p>
<p>Some UU churches put their whole service on YouTube. You can watch at home, on your own schedule. You don’t have to get out and rub shoulders with other people.</p>
<p>And that points out the first, fairly obvious, answer to the question of why people attend and why they join: You attend because you <em>want</em> to be in the physical presence of other people. That’s not a cost, it’s a benefit. And you join because you want to be together with some of the same people over and over again, to recognize them and be recognized by them.</p>
<p>There are a whole bunch of reasons you might want that, but the catch-all term for them is <em>community</em>. People come to UU churches looking for community.</p>
<p>Sometimes community is nothing more complicated than just looking for friends. Judgmental people might think that motive sounds a little lightweight compared to saving your immortal soul or joining a side in the great cosmic battle, but personally, I’m not in a position to look down on it. </p>
<p>My wife and I met John and Kathy Brackett [the Lakewood Ranch members who invited us to speak] in 1988 at a UU church in Lexington, Massachusetts. They went on to have children and we didn’t, so to a certain extent their kids became our kids. Through them, we experienced two decades worth of Halloween costumes and Christmas mornings and birthday parties and graduations. </p>
<p>In fact, UU churches are where I met most of the people I consider my friends for life. If those relationships were all I had ever gotten out of Unitarian Universalism, it would still be a pretty good deal. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly why, and your mileage may vary, but for me personally, UU congregations have a higher percentage of people I could imagine being friends with than any other groups I know.</p>
<p>I consciously started taking advantage of that about 13 or 14 years ago. That childhood Lutheran church I mentioned in was in Quincy, Illinois, a town of 40,000 that is about a hundred miles from anyplace you’ve heard of. It’s not on the way to anywhere else, so unless that’s your destination, you’ll never see it.</p>
<p>In adulthood, I came back about twice a year to see my parents. One day I was walking around the city, through the parks, past the town square where Lincoln and Douglas debated, when I thought about the fact that like myself, the people I knew from childhood and high school had almost all moved far away. So I had very few local connections of my own any more. And it dawned on me that someday my parents would die, and that when they did, I would never have any reason to come back here. That suddenly seemed tragic to me, as if some important part of my history was in danger of disappearing without a trace. </p>
<p>So I decided I needed my own Quincy community. For a lot of reasons, I couldn’t pass as a Lutheran any more, but there was also a small Unitarian church that had been started by some Emersonians back in the 1800s. So I started going there whenever I was in town, and arranged to talk there if their calendar had an opening. I also went to social events, met people, and looked for friends.</p>
<p>And wouldn’t you know, it worked. As my parents declined, I had to visit more and more often, and stay for longer stretches. Five years ago when my father died and I had to clean out the house and start settling the estate, I was in town for a couple of months. And that community took care of me as if I had been there forever. And now, years down the line, the future I was afraid of has not come to pass. My parents are gone, but I still have a relationship with my home town. I have people I care about there, and reasons to go back. And I do.</p>
<p>So if your purpose in being here is nothing deeper or more complicated than just that you need more nice people in your life, I get that. </p>
<p>But at the same time, I think the reason it works is that a Unitarian Universalist congregation is more than just a place where a lot of nice people hang out. It’s a community of shared values. I think John and Kathy welcomed us into their children’s lives not just because they liked us, but because we also were committed to the values they wanted Josh and Tory to learn. When I reached out to the Quincy Unitarians, in part they responded because they’re generous, hospitable people. But also I think they recognized, even as we were just meeting each other, that we shared something deep.</p>
<p>It’s no small thing to carry in your imagination the vision of a world where the UU Principles can be taken for granted, where of course all people have worth and dignity, of course we practice justice and compassion, of course we all nurture the interdependent web. As a description of how the world is, it’s pretty naive. But as a vision of what could be, of what we could work towards and make happen, it’s powerful.</p>
<p>Something else happens when you take seriously the distance between the world we live in and the world we hope for. If you think of yourself as just one person, alone, it’s overwhelming. Justice, democracy, the search for truth — what can I, by myself, do to bring any of that into reality? If the Unitarian Universalist vision is going to be anything more than just a pleasant daydream, we need allies. We need each other. </p>
<p>That really came home to me the last time I was in Quincy, which was the weekend after the election — that same Sunday when Ian was listening to our minister back in Massachusetts. Months before, when I had volunteered to lead a service in Quincy on the second Sunday in November, I had pictured a very different situation than the one I found when I arrived in town on Thursday afternoon, not even 48 hours after we found out who our next president would be. </p>
<p>Now, I don’t want to try to speak for all UUs — I’m taking advantage of that lack-of-authority-in-the-pulpit thing I mentioned a few minutes ago. But to me personally, last fall’s campaign felt like a continuous assault on my values and what I think of as Unitarian Universalist values. Day after day, I would hear that climate science is some kind of sinister conspiracy, that women often lie about sexual assault, that there is no racism worth talking about in America any more, that the international system in which America has 5% of the world’s population but consumes 25% of its resources — that system is actually rigged against us. When Mexicans come into this country and do our dirty jobs for less than minimum wage, they’re exploiting us. When I can buy inexpensive shirts at Walmart because people in Bangladesh are so desperate that they work in factories that could collapse on them at any time, and sometimes do, killing hundreds — that’s them taking advantage of me. </p>
<p>Rather than encouraging people to see each other’s worth and dignity, we were told to fear and resent anyone who is different from us. If we’re native-born, we should fear immigrants. If we’re in an opposite-sex marriage, we should resent the same-sex couples who now have the same rights we do. If we’re from a Christian or Jewish background, we should fear Muslims. If we’re white, we should fear blacks, and be grateful that police are so willing to shoot them down if they seem to be getting out of line.</p>
<p>For months, I had stayed calm by believing that America wasn’t really like that. These kinds of arguments came from a fringe group, a tiny minority. And then, they won. Suddenly, everything I had believed about my country and my fellow citizens seemed to be wrong.</p>
<p>If I felt that way up in New England, the UUs in Quincy had it much, much worse. Quincy is precisely the kind of heartland small town journalists go to when they’re trying to understand the new right-wing populism. The county voted 3-to–1 for Trump, and the discrepancy in yard signs and bumper stickers was even larger. </p>
<p>In the Boston suburbs, we speculated abstractly about the anger of the rural white working class. In Quincy, they looked at the neighbors and wondered: “How can these be the same people I’ve lived next to all these years?” If I felt challenged, they felt surrounded, encircled. Was it even still safe for them to have their own yard signs and bumper stickers? Was it safe to talk openly in public places where people you don’t know might overhear and respond? </p>
<p>So when the congregation gathered that Sunday, they weren’t just looking to hear an interesting talk and hang around with some nice people. They needed to be together. They needed to look into each other’s eyes and see some hope and courage.</p>
<p>That morning I had them do the same responsive reading we just did, so that they could hear themselves and hear each other proclaim what Unitarian Universalists stand for. In that time and place, it felt like a radical act. It felt like the beginning of resistance. </p>
<p>And that, I believe, is also why we join. Because if I am alone, it is easy to become intimidated. It is easy to start thinking of UU values as just some funny ideas I have, that maybe I shouldn’t talk about too loudly. If I am alone, it is easy to fall into despair, to think “I used to have these visions of a better world, but it didn’t happen. What was I thinking? I used to try to change things, but wasn’t that stupid? I’m just one person. Why did I think that my thoughts, my beliefs, my values could change anything or should matter to anybody?”</p>
<p>So yeah, it’s great to have friends. It’s good to have a pleasant place to go on a Sunday morning. It’s nice if somebody will provide interesting ideas to discuss over breakfast. </p>
<p>But there’s a deeper reason to be a congregation. We come together to hold each other up through difficult times. On days when you are feeling intimidated, you can be with people who have courage. When you feel yourself slipping into despair, you can look into the eyes of people who still have hope. Maybe today I do that for you. Maybe tomorrow you do it for me.</p>
<p>We join together because we are stronger that way. We need each other.</p>Doug Muderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04666144843949850394noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13399254.post-75722627482090631342017-02-03T09:01:00.001-05:002017-02-03T09:25:05.162-05:00The Hope of a Humanist<p>presented at First Parish Church of Billerica on January 29, 2017<span style="font-family: Cochin; font-size: 14px; text-indent: 18px;"> </span></p>
<p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin;">A little over a week ago, we inaugurated a new president. It wasn’t a surprise; we’d known for months that event was coming. That election itself was a shock to a lot of people, myself included. But then we had some time to adjust.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin; min-height: 17px;"> </p>
<p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin;">It probably won’t amaze you to learn that I was hoping someone else would win. Anybody my age has been on the losing side in many elections, but this one seemed different. I had never before felt so intensely that the vote was a referendum on my values, and on what I think of as Unitarian Universalist values. </p>
<p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin; min-height: 17px;"> </p>
<p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin;">So losing hit me harder than just an ordinary partisan loss. It challenged my faith in my countrymen, my faith in democracy, and even my faith in the direction that history is going in my lifetime. </p>
<p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin; min-height: 17px;"> </p>
<p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin;">In the last few months I’ve done a lot of traveling and talking to people, and I can report that I’m not the only UU who felt that way. I suspect that a number of you did also. (But in case some of you didn’t, I’m going to give you another way to get into this sermon in a minute. I hope you’ll bear with me until it comes around.)</p>
<p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin; min-height: 17px;"> </p>
<p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin;">I’ve been hearing two kinds of reactions. Some of us are energized now, feeling that history is putting us on the spot, and we need to respond. My editors at <em>UU World</em> feel that way, and so do a lot of the ministers I’ve talked to. Last Sunday at my home church in Bedford, our service centered on the dozens of members who had marched the day before, either in Boston or down in DC, and they seemed pretty energized. I gather that some of you marched as well.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin; min-height: 17px;"> </p>
<p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin;">But I’ve also been hearing about an opposite reaction: a general deflation, a loss of energy, a loss of hope, a falling into despair. For some it manifests as a turning inward, a retreat into the personal: "The news can happen without me. The larger world will have to take care of itself for a while." A lot of us, I suspect, have bounced back and forth between those two reactions: I have to do something, and yet I can’t bear to think about it. </p>
<p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin; min-height: 17px;"> </p>
<p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin;">This second reaction raises what I think is a very important question: When our hope gets damaged, how do we heal it? And this is where you can come back into this sermon, even if you don’t relate to the political angle. Because we all, from time to time, experience damage to our sense of hope: maybe from illness, or a career setback, or aging, or the breakup of a relationship, or some other misfortune. There are any number of ways that hope can get damaged, and we can find ourselves thinking: “Why do I bother? What is the point of trying to do anything?”</p>
<p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin; min-height: 17px;"> </p>
<p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin;">Now, if you complain about this despair in front of your Christian friends, I can predict what they’ll say: "This is why you need to come back to God." Matthew 19:26 says “With God all things are possible.” So believers never have any reason to feel hopeless, no matter how bad the prospects look. </p>
<p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin; min-height: 17px;"> </p>
<p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin;">The Bible offers many assurances that God will look out for you and intervene on your behalf. The 23rd Psalm says: “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of Death, I will fear no evil. For Thou art with me.” And Psalm 121 makes an even bolder promise: “The Lord is your keeper; the Lord is your shade on your right hand. The sun shall not strike you by day, nor the moon by night. The Lord will keep you from all evil.”</p>
<p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin; min-height: 17px;"> </p>
<p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin;">Now, I think we all realize that promises like that often fail in this life. Christians and other believers, no matter how dedicated and devout, seem to suffer misfortunes at more-or-less the same rates as the rest of us. But even then, the afterlife gives hope a second chance. In Heaven, the scales of justice can be rebalanced, and happy endings appended to all earthly tragedies. At the Lutheran church I grew up in we used to sing:</p>
<p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin; min-height: 17px;"> </p>
<p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin; text-align: center;">What though the tempest rage,</p>
<p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin; text-align: center;">Heaven is my home;</p>
<p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin; text-align: center;">Short is my pilgrimage,</p>
<p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin; text-align: center;">Heaven is my home;</p>
<p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin; text-align: center;">And time’s wild wintry blast</p>
<p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin; text-align: center;">Soon shall be overpassed;</p>
<p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin; text-align: center;">I shall reach home at last,</p>
<p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin; text-align: center;">Heaven is my home.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin; min-height: 17px;"> </p>
<p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin;">That answer works for a lot of people. I saw it work for my parents as they faced aging and death, and I could think of no good reason to try to talk them out of it. So if the promise of Heaven keeps you going through times of hardship, all I can say is: “Good for you."</p>
<p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin; min-height: 17px;"> </p>
<p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin;">But that doesn’t mean it works for me. To me, heavenly solutions seem a little too easy. All the scenes I would like to examine for evidence are conveniently off-stage. St. Paul says that faith is a gift of God. And while I’ve received a lot of gifts in my life, that wasn’t one of them. </p>
<p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin; min-height: 17px;"> </p>
<p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin;">So where does that leave me? Or leave anyone who takes a more humanistic view of life?</p>
<p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin; min-height: 17px;"> </p>
<p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin;">There is a traditional Unitarian answer to the question of what hope can be based on. Back in 1886, James Freeman Clarke, probably the greatest Unitarian minister of his era, listed what he called <a href="http://www.tentmaker.org/articles/fivepoints.htm">the five points of the new theology</a>: "The fifth point of doctrine in the new theology will, as I believe, be the Continuity of Human Development in all worlds, or the Progress of Mankind onward and upward forever. ... The one fact which is written on nature and human life is the fact of progress."</p>
<p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin; min-height: 17px;"> So if you are experiencing a personal loss of hope, you just need to expand your scale and your time horizon to identify with the upward march of humanity. Those 19th-century Unitarians wrote their own inspirational hymns about the future they were building here on Earth.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin; min-height: 17px;"> </p>
<p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin; text-align: center;">Hail, the glorious golden city</p>
<p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin; text-align: center;">pictured by the seers of old. </p>
<p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin; text-align: center;">Everlasting light shines o’er it.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin; text-align: center;">Wondrous things of it are told.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin; min-height: 17px;"> </p>
<p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin;">Who will live there? Their descendants, like maybe us.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin; min-height: 17px;"> </p>
<p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin; text-align: center;">For a spirit then shall move them</p>
<p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin; text-align: center;">we but vaguely apprehend.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin; text-align: center;">Aims magnificent and holy</p>
<p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin; text-align: center;">making joy and labor friend.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin; text-align: center;">Then shall bloom in song and fragrance</p>
<p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin; text-align: center;">harmony of thought and deed,</p>
<p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin; text-align: center;">fruits of peace and love and justice</p>
<p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin; text-align: center;">where today we plant the seed.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin; min-height: 17px;"> </p>
<p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin;">Like Clarke’s sermon, both of those progress-praising hymns were written before Auschwitz, before Hiroshima. James Freeman Clarke was a white male, living in a rising nation that seemed to have infinite potential, and ministering to a congregation of people who, by and large, were doing well. Optimism probably came easily to him, maybe a little too easily.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin; min-height: 17px;"> </p>
<p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin;">But similar arguments have been made more recently in a more nuanced way. In <em>The Better Angels of Our Nature</em>, for example, Steven Pinker argues that human society has been getting less and less violent for thousands of years. Martin Luther King certainly had an appreciation of injustice and human suffering, but he often quoted another 19th-century Unitarian, Theodore Parker: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” And King himself was identifying with future progress when he accepted that he might never see the freedom and equality he was fighting for, “I may not get there with you,” he said, “but I have been to the mountaintop.”</p>
<p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin; min-height: 17px;"> </p>
<p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin;">Optimistic liberals today point to young voters, who seem to be less susceptible to traditional prejudices. As a group, they are less racist, less sexist, less homophobic, less xenophobic, and in general just less deplorable than their elders. Eventually, the world will belong to them, so there’s reason to be hopeful about the long-term political future.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin; min-height: 17px;"> </p>
<p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin;">Countering that, though, is the observation of the great 20th-century economist John Maynard Keynes, that in the long run we are all dead. In other words, having the long-term trend on your side might not be that comforting, if the short-term trend in the opposite direction seems likely to continue for a very long time. Even if history eventually vindicates me, will I live long enough to deliver my I-told-you-sos?</p>
<p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin; min-height: 17px;"> </p>
<p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin;">And of course when you’re feeling hopeless, you can point to plenty of negative trends. In a thermonuclear age, Pinker’s millennia of progress towards nonviolence could be wiped out in one bad day. Climate change looks ominous, and if you look way, way down the road, eventually the Sun expands and this whole planet burns.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin; min-height: 17px;"> </p>
<p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin;">So as a reason to be hopeful, I wind up feeling about Progress much the same way that I feel about Heaven: If it works for you, that’s great. But I find that my faith in Progress deserts me when I need it most. When life is good, then “onward and upward forever” can sound pretty credible. But at times of defeat and despair and discouragement, it doesn’t.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin; min-height: 17px;"> </p>
<p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin;">Clarke’s faith in Progress is an example of a common first step as people abandon traditional religion: Their new worldview has a God-shaped hole in it, which they plug with a God-sized concept. Similarly, among early Marxists, the Revolution and the perfect Communist society to follow could sometimes sound a lot like the Second Coming and Christ’s millennial kingdom.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin; min-height: 17px;"> </p>
<p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin;">But I think a more mature humanism involves a deeper rethinking, rather than just finding a human concept to plug into the hole left by a religious concept. Usually, that rethinking takes the form of eliminating the middleman: So for example, medieval philosophers used the patterns found in Nature as indications of how God’s mind worked, and then drew conclusions from that. But when modern science came along, it eliminated the middleman: It left God out and drew conclusions directly from the patterns in Nature. Similarly, traditional religious morality revolves around the question of what God wants from us, and it deduces right and just behavior from that. But humanistic morality just goes straight at the question of what is right and just.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin; min-height: 17px;"> </p>
<p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin;">I want to do something similar with hope and despair. In dealing with a loss of hope, I think traditional religion goes the long way around: Faith in God leads to optimism about the future, which leads to hope in the present. And 19th-century Unitarianism takes the same long way round, but plugs Progress into the God-shaped hole: Our faith in Progress makes us optimistic about the future, so we can live hopefully in the present. </p>
<p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin; min-height: 17px;"> </p>
<p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin;">I’d like to eliminate those middlemen, and think about hope more directly. </p>
<p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin; min-height: 17px;"> </p>
<p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin;">So what is hope? I see hope as an experience in the moment, the feeling that it is worthwhile to try. It’s worthwhile to get out of bed in the morning. It’s worthwhile to speak to that person you don’t know. It’s worthwhile to apply for that new job or sign up for those new classes. It’s worthwhile to start turning your creative ideas into reality: writing that song or scripting that movie. </p>
<p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin; min-height: 17px;"> </p>
<p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin;">Hope gets intertwined with optimism, but they are not at all the same thing. Maybe while you’re writing that song, you keep yourself going by telling yourself that it’s going to be a hit and make you famous. But anybody who actually does write hit songs, or is successful in some other creative pursuit, will tell that those thoughts about the future just get in the way. Creating things is worthwhile because it just is; it’s a primary thing that you feel in the moment, not something you deduce from its prospects for success.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin; min-height: 17px;"> </p>
<p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin;">We human beings put effort into all kinds of things that we know from the get-go are pointless: We play games, we solve puzzles. We do it just to experience the sense of striving, not to produce something for the future. When a crossword puzzle is complete, we will crow for a moment, and then throw it away.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin; min-height: 17px;"> </p>
<p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin;">I see hope as that pure feeling of let’s-do-this. It doesn’t depend on judgments about the future. When my wife had cancer, she was optimistic and I was pessimistic — and wrong, as it turned out — but we both lived in hope. We both kept asking ourselves what we could do, and we felt that whatever we did to try to save her life was intensely important, whether it worked or not.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin; min-height: 17px;"> </p>
<p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin;">Hope is part of the natural equipment of a human being. Evolution built it into us because it helped our species survive. I imagine that proto-humans faced many discouraging situations through the ages. But some kept going anyway, and those are the ones who became our ancestors. They passed on to us this sense that we should do things, try things, and not give up.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin; min-height: 17px;"> </p>
<p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin;">But like the rest of our natural equipment, our hope doesn’t always work right. Some of us are born with a hope disability. Others have a weak hope that wears out over time. Some people’s early life wasn’t conducive to healthy hope development. Those are all difficulties worth our attention on some future day.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin; min-height: 17px;"> </p>
<p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin;">But what I want to focus on today is when a basically healthy hope gets injured by a traumatic event, the way that an accident might sprain your ankle or break your leg. Traditional religion tells you to approach that the long way around, by experiencing it as a loss of faith. Its prescription is to work on your relationship with God. </p>
<p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin; min-height: 17px;"> </p>
<p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin;">Humanism would have you eliminate that middleman, and look at your hope directly. You’ve been injured. How do you heal? How do you rehabilitate? </p>
<p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin; min-height: 17px;"> </p>
<p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin;">Watching myself, and other UUs I know, deal with the trauma of the election, I think many of us did the right things more-or-less by instinct, and I wonder how many of us consciously or unconsciously applied the model of physical injury. </p>
<p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin; min-height: 17px;"> </p>
<p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin;">When you sprain an ankle, you stop putting weight on it for a while. Similarly, many people’s reaction to the election was to stop paying attention to national affairs for a while, stop watching the news, stop participating in social-media forums where the election might be discussed, and change the subject when politics came up in their face-to-face conversations. </p>
<p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin; min-height: 17px;"> </p>
<p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin;">If you did that, you may have felt guilty, as if a better or a stronger person wouldn’t have needed to retreat like that. And if you had sworn off the duties of citizenship forever, that might have been blameworthy. But just pulling back for a while was probably wise. In the first days after the election, the people I felt sorriest for were the ones who were clearly injured, but couldn’t step back, who couldn’t stop reading things that made them more and more miserable, and kept throwing themselves into bitter arguments that couldn’t possibly turn out well.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin; min-height: 17px;"> </p>
<p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin;">But the injury metaphor tells you not just to rest, but to rehabilitate. And the first step there is usually to find the motions you can make without pain, and move those muscles so they don’t atrophy.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin; min-height: 17px;"> </p>
<p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin;">And so, the people who had retreated from politics looked for other areas of life in which to exercise their hope: in projects around the house, in planning social events, in trying new things at work, or maybe something entirely frivolous, like a difficult jigsaw puzzle. It was important simply to work through the motions of hope: to visualize something you might do, to try it, and to see it work out well enough that you were glad you did it.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin; min-height: 17px;"> </p>
<p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin;">Before long, especially when you’re rehabilitating a complicated joint like a knee or a shoulder, you start taking it through the range of motion that hurts. But you do it first under controlled circumstances, and you do it with help. Maybe a therapist moves the arm for you, or you do your first exercises in a pool, letting the water absorb your weight. </p>
<p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin; min-height: 17px;"> </p>
<p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin;">In the same way, those first forays back into public affairs were best taken under the watchful eyes of close friends whose recovery was a bit further along — settings where you wouldn’t be ashamed to wince or yelp, among people who would know when to slow down and move more carefully.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin; min-height: 17px;"> </p>
<p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin;">Eventually, when the injured part has mostly knit itself back together and you just need to get strong again, you seek out the support of a community. You join an exercise group or take a class at a gym. </p>
<p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin; min-height: 17px;"> </p>
<p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin;">Those of us who already belonged to UU churches had an advantage at this stage, because we had an obvious place to go. And I think a number of people whose previous connection to a UU church was a little shaky have drawn closer, recognizing their need for community support. </p>
<p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin; min-height: 17px;"> </p>
<p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin;">For some, Saturday’s march was a search for community support; they came out to be reminded that they are not alone. But for others it represented a return to the full exercise of their hope. They envisioned showing up with a bunch of their friends, maybe with some creative costumes or signs. They took some action to bring that vision into reality, and it worked. They’re back in the political arena, and some are back stronger than ever.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin; min-height: 17px;"> </p>
<p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin;">Because that’s the ultimate goal of rehabilitation after injury: not just to return to a semblance of your previous life, but to come back stronger. </p>
<p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin; min-height: 17px;"> </p>
<p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin;">Injury isn’t just a setback, it has a lesson to teach: The body doesn’t always take care of itself. It needs regular attention and maintenance. Similarly, maintaining healthy hope in your life doesn’t just happen. It isn’t a gift of God that we can just sit back and receive. Keeping your hope in a state of fitness that resists reinjury involves maintaining a good mental hygiene, observing what you take in and what you expose yourself to, watching to see what in your life builds your hope up and what tears it down. </p>
<p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin; min-height: 17px;"> </p>
<p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin;">And most of all, healthy hope requires exercise. On a regular basis, we need to visualize worthwhile things, try them, and see them come to pass. Not just because the world needs good things to happen, but because we, for ourselves, need to make good things happen and see ourselves making good things happen. </p>
<p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin; min-height: 17px;"> </p>
<p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin;">So in conclusion, I want to urge you: If you have had or are having a crisis of hope, don’t take the long way around. Don’t approach it as a crisis of faith. Don’t get distracted into debates about optimism and pessimism. Some people believe in God and some don’t. Some people are optimists and some are pessimists. But any of them can learn to live hopefully in the present. There may be a God or not. Sometimes the optimists are right and sometimes the pessimists are right. But it’s always better to live in hope than to live in despair.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin; min-height: 17px;"> </p>
<p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin;">So if it helps you to pray, feel free. If it comforts you to think about positive long-term trends, don’t stop on my account. But also take care of your hope the way you would take care of a knee or a shoulder or your lungs or your heart. Practice good hope hygiene. Break hope-defeating habits. And most of all, exercise your hope and keep it in shape. Going forward, let’s maintain a fit and healthy hope, both for ourselves and for the world.</p>Doug Muderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04666144843949850394noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13399254.post-54764809467348515382016-12-12T12:31:00.000-05:002020-06-04T11:19:44.360-04:00Season of Darkness, Season of Hope<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>presented at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto on December 11, 2016</i></div>
<h4 style="text-align: left;">
Chalice Lighting</h4>
At times our light goes out and is rekindled by a spark from another person. Each of us has cause to think with deep gratitude of those who have lighted the flame within us. -- Albert Schweitzer<br />
<h4 style="text-align: left;">
Centering Words</h4>
You may not always have a comfortable life, and you will not always be able to solve all of the world's problems at once. But don't ever underestimate the importance you can have, because history has shown us that courage can be contagious, and hope can take on a life of its own. -- Michelle Obama<br />
<h4 style="text-align: left;">
Sermon</h4>
Most of the time, some ceiling or roof blocks my view of the sky: in my apartment, my car, in stores, offices, churches, and just about anywhere else I go. Even when I’m outside, I don’t always remember to look up. Occasionally I check what the weather is doing or how much daylight is left. I might admire a beautiful sunset, or the Moon, or the stars on a particularly clear night. But I look at them the way I look at paintings in a museum. I contemplate them for a while and then I move on.<br />
So while I am well acquainted with the sky, I don’t live with it the way my father did when he was farming, and certainly not the way ancient peoples did. Not many of us do anymore. And so it can be hard for us to grasp what the Winter Solstice must have meant centuries or millennia ago, when our culture’s mythic intuition was forming.<br />
Our calendars tell us that the Solstice is about a week away, and of course we notice that days are shorter this time of year. But ancient peoples who lived with the sky as a constant companion would have seen much more than that. Even children must have noticed that the path the Sun takes across the sky was dropping ominously towards the horizon. And every child, at some time or another, must have asked the obvious question: "Is it going to keep dropping, until someday the Sun won’t bother to come up at all? What will happen to us if the Sun never comes back?"<br />
Today, that question sounds even more childish, because we are educated: We know about the solar system and the Earth’s tilted axis. We understand that the Sun’s shorter path across the sky does not mean that it is getting weaker or lazier. In the Southern Hemisphere, we know, days are bright and long now, and the tropics are as hot as ever. In short, the Sun is doing fine, however it might look from our angle. The Earth is in its usual orbit, and everything is right on schedule. The fear that the Winter Solstice might <i>fail</i> this year never really crosses our minds.<br />
Millennia ago, it probably did. If you were that questioning child, no doubt your elders would reassure you: “The Sun always turns around about now. Wait a week or two, and you’ll see for yourself.”<br />
But I wonder just how reassuring that was. I doubt it communicated the clockwork certainty we feel today. Probably it sounded like those somewhat less convincing reassurances we all get from time to time, like: “That fault line is stable.” or “People with your credentials always get good jobs.” or “America would never elect someone like that.” — reassurances that may have been true in living memory, but which come with no guarantees. “Maybe it has always been that way,” you think, “but is it going to be that way <i>this time</i>?”<br />
So I imagine that ancient peoples of all ages watched the sky this time of year with a certain anxiety, believing, but not completely certain, that the age-old pattern would hold, and a cosmic catastrophe would be averted once again.<br />
But of course, the pattern did always hold. Every year, the Sun’s arc across the sky stopped sinking and began to rise, the days got longer, and Spring eventually came. But no matter how many times you lived through it, I imagine that the Solstice never really lost its miraculous quality, because the mechanism behind it remained invisible.<br />
And so it became that rarest of events: a predictable, regularly occurring <i>miracle</i>. In time, the Solstice came to represent something a little more abstract than just the promise of Spring: It was evidence that miracles were still happening. It symbolized the lesson that you should never lose hope, because situations that just seem to get worse and worse every day can turn around, even if you don’t see exactly what is going to turn them.<br />
Over time, symbols and stories and holidays of hope clustered around this time of year: The Temple lights that should burn out, don’t. The Golden Child who will change all of our lives — whether it is the hero Mithras or the savior Jesus — is born. Even our secular Christmas mythology reflects this hope that things can turn around: Scrooge gets back his humanity. The Grinch’s heart grows three sizes. George Bailey discovers he actually is living a wonderful life.<br />
And every year, we are encouraged to bring that hope into our own lives: Maybe an old friendship can be rekindled. Maybe that ancient family quarrel can be patched up. Whatever part of your life seems stuck or broken, you should give it one more try, because this is a time when things might turn around, even if you don’t necessarily see how. This season of darkness is also a magical season, a season of hope.<br />
But what can Unitarian Universalists do with all that?<br />
Hope is fine, I guess, but we don’t put much stock in magic, or in things that are supposed to turn around for no particular reason. We want to see the mechanisms.<br />
We are also skeptical of saviors. When I was growing up Lutheran, we called this season Advent, and we sang:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
O come, O come, Emanuel.<br />
And rescue captive Israel<br />
That mourns in lonely exile here<br />
Until the Son of God appear.<br />
Rejoice! Rejoice! Emanuel<br />
Shall come to thee, O Israel.</blockquote>
That tune is still in our UU hymnal, but we changed the words. Because we are a proud people, a people of action, and we don’t plead helplessly for someone to come save us, not even God.<br />
A lot of us don’t believe in God, and even those of us who do probably don’t believe in the kind of God who steps into history and fixes things that humans have screwed up. At most, we might believe in the upward tilt of Progress, or in the Theodore Parker line that Martin Luther King liked to quote: “The arc of the moral Universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”<br />
Many of us don’t even believe that much. The universe simply does what it does, and whether it ultimately bends towards Heaven or Hell is beyond our knowing. Our so-called “progress” may lead to annihilation rather than paradise. Rather than grant us freedom, it may enable a tyranny more all-encompassing than even George Orwell could have imagined. Rather than evolve into an interconnected global village, the world may fragment into echo chambers that are increasingly suspicious of one another.<br />
Instead of adventure and innocent fun, the literature of our young people is full of dystopian wastelands and zombie apocalypses and heroes who hope for little more than to survive with a few of their friends. And who can blame the young for dwelling on such dark scenarios? Aren’t they just bringing into popular culture the private fears their elders are reluctant to discuss? <br />
So we can see the darkness, but where is this hope we are supposed to celebrate?<br />
In order to present that hope to Unitarian Universalists well trained in doubt and skepticism, I’m going to need to take advantage of something else we do well: appreciate subtle distinctions. UUs can split hairs like nobody else, and I’m going to split a really important one right now.<br />
So far I’ve been using the word <i>hope</i> interchangeably with the belief that things will get better. But those two notions aren’t the same at all. Believing that things will improve isn’t hope, it’s <i>optimism</i>. The opposite of optimism is <i>pessimism</i>, the belief that things will get worse. But the opposite of hope is something far more devastating than pessimism, it’s <i>despair</i>. To be in despair is to believe that it’s useless to try, because your actions don’t matter. Nothing can be done.<br />
So here’s the hair splitting: Optimism and pessimism are beliefs about the future. Hope and despair are attitudes towards the present.<br />
Pessimism is going to the plate in the ninth inning when your team is behind, assessing the situation, and concluding that you’re probably going to lose. Despair, on the other hand, would tell you not to bother taking your turn at bat, or if you do step into the batter’s box, to let the pitches go by without swinging, because what’s the point? What difference could it possibly make?<br />
Hope is the opposite of that. Hope is that feeling deep within you that you are alive, and that in this particular time and place, the only thing you need to concern yourself with is what you do next. Hope means refusing to prejudge the situation, it means doing whatever you can think to do and then whatever happens will happen.<br />
Optimism and pessimism both claim to know something, but hope thrives on the unknown. It focuses on those parts of the future that remain undetermined, and it says, “Let me see what I can do.”<br />
Once you appreciate that distinction, I think you’ll agree that while some UUs are optimists and some are pessimists, we are, at our core, a hopeful people. We don’t claim to know the future. We throw ourselves into the unknown and we act, because we have a deep, abiding faith that actions matter.<br />
People sometimes ask me, as they probably ask you, why Unitarian Universalists bother to form congregations at all. Why do we set our alarms on Sunday mornings, make ourselves presentable, and show up? After all, if you’re going to make up your own mind about the Big Questions and follow your own conscience, can’t you do that just as well at home? No UU Hell is waiting for the unchurched. No authority is going to condemn you if you sleep in. So why bother?<br />
I suspect that these last few weeks, you’ve known exactly why you bother. We are now in a season of darkness in more ways than one. The values Unitarian Universalists cherish are challenged today in a way they have not been in my lifetime. We are told from the highest levels to fear the stranger, and blame our misfortunes on those least able to defend themselves: on immigrants and refugees and the poor. Those who are different are presented to us as threats to our well-being and our very way of life. Science, we are told, is just another bias, and compassion is weakness. Those we might previously have seen as victims are in fact just losers, people unworthy of our concern.<br />
In the middle of this immense darkness, if all you can see is the small candle of goodwill that you carry yourself, then you may well fall into despair. Because no matter what you do or how hard you try, you cannot light the world. If you worry that your candle might really be the only one left, then you might do well to hide it, for fear of those who would snuff it out.<br />
Or you could bring it here.<br />
On the Sunday after the election, I was speaking in the place where I grew up, a small Midwestern town in a rural county that voted three to one for Trump. The Unitarian church there is small, but we drew a good crowd that day.<br />
I don’t think people came to church that morning because they wanted to be jollied back into optimism. We gathered together for reassurance, but not the kind that says everything is going to be OK. (A lot of things are not going to be OK in the coming years. I think we all know that.) No, the reassurance we were looking for that morning, that I think many of us are still looking for, is to be in the presence of people who are not surrendering to despair.<br />
I led the congregation in a responsive reading of the UU Principles, just so we could hear each other and hear ourselves say out loud what we stand for: the worth of all people; justice, equity, and compassion; acceptance of one another; the search for truth; democracy; world community; the interdependent web.<br />
We’re not ready to give those things up, or to hibernate for a few years and let them take care of themselves. We don’t all have a plan yet. We don’t know exactly what we’re going to do. Most of us are still casting about, trying to figure out what we <i>can</i> do, what roles we can play, where we might make some kind of difference. But UUs across the country are determined to do <i>something</i>, because we are a people who believe that our actions matter. We are a religion of hope.<br />
We are also a religion of faith. Not necessarily faith in some perfect world after death. Not necessarily faith in an all-powerful God who makes our stories come out right. Not even faith that some great leader will ride in with the cavalry to save us in our hour of need. But we do have faith that the potential for human goodness is far more widespread than it often appears. That flame you feel inside yourself, that desire to live in a more just and compassionate world, that willingness to make an effort and take some chances to help bring that world about — it also burns inside other people, including many you would never suspect. An old-time Universalist like Hosea Ballou would tell you that if you could look deeply enough, you would see that flame burning somewhere inside everyone. <br />
You can never predict when or how it will shine through. Several years ago, I was worried about my wife, who was facing a life-threatening cancer she eventually recovered from, and so I did not notice that I had picked up a virus myself. It hit me suddenly one afternoon in our local mall, and I dragged myself to Food Court to sit down and try to recover enough energy to drive home. But instead I just felt worse and worse. Looking around, I saw only strangers, no one I could ask for help. So I decided to make a run for the bathroom, hoping to be sick there rather than in front of everyone.<br />
But when I stood up, I keeled over, and woke up a minute or two later on the floor with people all around me. The man at the next table had caught me as I fell, and an impromptu emergency response team had formed around me. Mall security had been notified, 911 had already been called, and an ambulance was on its way.<br />
When I had looked around at all those strangers, I had not seen that level of caring, that willingness to get involved and help. But it was there.<br />
That is a story of personal caring, but history is also full of moments when caring for the public good has burst forth, seemingly from nowhere: when crowds have faced down armies, when workers have stood together in unions, when citizens have marched together in support of civil rights or against war, and very recently when Native Americans and their allies from across the country — including a sizable contingent of UU ministers — came together at Standing Rock.<br />
Hope thrives on the unknown, and we do not know what depths of goodness and courage might be hidden inside the American people. During this past year, it has been hidden pretty well sometimes. Sometimes I have felt that I didn’t know this country at all. But it is the faith of a Universalist that human goodness does not die just because it is hidden, any more than the Sun dies when it sinks behind the horizon.<br />
If we are honest with ourselves, we have to admit that our own goodness is hidden sometimes. We haven’t always done what we could have done. We haven’t always spoken up when we should have. In hindsight, I suspect, most of us can look back at times when we were on the wrong side of some important issue. (I know I can.) But the goodness inside us didn’t die in those moments, it was just obscured by ignorance, or by fear, or maybe just by exhaustion.<br />
It is the faith of Universalist to give others the same benefit of the doubt that we need for ourselves. And it is the faith of a Universalist to believe, as Michelle Obama said, that actions of courage, of generosity, and of inspiration are contagious.<br />
The challenge of a season of darkness is to start such contagions and to spread them. If you step forward, you do not know who will follow you. Maybe it will be people you never would have expected.<br />
In terms of optimism, I can offer you only the vaguest reassurance. Human history shows that things do not go on getting worse forever. Eventually they turn, and the moments when they turn are hardly ever obvious at the time. Even decades later, historians are usually still arguing about them. Right now, we could be closer to a turning point than anyone suspects, or it could still be a long way off. I don’t know.<br />
One thing I can guarantee you: In a season of darkness, whatever you can think to do will seem totally inadequate to the immensity of the situation. What does it matter if I wear a safety pin? Or correct that fake news story my friend posted to Facebook? Or put a Black Lives Matter sticker on my car? Or sit next to that kid who’s being bullied? Or call that congressman? Or go to that demonstration? Or work for that candidate? Or run for that local office? How is that going to turn the world around?<br />
And the answer is: We don’t know. By itself, nothing you do will turn things around. You cannot light the world.<br />
But we also do not know how much hidden goodness is out there, and how it might reveal itself. If you do that thing that it occurs to you to do, you do not know who will see it and be inspired by it, or what you yourself might learn from it, or what either of you might go on to do next.<br />
Here, in a time of darkness, we choose to act, but we do not know what will come from that action. We cannot know. And so, we hope.Doug Muderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04666144843949850394noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13399254.post-64092682250578232662016-11-15T10:21:00.004-05:002016-11-15T10:21:58.961-05:00A Post-Election MeditationWhen I led the service at the Unitarian Church of Quincy, Illinois on the Sunday after the election, I read this meditation (after apologizing to anybody who was feeling happy that morning).<br />
<br />
When something bad and unexpected happens, it hurts.<br />
<br />
That pain is part of the mind’s normal functioning, its healthy process of keeping order.
Those buzzing expectations of things that now are not going to happen need to be switched off and unplugged. Hopes that have become hopeless need to be boxed up and returned to storage. Through this process, space is made for new plans and new hopes and new expectations, even if we can't yet imagine what they’re going to be.<br />
<br />
And while all this is happening, we hurt.<br />
<br />
It’s tempting not to let this process play out. It’s tempting to skip past the period of adjustment and jump straight into new action. It’s tempting to skip past the time of hurting and leap into anger at those we blame for our misfortune.<br />
<br />
Sometimes it’s even tempting to turn that anger on ourselves, to goad ourselves into ever-deeper levels of guilt and recrimination: “If I had done this. If I hadn’t done that. Why did I let my hopes get so high? Shouldn't I have known better?”<br />
<br />
And while we’re running in circles, and raging, and recriminating, that inner work remains undone.<br />
<br />
So right now, let’s take a moment to sit with our pain and disappointment. Not goading it on, not telling it to go away, not trying to jump over it.
That pain has work to do. Let that work be done.<br />
<br />
Someday, maybe sooner than you think there will be a time for new plans, a time for new action, and even a time for new hopes. But all that will happen much better, after the debris has been cleared away.
Doug Muderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04666144843949850394noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13399254.post-88887230521533112322016-10-12T11:45:00.001-04:002016-10-12T12:00:10.364-04:00A Church That Would Have You as a Member<p>Back in 2010, the <em>New Humanism</em> online magazine asked me if I’d write an article introducing Unitarian Universalism to Humanists. I sent them a text titled “Unitarian Universalism: A Church for Humanists?”, which they posted under the title “A Church that Would Have You as a Member”. </p>
<p>So far so good. But recently it has been pointed out to me that the <em>New Humanism</em> web site no longer exists, and so links that used to point to my article now go to some page that’s trying to sell you something unrelated. I’ve googled lines out of my draft and haven’t gotten any hits, so I don’t think the article has moved somewhere else.</p>
<p>So I’m going to repost it here. I didn’t keep track of my agreement with <em>New Humanism</em>, so it’s possible I’m violating copyright by doing so. If so, and if that bothers whoever has a right to be bothered, they should just leave a comment. I’ll happily take this post down if you can point to somewhere else on the internet where the article can be found.</p>
<p>Bear in mind: What I have in my records is the article as I sent it to them, so it’s missing whatever edits they might have made, for better or worse. I fixed a mistake. (James Barrett died in 1994, not 2003.) Also, I’ve had to fix the links, which may not go to the original places anymore, but should go somewhere relevant. Anyway, here it is:</p>
<hr /><hr />
<p><strong>A Church That Would Have You as a Member</strong></p>
<p>Unitarian Universalism has long had a unique relationship with Humanism. What other religious group would showcase an outspoken atheist at its national convention, as the UUs did when they invited Kurt Vonnegut to give prestigious annual Ware Lecture at the General Assembly of 1984? UU Humanists have their own national organization (HUUmanists) with their own journal (<em>Religious Humanism</em>). In a 1998 survey, nearly half of UUs identified themselves as Humanists. <em>New Humanism</em>'s publisher Greg Epstein spoke at the 2008 General Assembly, and has been invited to speak again in 2010.</p>
<p>Unitarians were largely responsible for the first Humanist Manifesto, and in his 2002 book <em>Making the Manifesto</em>, former Unitarian Universalist Association President (and the AHA's Humanist of the Year for 2000) William Schulz claimed that there were more Humanists in UU churches than in the American Humanist Association. </p>
<p>Few other religious organizations have so consistently stood with Humanists in those battles where traditional morality and human rights take opposite sides. The lead plaintiffs in the Massachusetts same-sex marriage case <a href="http://archive.boston.com/news/local/articles/2004/05/10/unitarians_prepare_to_marry_gays?pg=full">took their vows at the Boston headquarters of the Unitarian Universalist Association</a>, with then-UUA President William Sinkford officiating. About a hundred UU ministers -- a significant fraction of the entire UU clergy -- marched with Martin Luther King in Selma in 1965, and the murder of one of them (<a href="http://www.uua.org/re/tapestry/adults/river/workshop5/175806.shtml">James Reeb</a>) provided the white martyr that President Johnson needed when he urged Congress to pass the Voting Rights Act. Another UU (<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/1994/07/30/us/death-doctor-overview-abortion-doctor-bodyguard-slainin-florida-protester.html?pagewanted=all">James Barrett</a>) was murdered in 1994 while trying to protect an abortionist from religious-right violence. Linus Pauling, the two-time Nobel laureate who led an international groundswell of scientists pushing for a nuclear test-ban treaty (and co-founded the International League of Humanists) was a UU.</p>
<p>UU General Assemblies have passed <a href="http://www.uua.org/liberty/religionstate/41771.shtml">more than a dozen resolutions supporting the separation of church and state</a>. People for the American Way founder Norman Lear was another Ware lecturer in 1994, and a Unitarian Universalist (<a href="http://www.uuworld.org/articles/pete-starks-untroubled-humanism">Pete Stark</a>) was the first congressman to announce in public that he did not believe in God. </p>
<p>Small wonder, then, that when Humanists go looking for a like-minded community -- a place to raise a child in humanistic values, look for social-action allies, solemnize a wedding or funeral, or perhaps just be reminded once a week that American consumer culture is not the only alternative to God -- the local Unitarian Universalist church is a prime option. There are about a thousand UU churches around the country (far more than Ethical Culture societies or other Humanist-friendly groups), and you can find at least one in every state of the union.</p>
<p>But is the humanist-community problem really that simple? Should we all just go join UU churches? As a Unitarian Universalist myself -- I am, in fact, more comfortable identifying myself as a UU than as a Humanist -- I wish I could make that sweeping recommendation in good conscience. But while many Humanists are happy as UUs, many others are not, and every year some number of UU-Humanists stomp out the door in disgust. </p>
<p>So would you be a contented parishioner or a stomper-out-the-door?</p>
<p style="text-align: center;">*</p>
<p>Probably the best way to get a handle on UUism is to understand where it comes from. Believe it or not, the story (or at least the Unitarian branch of the UU family tree) starts with the Puritans. When they came to the New World in the 1600s, the Puritans weren't any kind of Humanists or even particularly liberal Christians. But Puritan churches lacked two features that anchor religious institutions against the progressive forces of evolution: They didn't have a creed and they didn't have a hierarchy. </p>
<p>Each local congregation was supposed to read the Bible for itself, and no external authority could force a congregation to read it any particular way. Puritans believed that an external authority was unnecessary, because the Holy Spirit would keep pulling congregations back to Christian truth. What happened instead was that many of those congregations drifted towards liberalism. </p>
<p>The drift was gradual, but over the centuries the small changes added up. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, people like William Ellery Channing started interpreting the Bible according to reason rather than tradition, and noticed that some of the more unreasonable Christian doctrines, like the Trinity, were also un-Biblical. So they affirmed the unity rather than the trinity of God and became known as Unitarians.</p>
<p>By the middle of the 19th century, Ralph Waldo Emerson was challenging the uniqueness of the Bible itself, which he saw as the record of one people's inspiration. People in other times and places (like us here and now) might hope for their own divine inspiration. And if that was the goal, why not look to Nature or Art rather than to scripture?</p>
<p>From there, each generation of Unitarians became a little more humanistic than the last, until by 1920 Unitarian minister Curtis Reese could announce to his colleagues (in public, no less) that God was "philosophically possible, scientifically unproved, and religiously unnecessary."</p>
<p>The fact that Cotton Mather was not rolling over in his grave was, in itself, powerful evidence against the Afterlife.</p>
<p>Reese-style Unitarian Humanism was controversial for about a generation, but by the time of the merger with the Universalists in 1961, it was the majority point of view in most UU churches. Since then things have drifted in a different direction, which we'll get to in a few paragraphs.</p>
<p style="text-align: center;">*</p>
<p>This unique history explains the otherwise bizarre combination of features you will find in a typical UU church. If you walk into a UU Sunday-morning service wearing earplugs, you might imagine you are in a Christian church. Families arrive together and children go to their classes. Adults stand up or sit down in unison. Sometimes they sing together or read something out of the hymnal together. There might be a choir and an organ. Candles might be lit. More often than not, a minister will stand up and give something that might be called a "talk" or an "address," but looks an awful lot like a sermon.</p>
<p>UUs might appear to be imitating the more popular Christian denominations, but they're not. Like the evolutionary product it is, UUism comes by all that stuff honestly through a common ancestor -- the same way that dolphins get their lungs.</p>
<p>No matter how naturally those Christian trappings arise, though, they provide the first test of whether you'll be happy as a UU: If they drive you crazy, independent of the the service's intellectual content, then your life as a UU will be difficult. Don't torture yourself.</p>
<p>But if you can tolerate the appearances -- I've grown to like them myself -- then take out your earplugs and listen. You'll hear a message that is not always capital-H Humanist, but is decidedly humanistic: People of goodwill need to look past their disagreements about metaphysics and start fixing the world -- where fixing means creating the conditions for human happiness and fulfillment here and now, not preparing our invisible souls for some higher happiness after death. The world's many scriptures are read for inspiration, not for authoritative pronouncements, so a UU discussion doesn't end when someone quotes the Bible. Prayer is a community meditation on human needs and desires, not a request for supernatural favors. Science's description of the physical world is accepted, and while UUs may at times be skeptical about whether technology is creating a Heaven or a Hell for us, they completely understand and sympathize with the scientist's desire to solve whatever earthly mysteries might be solvable. Unlike Bluebeard's castle, a UU universe has no locked rooms.</p>
<p style="text-align: center;">*</p>
<p>Before you say "sign me up," though, you need to consider the continuing drift of recent decades. There was a moment in the 1960s or 70s when Unitarian Universalism might have become an unofficial Church of Humanism. Humanism was clearly the dominant philosophy and all forms of traditional religion were in retreat. Many UUs felt that their centuries-long evolutionary journey was done now: They had shaken off the barnacles of orthodox Christianity and had arrived at Humanism.</p>
<p>Many still feel that way, but the community as a whole has gone in a different direction. Particularly among the ministry, there is a trend to view traditional religion not as an encrustation to be shaken off, but as a resource to be mined. The solid shore of Humanism is largely taken for granted, but from that shore many 21st-century UUs dive back into religion, to see what can be salvaged: community-building rituals, teaching stories, techniques of personal transformation, invocations of awe and wonder, and so on.</p>
<p>And so, religious words that once seemed to be on their way out -- <em>worship</em>, <em>prayer</em>, <em>God</em>, <em>holy</em>, <em>sacred</em>, <em>salvation</em>, <em>divine</em>, and many others -- are on the upswing again. If you tap on those words, if you ask what UUs are trying to get at by using them, chances are you'll hear an explanation largely compatible with an underlying Humanism. But if you view the words themselves as the carriers of a dangerous infection, you'll find today's UU churches to be unhygienic environments. </p>
<p>Finally, UU congregations are tolerant to a fault. Literally anyone can show up at a UU church, believing any kind of craziness, and will not be told to go away. (In fact, if you take it on yourself to tell someone he or she doesn't belong, you are the one who is likely to be reprimanded.) If you mingle at the coffee hour after the Sunday service, you may run into astrologers, crystal gazers, faith healers, and new-agers of all varieties. They won't be anywhere close to the majority and most of them don't stay more than a few months. But if one such encounter ruins your whole week, you won't be a happy camper.</p>
<p>In short, if you are allergic to the appearances and words of traditional religion, Unitarian Universalism is not for you. If you are looking for a community of pure and unadulterated Humanism, you won't find it at a UU church.</p>
<p>But if you want to be accepted for the Humanist you are, without any fudging or hypocrisy, you can have that. If you want allies in the struggle to make the world a better place, you can find them. If you are stimulated by diverse points of view and enjoy engaging people who frame the world differently (but not too differently), a UU church is a good place to meet them.</p>
<p>If you came to my church, you'd be welcome. You might be happy there, or you might not. Only you can judge.</p>Doug Muderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04666144843949850394noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13399254.post-4737778846589009272016-05-05T09:07:00.001-04:002017-01-28T06:21:02.291-05:00The Holiday of Rising Energy<p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px 27.9px; text-indent: -27.9px; font-size: 18px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><em>presented at the Unitarian Church of Quincy, Illinois on May 1, 2016</em></p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px 27.9px; text-indent: -27.9px; font-size: 18px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><strong>Opening Words</strong></p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px 27.9px; text-indent: -27.9px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">The opening words are from <em>Camelot</em>:</p>
<blockquote style="font-size: 21px;">
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px 27.9px; text-indent: -27.9px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">It’s May! It’s May!</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px 27.9px; text-indent: -27.9px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">The lusty month of May. </p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px 27.9px; text-indent: -27.9px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">That lovely month when everyone goes blissfully astray.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px 27.9px; text-indent: -27.9px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">It’s here! It’s here!</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px 27.9px; text-indent: -27.9px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">That shocking time of year.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px 27.9px; text-indent: -27.9px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">When tons of wicked little thoughts merrily appear.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px 27.9px; text-indent: -27.9px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">It’s May! It’s May!</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px 27.9px; text-indent: -27.9px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">The month of great dismay.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px 27.9px; text-indent: -27.9px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">When all the world is brimming with fun,</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px 27.9px; text-indent: -27.9px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Wholesome or un.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px 27.9px; text-indent: -27.9px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">It’s mad! It’s gay!</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px 27.9px; text-indent: -27.9px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">A libelous display!</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px 27.9px; text-indent: -27.9px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Those dreary vows that everyone takes,</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px 27.9px; text-indent: -27.9px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Everyone breaks.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px 27.9px; text-indent: -27.9px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Everyone makes divine mistakes</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px 27.9px; text-indent: -27.9px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">In the lusty month of May.</p>
</blockquote>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px 27.9px; text-indent: -27.9px; font-size: 18px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><strong>Responsive Reading</strong></p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; text-align: justify; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">(by Henry David Thoreau)</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; text-align: justify; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Why should we live in such a hurry and waste of life?</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; text-align: justify; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">We are determined to be starved before we are hungry.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; text-align: justify; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">I wish to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; text-align: justify; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">I wish to learn what life has to teach, and not, when I come to die, discover that I have not lived.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; text-align: justify; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">I do not wish to live what is not life, living is so dear.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; text-align: justify; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Nor do I wish to practice resignation, unless it is quite necessary.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; text-align: justify; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">I wish to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life. </p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; text-align: justify; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">I want to cut a broad swath, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; text-align: justify; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">If it proves to be mean, then to get to the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; text-align: justify; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Or if it is sublime, to know it by experience, and to be able to give a true account of it.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px 27.9px; text-indent: -27.9px; font-size: 18px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><strong>Meditation</strong></p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">I want you to imagine that you are two years old, and running is something you have just recently gotten good at. </p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">All the energy that someday will animate a big clunky adult body is already in you right now. It's been compressed down into a tiny package, and you’re just bursting with it. </p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Adults are always so tired and slow. They plop down into a chair or a couch and it seems so hard for them to move. But for you, it’s hard <em>not </em>to move. There’s so much energy in you, you just can’t bottle it up. So you run.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">You’re not going anywhere, you’re not racing anybody, you’re just running. You run out to the fence and then run back. You chase the cat. You run around the swing set and then run around it again.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Do you know how amazing running is? Running <em>changes the wind</em>. The day can be perfectly still, but you run and suddenly there is wind in your face and your hair lifts off your ears and streams out behind you. </p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">And there’s one more thing you can try that just might work. You’ve seen older kids do it and it looks so unbelievable: You could jump.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Jumping is like running, but you don’t put a foot down to catch yourself. You get going really fast, and then you just pick your feet up and let yourself be in the air. </p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">You’ve tried it before and it hasn’t worked, you screwed the timing up or something. But that was days ago, when you were practically still a baby. You’re faster now, and this time maybe you can do it. </p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">So you go to the top of that little incline and start running down. You push it harder than you ever have before, and when you think you just can’t go any faster you give one last push and pick up your feet. </p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">You’re in the air.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">It probably doesn’t look like much to anyone else. You don’t get very high. You don’t go very far. But for one timeless instant you are off the ground, touching nothing but air. </p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">It’s like flying.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px 27.9px; text-indent: -27.9px; font-size: 18px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><strong>Readings</strong></p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Arguing with that spirit of May and Thoreau's ambition to suck the marrow out of life<br /> is the belief that a truly enlightened person, someone of broad vision, would know that it’s all pointless. </p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">That child who runs in circles is, after all, running in circles. She’s not getting anywhere, and her feeling that what she’s doing is intensely meaningful and important is just one of those illusions that people are prone to. </p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">To this mindset, what it means to grow up and get educated is that you expand your scale of reference beyond your self-centered frame; maybe all the way out to the Infinite and the Eternal. And when you do that, you inevitably see the sheer insignificance <br /> of anything human beings might ever achieve.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Shelley expressed that nihilistic view in his poem <em>Ozymandias</em>.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px 36px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">I met a traveller from an antique land</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px 36px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Who said: `Two vast and trunkless legs of stone</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px 36px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px 36px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px 36px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px 36px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Tell that its sculptor well those passions read</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px 36px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px 36px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px 36px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">And on the pedestal these words appear --</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px 36px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px 36px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px 36px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Nothing beside remains. Round the decay</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px 36px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px 36px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">The lone and level sands stretch far away.' </p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">But the curmudgeonly statement that has had the most influence in Western culture comes from the Bible. According to tradition, the Book of Ecclesiastes was the last thing written by Solomon, the wisest of the kings of Israel. </p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">“All is vanity,” he says, and it is foolish to think you are going to accomplish something that will last. Because the scale of the universe is utterly beyond you.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px 36px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">What do people gain from all the toil at which they toil under the sun? A generation goes, <br /> and a generation comes, but the earth remains forever. The sun rises and the sun goes down and hurries to the place where it rises again. The wind blows to the south <br /> and goes around to the north; round and round goes the wind, and on its circuits the wind returns. All streams run to the sea, but the sea is not full; to the place where the streams flow there they continue to flow. </p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px 36px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">All things are wearisome more than one can express; the eye is not satisfied with seeing or the ear filled with hearing. What has been will be, and what has been done is what will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun. </p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px 36px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Is there a thing of which it is said, "See, this is new"? It has already been in the ages before us. The people of long ago are not remembered, nor will there be any remembrance of people yet to come by those who come after them.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Ecclesiastes is the voice of the old man who has seen it all and done it all and lived long enough to realize that it was all pointless. He pursued every possible pleasure, acquired every kind of possession, built great works, ruled over a kingdom. </p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px 36px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Then I considered all that my hands had done and the toil I had spent in doing it, and again, all was vanity and a chasing after the wind.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Even then, you might think: Oh, but reaching that place of grand perspective — that must have been satisfying. Solomon denies us even that consolation. </p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px 36px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">This also is but a chasing after wind. For in much wisdom is much vexation, and those who increase knowledge increase sorrow.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px 27.9px; text-indent: -27.9px; font-size: 18px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><strong>Talk</strong></p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">When Ellen asked me to speak on May 1st, I warned her that the first word of the talk might be: <em>Comrades! </em></p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Because Mayday is famous as the holiday of revolution. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union would hold huge Mayday parades in Red Square, demonstrations of military might <br /> that promised the eventual triumph of the workers’ revolution over capitalist oppression.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">But the connection between Mayday and the workers' struggle actually predates the Soviets. Here in the United States in 1885, the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions threatened a general strike across the country if the 8-hour day didn’t become standard by May 1st. </p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">The unions weren't really strong enough to pull off a nationwide strike, but some large cities did see several days of strikes and marches. In Chicago, a confrontation with police response became the Haymarket Riot, for which several labor organizers were sentenced to death. In subsequent years, the American labor movement held demonstrations on Mayday to honor the martyrs of Haymarket. The European socialist community, and eventually the Russians, picked it up from us.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">But as the opening words reflected, Mayday celebrations predate the labor movement too. They go all the way back to the pagan festival of Beltane. </p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Beltane is the holiday of rising energy, and falls halfway between spring equinox and summer solstice. In the British Isles, where I think the growing season <br /> runs a few weeks behind what we see here in central Illinois, Beltane marked the beginning of the season of generativity, the lusty month of May. </p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Beltane is a celebration of potential. In the same way that the meditation envisioned all the energy of an adult body compressed inside a two-year-old who just has to run, at Beltane the lushness and bounty of July and August and September is imagined as already existing in the Earth, waiting to explode into manifestation through these tiny sprouts and buds. </p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">To quote another show tune, by the end of the lusty month of May, June will be busting out all over. Because all the ram-sheep and the ewe-sheep are determined there’ll be new sheep.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">And so on Beltane, a maiden would be crowned Queen of the May, and would lead her village in raising a Maypole, (which is basically just a giant phallus), to remind everybody that, yeah, it’s <em>that </em>time of year. </p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">It’s time to renew your fire — literally. Communities kindled a central bonfire, and households extinguished all their hearths and stoves and candles to relight them from the new flame. People would ritually walk between fires or jump over fires. </p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Young couples would have sex in the fields, partly to participate in the energy of the season, and partly as sympathetic magic, to make sure the plants were getting the right idea: It’s time to be fruitful and multiply.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Independent of Haymarket or any other anniversaries, it makes a certain symbolic sense that Mayday becomes the holiday of revolution. In the same way that a farmer might see the crops of the fall already existing as potential in the sprouts and buds of May, a 19th-century revolutionary might look at the discontented miners, the secret workers’ study groups, and the fledgling union organizing committees, and see the sprouts and buds <br /> of a fully realized socialist society, where working people would not just make a subsistence wage, but would enjoy all the fruits of their labor. </p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Society might only have made it to May, but the imagination of a revolutionary can see August and September and October, when everything comes to fruition. All the energy needed to make that happen is already here, if we could only channel it and rise up.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Mayday is also the holiday of adolescence and first love, of the May Queen and her partners in the dance. When we use the calendar to symbolize a lifetime, May represents the adolescent. In the same way that the shoots and buds of May are ready to burst out into every kind of grain and fruit and flower, adolescents are ready to burst out into every kind of role and profession. Just as physical energy wells up inside toddlers, emotional energy and sexual energy and social energy wells up in adolescents, yearning to erupt into the world and become something. </p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Adolescence is a time of almost pure potential, neither anchored by manifestation nor disillusioned by experience. Nothing has happened yet, but everything seems possible, <br /> even things that appear impractical to their more prudent elders. </p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Two and a half centuries ago, Adam Smith observed, “The contempt of risk, and the presumptuous hope of success, are in no period of life more active than at the age at which young people choose their professions.” </p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">If I’m 17, I could still rule the world someday, or I could fail totally and be a complete nonentity. Day to day, and sometimes even hour to hour, an adolescent’s expectations can swing from one extreme to the other. </p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">That unfulfilled potential is also the source of young people’s enviable resilience. A teen-ager’s dreams can crash and burnin a way that would be devastating in middle age. But in a week or two there can be new dreams, because the energy of life just keeps rising up, and it has to go somewhere. </p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">But what about those of uswho aren’t in the May of our lives? What should Mayday or Beltane mean to us?</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">In a few months I’m going to turn 60, which puts me in the October of life. By October, the harvest might not all be gathered in yet, but you can pretty well see the shape of it. All around me, friends are retiring, or retired already, or bringing their careers in for a landing. Friends who raised children have seen those children graduate, and maybe even marry and have children of their own. If I'm hearing someone's plans for bigger and better things than they’ve ever done before, I'm probably talking to one of those children I watched grow up, and not to anyone my own age.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Physically, the late 50s are a period of decline. So, for example, I still go out for runs. But not with the idea that I’m going to go faster or further than ever before. Instead, I’m just trying to hang on to my vitality as long as I can. I run cautiously, with my medical insurance card in my pocket, in case I injure myself. I’ve gotten very far away from that two-year-old who runs just for the thrill of running.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">By your late 50s, the rituals of Beltane have lost a lot of their appeal. Jumping over a bonfire seems like an unnecessary risk. And even the fantasy of sex in the fields sounds inconvenient and probably uncomfortable.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">But getting older isn't the only reason a person may not feel like celebrating a season of unbridled potential and explosive growth. At any age, the future might not be filling you with anticipation. Maybe, instead, you’re facing defeat or recovering from failure or grieving for someone you’ve lost. Maybe the bright green cheerfulness of May doesn’t excite you, so much asit mocks your lack of excitement.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Yes, energy is rising out there in the world, but what has that got to do with me?</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">At such times, it is tempting to echo the curmudgeonly attitude of Ecclesiastes: Yeah, I tried all those things that people get so whipped up about, and I was even good at some of it, but now I’ve risen above all that. I’ve gotten wise enough to see that it was all pointless. </p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">The child runs for the thrill of feeling the wind in her hair, and the old man says, “Vanity, vanity. It’s all just chasing the wind.” What does it matter than I ran and I jumped? That I ate good food and saw beautiful sunsets? That I built things or made things or owned things? That I read thick books and thought grand thoughts? The wind continues to blow this way and that, the rivers never manage to fill up the sea, and there is no new thing under the sun, or at least nothing that anybody will remember after a generation or two. </p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">But while I was preparing for this talk I re-read Ecclesiastes. (It’s short, you can do it in one sitting.) And this time, Solomon (or whoever the author really was) seemed to have a different message for me. He wasn’t trying to beat down my hopes or disparage my drive. </p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Instead, he was warning me not to try to justify my life through some external result. Because ultimately, the result of life is death. And if I think I can rise above that biological reality by getting rich or becoming famous or writing a book or building a company or even founding a dynasty, in the long run it’s not going to work. Because sooner or later the deserts return and the sands cover whatever we make. </p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Life is not a story where things work out in the end; in the end we die, and so does everybody we teach or help or influence. So the place where life needs to work out is in the middle. The point of life has to be in the living of it.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">This time, Ecclesiastes wasn’t telling me to rise above life and all the silly things people do. Quite the opposite, it was saying that the two-year-old has it right. It’s fine to imagine <br /> that you’re running to somewhere and that something wonderful will happen when you get there. But the best reason to run is for the joy of running.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Now, this point of view has gotten the reputation of being immature or unsophisticated. The sophisticated point of view is supposed to be that of the pessimist or the cynic. </p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">But I think that’s because we describe it badly. The examples we usually give are like the one I just used: the two-year-old, the innocent. In the archetypes of the Tarot, the card that represents the joy of life is the Fool, who is happily striding towards the edge of a cliff. </p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Or we say “Eat, drink, and be merry” — something else sophisticated curmudgeons can feel superior to: Just indulge your animal desires, because if you thought about things at all, you’d realize that life is pointless and you’d get depressed. The attempt to enjoy life on the terms that it offers is sometimes portrayed as denial, like the partiers in “The Masque of the Red Death” who dance ever more frantically the clearer it becomes that something is horribly wrong.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">But the physical pleasures of motion or consumption just symbolize the joy of life; they aren’t the whole story. In fact, there is no pinnacle of cold wisdom that rises above joy the way that an icy mountaintop rises above the treeline. Life-affirming experiences are possible at every level of consciousness. So on this holiday that celebrates possibilities, let’s recall a few of them.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Just as you can identify with your body and completely submerge yourself in whatever is happening physically, you can also identify with the role you’re playing, and for a period of time you can just <em>be </em>that role. For a moment or an hour or an afternoon, you just <em>are </em>a teacher or a healer or a friend. Sometimes doing the right thing, fighting for justice or uncovering the truth can give you a feeling of being exactly where you’re supposed to be, independent of how things ultimately work out. </p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Maybe you’re doing something entirely mundane, something you’ve done a thousand times before. You’re a plumber looking for a leak or a carpenter framing a house or a chef making a sauce, but you lose yourself in the activity, and for a while that’s all you need. Or maybe this moment is special. You are the father of the bride, or the grandmother who has brought the family back together for one perfect Thanksgiving.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Just as you can run for the joy of running, you can also think for the joy of thinking. Maybe you’re making the breakthrough that completes the Grand Theory of Everything or maybe you’re just working on the Sudoku puzzle in <em>The Herald Whig</em>. But you experience your mind in motion and it feels good. </p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Sometimes you can even blow your mind. Two or three ideas you’d always kept in their own little boxes turn out to be related, and suddenly a vast new landscape stretches out in front of you, and you have no idea how far it goes. The intricacy of the Universe is just more wonderful than you had ever imagined.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">There are epiphanies of beauty. Sometimes you find them in the natural world when you look out at a sunset or up at the stars or down into a microscope. Sometimes you find them in the arts, when a painting or a sculpture hits you just right. Or you listen to a poem or a song or symphony for the hundredth time, but this time you really hear it. Such moments don’t have to mean something or lead anywhere. They just are.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">There are mystical epiphanies, when you see the world in a grain of sand and discover that you love it, when you have compassion for every being that suffers, or when you make contact with a grace so enormous that it forgives everything.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">And if you believe the mystics, they have maps of human experiences that keep on going from there. To tell the truth, I have no clue what some of those higher spheres or upper chakras are supposed to do. But those who claim to have experienced them describe them as bliss. There is no wisdom so advanced or enlightenment so grand, that all the joy of living is now beneath you.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">So those of us who might have trouble identifying with May right now, whether because of physical decline or some other reason, if we refuse to become curmudgeons, if we refuse to use Mayday as an excuse to look down on these foolish teen-agers with all their dancing and flirting and impractical ambitions, how should we celebrate the holiday of rising energy?</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">I suggest that we take a broader view of what the season represents and what it might mean to us. There is a virtuous cycle, in which the energy of life rises up in you and through you. And if it manages to express itself as joy, a circuit gets completed that draws up new energy. </p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">There are times when that process seems so easy. Energy becomes joy becomes energy, <br /> round and round, as if it were happening on its own and didn’t require your attention at all. </p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">But yes, there are other times, when energy and joy will not come to you no matter how loudly you call. You go through the motions of the activities that used to invoke the joy of life, but nothing happens. Poetry is boring and puzzle-solving is drudgery and every role you know feels like a trap you can never escape from. Sometimes your compassion is burned out, and even good food just makes you nauseous. </p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Eat, drink, and be merry indeed! As if things were just that simple.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">And if someone suggests that a life-affirming experience is supposed to be available here ... that just increases the frustration and anger and despair that comes from not finding it.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">One sunny day a year or so before he died, I picked my father up at Sunset Home and drove him out to the farm my grandfather bought almost a century ago, the one my father grew up on and still owned and had worked for most of his life. We looked at the fields, the crops, and the machinery, and he seemed to enjoy himself. But the next time I offered he didn’t want to go. He said it would just remind him of all the things he couldn’t do any more.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">So how should we celebrate the holiday of rising energy if our own energies aren't rising? Perhaps Mayday could be a time of taking stock. Where does joy still manifest in our lives, and how can we help that process along? </p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">It may not be happening where we’ve been expecting it, in the places where we used to find it. In a time of decline or defeat or depression, Mayday can be a reminder to search the garden of life for the shoots and buds it still produces, in whatever odd places they might be. </p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Socrates, when he was old and had lost his trial and was waiting in prison for his death sentence to be carried out, found himself drawn to write poetry for the first time in his life. Who would have predicted?</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Those little shoots and buds, those tiny ways that small amounts of joy still enter your life, may seem unimportant, even trivial. But they are the offer Life is making, an indication of the energy it still wants to invest. And energy can become joy and draw up new energy. Small as they seem, if you nurture them, they could grow. Any tiny spark could be the beginning of new fire.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">These tiny sprouts, these little flames, they may not bear comparison now or ever to what we’ve seen in the past. And they may look like nothing when viewed from the perspective of Eternity. </p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">But they are what they are. And what they are is a sign that Life is not done with us yet. That, I believe, is worth celebrating. </p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Happy Mayday.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 18px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><strong>Closing</strong></p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">The closing words are from Ecclesiastes, because after all that discouraging talk about vanity and chasing the wind, the author does not advise us to lay down and die. Quite the opposite:</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Go, eat your bread with enjoyment, and drink your wine with a merry heart; for God has long ago approved what you do. Let your garments always be white; do not let oil be lacking on your head. Enjoy life with the wife whom you love, all the days of your insubstantial life. </p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Whatever your hand finds to do, do with all your might.</p>Doug Muderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04666144843949850394noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13399254.post-47335534835867717822016-03-09T14:02:00.000-05:002019-04-29T08:20:00.821-04:00Who Owns the World? (2016 version)<br />
<i>presented at First Church in Billerica on March 6, 2016</i><br />
<h4>
Opening Words</h4>
When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist. — <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H%C3%A9lder_C%C3%A2mara">Archbishop Hélder Câmara</a> of Brazil<br />
<h4>
Readings</h4>
Pope Francis is often thought of as a progressive or even radical pope, but much of his message has been to re-emphasize Catholic social justice teachings that go back more than a century, and have been restated by every pope since. Our first reading is from one of those prior encyclicals, <a href="http://w2.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc_14091981_laborem-exercens.html"><i>Laborem Exercens</i></a>, written by John Paul II in 1981. (One progressive thing popes didn’t do in 1981 was to use gender-inclusive language. So I apologize for that in advance.)<br />
<blockquote>
Working at any workbench, whether a relatively primitive or an ultramodern one, a man can easily see that through his work he enters into two inheritances: the inheritance of what is given to the whole of humanity in the resources of nature, and the inheritance of what others have already developed on the basis of those resources, primarily by developing technology, that is to say, by producing a whole collection of increasingly perfect instruments for work.</blockquote>
The second reading is from Ayn Rand, a favorite author of Speaker Paul Ryan and many other conservatives. This paragraph is from her magnum opus <i>Atlas Shrugged</i>, and in particular from the John Galt speech that is the philosophical climax of the novel. Here, Galt is also talking about those “increasingly perfect instruments for work” — specifically, the steel factory owned by one of the novel’s other heroes, the industrialist Hank Rearden. <br />
<blockquote>
The machine, the frozen form of a living intelligence, is the power that expands the potential of your life by raising the productivity of your time. If you worked as a blacksmith in the mystics’ Middle Ages, the whole of your earning capacity would consist of an iron bar produced by your hands in days and days of effort. How many tons of rail do you produce per day if you work for Hank Rearden? Would you dare to claim that the size of your pay check was created solely by your physical labor and that those rails were the product of your muscles? The standard of living of that blacksmith is all that your muscles are worth; the rest is a gift from Hank Rearden.</blockquote>
I’ll hit this point harder later on, but look at what Galt has done to what the Pope called “the second inheritance”, the inheritance of technology. In Galt’s view, Hank Rearden is not just the inventor of the specific new products his factory produces, he is the sole rightful heir of all technological progress since the Middle Ages. Having been disinherited from the legacy of past inventors, the workers’ standard of living rises only through their employer’s generosity. Anything more than a medieval wage is essentially just charity. It is “a gift from Hank Rearden”.<br />
<br />
The final reading is “The Goose and the Common”, a protest poem from 18th-century England. For centuries, the people of England had been suffering through a process known as Enclosure, in which a village’s common land would be fenced off and become the private property of the local lord. To appreciate the poem’s biting humor, you need to know this piece of 18th-century slang: a goose was not just a bird, it was also an ordinary person — a usage that survives today in phrases like “silly goose” or “What’s good for the goose is good for the gander.”<br />
<blockquote>
The law locks up the man or woman <br />
who steals the goose from off the Common,<br />
but leaves the greater villain loose ,<br />
who steals the Common from off the goose. </blockquote>
<blockquote>
The law says that we must atone <br />
when we take what we do not own, <br />
but leaves the lords and ladies fine <br />
when they take what is yours and mine.<br />
<br />
The poor and wretched don't escape <br />
when they conspire the law to break. <br />
This must be so, but they endure <br />
those who conspire to make the law.<br />
<br />
The law locks up the man or woman <br />
who steals the goose from off the Common. <br />
And geese will still a Common lack <br />
until they go and steal it back.</blockquote>
<h4>
Meditation</h4>
The meditation is a vision of peace and prosperity that comes from the prophet Micah: “They will sit under their own grapevines and their own fig trees, and no one will make them afraid.”<br />
<h4>
Sermon</h4>
Unitarian Universalists talk a lot about social justice. And when we when talk among ourselves, we all more-or-less know what <i>social justice</i> means: Things should be more equal. The disadvantaged should be less disadvantaged. No one should be hungry. The sick or injured should be cared for. Education should available to everyone. And so on.<br />
<br />
We’re much better making these kinds of lists than we are at explaining why this world we’re envisioning is just. Where is the justice in social justice?<br />
<br />
Among ourselves, we usually don’t need to answer that question. Most people with UU values just feel it, without explanation. You say, “Isn’t it awful that in such a wealthy country, so many people are hungry or homeless or go without healthcare or education?” And whoever you are talking to probably says, “Yes, it is awful.” And the conversation goes on from there.<br />
<br />
There’s nothing wrong with that conversation. But if that’s what we’re expecting, then we’ll be at a loss when we talk to people who have a different notion of justice. For example, <i>justice</i> could also mean that people get to keep the things they own, unless or until they decide to give them away.<br />
<br />
If that’s what <i>justice</i> means to you, then when you hear that list of social justice goals, you’ll wonder where the money is going to come from. Who is going to pay the farmers and teachers and doctors who provide those goods and services? And more specifically, is the government going to take that money by force from the people who rightfully own it. Because, what’s just about that?<br />
<br />
In <a href="http://www.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/1109/12/se.06.html">one of the 2012 presidential debates</a>, a young man asked the Republican candidates: “Out of every dollar that I earn, how much do you think that I deserve to keep?” Afterwards, Ron Paul had a clear and simple answer: “All of it.”<br />
<br />
Former Judge <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2013/04/18/taxation-is-theft-so-why-do-americans-put-up-with-it.html">Andrew Napolitano</a>, a frequent Fox News contributor, has generated this fantasy:<br />
<blockquote>
You're sitting at home at night, and there's a knock at the door. You open the door, and a guy with a gun pointed at you says: "Give me your money. I want to give it away to the less fortunate." You think he's dangerous and crazy, so you call the police. Then you find out he <i>is</i> the police, there to collect your taxes.</blockquote>
Napolitano saw the income tax as representing “a terrifying presumption. It presumes that we don't really own our property.” We only own the part of it that the government chooses not to take.<br />
No wonder <a href="http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2010/marchweb-only/20-51.0.html">Glenn Beck</a> told his listeners: “Look for the words ‘social justice’ or ‘economic justice’ on your church web site. If you find it, run as fast as you can.”<br />
<br />
When people respond to your social justice talk by grabbing their wallets and running away, it’s tempting to write them off as selfish or hard-hearted. But many of them aren’t. Some people who look at the world this way are quite generous. They give money away. They volunteer. They put themselves out for other people.<br />
<br />
But the model they put on this behavior isn’t justice, it’s charity. They do it out of the goodness of their hearts, not because they are under some obligation. And they expect the beneficiaries of their generosity to receive those gifts with humility and gratitude. Because, after all, beggars shouldn’t be choosers.<br />
<br />
And if the amount that individuals are willing to give away doesn’t match the need — which it never does — then the charity mindset sees that not as a flaw in the system, but as a problem of personal morality. We need to do a better job of preaching generosity, not change the way our economy works.<br />
<br />
Ultimately, if our social justice work is going to succeed, we need to do more than just talk to each other and shake our heads at people who disagree. We need to critique that charity-based worldview and explain why it’s inadequate. In short, we need to explain what’s just about social justice.<br />
<br />
The beginning of that critique was in our opening words: It’s fine to give food to the poor, but we also need to take the next step and ask why the poor have no food. Why can’t everybody buy their own food, save for their own retirement, pay for their own health insurance, and educate their own children? And if they can’t, what does that have to do with those of us who can? Why should our property or income be entailed with some kind of obligation to provide for them?<br />
<br />
Those are hard questions, and so right away you notice a major difference between a charity mindset and a social justice mindset: Charity comes from the heart, and often finds itself in conflict with more practical thinking.<br />
<br />
But social justice demands that head and heart work together. It’s not enough feel sorry for the poor, we need to understand how poverty happens, and how the system that creates such a gulf between rich and poor justifies itself. If the system that your reason supports leads to a result that your compassion rejects, social justice suggests that maybe you're taking something for granted that you shouldn't. Social justice doesn’t ask you to give up on thinking and follow your heart. Instead it tells you to check your assumptions and <i>think again</i>.<br />
<br />
Whenever I try to rethink things, my first instinct is to go back in time and read works that are a little closer to the era when the original assumptions were made. In this case there’s also a considerable irony in the author I want to tell you about, the Revolutionary War pamphleteer Thomas Paine.<br />
<br />
You see, at about the same time that Glenn Beck started telling everybody to run away from social justice, he was also styling himself as a modern-day Thomas Paine. He named one of his books <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Glenn-Becks-Common-Sense-Control/dp/1439168571"><i>Common Sense</i></a>, and claimed to be updating Paine’s classic to call for the Tea Party revolution that we need today. Now, if you actually know something about Thomas Paine, this is perversely hilarious. Because in addition to his role in founding our country, Paine is also one of the founders of the American social justice tradition.<br />
<br />
Thomas Paine was one of the true revolutionaries of the American Revolution. After we won our independence, he moved to England to stir up revolution there. And when the British deported him, Lafayette invited him to Paris where he tried to be the conscience of the French Revolution. That got him thrown into prison during the Reign of Terror, and only a bureaucratic mistake delayed his execution long enough for Robespierre to fall. Eventually the American ambassador, future president James Monroe, got him released. And in 1795, while he was staying with the Monroes and recovering from his ordeal, he wrote a little book called <a href="https://www.ssa.gov/history/paine4.html"><i>Agrarian Justice</i></a>.<br />
<br />
<i>Agrarian Justice</i> is addressed to the English, and proposes that when each young adult comes of age, the government should give him or her — I’m not being politically correct, Paine wrote gender equality into his system — a stake of capital to get a start in life. Also, those who survive to old age should get a pension. And all this should be funded by an inheritance tax on land.<br />
<br />
Paine writes: “It is justice and not charity that is the principle of the plan.” In his mind, young adults were <i>entitled</i> to a stake in the economy, and old people were entitled to a pension. And the rationale for his inheritance tax would strike fear into the heart of Judge Napolitano: Paine believed that we <i>don’t</i> entirely own our property, and that all property comes entailed with obligations to others.<br />
<br />
So Paine was not trying to appeal to people’s compassion and preach personal generosity. He was challenging their fundamental assumptions, and asking them to think again about one of the most basic concepts of the 18th-century economy: landed property.<br />
<br />
When people have lived under a property system their entire lives -- as the English had then and we have today -- they tend to take it for granted. But Paine did not take the property system for granted, because he had seen the example of the Native Americans. He writes:<br />
<blockquote>
The life of an Indian is a continual holiday compared with the poor of Europe; and, on the other hand, it appears to be abject when compared to the rich. … Civilization, therefore, or that which is so called, has operated in two ways: to make one part of society more affluent, and the other more wretched, than would have been the lot of either in a natural state.</blockquote>
But wait, European-style civilization is supposed to be a good thing, isn’t it? Paine agrees:<br />
<blockquote>
The first principle of civilization ought to have been, and ought still to be, that the condition of every person born into the world, after a state of civilization commences, ought not to be worse than if he had been born before that period.</blockquote>
Now that’s a fine heartfelt sentiment. But if our heads are going to come along on this trip, we need to understand why things didn’t turn out that way. Was there some reason why the poor had to be wretched, or did European civilization make some early mistake that led to that result? Paine says there was a mistake, and it has to do with how we invented the concept of property.<br />
<br />
Let me stop here for a minute, because I just snuck in a radical idea: Property is a human invention. Today, a lot of people write about property as if it were natural, something that exists prior to all societies or governments. But that’s just not true.<br />
<br />
Paine uses theological imagery to lampoon this belief: "The Creator of the earth," he says, did not "open a land office from which the first title deeds should issue."<br />
<br />
He might also have pointed to the animal world, because nothing remotely like property exists in nature. Animals have territory, which is a very different idea. A bird may chase rival birds away from the tree where it nests. But no bird has ever sold a tree to another bird, or rented a nest, or taken in someone else’s egg in exchange for a few worms. The tree and the nest are not property.<br />
Similarly, land as private property is not a natural concept at all. Paine writes: <br />
<blockquote>
The earth in its natural, uncultivated state, was, and ever would have continued to be THE COMMON PROPERTY OF THE HUMAN RACE. In that state every man would have been born to property. He would have been a joint life-proprietor with the rest in the property of the soil, and in all its natural productions, vegetable and animal.</blockquote>
Being a practical man, Paine recognizes that modern agriculture would not work on those terms, because it requires a long investment of effort before you see any product. You have to cut down the trees and pull up the stumps and dig out the rocks. Each year you have to plow and plant and fertilize and weed. And who would do all that if, in the end, he had no more right than anyone else to gather the harvest?<br />
<br />
So Paine believed it was right and just for the difference in value between cultivated land and uncultivated land to be private property. Not the land itself -- the <i>difference in value</i> between cultivated and uncultivated land. And here he locates the original mistake, the original sin for which the poor pay the price. Rather than just let people own the value of their improvements in the productivity of the land, we created a system in which they own <i>the land</i>. We created a system in which the Earth itself is owned, not by humanity in general, but only by the people who have their names on deeds.<br />
<br />
Consequently, a hungry Indian could go hunt in the forest or fish in the pond that was part of his tribe’s territory, but a hungry Englishman could not, because those natural resources were owned by some other Englishman. In short, the poor of Europe were worse off than the Native Americans not because God created them that way, and not because they were lazy or stupid, but because they had been disinherited; their share of the common inheritance of humankind had been usurped.<br />
<br />
Paine was just talking about land, but it’s easy to see how his ideas extend to other areas. No one would dig a mine or drill a well if they had no claim on the resulting iron or gold or oil, but some part of that output also has to belong to the common inheritance. It can't <i>all</i> be private property.<br />
<br />
And consider not just our physical inheritance, but our cultural inheritance. I’m a writer. I work in words and sometimes I sell my words. But I did not invent the English language, or teach it to all of you so that you could understand me. And the ideas I’m telling you this morning: I have some claim to them, but large parts come from Thomas Paine and Pope John Paul II and other benefactors of our cultural legacy. So if there is value in my words, I didn’t create that value out of nothing. Part of that value should belong to me, but part rightfully should go back into the common inheritance.<br />
<br />
The same is true for the Hank Reardens of this world, the inventors, researchers, and industrialists. They do indeed create value, but they don’t create it out of nothing. As Newton put it, they stand on the shoulders of giants, and the legacy of those giants should belong to everyone.<br />
<br />
In short, I’m endorsing that idea that so scares Judge Napolitano: We don’t really own what we own, free and clear, with no obligations. And to that young man at the presidential debate, I would say: “You earned that dollar by using the common inheritance. Some part of it needs to go back.”<br />
<br />
We all owe a debt to the common inheritance, because none of us makes things by calling them out of nothing, like the God of Genesis. Everything we make relies on the resources of the Earth and the tools that have been passed down to us. Paying our debt to the common inheritance -- and particularly to those whose share of that inheritance has been usurped -- is the “justice” in social justice.<br />
<br />
The flaw in the charity mindset is that it refuses to recognize that debt. It accepts, without question or objection, disinheriting the poor from the common legacy. Once you have done that, they have no rightful claim on anything beyond what the rest of us volunteer to give them. And any tax collector who shows up demanding money to help the less fortunate is just a well-intentioned thief.<br />
<br />
But if you do accept that the poor are owed a share of the common inheritance, how should they collect it? Paine, as I said, was a practical man, and he recognized that he couldn't even calculate the rents and royalties that the poor have coming, much less collect and distribute them.<br />
<br />
Instead, he proposes that everyone be offered a deal: In payment for your share of the common inheritance, in exchange for your acceptance that you were born into a world where virtually everything of value was already claimed by someone else -- we’ll offer you this: When you reach adulthood, we’ll give you a stake, some bit of capital that can get you started in life. And if you make it to an age where you can’t reasonably expect to work any more, we’ll give you a pension. That's how he proposes to make good on the principle that civilization should benefit everyone, and not just some at the expense of others.<br />
<br />
Notice that Paine does not propose a dole, or some program of bread and circuses, or make-work projects that will give everyone a meaningless job. His proposal is much more radical than that: <i>The poor should be capitalized.</i> Everyone should have a stake, a chance to launch themselves into the middle of the economy rather than start at the bottom.<br />
<br />
In Paine’s day, that didn’t take much.<br />
<blockquote>
When a young couple begin the world, the difference is exceedingly great whether they begin with nothing or with fifteen pounds apiece. With this aid they could buy a cow, and implements to cultivate a few acres of land; and instead of becoming burdens upon society … would be put in the way of becoming useful and profitable citizens.</blockquote>
A similar idea has popped up in many other guises. In Biblical times capital meant land, which is why Micah envisioned every family under its own vines and fig trees. Later on in the encyclical I quoted, Pope John Paul II envisions the ideal society not as a Great Feeding Trough but as a Great Workbench, where we all have our place and access to the tools we need to be productive.<br />
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Launching yourself into today's information economy may be more complicated than in Paine's day, but the value of the common inheritance has grown. Exactly what deal it makes sense to offer now, in lieu of the inheritance we still can’t deliver, is a topic for another day. But certainly education must be part of it, and childhood nutrition. In general, people should be freed from poverty traps, from situations in which their short-term survival depends on doing things that harm their long-term interests. No heir of a rich inheritance should ever have to eat the seed corn.<br />
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The Pope’s image goes a long way towards helping us evaluate the adequacy of any proposal: Everyone should have a seat at the Great Workbench. That seat should belong to them by right, and not depend on anyone's approval or generosity.<br />
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Even if we had such a program, if we had a way to deliver to each and every person the value of their share of the common inheritance, things could still go wrong. A Prodigal Son might waste his inheritance. Unlucky people might lose their stakes to accident or illness. Some people's abilities might be so limited that no tools we can provide will make them productive. There would, in other words, still be occasions for charity.<br />
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But that is not where we are now. In the world we live in today, people are poor because the common inheritance has been usurped by people who believe that what is theirs is theirs, and they owe no one for its use; who believe that only land-owners are beneficiaries of the Creation; that businessmen and industrialists are the sole heirs of technological progress; that only the educated rightfully inherit our cultural legacy.<br />
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After the inheritance or some fair compensation for it has been delivered to all people, then charity might be enough. But until then, we should never stop demanding justice.<br />
<h4>
Closing words</h4>
The closing words are by <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_Bless_the_Child_%28Billie_Holiday_song%29">Billie Holiday and Arthur Herzog Jr.</a><br />
<blockquote>
Rich relations may give you<br />
crusts of bread and such.<br />
You can help yourself,<br />
but don’t take too much.<br />
Cause Mama may have,<br />
and Poppa may have.<br />
But God bless the child that’s got his own.</blockquote>
Doug Muderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04666144843949850394noreply@blogger.com1