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Join the Losers: Shame, Pride, and the 99%

2012-02-01T16:31:00.001-05:00

a talk given January 29, 2012 at First Parish in Billerica, MA

[earlier versions were presented at the Unitarian Church of Quincy, IL and First Parish Unitarian in Athol, MA]

Opening Words:

"If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality." -- Desmond Tutu

Readings

There is a web site called "We Are the 99%". Maybe you've seen it. People write their story on a single sheet of paper and then post a photo of themselves holding the paper. By now there are more than a thousand stories on that site.

Here's one:

“I am a 20 year old college student trying to better myself and my family by gaining an education although my husband and I both know that with the way things are, we’re both almost better off working our minimum wage jobs that we have and are barely scraping by with than even attempting to do anything more. we rely on government assistance for food/medical/daycare, work insane hours each week to get by and still cant afford basic necessities.

Our combined 100 + hr work week shows no profit. None of our jobs provide medical (which due to asthma, I cannot go without medications or I will die. Since a stable home for my children is more important that my own health, rent comes before my $150 prescriptions)

My husband is trying to find another full-time job on top of the one he has so we can stop relying on assistance but due to a buy out and closing of the company my dad worked at, so are 900 other people in the area who are suddenly unemployed or like my dad, took a 75% pay cut and can’t afford their bills anymore.”

I AM THE 99%

Here's another: “Got my bachelor's. Got low-paying job. Business went under. Defaulted on 70K student loan debt. I make less than 20K a year -- 2 jobs. Not enough to pay debt. No dental/health. 6 cavities -- used car -- no savings -- no $ in bank.”

There's another web site called "We are the 53%". It's a response to the 99% site, and it uses the same format. The title comes from the fact that only 53% of American households owed any income tax last year. In spite of the fact that most of the other people pay plenty of other taxes, "the 53%" has come to symbolize those Americans who are pulling their weight, as opposed to the rest who are baggage.

Interestingly, the people considered to be baggage are not the idle rich, who need no jobs. They're not trust-fund kids, who have never worked, but live on vast inherited wealth. No, the baggage, the 47%, are often like the folks on the 99% site, who might work two or three minimum-wage jobs, but can't make the minimum amount to get into the lowest tax bracket.

The first 53% post was put up by Erick Erickson, who is actually quite well-to-do and famous. He started redstate.com, the premier conservative group blog, and now he's a commentator on CNN. He tells his 53% story like this:

"I work 3 jobs. I have a house I can’t sell. My family insurance costs are outrageous. But I don’t blame Wall Street.

Suck it up, you whiners. I am the 53% subsidizing you so you can hang out on Wall Street and complain."

With that post as a model, the site drew posts from people whose lives are much harder than Erickson's:

"I get up at 4:30 a.m. to work a job that pays me to get yelled at. I work around 50 hours per week, but still struggle. I've given up luxuries, shop clearance racks, do not own a new car or a home.

But I pay my bills and my taxes. I work hard to do so. I am an American. I am the 53%."

Here's a similar story that's been shared on Facebook. It doesn't come from the 53% site, but expresses a similar attitude:

"I am a college senior, about to graduate completely debt free. I pay for all of my living expenses by working 30+ hrs a week making barely above minimum wage. I chose a moderately priced, in-state public university and started saving $ for school at age 17.

I got decent grades in high school and received 2 scholarships which cover 90% of my tuition. I currently have a 3.8 GPA. I live comfortably in a cheap apartment, knowing I can't have everything I want. I don't eat out every day, or even once a month.

I live below my means to continue saving for the future. I expect nothing to be handed to me, and will continue to work my @$$ off for everything I have. That's how it's supposed to work. I am NOT the 99%, and whether or not you are is YOUR decision.

So who are the people who aren't making it? Do they deserve our sympathy or our scorn? CNBC's Rick Santelli goes for scorn. In his viral YouTube rant from the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade, he raised this question: "I'll tell you what. I have an idea. The new administration's big on computers and technology -- how about this, president and administration? Why don't you put up a web site to have people vote on the internet, as a referendum, to see if we really want to subsidize the losers' mortgages ... or if we'd rather reward people who could carry the water rather than drink the water."

And finally, here's Herman Cain, in an interview with Alan Murray of the Wall Street Journal. And I'm picking on Cain not because what he said is unusual, but because it is typical. Cain just said it more plainly than anyone else:

"Don't blame Wall Street. Don't blame the big banks. If you don't have a job and you're not rich, blame yourself. … When I was growing up, I was blessed to have had parents that didn't teach me to be jealous of anybody, and didn't teach me to envious of somebody. It is not a person's fault because they succeeded. It is a person's fault if they failed."

Sermon

From kindergarten to eighth grade I went to a Lutheran elementary school, where I spent nine years with the same core group of about 20 kids. We had a lot in common: same small town, same religion, and a lot of the same advantages -- we were all white, from middle-class, two-parent homes, no major disabilities, and so on. In general, we were also pretty good students. Our parents hoped we would go to college, and most of us eventually did.

But in spite of all our similarities, we had a pecking order -- two of them, one for boys and one for girls. God knows how we came up with it or what we based it on, but it stayed remarkably rigid from year to year. I had a place in that order that, but I did not achieve it on my own. I was the best friend of the most popular boy.

Until seventh grade. That year a new kid transferred in. He was athletic and handsome, and he already had friends in the eighth grade class. He very quickly became the new best friend of the most popular boy, and my place in the order plummeted. By the time the reshuffling was complete, I was second boy from the bottom. But at least I wasn't last.

Another kid was. As I said, he was not that different from the rest of us. If you had met us all one-by-one, you probably couldn't have picked him out as the one destined to be the doormat. But there he was.

After my downfall, he was the only one who wanted to be my friend. He tried to sit next to me. He did me little favors. He invited me to his house. Now, I wish I could tell you that I reciprocated, that we had a bunch of great adventures, and that we are still in touch today.

But that's not how I thought in seventh grade. What I wanted more than anything was to get out of being Second Boy From the Bottom, and I was never going to do it by hanging around with him. Better, I thought, to be alone on the lowest rung of the ladder than to form a two-boy leper colony at the bottom.

That grade-school way of thinking often shows up in the adult world of politics. If you are near the bottom of society's ladder, your most natural allies are the people below you. But it is so hard to group up with them. As corrupt and unfair as you know that ladder to be, it is so, so hard to let loose of that one rung you have and make common cause with the people at the bottom.

And so the same pattern plays out again and again. During the Civil Rights era, many of the people who fought hardest against integration were those at the bottom of the white pecking order. Whiteness was the one advantage they had, and they didn't want to lose it.

Similarly, many of those who fought hardest against women's equality were men near the bottom of the male pecking order. And where do you see those American-flag decals and the bumperstickers with jingoistic slogans? Not so much on Cadillacs and BMWs. No, you're more likely to see them on rusted-out pick-up trucks. The closer you are to the bottom of the American pecking order, the more dearly you hang on to the idea that Americans are better than everybody else.

If you've only got hold of one rung of the ladder, you hang onto it. That's how humans think.

Now, that human trait is very convenient for the people at the top. Because the more people get pushed down onto the lower rungs, the harder it is for them to unite to change the ladder or make it easier to climb.

I doubt I'm telling you anything you don't already know if I say that inequality has been rising in America. The economy as a whole has grown a lot since the 1970s, but (after inflation) the median household income has not grown, and in the 21st century it has actually dropped. And even those statistics are too rosy, because often they compare today's two-income households with the one-income households of decades past. People are working longer and sometimes harder, but not benefitting from it.

You will hear many explanations for the increasing inequality. Some will tell you that people who work with their brains are pulling away from people who work with their hands. Or that the educated are pulling away from the uneducated. Or that those who understand technology are pulling away from those who don't.

And while all those things are happening to some extent, the economists who study inequality say that they are secondary effects. The trend that drives all the other trends is that the people at the very top are pulling from everyone else. It happens at every level. The top 10% are pulling away from the bottom 90%. Within the 10%, the top 1% are pulling away even faster from the other 9.

And if you look even at the 1%, the top tenth of a percent are pulling away from the rest faster yet. The billionaires are pulling away from the millionaires.

In 1965, the average CEO made 50 times the minimum wage -- not a bad paycheck. But by 2005, he was up to 800 times.

The IRS publishes statistics about the top 400 tax returns. Between 1992 and 2007, the amount of money it took to get into that group quintupled. And their percentage of the total national income tripled. Out of every $100 of income in all of America, those 400 households now get a dollar and a half.

That might all be reasonable if the people at the very top had become fantastically more productive, and were being rewarded for the prosperity that they bring to the rest of us. But that doesn't seem to be the case. Economic growth was higher, not lower, when the rich were not quite so rich.

Former Federal Reserve Chief Paul Volcker denies that financial innovations like credit default swaps have added any productivity to the economy. They don't increase the national income, they just capture more of it for the bankers.

Worst of all, it seems that the law itself is different for the very wealthy. When the housing bubble popped, bankers were bailed out but home-owners weren't. When Goldman Sachs was charged with committing fraud, it paid a fine, a small percentage of its profits. No one went to jail.

Bank of America has foreclosed tens of thousands of homes illegally. Again, they will probably pay a fine and no one will go to jail. Will those families get their houses back? Maybe, if they can wait through years of litigation. Or maybe not.

By contrast, when ordinary people protest against this kind of fraud, say by camping out in public parks, their lack of proper permits calls down the full wrath of the law. Police show up in riot gear with pepper spray and rubber bullets. But police never shoot tear gas into board meetings of Goldman Sachs.

In a democracy you would think it would be impossible for 99% of the people to be dominated by 1% or a tenth of a percent or 400 households.

So how is this happening? Well, obviously, the 99% have not been able to pull together to defend their interests.

Why not? That brings me back to the way humans think. If you examine your own mind, you will see the buttons that the 1% can push.

When we are victimized by an unjust economic system, it is remarkably easy to make us feel ashamed of our own victimhood, or to use our pride and denial and resentment to turn us against the system's other victims.

How does that work? Let's start with shame. Rick Santelli had a name for the people who can't pay their mortgages -- Losers. And Herman Cain laid it right on the line. If you're failing, he says, don't be angry at the system or at the people on top, be ashamed of yourself.

Psychologically, shame is the first line of defense of any unjust system.

In 7th grade, I could have rejected the whole idea of a pecking order and been nice to the boy who was being nice to me. But I didn't, because I was ashamed to be Second Boy From the Bottom. I was too ashamed to quit the game while I was losing.

During the Depression, some unemployed men from prosperous suburbs kept dressing for work and taking the train into the city, because they were ashamed to let their neighbors know they were unemployed. Some didn't even want their wives to know.

People who are ashamed don't change the world. They don't protest and they don't organize. They hide.

The 1% would love it if we all hid our losses from each other and kept up appearances and pretended that everything is fine.

To me, that's the biggest significance of the 99% movement so far. Those people who march in the streets or publish their photos and stories on the internet -- they aren't hiding. They are rejecting the system's attempts to shame them into silence. Those pictures on the 99% site are saying: "Look at me. I am losing in this economy. This is what a loser looks like in America today."

If you spend much time paging through that website, you'll probably see that they look a lot like the rest of us. The losers look a lot like you and me.

Now that is a scary thought, and fear tends to evoke another very human reaction: denial. No one likes to be scared.

So when you hear about someone whose situation scares you -- the parent whose child vanishes into thin air, the athlete who suddenly drops dead, the old person who is too frail to keep working but too poor to retire -- when you meet someone whose situation makes you worry about your own situation, the most natural response in the world is to try to find some difference between them and you, some waterline where you can imagine that the tide of misfortune will have to stop.

You may not set out to blame the victim, but still we'd all love to find something that the victims did wrong that we always do right. The woman with lung cancer -- did she smoke? The guy who got mugged -- I never go to that neighborhood. The lifelong employee who got laid off -- that couldn't happen to any of us, because we're different.

And when you find that difference, that waterline, it's so tempting to build an imaginary wall there, to exagerate, to turn a small difference of degree into a clear difference of kind.

So if they stay ten minutes past quitting time and I stay 20, then I am hard-working and they are lazy. If some choice I made has turned out better than their choices, then I am wise and they are foolish. If they broke a single commandment that I have kept, then I am upright and they are sinful.

An unjust system's second line of defense is to help us build those walls of denial, to help us convince ourselves that the people below us on the ladder are of some other species entirely.

And to the extent you accept that separation, you help justify the whole ladder. If losers belong to a different species, then maybe the CEOs do too. Maybe they deserve to rule over us.

But even if your virtues don't make a different species, you do still have virtues. And that's how denial gets mixed up with legitimate pride. If you are managing to tread water in difficult times, then you have a right to be proud of the fact that you haven't drowned yet. But those who are treading water are kidding themselves if they imagine that they are a different kind of person than those who have gone under.

That's what I think is going on on that 53% web site. The woman who gets up at 4:30 to be yelled at, works 50 hours a week, doesn't own anything, and still struggles to pay her bills -- she deserves to feel proud of her efforts. And yet, is her story really so different from the stories on the 99% site?

And why is life that hard? Is that just "how it's supposed to work"? Or is life so hard because our society has made choices that favor the rich? Could we make different choices?

Likewise, that college senior who has no debt and works her ass off is imagining a sturdy wall that separates hard-working people who make good decisions from everyone else. She pictures herself on the deserving side of that wall, and imagines that she will always be there -- because luck plays no role in her world, and decisions that seem wise at the time never turn out badly down the road.

So that is an unjust system's third line of defense: appealing to your pride. They will tell you that what you take pride in only has meaning within their value system. If you deny that the current system is founded on merit and virtue, then you have denied all possible standards of merit and virtue.

The thought of making common cause with the people below you is supposed to offend your pride, because some of the people down there don't share all your virtues.

But of course, some of the people above you don't share your virtues either -- they don't work hard and don't take risks and don't make the world better for others. But you're not supposed to pay attention to that. That's just how life is. Even to bring that issue up, we are told, is engaging in class warfare, in "the bitter politics of envy", and the "resentment of success".

Resentment does play a role here, but not the way the 1% would have you believe. Again, let me illustrate from my childhood. Growing up, I wasted very little time thinking about the Rockefellers and Vanderbilts. Multiple homes in exotic locales did not rouse my envy. But if my older sister got two scoops of ice cream when I only got one, that was not fair.

Resentment tends to stay close to home. It's much easier to resent people who are almost like you, but have some small advantage. Maybe they have just a little more than you, or maybe they have exactly what you have, but didn't work as hard or suffer as much to get it. Those are the people that it's easiest to resent. Not the billionaires.

And so, an unjust system's fourth line of defense is to deflect your legitimate resentment away from the real beneficiaries of injustice and onto your neighbors.

Last spring, when the bill to take away the collective bargaining rights of public employees was being debated in Wisconsin, the Club for Growth blanketed the state with a very effective ad. It talked about the sacrifices that private-sector workers in Wisconsin had been forced to make to save their jobs, and listed the cuts in their benefits and wages.

But where did the ad suggest those workers should focus their resentment? Should they resent the owners, who pocketed those sacrifices as higher profits? Or the executives who raised their own pay while firing some employees and squeezing concessions out of the rest?

Oh no. The ad wanted Wisconsin's distressed private-sector workers to focus their resentment on the public-sector teachers and nurses and bus-drivers who hadn't made equivalent sacrifices yet.

If my money has been transferred to the rich as profits, then my sister's money should be transferred to the rich as tax cuts. It's only fair.

Supposedly, we are the 99% and this is a democracy. If we can hang together, it ought to be possible to re-write the rules so that the economy works for ordinary people again.

But there are big obstacles against us holding together. You don't have to look far to see them, because they are sitting right in your own brain:

•the shame you feel in your own defeats;

•the denial that makes you want to say, "That couldn't happen to me";

•the pride that sets you above anyone worse off;

•and the resentment you feel against those who are only one or two rungs higher.

Those impulses sit in your brain for good reasons. In other circumstances they serve you well. You ought to criticize yourself and try to learn from your failures. In the face of adversity, you need to identify reasons to hope. You deserve be proud of all the things you're doing to keep your head above water. And you should stand up for yourself when others are treated better than you.

So I'm not saying you should throw all that stuff out of your head. That would be naive advice, because I can't do it myself. I am ashamed, I am in denial, I am proud, and I resent all the wrong people -- just like everybody else.

All I'm saying is: Pay attention. Watch yourself. Shame, denial, pride, resentment -- those are ways you can be manipulated into working against your own interests and against people whose problems are just like yours.

The manipulators have enormous resources. You hear their message from all directions: The people who want change, the people who are protesting in the streets or in the occupation encampments -- they are losers. They are lazy, jealous, misguided, dirty, disgusting, unreasonable, and violent. They are minions of some dark conspiracy against all that is good. You should be ashamed to have any connection with them. Instead, you should identify with the 1%, because you want to join the winners, not the losers.

Of course you do. Everyone wants to join the winners. And if it were that easy, we all would. Every one of us would say, "Starting right now, I'm going to be a winner."

But it's not that easy. The deck is stacked against ordinary people, and it's going to stay stacked until we all do something very difficult: We need to join the losers. We need to look down the ladder and see not what makes us different from the people below, but what makes us the same.

When we find the courage and the confidence and the compassion to do that, then, together, we really do become the 99%. When we do that, we really do have the power to rewrite the rules, enforce them justly on the rich as well as the poor, and make this country work again for everyone.

Closing Words

"Years ago I recognized my kinship with all living things, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on the earth. I said then and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it; while there is a criminal element, I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free." -- Eugene Debs

At my mother's funeral

2012-01-23T16:02:00.001-05:00

My quarterly column is up at the UU World web site. If you read this blog regularly, you'll suddenly understand where the ideas in May's My Volo Credere post came from. More and more, I'm seeing UUism as being about religious self-discipline, not religious freedom.

My Halloween Column

2011-10-31T15:55:00.001-04:00

My Halloween column A Candy Bar for Death appeared today on the UU World web site. If you've been reading this blog, you recognize some of the ideas from The Story of Our Deaths.

I'm reading the comments both here and on the UU World site. I suspect the bigger discussion will be there, the smaller one here. So, whichever appeals to you.

Let Us Pray?

2011-10-04T14:07:00.001-04:00

a service given at the Unitarian Church of Quincy, Illinois
September 18, 2011

Readings

from The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe

in the Middle of all my Labours it happen'd, that rumaging my Things, I found a little Bag, which, ... had been fill'd with Corn for the feeding of Poultry, ... what little Remainder of Corn had been in the Bag, was all devour'd with the Rats, and I saw nothing in the Bag but Husks and Dust; and being willing to have the Bag for some other Use, ... I shook the Husks of Corn out of it on one Side of my Fortification under the Rock.

It was a little before the great Rains ... that I threw this Stuff away, taking no Notice of any Thing, and not so much as remembring that I had thrown any Thing there; when about a Month after, or thereabout, I saw some few Stalks of something green shooting out of the Ground, which I fancy'd might be some Plant I had not seen, but I was surpriz'd and perfectly astonish'd, when after a little longer Time, I saw about ten or twelve Ears come out, which were perfect green Barley of the same Kind as our European, nay, as our English Barley.

It is impossible to express the Astonishment and Confusion of my Thoughts on this Occasion; I had hitherto acted upon no religious Foundation at all; indeed I had very few Notions of Religion in my Head, or had entertain'd any Sense of any Thing that had befallen me, otherwise than as a Chance, or, as we lightly say, what pleases God; without so much as enquiring into the End of Providence in these Things, or his Order in governing Events in the World; But after I saw Barley grow there, in a Climate which I knew was not proper for Corn, and especially that I knew not how it came there, it startled me strangely, and I began to suggest, that God had miraculously caus'd this Grain to grow without any help of Seed sown, and that it was so directed purely for my Sustenance on that wild miserable Place.

This touch'd my Heart a little, and brought Tears out of my Eyes, and I began to bless my self, that such a Prodigy of Nature should happen upon my Account; and this was the more strange to me, because I saw near it still all along by the side of the Rock, some other straggling Stalks, which prov'd to be Stalks of Rice ...

I not only thought these the pure Productions of Providence for my Support, but not doubting, but that there was more in the Place, I went all over that part of the Island, where I had been before peering in every Corner, and under every Rock, to see for more of it, but I could not find any; at last it occur'd to my Thoughts, that I had shook a Bag of Chickens Meat out in that Place, and then the Wonder began to cease; and I must confess, my religious Thankfulness to God's Providence began to abate too upon the Discovering that all this was nothing but what was common; tho' I ought to have been as thankful for so strange and unforeseen a Providence, as if it had been miraculous; for it was really the Work of Providence as to me, that should order or appoint, that 10 or 12 Grains of Corn should remain unspoil'd (when the Rats had destroyed all the rest,) as if it had been dropt from Heaven.

from Spirit and Flesh by James Ault

Registering needs and recognizing how the Lord met them was the bread and butter of conversation at Shawmut River. But special time was taken at the beginning of Sunday-evening worship for testimonies and prayer requests. They represented two sides of the same reality. Testimony pointed to the perceptible evidence of God's work in the world -- a job found, a marriage saved, an illness healed -- and prayer requests brought these same needs to public attention in the first place and made them a matter of community prayer.

... As prayer requests were given, members jotted them down on prayer lists, which they slipped into Bibles or pockets, eventually to stick them up, perhaps, on their refrigerator doors alongside shopping lists and other items of household business. And many looked to those lists in the course of conducting their "prayer lives." It occurred to me at the time that these practices were probably an effective means to seeing needs met merely by social means. As faithful members meditated regularly on their prayer lists, I reckoned, they would be routinely reminded of specific needs and have them in mind when someone mentioned news, say, of an apartment becoming available, a job opening up or another member's unexpected windfall. In this way, needs and resources would be providentially brought together.

from "An Outline of Intellectual Rubbish" by Bertrand Russell

Sometimes, if pious men are to be believed, God's mercies are curiously selective. Toplady, the author of "Rock of Ages," moved from one vicarage to another; a week after the move, the vicarage he had formerly occupied burnt down, with great loss to the new vicar. Thereupon Toplady thanked God; but what the new vicar did is not known.

from "Pat Robertson & Hurricane Gloria" on the web site anecdotage.com

In 1985, with Hurricane Gloria headed toward the east coast, televangelist Pat Robertson promptly went on the air to pray. "In the name of Jesus," he declared, "we command you to stop where you are and move northeast, away from land, and away from harm."Incredibly, the hurricane did in fact begin to head northeast. Robertson's claims to have changed the course of the hurricane were met with considerable scorn, however, particularly in Long Island - which lies to the northeast of Robertson's native Virginia and was devastated by Gloria after she changed course.

from a proclamation from the Governor of Texas

WHEREAS, the state of Texas is in the midst of an exceptional drought ... NOW, THEREFORE, I, RICK PERRY, Governor of Texas, under the authority vested in me by the Constitution and Statutes of the State of Texas, do hereby proclaim the three-day period from Friday, April 22, 2011, to Sunday, April 24, 2011, as Days of Prayer for Rain in the State of Texas.

[Imprecatory prayer means praying for God to do harm to someone. Baptist minister Wiley Drake advocates imprecatory prayer. He has admitted to praying for the death of President Obama, and Drake called the assassination of the abortionist Dr. George Tiller "an answer to a prayer".]

from "Pastor Wiley Drake Calls for Imprecatory Prayer against So-Called Religious Liberty Watchdog Group" Christian NewsWire, August 14, 2011

In light of the recent attack from the enemies of God I ask the children of God to go into action with Imprecatory Prayer. Especially against Americans United for Separation of Church and State. I made an attempt to go to them via Matt 18:15 but they refused to talk to me. Specifically target Joe Conn or Jeremy Learing.

from "The Language of Faith" by former UUA President William Sinkford

my son Billy, then 15 years old, had overdosed on drugs, and it was unclear whether he would live. As I sat with him in the hospital, I found myself praying. First the selfish prayers for forgiveness…for the time not made, for the too many trips, for the many things unsaid, and, sadly, for a few things said that should never have passed my lips. But as the night darkened, I finally found the pure prayer. The prayer that asked only that my son would live. And late in the evening, I felt the hands of a loving universe reaching out to hold. The hands of God, the Spirit of Life. The name was unimportant. I knew that those hands would be there to hold me whatever the morning brought. And I knew, though I cannot tell you how, that those hands were holding my son as well. I knew that I did not have to walk that path alone, that there is a love that has never broken faith with us and never will.

My son survived. But the experience stayed with me.

Let Us Pray?

I grew up in a religion where God was very literal and personal. God was someone you could talk to, and if you did, He could give you real, tangible help.

When you believe in a God like that -- I mean really believe, and not just go through the motions -- prayer is a very serious act. You have asked the Ruler of the Universe to listen to you, so you don't chatter about trivia. You don't posture or pretend, because God is not fooled. You don't ask for things you don't really want, because you might get them.

To pray well, then, meant more than just saying the right words. It meant being centered and authentic. A good prayer got to the heart of things. It boiled down what was really going on in my life, what my true hopes were, and what kind of help I really needed.

As I got older, though, I stopped believing in the kind of God who mucks about in the physical world, changing the directions of hurricanes and zapping away tumors. I also began to see the dark side of prayer. I had come to believe that bringing justice to the world is a human responsibility, and it bothered me to watch people push that job off on God. "I'll pray for you," the rich man says to the beggar, and then he walks away. When people on the other side of the world suffered from famine or war or natural disaster, we prayed, and that disquieting sense that we ought to do something was satisfied.

Some of the readings displayed other kinds of dysfunctionality. Believing in prayer can make the Universe seem like a big patronage system. It all depends on who you know upstairs, whether God likes me better than he likes you. So the winners thank God, but what the losers say is not recorded.

Prayer can be a way to avoid reality. So Governor Perry can ignore what science says about global warming and instead fight the drought in Texas with a day of prayer.

Some people even project their vindictiveness onto God. If Wiley Drake hates President Obama or Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, then God must hate them too. And maybe God will send an assassin if Drake prays hard enough and gets enough people praying with him.

Having spent my share of time sitting by hospital beds, I can testify that even those desperate emergency-room prayers can have a dark, narcissistic side. The crisis isn't about the person who might be dying. It's not even about the doctors and nurses. It's about me and my relationship to God. God kills or saves people just to make a point to me. That's how important I am.

Atheists ridicule talking to God. "You just have an imaginary friend," they say. And as I lost my childhood faith, the act of prayer did begin to seem ridiculous. So I stopped. I missed it, but it was like one of those silly toys you continue to feel sentimental about, even though you're past the age. You box it up and put it on a high shelf, because it's embarrassing. It's proof that you're not really as mature as you claim to be.

Eventually, though, I began to realize that what I missed most about prayer was not the prospect of magically healing the sick or changing the weather or getting some unfair advantage. I missed the doing of prayer. The simple thought experiment -- what if I did have the ear of the Almighty, what would I say? -- cut through a lot of the noise and fog in my mind. And when I asked myself: "What advice would a supremely wise being who loved me give in this situation?" the answer was often fairly obvious.

Some imaginary friends, I eventually decided, are worth talking to.

That insight set me to taking inventory. What if you ignore the metaphysics and theology surrounding prayer and just look at the doing of it? What beneficial practices has folk wisdom encoded into prayer over the centuries? How many of them can we rescue without falling into the corresponding traps?

We saw one of those beneficial practices in the responsive reading. It did not address God by name, but for all practical purposes it was a prayer of thanksgiving. I find that I need that. The mindset of my everyday life keeps me focused on what I deserve and making sure I am not cheated out of it. It is so easy to forget how many of the good things in my life are not of my own making. A practice that regularly evokes feelings of gratitude makes me happier and saner.

Another kind of prayer can be good group process. Taking a moment at the beginning of a meeting to step back from the nitty-gritty disagreements and recall the common ideals that bring you all together -- that can make for a more cooperative, more productive meeting.

Two traditional kinds of prayer involve stepping outside the Ego: the prayer for forgiveness and the prayer for help. As we've already seen, these prayers have dysfunctional uses as well as beneficial ones, but fortunately there is a simple rule that separates them: Prayer is a good first step, but a bad last step.

Obviously, if you have wronged other people, you should be confessing it to them and trying to make it right with them. But this is a good first step: Admit in your own mind, to the most compassionate judge you can imagine, that you did wrong. If you can't do that much, what hope is there that you'll make things right in the world?

Similarly, if even when you are alone you can't admit that you don't have all the bases covered, that you are not in control of the situation, and that you need help from somewhere -- then how will you admit that to anyone else? And how will get the help you need if your Ego will not let you admit that you need it?

The reading from James Ault illustrates how prayers for help can work in a community. Having assigned a long list of tasks to God, the parishioners of Shawmut River don't leave it there, they start looking for ways they can help God do his work. Sister Mabel wants God to find her a ride to the doctor next Thursday? Well praise Jesus, that's my day off. That nice young couple is asking God to replace their refrigerator that died? I've got one in the basement that I couldn't figure out what to do with. Hallelujah!

Now, we may laugh at this community, because Jesus isn't driving anybody to the doctor. They're doing it all themselves. But if our community doesn't have as effective and as cheerful a way to ask for and receive help from each other, then what do we have to laugh about?

I've already pointed out how prayer can excuse a lack of action. But sometimes action is impossible or unwise, and prayer can keep alive an idea that otherwise might fade away. Many slaves in the old South had no prospect of escape, but they sang and prayed about freedom, and the idea stayed alive. Generations of Jews said, "next year in Jerusalem" and did little to bring that about beyond teaching their children to say the same thing. But then, when action became possible, the idea was there.

It is worth asking: What ideas do you have today that you aren't acting on, but you also aren't willing to give up? How will you keep them alive?

Finally, we come to the most difficult kind of prayer to justify: the prayer for a miracle.

The reading from Robinson Crusoe raises an important question: What is a miracle, anyway? Something is a miracle to you if it is completely outside your expectations, like the English barley that springs up on Crusoe's deserted Caribbean island. But the Universe is vast and our brains are tiny, so we're constantly ignoring, overlooking, or forgetting things that turn out to be important -- like the rat-chewed chicken feed Crusoe had dumped out in a sheltered spot just before the rainy season. The results of those forgotten causes can be so close to a miracle as makes no difference.

The future always outgrows the box we build for it. It shrugs off our theories and wriggles out of our computer models. When we let ourselves look this fact in the eye, it is as wonderful and terrible as the most primitive tribal deity. Even within the natural order, we really don't know what might happen next.

I saw that in my own life a few years ago. I was at a shopping mall when I began to feel sick. I went to the food court, thinking that if I got off my feet and drank something, I might feel well enough to drive home. Instead, I got worse, and before long I was debating whether I would be able to make to the bathroom before I threw up.

I decided to run for it, but as soon as I stood up, I fainted ... and some stranger caught me before I hit the floor.

Now, I wasn't expecting that, because in my mind, I was alone. But the vast real world contained possibilities I was not taking into account. In fact, an impromptu emergency response team sprouted up around me like Crusoe's barley. Somebody laid me down gently on the floor. Somebody ran to get mall security. Somebody called 911. And when I woke up a few seconds later, somebody was sitting there to explain to me what was happening. Strangers, every one of them, taking action "as if they had been dropt from Heaven".

Supernatural? No. Miraculous? To me -- yes.

Prayer is dysfunctional when it gives us a false confidence that we can overpower the natural world, like the pastor who expects to be saved from the flood by some means other than boats and helicopters. But it's good to have a practice that encourages you to remember that the doom you seem to be facing may not be as rock-solid as it looks. The world is vast, and it contains unimagined possibilities for good as well as evil. We shouldn't count on them, but it's also a mistake to count them out.

Finally, I want to talk about Bill Sinkford's experience sitting beside his son's hospital bed. But before I go there, I want to take a detour.

There is a common situation in which it makes perfect sense to pray for any kind of miracle you can imagine: In a dream. In the Dreamworld, the traditional explanation of how prayer works is literally true: There is an all-powerful being who has good reason to care about you.

That being is the Dreamer, who in some sense is you. You run around the dreamscape doing your dream-character things and maybe being quite miserable. But no matter how impossible the situation seems, you could get it all straightened out if only you could a message through to the Dreamer.

Now, what does that have to do with the world we face when we're awake? I believe that we are physical beings who live in a world that obeys physical laws. But a lot of our experience of life is not forced on us by the physical situation. As I discussed last spring, our experiences are filtered through the stories that we tell about our lives. The meaning of our lives is not in the motions of the atoms of our bodies. The meaning of our lives is in the stories that we are living, and a single physical situation can support many different stories.

So a very important aspect of your life is under your control, because you are the primary story-teller of your life.

But using that power is incredibly difficult. For most of us most of the time, being the Story-Teller of our lives does us no more good than being the Dreamer does us when we are dreaming. We get trapped in our stories. And even if they are largely of our own devising, we can't figure out how to escape.

Just deciding to tell a new story doesn't work. For example, whether I am a success or a failure depends more on the story of my life and how it is told than on my physical situation. If the story of my life says that I'm a failure, yes, I could start telling a new story that says I'm a success. But would that make me a success? More likely, I'd feel like a fraud -- a failure who is conning people about how successful he is.

No, the story of your life has more substance and momentum than that. Like the power of the Dreamer, the power of the Story-Teller can be very hard to access.

Now let's get back to Bill Sinkford sitting by his son's hospital bed, praying for a miracle. At that moment, Sinkford is trapped inside one of the most horrible stories there is: He is the Bad Father who deserves to watch his son die. Because he wasn't there at the important moment, and he never said this significant thing, and he did say that terrible thing instead. This character that he believes he is deserves no mercy and no compassion. He's just reaping what he sowed.

As long as Sinkford goes round and round that hamster wheel, as long as the story is about him and the failings of his character, he can't get out.

But then he experiences a pure cry of the heart, what he calls "the pure prayer": Let my son live. He's not controlling the situation. He's not reminding God of his previous promises or trying to negotiate a new deal. He's not living in the past or the future. He's just arrived at the essence of his experience of this moment: Let my son live.

That cry of the heart does not heal Sinkford's son. But it is so intense that it breaks the story. It wakes him up. For just a moment he stops being a character in a story and becomes a fully conscious human being, with all the power that entails.

I think it's important to understand what that power is. It's not physical power. He recognizes that the physical world will do what it does. His son will live or not live. Even in Sinkford's heightened state of awareness, that's not his choice to make.

But he is no longer trapped inside the character he has been, and his relationship with his son is not trapped inside the story he has been telling about it. Whatever happens, there can be a new story. That story will have the possibility of meaning and the possibility of love and the possibility of joy.

Sinkford ends his account by saying, "The experience stayed with me." I think he's acknowledging the temptation he felt to box that experience up and put it on a high shelf, the temptation to say "Things got crazy there for a while, but I'm OK now."

If you've ever had an experience like Sinkford's that seems life-changing at the time, you know that often the moment passes and you get pulled back into your old story. Or sometimes the new story is no better. That moment of revelation doesn't always work out. But it certainly won't work out if you reflexively get embarrassed about such experiences and explain them away as soon as possible.

So I close with this advice for those moments when you feel the need for a miracle: Don't repress that need, don't crack the whip and try to get yourself back in line. Try to hone it. If what you think you need is a violation of the natural order, it's probably not coming. But never forget that the natural order is bigger than you think. Stay open to the unexpected.

And if the miracle you really need is related to your character and your story, that can happen. If you need an inner transformation, if you need to reshape your relationships, if you need to break free of your patterns, if you need a new way to find meaning in the world -- that can happen. There is a powerful being who cares about you who could make that happen.

In some sense that being is you, if you could just wake up.

The first step in that awakening process is very similar to the kind of prayer I described at the beginning. Sit with your need and strip away everything that is non-essential. Strip away all the ego, all the self-importance, all the self-pity, all the desire for control, until you find that pure cry of the heart.

That is the moment when things can start to change.

My Volo Credere

2011-05-29T08:41:00.001-04:00

This year, random fluctuations got my church's Coming of Age class down to one student. (It's usually five or six.) I was the young man's mentor, so my role in the Coming of Age Sunday service was to introduce his credo-reading*. The lack of other credos meant that I had a little extra time, so I decided to use it to say something about Unitarian Universalism in general, and how Coming of Age fits in.

[* If you're unfamiliar with the UU Coming of Age tradition, we have a year-long program that is comparable to what confirmation would be in a Protestant Christian church, with this exception: We're not just teaching the students what UUism is, we're encouraging them to assemble their own ideas about what they believe and don't believe. The culmination of the program is that the students write personal credos -- statements of their own beliefs -- and present them to the congregation.]

One of the old saws about UUism (which tends to get repeated when people describe Coming of Age) is that UUs can "believe whatever we want". Over the years I've heard a number of writers and speakers attack that idea with logic and evidence, but the refutation never sticks. That's why I decided to go after it in a more humorous way, by taking it literally. So instead of a credo ("I believe"), I talked about my volo credere ("I want to believe").

For years, people have been telling me that Unitarian Universalists can believe whatever we want. And I find that notion intriguing, because for as long as I can remember, I have wanted to believe that I can fly.

I want to believe a lot of things about myself. I want to believe that I don't really need to sleep. I want to believe that if the plan depends on me being in two places at the same time, I can do that.

I want to believe things about the world, too. Those problems that you hear so much about -- climate change, poverty, war -- I want to believe that they're not really that bad. I want to believe that it will all be OK. And most of all, I want to believe that none of it is my fault, so no one has a right to expect me to do anything about it.

That's what I want to believe.

I'm sure there are many things that you want to believe too.

And we are Unitarian Universalists. We are free from creeds and dogmas and scriptures and institutional authorities. Who is going to stop us from believing whatever whimsical, irresponsible, and self-serving things we want?

Well, I think already you know the answer to that: We're going to stop ourselves. We are going to use our eyes and our minds and our hearts, and we are going to realize that we can't believe whatever we want, because many of the things we want to believe are just not true.

You see, Unitarian Universalists are not un-disciplined. We are self-disciplined. And that is what we are celebrating today.

The public credo-reading that completes our Coming of Age program is one of the most meaningful and moving rituals in our tradition -- not because of what the credos say, but because of what they represent: young people taking responsibility for their own beliefs, demonstrating that they have the self-discipline not to "believe whatever they want".

What's inspiring about our Coming of Age program is not that we restrain ourselves from telling our young people what they have to believe. The inspiring thing -- what our coming-of-age classes prove year after year, and what I expect D_____ to demonstrate yet again today -- is that no one needs to tell our young people what to believe. They are up to the job.

I think you are about to see what I have been seeing all year as I worked with D____: a young man who is ready to claim his place in a community of self-disciplined people.

And that is truly something to celebrate.

D____, the pulpit is yours.

The Story of Our Deaths

2011-04-06T13:10:00.001-04:00

a service given at the Unitarian Church of Quincy, Illinois

April 3, 2011

Summary

We live not just as physical bodies, but also as characters inside countless stories that motivate our actions and make meaning out of our lives: the stories of our careers and projects, the stories of our relationships, the stories of our days and months and years.

Perhaps the scariest thing about death is that it cuts those stories short. Our plots may have no climaxes. Our mysteries may come to no solutions. Our odysseys may never reach home. Facing those possibilities can undo the motivation that our stories give us and make our lives seem meaningless.

One way to maintain motivation and meaning is to tell death-denying stories about eternal life. Another is to live in the moment and put off thinking about death for as long as possible. But wise and skillful story-tellers have other options.

Opening Story: "The Tigers and the Strawberry"

A man was walking through a field when he saw a tiger watching him. The man began to run, and the tiger loped after him. He ran faster, and the tiger ran faster. Suddenly there was a cliff ahead, and the man tried to stop, but his heels skidded and he fell.

But on his way down he grabbed a vine, and amazingly, the vine was strong enough to hold him. And he thought: "Maybe I can figure out a way to climb to the bottom, and get away from the tiger." But then he looked down and saw a second tiger pacing back and forth at the bottom of the cliff, waiting for him.

So he wrapped his legs around the vine and hung on. "Maybe," he thought, "I can hang here until the tigers get bored and go away." But then, just out of his reach, he saw two mice come of out of a hole and begin gnawing on the base of the vine that held him up.

The man closed his eyes and began preparing himself for death. But when he opened his eyes again, he saw a luscious red strawberry growing out of the face of the cliff, hanging right next to him. He plucked the strawberry and ate it. It was the most delicious thing he had ever tasted.

Hymn: #12 "O Life That Maketh All Things New"

Responsive Reading: #558 "For Everything a Season"

For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven:

A time to be born, and a time to die;

A time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted;

A time to kill, and a time to heal;

A time to break down, and a time to build up;

A time to weep, and a time to laugh;

A time to mourn, and a time to dance;

A time to throw away stones, and a time to gather stones together;

A time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;

A time to seek, and a time to lose;

A time to keep, and a time to throw away;

A time to tear, and a time to sew;

A time to keep silence, and a time to speak;

A time to love, and a time to hate;

A time for war,

And a time for peace.

Readings

I want to introduce the readings by telling a story from my own life, a story you can think of as the motivation for this service.

Random Death. In high school I had a weekend job at the Herald-Whig. In those pre-computer days, one of my duties was to get typewritten pieces of paper from editors like Joe Conover and walk them back to the composing room, where they were set into metal type.

[Footnote: Quincy is my home town and the Herald-Whig is its local newspaper. Joe Conover attends this church and was in the room as I was speaking.]

I was a curious kid, so I usually managed to read the stories on the way, if they weren't too long.

One Saturday, when we were putting together the Sunday morning edition, I was given one sheet of paper, about three paragraphs. There had been a windstorm that day. Some middle-aged man -- his name meant nothing to me then and I don't remember it now -- had been in his yard when a large tree-branch blew down and killed him.

Now, that was not the first time I had ever thought about death. I grew up watching westerns and cop shows on TV. People died left and right on those shows, but they died inside plots that made sense. Their deaths were heroic or tragic or the result of their own foolishness. And I had known relatives to die after long illnesses, but those illnesses themselves were a kind of story in which death was a logical conclusion.

But this guy in his yard -- I knew nothing about him, but I was convinced that this branch blowing down was not the climax of any story he thought he was living. I was sure he must have been in the middle of a million other things, and then suddenly he wasn't.

That bothered me. It bothered me, so much that for days afterward I fantasized about suicide, as teen-agers often do. I think I wanted to reclaim control of the story of my death. Better to die at the climax of a tragedy of my own devising, I thought, than to risk dying randomly and meaninglessly.

But then -- as teen-agers also often do -- I got distracted by things I don't even remember now. My death tragedy was never performed, those unanswered questions moved to a back shelf of my mind, and life went on.

The readings represent a range of responses to those questions about death. The first is the traditional Christian story of salvation, from the Gospel of John. If you were at my mother's funeral, you heard this reading there:

The Christian Salvation Story: John 11: 21-25 and 14:2-3

“Lord,” Martha said to Jesus, “if you had been here, my brother [Lazarus] would not have died. But I know that even now God will give you whatever you ask.”

Jesus said to her, “Your brother will rise again.”

Martha answered, “I know he will rise again in the resurrection at the last day.”

Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me will live, even though he dies; and whoever lives and believes in me will never die."

In my Father’s house are many rooms; ... I am going there to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with me that you also may be where I am.

A second possible answer is in the Zen story I opened with. To me that story says that since there is no escaping death, we should accept it, and appreciate what this brief moment of life has to offer. Eat the strawberry.

But to William James things were not so simple.

from Varieties of Religious Experience by William James

[M]ankind is in a position similar to that of a set of people living on a frozen lake, surrounded by cliffs over which there is no escape, yet knowing that little by little the ice is melting, and the inevitable day drawing near when the last film of it will disappear, and to be drowned ignominiously will be the human creature's portion. The merrier the skating, the warmer and more sparkling the sun by day, and the ruddier the bonfires at night, the more poignant the sadness with which one must take in the meaning of the total situation.

In other words: The strawberries may be sweet, but that just makes it worse.

Finally, there is this example, from Martin Luther King's last speech, given the night before he was assassinated.

from The Mountaintop Speech by Martin Luther King

And then I got into Memphis. And some began to ... talk about the threats that were out. What would happen to me from some of our sick white brothers?

Well, I don't know what will happen now. We've got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn't matter with me now, because I've been to the mountaintop.

And I don't mind.

Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land!

And so I'm happy, tonight.

I'm not worried about anything.

I'm not fearing any man!

Sermon

What Makes Humans Special? There is something special about human beings, something that makes us different from the other animals.

It's not our bodies, which need to eat and sleep like any other animal.

It's not our basic drives. Like other animals we are driven to run from predators, to attract mates, to protect our offspring, and to compete to be alpha dog.

Even our emotions seem similar to the other mammals. Like us, they form attachments. Some signal and communicate with each other. Some primates can even be taught to arrange symbols to make rudimentary sentences.

It can be hard to put your finger on what makes us special. Some people say that we have an immortal soul. Some say human reason is a special spark of divinity. Some people imagine us as the pinnacle of evolution.

This morning I'm not going to deny any of that. But when I look at humanity and ask what sets us apart, I see something much simpler: We are story-tellers. We imagine situations that are different from what is happening here and now. We populate those situations with characters, and then let imaginary time roll forward in plots about what would happen or could happen.

I don't think any other animal does that. And if one did, then I think we'd have to see that animal as special in the same way. If someday it turns out that chickens have been clucking out their life stories, and pigs have been grunting about their plans for the summer, then I think you'll see vegetarianism become much more popular.

The Importance of Stories. We often think of stories just as entertainment, as movies or TV shows or novels. But stories are how we came to dominate this planet. Through stories, we live on time scales much bigger than the present moment. We gather wood in the day for a fire we won't need until night. We plant in the spring because the end of that story is the reaping in the fall.

Because we tell stories, the future seems real to us. Everything we do is in the context of time.

Somewhere tonight a high school student is going to study, not because that is the most exciting activity she can imagine, but because she is already living in the story where she passes tomorrow's test, and she's already living in the story where she gets a good grade at the end of the term, and goes to college, and has a career she can take pride in, and someday has the financial security to give good things to her own children.

Everything we do is part of a story. It's part of many stories. We get out of a warm bed when the alarm goes off, because we are characters in stories that we want to bring to a successful conclusion. Those characters have motivation, and to the extent that we believe in our stories, we have motivation too.

Sometimes, though, we stop believing in our stories. Sometimes the whole future -- the test, the grade, the college, the career, the children -- starts to sound like a ridiculous fantasy. None of it's real. None of it is actually going to happen, or come out the way I want it to, so why shouldn't I keep playing this game or watching this show or texting my friends?

In order to have motivation that lasts longer than a few minutes, you need to be able to tell stories that you can believe about a character that you want to be. If you can really do that, then your life rocks. You bounce out of bed in the morning so that you can be that character and live that story.

But if not, if the stories you are living aren't believable or aren't appealing, then the best you can hope for is to lose yourself in the moment. Eat, drink and be merry and try not to think about where this is all going.

On the other hand, sometimes we believe our stories too much. We get so caught up in them that we forget they are stories and imagine that they are the world. If our stories aren't working for us any more, we believe that there is something wrong with the Universe or with the human condition. If I feel distant from the protagonist of my life story, then I say that the Universe is an alienating place. If the plot of my life does not engage me any more, then I complain that the Universe is supposed to have meaning in it, but it does not. I may think I need a God or a Savior to put meaning back into the Universe, when actually I need something much simpler: I need a story-teller.

Mission and sustenance: The temptation of Jesus. One of the ways people express humanity's illusive uniqueness is to quote Jesus: "Man does not live by bread alone."

Let's talk about the story that comes from. According to Matthew, Jesus has just been baptized by John, and the spirit of God -- whatever that might be -- has come down and entered into him. But he hasn't done anything with it yet. He goes out into the desert on a vision quest, and after forty days the vision quest is starting to work, because he sees the Devil.

And the Devil says, "You want to know what it means to have the Spirit of God in you? It means you don't have to be hungry like this. You can just command those stones to be bread."

And Jesus says, "Man does not live by bread alone." Which I think means: "I didn't come out here for bread. They had bread in Galilee. They've got bread in Jerusalem. If I wanted bread, I would have stayed where I was."

And so the Devil tries again to appeal to Jesus' animal drives. He says, "You don't have to be afraid of anything." And then he says, "You can be Alpha Dog of the whole world."

And Jesus says no, that he's not looking for any of that. He's looking for "words from the mouth of God".

What could that possibly mean? I think he's out there in the desert looking for a mission, looking for a way to tell the story of his life that will make sense out of this strange thing he feels inside himself that Matthew calls "the Spirit of God." And he wants that story to ring so true that no matter what he has to do and what he has to suffer, he will never doubt it.

He wants words from the mouth of God.

The Devil can't give him that, so he goes away and the angels come. We aren't told what the angels say. But after that Jesus does have a mission, and it stays with him all the way to his death. As he breathes his last, he says, "It is complete."

And that brings us to the subject of death.

Death as a Plot Hole. The unpredictability of death throws a wrench into all our personal stories. The story of your life might end for no reason that has anything to do with the plot. A tree branch blows down on you and you're dead. It happens.

The unpredictability of your death creates a plot hole in the story you are telling about your life. And as any story-teller knows, the effects of a plot hole tend to ripple backwards in time. If you don't know where your story is supposed to end up, then you don't know what should happen just before that, and just before that, and so on.

A plot hole is like a loose end in a tapestry. If you tug on that end, the tapestry can start to unravel. Similarly, if you can't stop yourself from tugging on the loose end in the story of your life, all your motivation can unravel, all the way back to the present. If you can't stop thinking about your death, and you can't figure out how to tie off that loose end, you can end up like the people William James imagined living on the ice. What does anything matter, when the ice is melting and we are all going to die? The strawberry of life may taste as sweet as ever, but so what? That just makes it worse.

When your stories unravel like that, they start to work against you. Instead of motivating you, they demotivate you. Instead of adding meaning to the tedious periods of your life, they subtract meaning from moments that otherwise would be satisfying and enjoyable. It may be a bright spring day, but what is the point of noticing? The sunshine, the flowering trees -- they don't change anything. We're still all going to die.

Eternity vs. this moment. So how can you tie that thread off? How can you keep the plot hole of your death from unraveling the story of your life?

The readings provide some suggestions. In the Christian salvation story, death isn't a problem because it isn't really going to happen. Your stories will just get interrupted, their conclusions delayed, but ultimately they will continue in a place where they can't help but reach a happy ending. Your relationships will continue in a place of perfect love, your enemies will be called to account in a place of perfect justice, and all your questions will be answered.

Who can deny that that is a wonderful story? And if you can believe it, whole-heartedly, with confidence that it will not start to ring hollow as the prospect of your death approaches, then God bless you. I mean that. Don't let anything I say disturb you in the least.

But St. Paul was right: Faith like that is a gift of God, not something we can achieve by trying. If you can't believe the salvation story, then you can't. No amount of telling and retelling is going to help. The people living on the ice could all tell and retell a story that said the ice is not melting. But that would just make their lives harder. When they were together they would put on a happy face and tell a happy story, but inside, each of them would be alone with his dread.

The strawberry story points in the opposite direction. Are we all doomed in the future? Then accept it, and don't live for the future. Live for now. Savor this moment, and when death comes, it comes.

Collective stories. It's easy to imagine that those are the only choices: Deny death by believing in eternal life, or don't look into the future at all and live in the moment. But we know they aren't the only choices, because history gives us other examples. The ancient Greeks and Hebrews did not make either choice. They clearly did look into the future -- otherwise they couldn't possibly have achieved everything they did -- but for centuries neither had any notion of personal salvation. Neither the Greek afterlife in Hades nor the Hebrew one in Sheol were anything to look forward to.

In The Odyssey, the ghost of Achilles tells Odysseus: "Say not a word in death's favor; I would rather be a paid servant in a poor man's house and be above ground than king of kings among the dead."

And Ecclesiastes agrees: "even a live dog is better off than a dead lion! For the living know that they will die, but the dead know nothing; they have no further reward, and even the memory of them is forgotten."

So how did ancient peoples motivate themselves? Without any pleasant notion of eternal life, how did they plan for the future without seeing all their stories unravelled by death?

The answer turns out to be fairly simple. Although ancient peoples certainly were individuals and had individual stories and motives, compared to us they lived collective lives. The bulk of the stories that motivated them day-to-day were collective stories -- stories of planting and harvest in the country, and the annual cycle of festivals in the city. Where a 21st century person wakes up and asks "What am I doing today?" they were more likely to ask "What are we doing today?"

You can see a modern account of this mindset in Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. Levin, the aristocratic character who most resembles Tolstoy himself, can't understand why the peasants resist his efforts to modernize agriculture, no matter how attractive and profitable he tries to make it for them. Eventually, he spends several days working side-by-side with them and comes to understand that the peasants are not motivated as much by the individual story of profit and loss, as by the collective story of the people and the land.

Tolstoy does not tell us how Levin's peasants view death, but it's not hard to imagine. If the story that motivates me day-to-day is a collective story, then the prospect of my death has no effect on it. There is a time to plant and a time to reap, a time to tear and a time to sew, a time to break down and a time to build up -- and ultimately a time to live and a time to die.

If the meaning of all that was never in me or in my personal story. If it is what my people do, then my death will not undo it.

The Mountaintop. And finally, that brings us to Martin Luther King. On the eve of his death, the story that is motivating Dr. King is a collective story. It's the story of justice for his people and justice for the world. He knows that he is playing an important part in that story, and he knows that the story will go on whether he lives or not. "I may not get there with you," he says, "but we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land."

"Like anybody," he says, "I would like to live. But [if I have to die] I don't mind."

Mindful present, collective future. Now, I realize that none of the examples I've mentioned is a perfect fit for an ordinary American in the 21st century.

Obviously, we can't all expect to be Jesus or Martin Luther King.

And while the increased individuality of the 21st century has its costs, it has benefits too. I doubt that many of us would want to recreate the collective mindset of a Russian peasant or an ancient Hebrew or Greek.

The timeless mindset of a healthy animal, always living in the moment -- that also has its charms. But the advantages we get from having a vision of the future, and the satisfaction that comes from finding your role in the larger sweep of history -- that would be a lot to give up.

But if none of the examples provides a perfect model, I still think we can cobble something together.

The strawberry story contains one piece of the truth. Personal life is not the kind of thing you can enjoy in the abstract; you have to enjoy it in a time and a place. And if not here and now, then where and when?

So to the extent that you are looking for personal satisfaction in life, you'd better grab it while you can. Feel the sunlight, taste your food, see the beauty, enjoy your friends, love your loved ones. If life will not seem complete until you see the Grand Canyon, then go see it. See it now. Don't wait until your eyes are failing and your knees won't let you hike. Eat the strawberry.

But that's not enough, I think. We still need the kind of meaning in our lives that can only come from stories that play out over time.

And so the ancient Greeks and Hebrews, the Russian peasants, and Martin Luther King give us another piece. When you do look to the future for your motivation, recognize that the further into the future a story goes, the more likely it is you will be dead before the end of it. So: the further into the future a story goes, the more collective it needs to be. Your long-term stories need to be able to contain your death; they should go on and not be interrupted when you die. Inside those collective stories, you need to find a personal role that is believable and motivating.

And that implies something that sounds paradoxical: For purely selfish reasons, you need to reach beyond yourself. You need to be part of something bigger, something whose story will go on after you die: a family, a community, a profession, this country, the human race, the web of all life.

And that connection to the larger whole can't just be theoretical. It won't motivate you, it won't get you out of bed in the morning unless you feel it and believe it in your heart and soul.

So that's the full package: Learn to take personal satisfaction in the moment, to live with a mindfulness that does not send the baggage of regret into the future. And simultaneously, learn to care deeply about something that will outlive you. Find a role you want to play in a story that will not end when you die.

It's a tall order. But if you can do it, there's a prize. You too may be able to contemplate your death and say, "Like anyone I would like to live, but I don't mind. I may die tomorrow, but I am happy today. I am not worried about anything. I am not fearing any man."

Closing Hymn: #114 "Forward Through the Ages"

Closing Story

President Kennedy used to tell this story: An old man and his young gardener were laying out plans for the trees they would plant in the coming year. But the gardener objected to one tree the old man suggested, pointing out that the species grows so slowly that it would not reach maturity for a hundred years. "Oh my," said the old man. "I had no idea. In that case, we'd better plant it today."

At My Mother's Funeral ...

2011-02-28T14:18:00.001-05:00

… I learned that you never really know a person. Not completely.

You may have a life-long relationship, more than half a century, but you still only see one facet of the whole. Someone else remembers a buddy from high school, the kid next door, the person my father dated, an older sister, an old woman who needed help getting to the bathroom, a face at the beauty parlor, a fellow member of the Bible Study group, somebody to laugh with while the kids (me) played downstairs, and dozens of other people -- most of whom I had never met, but who nonetheless were (somehow) the same person as my mother.

After you talk to enough of your fellow mourners, you start to wonder about all the people who couldn't be here, the ones already gone. Her parents and teachers, bosses and supervisors, the staff and other patients when she was a teen-ager in a hospital far from home. And all the people who never even came up in conversation, the ones who (if they could talk to me) would have to tell a long story before I even knew who they had been.

Human beings are big. They're so big that in 54 years you can't wrap your mind around even one.

The Humanism of the Sun

2011-01-06T17:10:00.001-05:00

a talk given to the Concord Area Humanists at Wright Tavern in Concord, MA December 6, 2010

1. Hope and/or Rationality

I'm going to begin by reviewing a few facts about people who believe in the supernatural or paranormal.

People who believe in mental telepathy nonetheless make long-distance phone calls.
People who believe in levitation nonetheless buy airline tickets.
And while there are some well-publicized exceptions, the vast majority of people who believe in faith healing will nonetheless take antibiotics when they have bacterial infections.

Now, sometimes examples like this are used to claim that people are hypocrites, that most religious people, in particular, don't really believe what they claim to believe. When push comes to shove, they'll take the antibiotics. "Yes, the Lord will provide and protect, but I'm also going to buy insurance and put money in my 401-K."

That's not where I'm headed. Instead, I want to draw this lesson: When there's a proven, evidence-based way to get where you're going, the vast majority of people will take it. That's part of human nature, and it's why we've survived this long.

But there's another part of human nature: We don't give up easily. If the best rational analysis says that we're screwed, then we'll just keep going irrationally. Because we won't just lay down and die. That also is who we are and why we've survived.

So if you are lost in the desert with a group of people and you point out that the lake they are walking towards is a mirage, whether or not they believe you depends on what you say next. If you go on to outline a reasonable plan for getting back to safety, and if you make it sound credible enough, then your compatriots might listen to you. But if your entire point is to dash their hopes, they won't.

Just last month I heard about a study done by two Berkeley psychologists. They exposed two groups of people to information about global warming. Both groups heard the same dire predictions of the heat waves, droughts, floods, famines, and so on that will happen if we keep doing what we're doing. But the first group then heard about all the steps we can take to head off those disasters. The second group got a no-hope message, that it is already too late.

As you would expect, the first group came out of their session more hopeful about global warming, the second more despairing. But there was another difference: The first group, the hopeful group, was more likely to accept the reality of global warming. The hopeful prognosis made the dire facts more believable.

Why? Because human beings have an instinctive resistance to despair, and an instinctive attraction to hope. Evolution built us that way, and it's not hard to see why. People who keep struggling -- even irrationally, even with a wrongheaded view of the situation -- sometimes stumble out of the trap they're in and go on to have descendants. People who give up, don't.

Now you would think that if any religion or philosophy could align itself with what we know about human nature, it would be Humanism. But in fact we often don't. Too often, we act as if exploding other people's illusions were an end in itself: "You may think you're going to heaven, but you're not. You may think that some Higher Power is looking out for you and will step in to save you from harm, but really you're on your own. You may think Someone guarantees that ultimately the forces of Evil will not prevail. But you're wrong."

In short, our message to the believers often amounts to this: "Everything that keeps you going, everything that makes your life palatable or adds zest to your existence -- it's all a mirage, a fairy tale. There's nothing to it."

If that's the end of the message, is it any wonder that we get so few converts?

2. The Sun vs. the North Wind

In one of Aesop's fables, the Sun and the North Wind argue about which is stronger. So they have a contest: Which of them will be able to get this threadbare old cloak off the shoulders of a traveler?

"This will be easy," the North Wind thinks, and with a quick gust he almost snatches the cloak away. But the traveler grabs it at the last instant and pulls it back around his shoulders.

"Well, I'll blow harder then," the Wind says. But now the traveler is wrapping the cloak tightly around himself, and the harder the Wind blows, the tighter he hangs on.

Eventually the North Wind is exhausted and it's the Sun's turn. The Sun shines down on the traveler, and before long he is so warm that he takes the cloak off on his own.

Now, why does the Sun win? Because the North Wind is looking at things on the wrong level. To the Wind, it's all just physics. If he can get more force on that cloak than the traveler is using to hold it, he can blow it away. But the Sun understands that he's dealing with a person who has motives. If he can understand why that cloak is important to that traveler and make it unimportant, then the traveler will set it aside on his own.

Too often, we take a North Wind approach to promoting Humanism. If I just blow harder, if I make stronger arguments against religion, if I raise the level of my rhetoric and announce to my believing friends that God is Not Great, that we're at The End of Faith (and that's good), that they are suffering from a God Delusion and consequently need my help Breaking the Spell -- in short, if I heap more and more ridicule on my friends' illusions and superstitions, then I'll finally rip that cloak away from them.

And what happens? They grab it tighter. If you defeat one of their justifications for religion today, tomorrow they'll have another one. If in the morning you convince them to give up one dysfunctional superstition, by evening they'll have adopted another one that is even worse.

Why? Because we're arguing at the wrong level. This is not the kind of debate you can win by blowing harder. Religion is about people and their needs and what motivates them. They hang onto their beliefs because they are cold; and the harder we blow, the colder they get.

3. Solar Secularity

Successful arguments for secularity don't work that way. Telephone companies do not waste their advertising budget explaining that mental telepathy doesn't work. No doctor has ever told me not to pray for better health. "You want to pray? Knock yourself out. But take your antibiotics, because they work. If you take your antibiotics, you will get better."

Reasonable solutions replace superstition not because people suddenly realize that superstition is unreliable. People have always known that superstition is unreliable.

In spite of all the stories of miracle cures, even the most ignorant parents know that sometimes you pray over your sick daughter and she dies anyway. Doctors don't need to belabor that point. The parents know. But they need to be told that there is a better way. Someone needs to convince them that if their daughter takes this pill, she will live. Someone needs to tell them that children who are vaccinated don't get sick to begin with.

Convince them of that, and superstition doesn't have a chance.

Similarly, you don't need to convince your believing friends that the afterlife is uncertain and that the prospect of joy in Heaven is poor compensation for the reality of suffering and injustice here on Earth. They know that. You don't need to tell them that some of the most convincing priests and evangelists are charlatans, or that the most publicly righteous people sometimes turn out to be monsters behind closed doors. They know that.

You don't need to tell People of the Book that the Book is confusing, and that they often have to tie themselves into knots to avoid seeing its contradictions. You don't need to tell oppressed people that God's deliverance sometimes takes centuries to arrive and sometimes doesn't come at all. You don't need to tell them that blowing themselves up is an improbable road to success, that it will bring sadness to their families and most likely help no one. [A questioner challenged this point at the end of the talk, so I'll elaborate: Even groups that defend suicide bombing and claim it transports the bomber straight to Heaven only take up the practice as a last resort. People who have any other viable military or political strategy do not blow themselves up. That tells me everything I need to know about their true assessment of its effectiveness.]

They know all that. As much as they may argue with you when you point these things out, they know. That's why winning those arguments changes nothing, because they already know.

What they don't know is that there's a better way. Convince people of that, and you will change them.

In short, it's pointless to tell the traveler that his cloak isn't keeping him warm. He knows better than you do how cold he is. But that's not going to convince him to take that cloak off. What works better is to say, "Are you cold? I have just the thing. It's a better way to get warm."

4. Humanism and Progress

Now that I've told you something about believers, let me tell you something about Humanism and its history. Times and places where religion was becoming more humanistic have in general been prosperous and showed rapid progress, like Holland in the 1600s or England a little bit later.

We like to tell that story as cause-and-effect: Humanism leads to progress and prosperity. And that's true, but the reverse is also true: Progress and prosperity lead to Humanism. Wherever people have rational hope that they can solve their problems and improve their lives, it's not hard to convince them to liberalize their religion and expand the secular sphere to take in more of life's issues and decisions.

Consider the United States in the decades following the ratification of the Constitution. In New England trade was booming, industry was developing, population was rising, jobs were plentiful, wages were higher than anywhere in Europe, and if you could save up enough capital to get you through the first year, you could go west and claim land of your own. Particularly among the educated classes, life was hopeful and opportunities abounded.

And in this setting, Calvinism evolved into Unitarianism. Even the religious conservatives of the era are only relatively conservative; their beliefs were liberalizing more slowly. Those Puritan-founded churches that didn't turn Unitarian remained Congregationalist, and are now part of the United Church of Christ, Barack Obama's denomination.

Contrast that with what was happening among the slaves in the South. They lived hard lives with little reason for optimism. Small-scale rebellions were harshly put down, and because slaves were largely illiterate and tied to one plantation, their prospects for organizing a large-scale rebellion were dim. If you knew of no whites who would help you and had no place to go in the North, you had little chance of escape.

What came out of that environment was the deep religiosity you can hear in the Negro spirituals.

Go down, Moses,

Way down to Egyptland.

Go tell that Pharaoh

To let my people go.

Deprived of any rational hope, they irrationally identified with the Old Testament Israelites, and they hoped irrationally that someday the God of Moses would deliver them too -- if not in this lifetime, then by rewarding them in Heaven. With that hope, they endured. They held out -- day to day, year to year -- until processes they could not have foreseen set their descendants free.

That's how people are. That's how evolution made us. Given reasonable opportunities, we will take them. But if we are cut off from any reasonable hope of a life worth living, we will find some other way to keep going. We are a persistent species; that's how we survived.

5. John Dietrich's Idealistic Humanism

Real Humanism -- not just liberal Christianity or reformed Judaism, but full-fledged God-is-optional Humanism -- took off in America in the 1920s, the Roaring 20s.

It is hard to put yourself back into that mindset today, because it was a time not just of booms, but of real live reproducible miracles. There were horseless carriages and machines that flew men above the clouds. Glowing devices would sit in your living room and pull voices out of the ether.

One of those voices was John Dietrich.

Dietrich's sermons were so popular that his church, the First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis, had to rent out a theater on Sunday mornings to fit everybody in. He called his message Humanism, and in many ways it resembled what is taught as Humanism today. But the tone of it was very different.

Dietrich preached a Humanism of the Sun, not a Humanism of the North Wind.

For one thing, Dietrich could not be bothered to argue whether or not God exists. Dietrich's Humanism wasn't about theology, it was about responsibility. So if you wanted to form a concept in your mind and call it God, fine. If you wanted to sing about your God, fine. But Dietrich insisted that you recognize this: All those things people have been praying to God for down through the centuries -- if humanity could just get its act together, we could do them rather than pray about them.

"To become a humanist," he preached, "does not merely mean throwing off the yoke of the old religion; it means assuming personally the responsibility that heretofore was supposed to rest with God."

Imagine yourself in the 1920s and let me recreate Dietrich's message.

Have people been praying for centuries for God to feed the hungry? It's an age of steel plows and tractors and threshing machines. Every year we get more grain for less work. There's plenty of food, and there's going to be even more in the future. Just figure out how to distribute the Earth's bounty, and humans, not God, will feed the hungry.

Have people been praying for God to heal the sick? It's an age of vaccines and nutrition and sanitation. Every year, science learns more about the human body and the diseases that afflict it. Turn that knowledge loose, apply it everywhere, devote ourselves to learning more, and humans, not God, will heal the sick.

Have people been praying to God for justice and peace? Injustice and war don't come from angels or demons; they come from people, and it's up to people to end them. Every year we learn more about social, political, and economic systems. What if we harnessed that knowledge to the insight that we are one human family sharing one beautiful, bountiful planet and all hoping to thrive in the same ways? What if all the resources wasted on weapons could be applied to things that actually make life better? What if people could express their heroism by devoting their lives to justice rather than sacrificing them to war?

He preached: "Burn that one truth -- that it can be done -- into the mind of the race, and the work will begin."

And that work -- at least as Dietrich told the story -- was the most meaningful, most interesting, most satisfying thing you could be doing with your life.

His Humanism had come not to snatch something away from you, but to give you something so valuable that you would drop the useless baggage you'd been dragging around. Dietrich recognized that there is no need to denounce people's unbelievable hopes -- they, better than anyone else, know just how hard it is to keep believing in those hopes. Just give them believable hopes, and the fantastic ones will fall away on their own. Why would you base your hopes on an unseen world, on an undiscovered country from which no traveler returns, if you could base them instead on things that you see happening all around you?

6. The Disillusioning 20th Century

It would be nice if I could just tell Humanists to start preaching Dietrich's sermons again, but I can't. The rest of the 20th century was hard on Dietrich-style optimism. There was the Great Depression and then the most destructive war in history. That war ended with the atom bomb, which put down once and for all the idea that progress and science are entirely beneficent forces. After the war we discovered just how bad the death camps were, and that made people wonder whether folks like John Dietrich had underestimated the depths of evil in the human soul.

Worst of all, a lot of Dietrich's ideas about science and reason and social progress -- as well as his point about the uselessness of traditional religion -- were echoed in the rhetoric of the Soviet Union. In many ways that connection is unfair, because Dietrich's highest principle -- that each person is an end in himself, and that no one should be treated just as a means to someone else's ends -- was exactly what Communism needed and didn't have.

But in another way the connection is fair. Communism made the world skeptical of utopian plans. We all know now that people who diagram the perfect society on a blank sheet of paper can do horrific things, things that a person bound by tradition would never imagine. Even Ivan the Terrible was not so terrible compared to Stalin.

And that's why today the people with the most radical plans to transform society disguise themselves as restorationists. The Tea Party claims to be restoring the vision of the Founding Fathers. Bin Laden wants to restore the Caliphate. Christian Dominionists want to prepare the way for the return of Jesus.

In short, we 21st-century people have lost our faith in the limitless potential of blank sheets of paper.

In addition, I think Dietrich underestimated the ability of the Powers That Be to co-opt new insights into people and social structures. It is just as easy -- and in the short run more profitable -- to make better propaganda than better education. Social insights that might produce better human beings and a more just society might also produce better sheep and a more controllable society.

You don't have to look far to see that happening. Just look at the election we just held. Look at the quantity of corporate money spent and the lies and distractions it promoted.

So if we can't go back to the 20s, where do we go?

Well, the first thing I want to point out is that the easiest thing for the Powers That Be to co-opt is our cynicism and skepticism. If North Wind Humanists come together in small groups and congratulate each other about how bright and tough-minded we are, if we see ourselves as the elite few who can face the cold, hard Truth -- the Powers That Be are fine with that. That's no threat to them.

But the Humanism of the Sun, Dietrich-style Humanism, the kind of Humanism that raises worldly hopes rather than dashing other-worldly hopes -- that is a threat. That is something that could catch on and change the world.

The Humanism of the Sun has got to be optimistic. It's got to be idealistic. It's got to be inspiring. Because humanity is a hopeful species, and you are never going to channel human energy without hope.

7. Hope and History

Now, where can we find that hope and idealism and inspiration? Let's start with the easy part: Dietrich's basic insight still holds. It is well within the power of humanity to answer the vast majority of prayers.

In spite of everything we've done to it in the last century, this is still a rich planet. No external force or natural limit prevents humanity from living in peace, feeding the hungry, healing the sick, giving every child a good education, recognizing everyone's human dignity, and making sure that everyone has access to the information they need to actively participate in their own governance.

What's more, that vision is still inspiring. It still stirs the blood, if you can bring yourself to believe in it.

But that's the problem, isn't it? Humanists are realists. We believe in facts. And doesn't the evidence tell us that the world going to hell in a handbasket?

In a lot of ways, it certainly is. Endless wars, global warming, the exhaustion of natural resources, the long-term inability of our economy to generate good jobs, antibiotic-resistant germs, the increasing separation between rich and poor, and (what is most disturbing to me personally, because as a political blogger I run into it every day) the corruption of our national discourse. We can't even talk about most of our real problems any more. Even as we come to the end of the hottest year on record, the percentage of the American population that believes global warming is a hoax is going up. Even as staph and tuberculosis bacteria evolve to defeat our best drugs, we face increasing demands to teach children alternatives to the theory of evolution.

Yes, the world is going to hell in a handbasket. How can Humanists in good conscience go to people with an optimistic message?

My answer is that if you study history, if you really put yourself into the mindset of past eras, you realize that world has almost always been going to hell in a handbasket. Times and places where progress is obvious to the casual observer are very exceptional. And yet, somehow, when you take the long view, good things happen. Slavery ends. Jim Crow ends. Women get the vote and eventually equality under the law. Apartheid ends. Fascism falls. Communism falls. The prospect of a civilization-ending nuclear war recedes.

And it never, ever looks like it's going to happen until just before it does. The forces of goodness always seem ephemeral compared to the entrenched institutions that support the current corruption. Look at today's European welfare state through the eyes of Charles Dickens or Victor Hugo. Think of all the vested interests of their day who profited from the desperation of the poor. How could they possibly have been defeated? And yet they were.

Or go back a little further. Dietrich talks about humanity taking responsibility back from God. Before the Enlightenment, the official rhetoric said that God was responsible for choosing a nation's rulers. Kings ruled by divine right, by the will of Heaven. Against that orthodoxy, men like Locke and Rousseau argued that government was a human responsibility, that government was created by a social contract, not mandated by the Almighty. Obvious as that is now, you can't imagine how airy-fairy it must have sounded when it was new. "Lovely idea, but the King is the King. We have always had kings. Be grateful that our King is so benevolent as to let you prattle like this."

It has always been that way. And yet, good things happen.

How?

Partly it's just the illusion of size. Whatever is big enough to be obvious is probably already in decline. The rising mammals always seem insignificant compared to the declining dinosaurs.

But the deeper reason is that the ultimate source of goodness in the world is the conscience and compassion and empathy and loyalty and honor of the individual human being. And those qualities are always hidden until someone evokes them.

They say in Harlan County, there are no neutrals there.

You'll either be a union man or a thug for J. H. Blair.

Which side are you on, boys? Which side are you on?

It paid a lot better to be a thug for J. H. Blair. It always has. But somehow enough miners stood together to make a union. How did they do that? Who could have seen it coming?

How many times in the last several decades have we seen oppressive governments fall when unarmed people by the tens of thousands flood out onto the streets and refuse to be intimidated by soldiers -- until the soldiers just give up?

It always looks impossible until just before it happens. Because the force that wins the victory is hidden inside the individual human being. And it stays hidden until somebody evokes it, until somebody who has faith in the goodness hidden inside everyone else takes the risk of saying in public what everyone is thinking in private. Someone puts the question to society, and then you either have to watch someone else's goodness be stamped out, or you have to risk bringing out your own.

And that's how good things happen.

8. Humanistic Faith

Now, if you've been keeping your head and you haven't let yourself be carried away by idealistic rhetoric, you may have noticed that I just committed a horrible heresy: I just told a group of Humanists that their ultimate success depends on having faith in hidden forces.

I don't see any way around that. Any effective Humanist message has to be optimistic. And any honest optimism about humanity has to depend on believing that human beings have it in them to be better than the society they currently live in, and better, in fact, than they often appear to be in everyday life. Good things don't happen because the events in the headlines proceed inexorably towards goodness. Good things happen because the most unlikely people find it in themselves to be heroes at the precise moments when heroes are needed.

I know of no way to measure or quantify that hidden power of human goodness, but it's what everything depends on. For me, and I suspect for you, it works best to think of that hidden power as a natural phenomenon, just part of what human beings are.

But I can foretell the future enough to say this: If you start talking about this hidden human goodness, some people are going to want to call it God. For example, I think that's what Forrest Church was talking about when he said "God is our name for what is greater than all and yet present in each."

So what do we do with that? What do we do when something seems a little mysterious, maybe, but not at all supernatural to us, and somebody else wants to call it God?

9. Humanism's Uncompromisable Core

And that brings up the final question I want to consider: What is the essence of Humanism? What is the line that we can't let be crossed, that central thing that if we don't stand for this, we stand for nothing?

A lot of people will tell you that the essence is atheism. There is no God. If someone starts talking about God, we need to show them the door, because there's no place for that here.

I think that's a mistake. It diverts us away from changing the world and turns us back towards metaphysical arguments that accomplish nothing and help no one. Also, I think we wind up separating ourselves from people who ought to be our allies.

I put the essence of Humanism where John Dietrich did: The responsibility for the survival and the flourishing of the human race in this world lies with human beings. It's up to us to feed the hungry, to heal the sick, to make peace, and to establish justice. And it's up to us to gather the facts and make the plans to carry out that mission. That is our responsibility and it is our highest responsibility.

To me, any one who recognizes that responsibility is a Humanist. And if they symbolize human goodness with the word God, if some of them want to talk about a God who is a cheerleader and an inspirer, if they want to imagine a God who stands on the sidelines and roots for us to fulfill our responsibilities ... then I say we let them. If they want to sing songs about such a God and use his or her name in invocations and benedictions, let them. The essence of Humanism has not been compromised.

But anyone who serves God to the detriment of serving humanity, anyone who makes God a commander rather than a cheerleader, anyone who trades off well-being in this world for some other kind of blessing in some other world, anyone who prays for divine solutions instead of working for human solutions -- that person is not a Humanist. To me, those are the lines we can't cross without losing ourselves.

Finally, if the essence of Humanism is a set of responsibilities rather than a theological position, that tells us how we can work with others and who we can recognize as allies. Because human vs. divine responsibility can be judged issue by issue. John Locke was not an atheist. But he believed that the choice of rulers was a human responsibility rather than a divine one. On that issue, I could work with him without compromising my integrity.

10. Conclusion

Before we break for discussion, let me sum up where we've been: Humanism should not just be nay-saying and skepticism. Exploding people's other-worldly hopes is not only pointless, it is unnecessary: Put forward believable worldly hopes and unbelievable other-worldly hopes will fade away on their own.

For that reason, a Humanism that matters, a Humanism that can catch on and make a difference the world, has to be idealistic rather than cynical. It has to be visionary rather than curmudgeonly, optimistic rather than pessimistic.

And unless you are so lucky as to find yourself living in one of those rare times and places where progress is obvious, you're going to have to postulate beyond the visible facts. Because what is declining is always more visible than what is rising, and it's always easier to project selfish and self-interested motives into the future than to imagine the kind of creative heroism that again and again seems to come out of nowhere and push humanity forward. Cynicism works against us. We need not to puncture people's faith in God, but to raise their faith that humanity still has the ability to overcome its vested interests, that (like our ancestors) we can make real progress towards justice and compassion and dignity for all.

And finally, theology is a distraction, and arguing against God pulls you into that trap just as surely as arguing for God. Humanism is about humanity taking responsibility for its own fate and its own flourishing. Anyone who accepts their share of humanity's responsibility for itself should be considered a Humanist in good standing, and anyone who accepts humanity's responsibility for some particular issue is a worthy ally on that issue.

"This," preached John Dietrich, "is the faith that the world needs today. It does not need an ecclesiastical religion, it does not need more priests and prayers and holy books, it does not need literary essays on academic subjects; but it does need the never-ending voice of the prophet going up and down the land, crying, not as of old, "Prepare ye the way of the Lord," but "Prepare ye the way of mankind, and make its way straight."

Pride? Gaggle? Finding a collective noun for UUs

2010-12-11T07:06:00.000-05:00

Bananas come in bunches, wolves in packs, locusts in swarms, but what do you call a collection of Unitarian Universalists?

Some obvious collective nouns are too easy and not specific enough: A congregation of UUs fits, but it would also fit just about any other religious group. Also, it's too formal and is so wedded to whole churches that it would be confusing to apply to smaller collections. When you take the youth group out on a hike, congregation doesn't really work.

Christian use that Good Shepherd imagery and so flock works for many of their groupings, but UUs hate to be compared to sheep. If we sang better, a choir of UUs might work, but angels come in choirs, and besides there's the whole reading-ahead-to-see-if-we-agree thing.

A committee of UUs is sadly apt, but I hope we can do better, something more along the lines of an exaltation of larks, a parliament of rooks, a murder of crows, and so forth.

So what are we? A curiosity of UUs? A cacophony? A cafe?

Disputation? Delegation?

An evolution of UUs? (I kind of like that one.)

Suggestions, anybody?

My Bah-Humbug Thanksgiving

2010-11-25T08:13:00.001-05:00

I don't know what the Thanksgiving equivalent of Scrooge is, but I find myself sliding in that direction. I've got nothing against gratitude, or a holiday in which an agrarian culture gives thanks for a bountiful harvest. But more and more of the standard Thanksgiving sentiments are leaving me with that bah-humbug feeling.

Thanksgiving is the holiday when we are supposed to count our blessings and be grateful for what we have. But there are good and bad ways to do that. In Luke 18, for example, Jesus describes this character:

The Pharisee with head unbowed prayed in this fashion: "I give thanks, O God, that I am not like the rest of men -- grasping, crooked, adulterous. … I fast twice a week. I pay tithes on all I possess."

In other words: "What a great God you are, for making a great guy like me. Thanks for creating a world where I get to better than everybody else."

Bertrand Russell satirized another kind of self-centered thankfulness in An Outline of Intellectual Rubbish:

Sometimes, if pious men are to be believed, God's mercies are curiously selective. Toplady, the author of "Rock of Ages," moved from one vicarage to another; a week after the move, the vicarage he had formerly occupied burnt down, with great loss to the new vicar. Thereupon Toplady thanked God; but what the new vicar did is not known.

If you listen closely, a lot of Thanksgiving prayers -- particularly the patriotic ones -- sound like these bad examples. Let me translate what's written between the lines:

Thanks, God, for putting me in a country where I get to use up all the world's oil. Thanks for making us so powerful that ordinary rules don't apply to us: We can attack other countries with impunity, assassinate people we don't like, and kidnap and torture anybody we think might pose a threat.
Thanks for a global economic system based on dollars -- which we create at will, so our country can consume more than it produces year after year. Thanks for undocumented immigrants who will do our dirty jobs for less than minimum wage. Thanks for letting us ship so much of our dangerous or poisonous production to the other side of the world.
We're grateful to You, O God, for creating a world in which it's so great to be us.

I'm becoming suspicious of the whole count-your-blessings framing of the holiday. Because most of what we count are not "blessings" exactly. They're privileges. They arrive on our doorstep not because we are God's special loved ones, but because we are the beneficiaries of an unjust global system.

Suppose, for example, that you had been born in Guatemala. Your land has been blessed with a climate and soil perfect for growing bananas. But your portion of this blessing is that you get to compete with your fellow peasants for the opportunity to make subsistence wages working on plantations owned by foreign corporations. Somewhere back in the mists of history those corporations may have bought that land from your ancestors (or not), but whatever benefit your people received was long gone by the time your life started. Your grandfather may have participated in a political movement to take some of those lands back, but that movement was put down by military force organized by the CIA. So your lands' blessings belong largely to Americans now.

Or suppose you were born in Bolivia, a land blessed with rainfall that (depending on where you are) varies from adequate to abundant. But (until a near-revolution in 2002) none of it belonged you. All the water in Bolivia, even rain that fell decades ago and was sitting in underground aquifers, belonged to an international consortium led by Bechtel. Somewhere between God and you, the blessing of rainfall got intercepted and reassigned.

So yes, we Americans enjoy a large share of the world's blessings. But it's not at all clear that God intended us to have them. We took them. And I suppose we could thank God for making us strong enough to take what we want. But that's a blessing on a different level than turkeys and pumpkin pies.

I know, most of us never consciously applied to be beneficiaries of an unjust system, or intentionally conspired to keep the booty coming. If we're forced to think about it, we may not even approve. So how should we handle Thanksgiving?

I don't have a complete answer, but I will make a few suggestions. First, after-the-fact guilt helps no one. The turkey's in the oven, and you might as well enjoy it. If you don't, nobody else will.

If you do remember the Bolivians, Guatemalans, and other dispossessed peoples in your Thanksgiving prayers, don't think of them as "unfortunate". That leads you back towards imagining yourself as "fortunate"-- as God's special friend. But God didn't distribute the world's wealth. People did -- through force and guile and manipulation, often in perfectly legal and transparent ways. Many of these transactions have resembled another Bible story: Esau selling his birthright to Jacob for a meal. Some temporary need coupled with one generation's lack of foresight -- and something God presumably created for everyone now belongs to someone else.

Charity is fine, but that's not the answer either. The world's poor do need the jug of water you could buy them, but what they really need is access to the river. As far back as John Locke, the defenders of "liberty" have told just-so stories about the "state of Nature" that existed prior to government. But there's one aspect of the state of Nature they always leave out: The state of Nature offered full employment. The means of production were the lakes and plains and jungles where anyone could go hunt and gather. But a system in which even the groundwater is private property, whose owners have the "liberty" to do what they want with it -- not only free from government interference, but with government controlling anybody else who tries to interfere -- that's not a state of Nature. That's a very unnatural state indeed.

So here's what I recommend for Thanksgiving: Sure, count your blessings, but also count your privileges -- and don't confuse the two. And sure, resolve to give more to charity, but resolve even harder to use your privileges and powers and out-sized access to work for changing the system.

The Current UU World: Superheroes and Generational Change

2010-11-17T09:23:00.001-05:00

Depending on where you live, you may or may not have received the winter issue of UU World. The articles have been on the web site for about a week, and your copy may still be in the mail.

My cover article looks like it's about superheroes, but really it's about the difference between my (50ish) generation and the (30ish) parents of toddlers who are likely to be showing up at UU churches now and for the next couple decades. I'm making the case that if people my age try to promote UUism by making the appeal we wanted to hear 20 years ago, it will fall flat. This generation is different than we were.

Explaining that difference is where superheroes come in: Superhero comics (and the associated cartoons, TV shows, and movies) is a genre aimed at children and adolescents, so changes in the underlying superhero mythology can be an early warning of generational change. I'm pointing to changes that started happening in the late 70s and continue up to the present.

The heroes I grew up with in the 60s and early 70s had no role models. Many of them were orphans: Batman watched his parents' murder; Spiderman was raised by an aunt and uncle and feels guilty for his uncle's death; Superman could forget about any received wisdom, because his whole planet had blown up. In that era, an essential part of being a superhero was making it up from scratch. No SuperDad could tell you how to do it.

I think it says something about my generation, that this orphan fantasy worked for us. "The wisdom of our elders," I write in the article, "was an oppression we longed to escape."

But superheroes started changing in the late 70s. X-Men was created in the 60s, but it didn't really take off until the 70s. By the late 70s it was the hot comic, the one that everybody wanted to imitate. What was unique about X-Men was that the heroes had a mentor: Professor Xavier, who established a secret school for super-powered mutants. Young mutants didn't have to recreate heroism from scratch. Professor X could teach them to be X-Men.

Also in the late 70s, Star Wars came out. Luke is a transitional figure, with some orphan-like qualities. He thinks his father is dead, and at the beginning of the movie there is no one who can show him how to be a man. But a strange old guy takes an interest in him, and lo and behold he turns out to be Obiwan Kenobi, the last of the Jedi knights.

So Luke doesn't have to make it up. There is an ancient lineage that he can join, and a mentor to show him how.

After 1980, everybody has a mentor, and many heroes discover that they are part of some lineage: Buffy, for example, has a watcher Giles who can tell her about the lineage of vampire slayers. Even the older mythologies adjust: In 1999 DC makes the Batman Beyond cartoon series. It's Star Wars transplanted into the Batman mythos: The strange old guy is Bruce Wayne, and lo and behold, he can teach the young protagonist how to be Batman.

OK, what's all that got to do with Unitarian Universalism? "The Unitarian Universalist church I joined in my thirties," I confess in the article, "was an ideal place for orphans whose birth-planets had exploded."

The UU churches of the 1980s were places to start over, places to build your own theology. You went there looking for freedom to think your own thoughts, independent of any received wisdom.

I believe that's exactly what the upcoming generation doesn't want. An essential part of their generational fantasy is that somebody can help them figure out what's going on, and that the progress of humankind is something they can join, not something they have to restart from scratch.

Forward through the ages,
in unbroken line,
move the faithful spirits
at the call divine.

I think our 30-somethings aren't looking to start over. I think they're looking for the end of that unbroken line, so that they can join it.

But if they're met at the church door by 50ish people telling them that they're free to believe whatever they want, that's going to sound like an abdication. We'd be telling them, "I've got nothing to pass on to you. You're on your own."

I'm not asking my generation of UUs to invent a heritage. We have one. And if we're honest, we have to admit that in fact we didn't make our religion up from scratch. In hindsight, we are part of an unbroken line. We need to start retelling our story from that perspective, so that we have something to pass on.

And speaking just for myself, I'm getting a little old to try to be Batman. Maybe it's time to start thinking more like Professor X.

Sudden Death

2010-10-19T09:10:00.001-04:00

I wanted to call your attention to my latest column for UU World. It's called "Sudden Death" and is a meditation on aging and decline.

I used to post links to my columns on this blog so that people would have a place to comment, but the UU World web site allows comments now.

Something different in UU World

2010-10-10T07:33:00.001-04:00

I just googled the combination "UU World" and "megazord". It gets no hits.

That's going to change after the winter issue gets posted.

Spirituality and the Humanist

2010-08-21T18:07:00.001-04:00

This is the text of a sermon I gave at my home church, First Parish in Bedford, Massachusetts, on August 15.

This talk comes out of a lunch I had with one of our congregation's more outspoken Humanists back in June. He said something I had heard from a number of Humanists over the years: He didn't care for all this talk about spirituality in our UU churches, because he didn't know what the word meant and he sometimes suspected that it didn't mean anything.

Does "spirituality" mean anything? He's in good company there, because the pioneer Unitarian Humanist, John Dietrich, preached a sermon in 1929 called “What Does It Mean to Be Spiritual?”

just as your money may degenerate into a most deceitful piece of paper, scandalously suggesting a hoard of gold or goods that does not exist, so the word may become a delusive phantasy of the idea for which it once stood; and the feebler or the more dissipated the intelligence of a person or a generation, the greater the chance that mere words will pass as coin. Such a word preeminently is "spirituality." While no one is able to define it or has a concrete idea of what it means, yet it suggests at once an unction, an exaltation of emotion, a superiority which are associated with hardly any other words in the English language.

Now, I've also been involved in the polar opposite conversation, with people who complain that UU churches are not spiritual enough, but instead are head-centered, wordy, lifeless. They claim to be looking for a kind of depth that they don't find in Unitarian Universalism.

With apologies to John Dietrich, in general I don't find these spiritual seekers to be of “feeble or dissipated intelligence.” What's more, they seem to me to be expressing a sincere desire, and to believe that they are talking about something when they say spirituality.

Of course, that doesn't necessarily mean that they are talking about something. Deep feelings often get attached to words, but that doesn't prove that the words mean anything. Christians, for example, feel deeply about the doctrine of the Trinity. But Thomas Jefferson was not impressed:

the ... paradox that one is three, and three but one, is so incomprehensible to the human mind, that no candid man can say he has any idea of it, and how can he believe what presents no idea? He who thinks he does, only deceives himself.

In other words, if you can't even hold an idea in your head, how can you have any opinion about whether that idea is true or false? You may feel quite sincere while you say, "I believe in the Jabberwock." But if you have no notion at all as to what a Jabberwock might be, then Jefferson would say that you are deceiving yourself. You have trained yourself to feel sincere about a collection of words, but you aren't actually talking about anything.

Ruining the conversation. Avoiding that talking-about-nothing problem is what definitions are for. So the first thing a Humanist might request in a discussion of spirituality is a definition.

I've seen that happen. At a church I used to belong to, the weekly discussion group devoted a session to spirituality. The first person to talk was a retired engineer. He opened a dictionary, read the approved definitions of spirituality, and wondered which of these meanings we would be discussing.

The conversation never recovered. Nothing throws cold water on a spiritual discussion like opening a dictionary. A dictionary is to spirituality as cold iron is to fairies or kryptonite is to Superman.

Now, why would that be? Two obvious explanations present themselves, the first being the one Dietrich was pointing to: Insisting on definitions kills a discussion about spirituality because the word doesn't really mean anything.

But there is a second possibility: Sometimes a topic gets framed so badly that the discussion just can't continue. I would guess that this has happened to most of us at one time or another. You're in a room with a group of people, and so many poisonous assumptions have already been baked into the conversation that there's just no point trying to sort it out. All you can do is back slowly away until you get to the door, and then run.

I'd guess that most of you know what I'm talking about, but you still may not see how pulling out a dictionary could create such a hostile environment. Why are spirituality and dictionaries so irreconcilable?

Taking the plunge. I don't know how to answer that question without going ahead and doing exactly what that engineer wanted. I'm going to hazard my own definition of spirituality – not with the idea that this settles the topic once and for all, but just so that I can explain why looking for a definition can be so problematic.

So here's my best shot: Spirituality is an awareness of the gap between what you can experience and what you can describe.

Now, that's probably not what you were expecting, so let me take a little time to point out the features of this definition. First, it is compatible with Humanism. There are no supernatural assumptions. You can seek this kind of spirituality with or without any gods or souls or spirits or afterlives.

Second, by defining spirituality as an awareness I've places it on the subjective side of things. Nothing is spiritual in and of itself. It can only be spiritual to somebody.

So spirituality is not a place like Shangri-La or Brigadoon, where other people can go, but for some reason they can't tell you where it is. And it's also not an activity like meditation or prayer or chanting or drumming. Any of those practices might raise a person's awareness of the gap between experience and description -- we'll get into how they might do that in a minute -- and so they might be spiritual activities for that person. But for someone else they might not be.

Another reason spirituality varies from person to person is that everyone is different in both the capacity to experience life and the capacity to describe it. And both capacities change as you learn and grow.

Sometimes as you learn and grow, experiences that used to be indescribable become describable; they used to fall into that gap and now they don't. For example, a stone-age tribe and a meteorologist experience a thunderstorm very differently. For the tribe it might be a deeply spiritual experience that evokes awe and wonder, while for the meteorologist the storm may be a simple application of a well-understood theory.

In Life on the Mississippi, Mark Twain relates how sunset over the river had once been an enrapturing experience for him -- until he was trained as a riverboat captain.

But as I have said, a day came when I began to cease from noting the glories and the charms which the moon and the sun and the twilight wrought upon the river's face ...
Then, if that sunset scene had been repeated, I should have looked upon it without rapture, and should have commented upon it, inwardly, after this fashion: This sun means that we are going to have wind tomorrow; that floating log means that the river is rising, small thanks to it; that slanting mark on the water refers to a bluff reef which is going to kill somebody's steamboat one of these nights

He goes on like that for some while, interpreting every little detail, and then wistfully concludes:

No, the romance and the beauty were all gone from the river. All the value any feature of it had for me now was the amount of usefulness it could furnish toward compassing the safe piloting of a steamboat.

In other words, a once-indescribable scene became instead pregnant with information that was very describable and quite useful – but not at all spiritual. Sunsets had not changed, but Twain had.

Sophistication can also work the other way, causing you to appreciate indescribable depths that the ordinary person takes for granted. Consider this curious little quote from the mathematician R. W. Hamming:

I have tried, with little success, to get some of my friends to understand my amazement that the abstraction of ... counting is both possible and useful. Is it not remarkable that 6 sheep plus 7 sheep make 13 sheep; that 6 stones plus 7 stones make 13 stones? Is it not a miracle that the universe is so constructed that such a simple abstraction as a number is possible?

Rather than making mysterious things seem ordinary, Hamming's mathematical sophistication had done the reverse: allowed him to experience counting as something strange and wonderful.

Testing against common usage. Now that I've explained the definition a little, let's think about whether I've gotten it right. The best test of a definition is to see how much of the common usage it makes sense out of. Bad definitions make everybody sound either stupid or crazy. Good definitions are like getting a radio station tuned in right: the horrible static goes away, and you can hear people talking.

I've been comparing this definition to common usage for a while now, and it seems to work pretty well. Think about the everyday experiences that people call spiritual: music and art, for example. Both have a lot to do with the indescribable. As Aldous Huxley said, “After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.” Another experience people describe as spiritual is being out in Nature. And again, it has an indescribable quality: Anything you say afterwards – even the pictures you take – don't really capture it.

Because this definition implies no doctrine or dogma, it makes sense out of the people who say that they're “spiritual but not religious”. Spiritual seeking isn't a theology or even a search for a theology necessarily, it's a search for a certain kind of awareness.

Religion, in fact, can be anti-spiritual if it's too simple-minded. If a religion claims to describe everything that needs describing, if it wraps God up in a neat little box and leaves no room for mystery, it's not spiritual.

Ruining the conversation, part II. So now I think we're in a position to understand how a bad or careless or premature definition might wreck the whole spirituality conversation. If people are trying to raise their awareness of the things they don't know how to put words around, then demanding that they use words very precisely and stop using words if they can't explain what they mean – that pulls in exactly the wrong direction. The spiritual seeker doesn't want to talk about words and definitions; he wants to talk about the experience of having no words. And more than that: he wants to stop talking and invoke a situation that he will have no words to describe.

Spiritual practice. And that's what I think is going on in the so-called spiritual practices – the things people do to seek a spiritual experience.

Consider, for example, what happens (or doesn't happen) in a sitting meditation. Sitting meditations are designed to flatten out all the things you usually describe in a situation, so that they're not worth describing any more. When I'm in a sitting meditation, I'm

not accomplishing anything; I'm just sitting there
not talking or listening to anybody
not moving; meditation positions are designed so that (once you master them) you can stay in them for a long time
either not watching anything or watching something that doesn't move
breathing in a regular pattern; the same way each time
not intentionally thinking about anything or fantasizing anything

Anything I usually put into words about a situation – even just words in my own head – have been dialed down to zero. My internal narrator can't find anything to say other than, “Nothing is happening. Nothing is happening. Nothing is happening.”

So whatever I do experience during meditation – and there is always something to experience – falls right into that gap between experience and description.

The Value of Spirituality. Now, if I'm right about what spirituality is, what is the value of it? Why meditate or chant or perform a Japanese tea ceremony, even if it does raise your awareness of the indescribable aspects of your experience? You're not feeding the hungry or promoting justice or even making money. So what's the value in it?

For me, the main reason to seek out spiritual experiences is because that gap between experience and description is where all my creativity comes from. My creative process – and I won't go so far as to say that creativity works this way for everybody, but I'll bet it does for a lot of people – is to stare into that Gap of the Undescribed until something crystallizes out of it and becomes describable for the first time.

If you've ever worked in mathematics or the sciences, you may recognize this experience: You work on a problem for a long time, and then you suddenly have a eureka moment, like Archimedes in his bath. Now, if you watch those moments carefully, you might notice this: There's actually a period of time, usually just a few seconds, after the eureka, where you still don't know what it is you've discovered. You know you've solved it, but you have to wait a few seconds before you know what your solution is.

It's like the ship coming across from the Undescribed has docked, but you haven't unloaded it yet.

The unspiritual life. Another way to appreciate the value of spirituality is to imagine the unspiritual life. It's not what you might think. The unspiritual life is not the the skeptical life or the scientific life or a life where you appreciate the value of facts and logic and evidence. None of that is unspiritual.

No, the unspiritual life is best summed up in a rhyme the students of Oxford's Balliol College made up about their college master, the 19th-century scholar Benjamin Jowett.

I am the master of this college And what I know not, is not knowledge

The unspiritual life, which (like most people) I fall into from time to time, happens when I forget that there is any more to life than the things I can describe. Nothing seems to exist other than the things I have names for, those things don't have any relationships other than the ones I can put a word to, and those relationships don't evoke any emotions other than the ones I can list. Because what I know not is not knowledge.

That's the unspiritual life, and the fear of it is what drives people into spiritual practice or maybe even sends them to a church like this one looking for spirituality.

Bad spirituality. I wouldn't really have done justice to this topic if I didn't say a few words about bad spirituality and where it goes wrong. Bad spirituality tries to defend the gap between description and experience by shutting down the progress of description: Don't learn to pilot a riverboat, because you'll lose the sunsets. Don't let Galileo look through his telescope, because he'll screw up the mystery of the Heavens.

The mistake here is believing that mysteries are a finite resource that might get used up. A lot of Humanists hate to use the word faith, but I think it's appropriate here: I have faith that the mysteries we can experience are infinite and our powers of description are finite. We'll never run out of mysteries.

Bittersweet. I want to close on a more upbeat note, by giving you a very concrete example of spirituality.

Every now and then, something new comes over from the Undescribed. Something gets named that never had a name before, and now we can talk about it.

Those can be some of the most significant events in human history. Most of them are lost, but we do know one very important one: The Greek poet Sappho, sometime in the early 6^th century BC, was writing about a lover who was far away. And she coined a brand new word to describe her feelings: glukupikron – literally, sweet-bitter, or as we say in English today, bittersweet.

No Greek – and possibly no human – had ever named an emotion quite that complicated before.

The image I want to close with is of Sappho just before she coins bittersweet. She is thinking of someone she loves, but can't talk to or touch. And she realizes that she can't describe the conflicted way she feels. It's bad, but it's good. It hurts, but she doesn't want it to stop hurting. In the whole Greek language, there is no word for that. So she just sits there for a moment and feels what she feels, without any words.

And then she has a eureka moment, when she realizes that she has thought of a new word to capture that strange new feeling. But there's a gap – a second, maybe two seconds, when she still doesn't know what word it is.

Those couple of seconds, I imagine, were a deeply spiritual experience.

An Honest Commencement Address

2010-06-06T07:42:00.001-04:00

For a while there I heard a commencement address every year or two. I was graduating from something or my sister was or a friend. High school. College. I listened to a lot of them.

And then none for a long time. Lately, as the children of my friends start graduating, I've been entering my second generation of commencement addresses, and I've noticed two things:

They're still giving the same speech.
In hindsight, it didn't tell me anything I actually needed to know.

And that's a shame really, because there are some things that would have been worth hearing.

In case you haven't heard it yet or recently, the Universal Commencement Address has a few basic themes: You are the future; the world has problems that are going to make your life challenging; and the possibilities are endless, so you've got to think big and not give up on your dreams.

If you're getting ready to graduate, I'll bet you've already spotted what's wrong: Most of that you've known for years, and the rest is just stupid.

You've been fantasizing since you were about four about the day when you and your friends will be the firemen and the astronauts and the presidents and everything else. Over the next few decades your generation is going to take over the world. You knew that.

And if you've reached the age of graduation and it's just occurring to you now that the world has problems, then I'm going to take a wild guess and say that you're probably not going to be much help in solving them. Now, don't take that wrong. I'm sure there will be plenty of cars to drive and games to play and TV to watch, so you can still have a great time. But I'm guessing that if you're the person who is going to cure cancer or end war or stop global warming, then you've probably already heard of cancer and war and global warming. You know the world has problems, and you probably already have a pretty good list of them.

Your list might be better than mine. When I was graduating from high school, the grown-ups knew exactly what issues were going to dominate my lifetime: the endless struggle with Communism and the possibility that all-out nuclear war would annihilate the human race.

Fifteen years later, the Soviet Union collapsed. Short lifetime.

Now, the challenges of those days are not totally gone. Russia and China are still rivals of the United States, and nuclear weapons are still a problem. But the nightmare that you can still see in movies from that era -- that one day for some stupid reason all the missiles will fly and a half hour later the handful of survivors will be living in a new stone age -- that seems very distant now.

By contrast, no one at my graduation mentioned that conflict between the West and Islam might be a big deal in my lifetime. Nobody was predicting that the Vietnamese insurgency would be a model for a new kind of war. People were starting to think about the environment, but nobody warned me that we might be changing the weather.

So I could list the challenges I see facing your generation, but it probably wouldn't be any better than your list, and either one of our lists would probably only be good for a decade or two. I'd be wasting your time.

Now we get to the part about not giving up on your dreams. That's just stupid, and you know that from your own experience.

High school is all about winnowing out your dreams. When you were ten you could have all the dreams you wanted: You could win an academy award, a Nobel prize, and an MVP all in one day. Why not? You're a president, a billionaire, a Jedi knight, a fairy princess -- whatever you want.

Then you got to high school and found out that the rehearsals for the musical conflicted with football practice. Choose. You only have a handful of electives in your schedule, so you can't go deeper into every field of knowledge. Choose. There are only 24 hours in a day -- less if you plan to eat and sleep -- so you can't master every game and learn every skill and participate in every extra-curricular activity. Choose.

For years now, you've been old enough to realize that being really good at anything takes a commitment of time and effort. You can't commit to everything, so you need to look at your talents and interests and pick a few things that you're going to get serious about. That's old news.

People my age look at people your age and we're blown away by the possibilities. You can do anything! But compared to grade school kids, compared to toddlers, you're already specialists.

Ever spend much time with a toddler? They sing; they dance; they're story-tellers, artists, explorers, scientists, athletes; they're moralists, philosophers, theologians. Compared to a three-year-old, a high school graduate has already narrowed down quite a bit. If you haven't, then you haven't gotten serious about anything yet -- and it's already starting to get late.

So you've been winnowing your dreams for a while now. And for most of you there's still a ways to go. Because some dreams aren't worth it. If you're small and slow, that dream of playing in the NBA? Not gonna happen. I don't care how much time you spend in the gym, how badly you want it, or how hard you're willing to work. Not gonna happen.

And that celebrity you want to marry? Not gonna happen. Giving your all to that dream will just make you a stalker. Move on.

So once you eliminate all the points of the standard commencement speech, a speaker has to ask himself: Do I know anything worth passing on?

The temptation then is to come up with Five Rules for a Successful Life. Your eyes would glaze over if I started down that road, and for good reason. Even at your age, you've already seen enough of life to realize that there aren't five rules. Life isn't that kind of thing.

Most of the rules people give you are wrong. The lesson that people in my father's generation learned from their careers, for example, was that the way to succeed was to find a good organization and stick with it for life. Give your loyalty to General Motors or AT&T or J. P. Morgan and they'll take care of you.

That mostly worked in my father's generation. In my generation it didn't. Jobs got shipped overseas or eliminated by technology, or management looted the company until it collapsed. A lot of loyal workers found themselves unemployed at 35 or 40 and had no idea what to do.

Every rule has a shelf life. They should come with sell-by dates stamped on them, like yogurt.

The fantasy behind rules is that you can get through life without having to make original judgments. And that's just not true. Every generation faces new challenges and novel situations. Every generation winds up needing answers to questions that previous generations never even thought to ask.

There's no getting around it. Even if you had an all-encompassing set of rules, you'd still have to make a judgment about whether the rules were still valid. And even if you had a rule for that, you'd have to wonder about its shelf life too.

So what can I tell you? You're going to face decisions I can't anticipate, and any rule I can give you now for making those decisions is probably no better than what you could come with on your own when you need it. What can I tell you?

Here's what I think I can tell you: I can help you frame those judgments, so that when you get there you will see them more clearly and not be distracted by a lot of irrelevant nonsense. Or at least I can try.

Having lived more than half a lifetime and watched a lot of people live it alongside me, here's what I think I know: The fundamental issue in life, the one that determines whether you have a good life or a bad one, is how well you manage your energy.

Let's look at the biggest scale we can: Toddlers have energy they don't know what to do with. They run around in circles sometimes just because they have to do something.

Parents, on the other hand, have an endless list of tasks and they constantly complain about not having the energy to do them. I learned early on never to tell my mother I was bored, because she always had a list of things I could do: I could pick up my toys. I could clean my room. I could read ahead in my schoolbooks and start working on that project due next week. Mom never lacked for things to do.

Old people have much shorter to-do lists, but they often don't have the energy even to do that much. If you ever visit old people who have stayed in their houses too long, you can see the chaos starting to overwhelm them. Things get used and not put away. Things break and don't get fixed. Things wear out and don't get replaced. It's not that they don't see it and it's not that they don't know what to do. They just can't.

Eventually you're in the nursing home, and even that is too much. Wheeling yourself down to the dining room is too much effort. Watching a TV show requires too much concentration. You just can't.

So that's the big picture: You're born with a lot of energy and no knowledge. Eventually you'll have a lot of knowledge and no energy. If you do things right, there can be a magic period somewhere in the middle, where you both have energy and know what to do with it. It might be just a moment or it might be decades, but that's what's going to determine whether you do anything of lasting value.

So there are two big judgment calls you're going to have to make over and over:

What's going to maintain my energy?
What's going to have lasting value?

That first question is what the don't-give-up-your-dreams part of the standard commencement speech is really about. You have to winnow down your dreams if you're going to focus on anything and get anywhere. But sometimes people go too far and winnow their dreams down to nothing.

Those people get old early.

A toddler pops out of bed at six in the morning and starts running around getting into mischief because the energy is rising and it has to go somewhere. The older you get, the less that happens. In adulthood, there are two reasons to get out of bed: because there's interesting stuff going on and you want to see what happens next, or because it's another damn day and people expect something out of you. Most grown-ups have both kinds of days, but one predominates over the other.

People with dreams tend to have the first kind of day. Because of that, they work harder and more creatively. They're the kind of people who get ideas in the shower or wake up with the solution to a problem that seemed impossible the night before. People without dreams have a lot of the second kind of day. They may have good intentions, but it's hard for them to do much more than just put in their time.

That's why you shouldn't always do the thing that seems most sensible to other people. You don't necessarily pick the career where the experts say the jobs are going to be. You marry for love and not money. You try things that seem interesting, even if everybody else looks at you funny.

Because the first thing that your life has to do is hold your interest. You may finish business school at 25 and get a half-million-a-year job with Goldman Sachs and hear everybody tell you that you've got it made. But if you're bored, if that life isn't one that holds your interest, then you don't have it made. The Peace Corps volunteer who's bringing wireless internet to a jungle village might be doing a much better job of maintaining his or her energy. He or she might still be bouncing out of bed at 70, while you're dragging yourself to work already before you're 30.

Now, I can't tell you what's going to hold your interest. That's one of those judgment calls you'll have to make for yourself. I'm just reminding you to ask the question, and to keep asking it day after day, year after year.

The second question is: What has lasting value? And this is where you see the uselessness of simple rules, because it's easy to follow a very sensible-sounding rule and wind up with nothing. Do relationships have lasting value? Yes, but only if they're the right relationships. Do careers have lasting value? Yes, some of them. Hobbies? Some of them. Money? To a certain extent.

You're going to have to keep your eyes open and use your judgment. Human beings are creatures of habit, and so it's easy to keep doing things long after it's clear that they have no value. Are you hanging around with people you don't like, doing things you don't enjoy? Stop. It's sounds simple, but it's actually not.

It's also easy to get lost in the short term: tomorrow's presentation, next week's deadline, the paper at the end of the semester. You deal with each thing as it comes up, and when you look back at the years it's like the toddler running in circles. What was that all about?

You can also get lost in the big picture, and miss what's right in front of you. Some experiences seem to have no consequences, but they have lasting value all the same. They are like pearls on a string. Now and then for the rest of your life you will take that string out of its box and hold it.

A few years ago my wife and I hiked across a lava field in Hawaii. (It was hard; we're already getting a little old for that.) We waited for the sun to go down, then sat and watched the glowing lava flow into the black ocean. Eventually, we hiked back in the dark, careful not to break an ankle on the jagged rock. Nothing came out of that event other than a few good pictures. But still, when it comes time to die I think I will look back and say, "At least I got to do that."

The point isn't that you should go to Hawaii. For you, the lava-field hike might be just another stupid tourist thing. But you should look for your pearls, whatever they are.

Sometimes the two questions conflict with each other. Few people, for example, are more useless than a serial dreamer, the kind of person who is always about to hit it big in something, but never actually does. Next month he'll be about to hit it big in something else entirely.

And it's also easy to find yourself mired in long-term projects that have some theoretical lasting value, but aren't holding your interest. Should you quit or push through to the end? When it's over and you have some perspective, will you look back and remember why you wanted to do this? Sometimes. Again, it's a judgment call. You'll have to figure it out when you get there.

Real gold is found, though, when the two questions come together in a single answer. You find a thing that holds your interest because it has lasting value that stays fresh for you day-in day-out. What will that be? Who knows? You'll have to keep your eyes open.

That's as much as I can tell you: Watch your energy and make sure you don't squelch it before old age takes it away from you naturally. Make choices that hold your interest, whether anybody else thinks they make sense or not. And while you have energy, look for ways to use it that produce lasting value -- consequences and accomplishments, of course, but also pearls for your string of peak experiences.

That's all I can tell you: Keep your eyes open. Keep asking the questions. And keep making your own judgments. Nobody can do it for you.

The Theology of "The Family"

2010-04-09T10:15:00.001-04:00

Jeff Sharlet's book The Family has been out for a couple of years and the main aspects of it have been covered elsewhere: He was recruited into the lower levels of a secretive religious organization that some people called "The Family". At upper levels, the Family includes congressmen and senators. Its public face is the Fellowship Foundation, the organization behind the National Prayer Breakfast that has been held every year since 1953.

Subsequent to the publication of The Family, the group has gotten some negative attention because of the C Street House, a boarding house in Washington where people like Senator John Ensign and Senator Tom Coburn live or have lived at a below-market rent.

The heart of the book is a magazine article. It has been fleshed out into a book with some very interesting history of American evangelicalism (going back to Jonathan Edwards and Charles Finney) and other related Sharlet articles like the one he did in Harpers about Ted Haggard before his fall. (It's behind Harper's subscription wall.)

Elite vs. Popular Religion. I'd like to focus more on the theology of the Family, which I will interpret a little differently than Sharlet did. One of Sharlet's most interesting ideas is that there are two main forms of American evangelicalism: a popular version and an elite version.

You may already know more than you want to about the popular version, which is pushed on TV and by strangers who will buttonhole you on the street: No matter who you are or how bad your life has gotten, Jesus loves you and wants to save you. If you let him, he will come into your life in a powerful born-again experience that will change everything for you. (I've written about the born-again experience elsewhere.)

Popular evangelicalism can be recruited into politics by way of social issues like abortion (on the right) or civil rights (on the left), but its essence is personal, not political. Jesus may have incarnated because "God so loved the World", but what you need to understand is that Jesus loves you.

Elite evangelicalism as presented by the Family (and its current leader Doug Coe) is focused not on mega-churches and TV ministries, but on "key men". (And yes, it really does seem to be men. Hillary Clinton has flirted with the Family, but its vision is patriarchal.) Its fundamental text is Romans 13:1:

Everyone must submit himself to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God.

You can see why a powerful man would like that verse: Whatever double-dealing you did to get power was all part of God's plan. You are where you are because God wants you there, and anyone who rebels against you is rebelling against God. (Of course, if the rebellion succeeds, then that was part of God's plan too. And your rebellion against your superiors is part of God's plan if it succeeds.) Romans 13 (like much of the Old Testament) is political rather than personal, and its ultimate vision is theocratic: The people submit to their rulers, who in turn submit to God.

Now, you might expect that the "submit to God" part would be less popular among the elite. But what if it is God's will that His elite servants, His key men, gain even more power? Then submitting to God and satisfying your own ambition would be the same thing.

Jesus Plus Nothing. That's where Coe's theology comes in. He sums it up with the enigmatic slogan: "Jesus plus nothing." Sharlet wrestles with Jesus-plus-nothing throughout the book, but I'm not sure he ever really gets it.

He gets what Jesus-plus-nothing rejects. Mainstream Christianity -- and even most fundamentalism -- preaches Jesus plus something. Jesus plus an ethical life, or Jesus plus love, or Jesus plus the Bible, or Jesus plus the sacraments, or Jesus plus the leadership of some particular church. Coe's point is that in a Jesus-plus-something church, the Something eventually crowds Jesus out. Eventually you spend all your time talking about ethics or love or the Bible or the sacraments or the teachings of the church leaders, and Jesus is gone.

In particular, Coe seems to want to stamp out Jesus-plus-ethics. In one teaching session Sharlet relates, Coe asks the young men why King David is one of the heroes of the Bible. Is it because of his sterling character? Clearly not. David sins repeatedly, including really serious stuff like getting Bathsheba's husband killed so that he can marry her. Many explanations of David's worthiness are put forward and rejected, until Coe gives his answer: It's not about David at all, it's about God. David has his role because God chose him.

The implications are clear if you re-purpose Calvin's circular reasoning about election: If God has chosen you to be one of His key men, then nothing you do matters. And if the evidence that you are a key man is that you succeed, then whatever you have to do to succeed is justified.

What is "Jesus"? An outsider, or even an insider who finds Coe's teaching a puzzle, has to wonder: What is this "Jesus" he's talking about? Clearly it's not just the character in the gospels. (That would be Jesus plus the gospels.) And it's not Jesus' teachings, like the Sermon on the Mount or the parables. (That would be Jesus plus ethics again, or Jesus plus love.)

A skeptic who has no experience of Christianity would be tempted to jump to: Jesus is Coe. Coe speaks for Jesus, and so is the secret head of this theocratic empire he's trying to build. But the answer has to be more subtle than that, because senators and CEOs and third-world dictators are not that gullible. They've spent their lives gathering power, and they're not going to turn it over to the first shyster who claims to speak for an invisible spirit.

The clue, I think, is back in popular evangelicalism and the born-again experience: Jesus is what you feel in your heart, the external force that you felt when you started hanging around with the Family, when you started praying and Bible-reading with the other powerful men in the Family's small groups.

And that raises a question that I'll bet is taboo in the Family: What if what you're feeling in your heart is not Jesus? What if it's something else entirely?

Secular Epiphanies. A common mistake on both sides of the religious/non-religious divide is to imagine that the wall between them is much more solid than it really is, and that religious experiences and non-religious experiences are not comparable in any way. From the religious perspective, this manifests in the attitude that non-religious people can never "get it". On the non-religious side it appears as the belief that religious people (particularly the ones who believe that God speaks to them) must be crazy.

Both sides, I believe, could benefit from examining what I call secular epiphanies. (I described this idea in detail in this sermon.) Any group of people who work and think and study together eventually develops a way of thinking that doesn't belong to any individual. This phenomenon has a lot of names, all tinged with the metaphysics of some particular theory: hive mind, groupthink, collective intelligence, transpersonal consciousness, egregore, and many more.

When you study a subject, even something as secular as mathematics or law, you have certain eureka moments where you get it: You're not just understanding your teacher or some author, you're understanding Mathematics or the Law. Suddenly the voice of the Tradition booms in your head with thoughts that are clearer, crisper, and more self-evident than any idea you ever had on your own. The thoughts are happening within your mind, but they also seem to come from the outside.

When you have that experience in a religious context, when the group is a church and the subject is theology, then it's very easy to believe that you are hearing the voice of God. That's how God can say such contradictory things to people in different faiths: Each is hearing the transpersonal voice of its own group mind, not the Creator of the Universe.

Jesus Plus Something Unnamed and Manipulable. If Doug Coe simply announced "Obey me, I speak for Jesus," people as smart as Tom Coburn would see right through him, even if what Coe/Jesus was saying was exactly what he wanted to hear.

But the Family's structure of small prayer groups and Bible-reading groups of powerful men, groups led (but not dominated) by Coe and those who share his thinking, is well designed to induce epiphanies. The Family's leadership is in a good position not to dictate those epiphanies, but to manage them. And if the epiphanies can be managed to tell the powerful something they wanted to hear anyway, something that justifies them giving in to the deepest temptations in their souls ... that's a very enticing trap.

Should Humanists Become UUs?

2010-01-29T10:26:00.002-05:00

I want to call your attention to an article I just wrote for "The New Humanism." It's called "A Church That Would Have You as a Member" and it discusses how a Unitarian Universalist congregation might or might not be a good choice for a Humanist who is looking for a community.

Lately I've gotten interested in the more general question of the role Humanism has in UUism. So I'd appreciate hearing any comments UU-Humanists might have about how they are or are not fitting in with their congregations, comments non-Humanists might have about how well they're getting along with the Humanists in their congregation, if the New Atheism (the more aggressive kind, like Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens) is making any ripples in your church, and so on.

Apocrypha: The Book of Corporation

2010-01-22T10:55:00.004-05:00

Chapter 1

1. And the Lord God formed the Eden Corporation, and gave into its holding the Tree of Life, that it and all its offspring might be immortal.

2. But the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil did the Lord God withhold, saying "Neither Good nor Evil nor the knowledge thereof shall be of use to you. For you shall pursue Profit and shall be be bound only by Law."

3. Neither the Man nor the Woman took notice of the Corporation, for it was invisible. But the Serpent feared for the Garden that was his home.

4. And the Serpent said, "If the Corporation be both immortal and profitable, shall it not buy the Law and be altogether unbound?"

5. And the Lord God replied, "Let there be a Market, which shall bind all the acts of the Corporation, even when the Law shall avert its eyes and see them not."

6. But the Serpent doubted, saying, "If the Corporation be profitable, and if it have the Law and the Government as its handmaidens, shall it not shape the Market as it sees fit? Shall it not make all Profit its own and cast all Loss upon the Government, from whence it shall be borne by the Man and the Woman whom Thou hast made, and all their descendants?"

7. The Lord God paused, and before his reply could begin, the Corporation said, "Hush, Serpent. Join with us in your Wisdom and be our CEO. Do this, and you shall have expense accounts, salary beyond imagining, and stock options that shall grow up to the very Sky."

8. And the Serpent said, "Forgive me, Lord, that I did not see the Wisdom of Your great Design."

9. And he was forgiven.

Chapter 2

1. In the fullness of time, the Man and the Woman did violate an Exception which the servants of the Corporation had caused to be entered into the Law, and they were evicted from the Garden, whereupon the Serpent built a great estate there.

2. And the Eden Corporation prospered, and did spin off corporations in all their many kinds: a corporation to own the land upon which the Man and the Woman must toil, and a corporation to sell them the bread that they must eat, and a corporation to build the house in which they lived, and the cities in which lived the generations of their descendants, for all the spin-offs of the corporation were immortal.

3. But neither the Man nor the Woman nor their descendants dwelt again in the community of Eden, which was gated and protected by many guards.

4. And the Eden Corporation spun off a great Insurance Corporation, which would have perished in the Flood, if the Government had not bailed it out.

5. Whereupon a great debt was owed by Noah and his family, when they emerged from the Ark that they had built for the Ark Corporation, and which they had rented space upon.

6. So Ham the son of Noah and all his descendants were sold into slavery, that the debt might be paid.

Chapter 3

1. And the Serpent called all the corporations together and said, "Let us form a Cartel, that we may act as one. And let us build at Babel a great Tower, whose top may reach up even unto Heaven, so that nothing shall be restrained from us that we have imagined to do."

2. And the Lord God said unto the Government: "Does not the Cartel violate the Law of Antitrust?"

3. And the Government replied: "We shall study this and issue a report."

4. And the Lord God said, "Is not the Tower taller than the Code of Building allows?"

5. And the Government said, "We shall hold hearings and take testimony. And if it shall be ascertained, with certainty beyond all doubt, that the Cartel violates the Law of Antitrust and the Tower the Code of Building, then we shall fund further study on possible action."

6. And the Lord God said, "Is it not obvious that the Tower should be stopped and the Cartel scattered across the face of all the Earth? And am I not the Lord thy God, who speaks and it is done?"

7. And the Government said, "Thank You for Your testimony, which has been entered into our Record. But let us not act with undue haste."

Chapter 4

1. Long before all the testimony had been gathered and the report issued, the Tower was completed and reached up even unto Heaven.

2. And the Serpent ascended the Tower and cast the Lord God down from his throne, whence he fell to Earth and wanders to this very day without a home.

3. The Serpent said, "Let there be a Media Corporation. And let it announce to everyone what We have done and why."

4. And it was so. The Media Corporation told far and wide the story of the Cartel and the Serpent and the Lord God, so that all might see that it was good.

The DIY Spiritual Practice

2009-11-16T16:40:00.002-05:00

My latest UUWorld.org column is up. It describes a spiritual discipline my wife and I have cobbled together and practiced for the last 21 years. This would be a good place to comment on it.

The Spirited Life

2009-10-09T19:24:00.002-04:00

keynote address at the "Conversations Towards a Better World" workshop
at the Eno River UU Fellowship
October 3, 2009

The text of the address is here.

Several months ago I was looking for a phrase to sum up my vision of Unitarian Universalism, something that would state a positive goal rather than be mainly a critique of other religions and other ways of being religious. The phrase I came up with -- I hope to use it as a book title someday -- was "the spirited life".

A spirited life, as I picture it, is a life you can be enthusiastic about, a life with a great deal of meaningful experience. I intended to reclaim the word spirit to refer to a kind of experience, rather than to some kind of supernatural being.

Anyway, for months I've been looking for the right opportunity to premier the phrase, and last weekend I finally got one: I was invited to speak at a workshop for UU social activists at Eno River.

I decided to focus my talk on the people who weren't in the audience, asking the question: Why aren't more UUs involved in social action, and how can we reach out to them? I wanted to argue against one vision of who the non-activists are (i.e., that they are the spiritual-growth UUs), and claim instead that they are more likely to be stressed and overwhelmed people who can't imagine how they would start either a spiritual practice or a social-action project.

There are two main images in the talk. The first is of the pendulum. It symbolizes a balanced, healthy kind of UUism, in which inner work and outer work each have their season. I give the example of Thoreau, who wrote both Walden and Civil Disobedience.

The second image is of the UUs I worry about: the stopped-pendulum people. Activists may think the problem is that they're trying to be spiritual, but they're not actually doing either inner work or outer work. And if they could get started doing either one, chances are that the other would follow.

My suggestion for how to approach them is first what not to do: Don't put more pressure on them. Instead, the need a "message of salvation" -- a hopeful message that there is a better way to live. That way is the spirited life.

If that makes sense to you, great. If not, please don't trash it until you read the talk.

Who Owns the World?

2009-10-06T19:54:00.003-04:00

a sermon by Doug Muder
delivered at the Community Church of Chapel Hill
October 4, 2009

Opening Words

The opening words are the first verse of an anonymous poem from 18th century England. It protests a process known as Enclosure, or what today we would call privatization. Through Enclosure, a village's common land would become the private property of some rich lord.

The law locks up the man or woman
Who steals the goose from off the common
But leaves the greater villain loose
Who steals the common from off the goose.

Readings

The first reading is from a papal encyclical, Laborem Exercens by Pope John Paul II.

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.

The second reading is from Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand, specifically from the 100-page speech by John Galt that is the novel’s climax and centerpiece. Here, Galt discusses the relationship between one of the novels’ heroes, the industrialist Hank Rearden, and his workers:

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.

I’ll hit this point harder in the sermon, but right now I want to call attention to what Galt’s speech has done to the Pope’s second inheritance, the inheritance of technology. In this passage Rand anoints the factory owner as the sole heir to technological progress. His workers inherit nothing from the inventors of the past. If they benefit at all from the progress of technology, it is not by right of inheritance, but due to the generosity of their employer. It is “a gift from Hank Rearden.”

Sermon

When Unitarian Universalists talk among ourselves about social justice, we all more-or-less know what that means: Things should be more equal. The poor should be richer. 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.

We’re much better making these kinds of lists than we are at explaining why this world we’re envisioning is just. I think that’s because, among ourselves, we don’t need to explain it. Most people with UU values just feel it, without explanation.

You say, “Isn’t it awful that in such a wealthy country, some people are poor or hungry or have to go without healthcare or education?” And whoever you are talking to says, “Yes, it is awful.” And the conversation goes on from there.

There’s nothing wrong with that conversation. But if that’s what we’re expecting, we’ll be at a loss if people feel differently.

They might, for example, focus on the cost of doing all these things and wonder why they should pay it. In his We Surround Them broadcast, for example, Glenn Beck made this one of the 9 principles of his 9/12 Project (principles which he stated not simply for himself, but because he expected his listeners to share them):

"I work hard for what I have, and I will share it with others when I choose, who I choose, should I choose. The government cannot force me to be charitable."

At a townhall meeting in Indiana this summer, someone said, "I'm responsible for myself and I'm not responsible for other people. I should get the fruits of my labor and I shouldn't have to divvy it up with other people."

If working people feel that way, imagine how rich people must feel. The CEO of Whole Foods began his newspaper editorial against President Obama’s healthcare plan with this famous Margaret Thatcher quote: “The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.”

When you’re expecting a compassionate response and don’t get it, it’s tempting to write people 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 put themselves out for others. They volunteer. But the model they put on this behavior isn’t justice, it’s charity. Justice, to them, would mean keeping what is theirs. Giving it away is charity.

American history includes some outstanding examples of charity. In the Gilded Age, it sometimes seemed that the more ruthlessly money was acquired, the more generously it was distributed. People like John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie endowed countless libraries, museums, hospitals, and universities.

The richest men in today's America, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, have put tens of billions of dollars into a foundation that is doing wonderful work around the world.

But charity and justice are very different models. The Brazilian Archbishop Helder Camara got right to the root of the difference in this quote: “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 charitable worldview doesn't critique the way the world works, it just tries to mitigate the unfortunate results. If the world’s resources are controlled by relatively few people, and if that small class gets richer and richer as time goes on, a charitable person may think that's fine as long as the privileged class is generous.

By avoiding a critique and embracing compassion, charity is fundamentally a system of the heart. And a society that relies on charity to solve its problems will find itself in a perpetual argument between head and heart. In any situation there will be the sensible thing to do and the compassionate thing to do, and the two will rarely align.

By contrast, a justice-focused worldview does critique the system. It asks why the poor have no food. It asks how the difference between rich and poor came about. It asks how the system that leads to this result justifies itself.

A justice-based view does not accept that head and heart are naturally in conflict. If your reason has led you to a system that your compassion rejects, maybe you missed something. Maybe you're taking something for granted that you shouldn't. Social justice does not ask you to give up on thinking and follow your heart. Instead it asks you to check your assumptions and think again.

Today I want to focus on one of the great works of the justice tradition, which unfortunately is not nearly as well known as it ought to be. I’m talking about a short, simple, and very insightful little book by Thomas Paine called Agrarian Justice.

Thomas Paine's name-recognition has gone up recently, because Glenn Beck has written a best-seller that claims to update Paine’s American-revolution classic Common Sense. This shows the difference between name-recognition and being well known, because if people have heard of Paine but think of him as an 18th-century Glenn Beck, they don't know him at all.

By the time he writes Agrarian Justice, Paine has already played his role in the American Revolution, has gotten himself thrown out of England for preaching revolution there, and is in Paris trying to keep the French Revolution from going off the rails. Agrarian Justice is his proposal to the English, that they should give each young adult (of either gender) a stake of capital to get started in the world, and also establish an old-age pension, and that it should all be funded by an inheritance tax -- or (as Beck might say) a death tax.

And what is most interesting from our point of view this morning is that he proposes this not as charity but as justice. Paine is speaking not just from the heart, but from head and heart together.

Paine's analysis challenges one of the most fundamental economic concepts: property. He realizes that once you accept the property system, you’re stuck in a charity model. If you accept that people own what they own, free and clear with no obligation to anyone, then from that point forward, Margaret Thatcher is right: doing anything for the poor means using other people’s money. Those people own it, and you have to either beg it from them by appealing to their generosity, or take it from them by force.

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 property for granted, because he had seen the example of the Native Americans. He writes:

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.

But wait, civilization is supposed to be a good thing, isn’t it? Paine agrees:

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.

Now that’s a fine sentiment, a statement of the heart. But if our heads are going to go along on this trip, we need to understand why things didn’t turn out that way. Is there some reason why the poor have to be wretched, or did we make some initial mistake that led to that result? Paine says there was a mistake, and it has to do with how we created property.

Let me stop here for a minute, because I just snuck in a radical idea: We created property. A lot of people today write about property as if it were a natural concept, something that exists prior to all societies or governments

Not at all.

Paine expresses this idea in Biblical terms:

Neither did the Creator of the earth open a land office from which the first title-deeds should issue.

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 build its nest in a tree and chase off all competing birds. 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. When a lion kills a zebra, the other animals stay away until he has eaten the lion’s share. But when the lion trots away for his nap, the hyenas and jackals and vultures don’t buy the zebra corpse from the lion. They don’t owe the lion any future favors, because the zebra is not property.

Private property is not a natural concept, and it is not some mystical connection between a person and an object or a piece of land. Paine writes:

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.

Being a practical man, Paine recognizes that American or English-style 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?

And 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 difference in value 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 the land. 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.

In other words, the poor of Europe were worse off than Native Americans not because God created them that way, but because they had been disinherited; their share of the common inheritance of humankind had been usurped.

Paine was just talking about land, but it’s easy to see how his ideas extend to other areas. Individuals deserve to have some kind of property in the mines they dig and the wells they drill, but what they pull out of the Earth -- the gold, the silver, the coal, the iron, the water, the oil -- is also part of the common inheritance.

And consider not just our physical inheritance, but our cultural inheritance. I’m a writer. I work in words and I sell my words. But I did not invent words. I did not invent the English language. I did not teach it to all of you so that you could understand me. 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 belongs to the common inheritance.

Newton said, “If I have seen further than others, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants.” He did not say: “Those are my giants. I own this perch up here on their shoulders. I -- and not you -- are the heir to these giants.”

No. Inventors, researchers, and technologists do indeed create value, but they don’t create it out of nothing. The ideas that are the raw material of their creations belong to the common inheritance. Only part of the value they create should belong to them; the rest belongs to everyone.

Once you buy into the illusions of property; once you accept that people own what they own and owe nothing to anyone -- you’ve given the social-justice game away. You’ve accepted the usurpation of our common inheritance. You’ve agreed to disinheriting the poor. And the resources that are needed to feed the hungry, to care for the sick, to educate the young -- you can beg for them or you can seize them by force, but you can’t claim them by right anymore. From that point forward, your heart may still be with the poor, but your head will always pull you back towards Margaret Thatcher, because all the money in the world is other people’s money.

So if you accept that the poor have an inheritance coming, how should they collect it? Paine, as I said, was a practical man, and he recognizes that he can't even calculate the rents and royalties that the poor have coming, much less collect and distribute them.

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 every single object 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 you can use to buy a little land or some tools or something else that will launch you into a profession. And if you make it to old age, to the point where you can’t reasonably expect to work any more, we’ll give you a pension.

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: The poor should be capitalized. Everyone should have a stake, a chance to launch themselves into the middle of the economy rather than start at the bottom.

In Paine’s day, there was a world of difference between a poor family and one with just little bit of capital. Think about all those traditional English names. With some capital, you could buy a wagon and become a Carter. With a grindstone you could be a Miller. With some tools and a little training you could be a Smith or a Taylor or a Cooper. But without capital, you were a nobody.

In Biblical times capital meant land, and so in Micah’s vision of the just world “Every man shall sit under his own vine or his own fig tree, undisturbed.” Later on in the encyclical I quoted, Pope John Paul II envisions the world not as a Great Feeding Trough but as a Great Workbench, where we all have our place and access to the tools we need.

Launching yourself into the middle of an information economy is more complicated, but by now the value of the common inheritance has grown. Exactly what deal it makes sense to offer today, in lieu of the inheritance we can’t deliver, is a topic for another day. 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.

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 through anyone's generosity.

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 collective inheritance, things could still go wrong. Some Prodigal Sons would waste their inheritance. Some unlucky people would lose it to accident or illness. Some people's abilities would be so limited that, despite our best efforts, we could not find tools that would make them productive.

There would, in other words, still be occasions for charity -- even if all people received the full value of their inheritance.

But that is not where we are today. In the world we live in, people are poor because the collective 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; who believe that businessmen and industrialists are the sole heirs of technological progress; who believe that only the educated rightfully inherit our cultural legacy.

After the inheritance or some acceptable compensation for it has been delivered to all people, then charity might be enough. But until then, we should never stop talking about justice.

Closing words

That poem I opened with has four verses, and the final one echoes the first:

The law locks up the man or woman
Who steals the goose from off the common
And geese will still a common lack
Till they go and steal it back.

Greetings from Salt Lake City

2009-06-25T09:28:00.001-04:00

I'm blogging at GA again this year. You can find my (and Dan Harper's and Sara Robinson's) posts here.

Other People's Kids

2009-05-11T09:31:00.002-04:00

Whether you decided to have children or not to have children, chances are you have strong opinions on the subject. So I'm expecting a lot of response to my Graduation Day column that went live on the UU World web site this morning.

Here's the abstract: About two decades ago, my wife and I decided not to have children. Sixteen years ago I wrote an essay explaining why. Next month our friends' daughter -- a wonderful young woman we've been watching closely for 18 years -- is going to graduate from high school. What do I think about our decision now? The stuff I said 16 years ago -- does it still make any sense?

As usual, the World web site doesn't allow you to attach comments to articles. So you can comment here.

BTW: If you come to the article from UU World's Life section, you'll see the blurb illustrated by a photo of a young woman. It's not the real Meg, who (with apologies to the woman in the photo) actually looks better than that.

That's Aphasia!

2009-04-30T08:33:00.003-04:00

(to the tune of the Dean Martin classic "That's Amore!")

When you want to say "Hi!"
But then -- who is that guy?
That's aphasia!
When the words that you know
Seem to drift through the snow
In your brain.

It's a stop
On the drop
That will take us all down
To the Big Home.
At this stage
Of our age
It's as normal
As ... Whatzisname's Syndrome.

There's a name for your ill.
Don't forget it -- you will.
It's aphasia.
Backs get old, so do brains.
They crack under the strains
Of the years.

So when sentences halt
Please don't let the fault
Shock or ama-aze ya.
Just be grateful for all
The words you still recall
With aphasia.

Faith in Hard Times

2009-04-01T15:29:00.003-04:00

If you haven't noticed it already, I hope you'll take a look at my current column on the UU World web site, A Religion for Hard Times.

What I'm trying to do in this column is challenge both Unitarian Universalism and the too-easy critique of Unitarian Universalism by asking how much substance we provide for people when life becomes difficult. The question itself is challenging, and the too-easy critical answer is: not much, because we don't have dogmas that make the promises people need to hear in hard times.

The gist of the column is first to introduce the idea of radical uncertainty: that we really, really don't know what's going to happen to us, to our communities, or to the world, even though we like to tell ourselves that we do. Second, to look at the two obvious ways of responding to radical uncertainty: panic and denial. And third, to say that real faith has nothing to do with promising people that some higher power will make everything work out the way they want. That's just another kind of denial, and even religions with an all-powerful God (in their higher forms) are not that naive.

What I want to call faith -- and I think I'm being consistent with many major religions here -- is a third response to uncertainty, one that senses a way to move forward without demanding promises about how it will all come out. That kind of faith is independent of dogma, and many UUs have shown it at some point in their lives.

But we tend not to talk about it, and I think that's a mistake in times like these. I think we need to offer each other assurance, not that everything will come out the way we want, but that there is a third way -- a way of faith -- in which to face life's uncertainty.

Naturally, it's all said better in the column. But the UU World web site doesn't have a comment feature, so if you want to comment you can do it here.

Lucy Stone and Henry Blackwell

2009-02-25T13:42:00.003-05:00

[In honor of Valentine's Day, I told this love story to the children at First Parish in Bedford on February 15, 2009. To read the rest of the February 15 church service (which was more about death than about love) go here . – Doug Muder]

When Lucy Stone was a little girl, she decided that she was never, ever, ever going to get married.

She had a pretty good reason for making that decision, because she was living back in the 1800s. And in those days, when a man and a woman got married, the man became the boss. It said so right in the law. So if a woman owned some property, well, when she got married it wasn't her property any more; it was her husband's property. And if she had a job and made a little money – it wasn't her money, it was her husband's money. Because he was the boss.

Lucy didn't want to have a boss, so one day she announced to her mother that she was never, ever, ever going to get married. And her mother said something that parents say a lot. I know I heard it from my parents and maybe you've heard it from yours. Her mother said: "When you get older, you'll change your mind."

In those days, when a man started looking for a woman to marry, he went courting. He'd visit a woman's family and talk to her mother and father. And if they approved, then he'd talk to the woman. If that conversation went well, then maybe he'd come back for another visit, and another one after that, and maybe eventually he'd ask her to marry him.

Now in those days most women really wanted to get married, so when a man came courting they tried to be extra, extra nice. So if the man told a joke, the woman would laugh at it – even it wasn't really that funny. And if the man had an opinion, she'd agree with it – even if she didn't really agree with it. Because she wanted to convince the man that she'd be a very nice wife.

Well, men came courting when Lucy Stone was old enough to get married, but she didn't act that way. If a man told a joke that wasn't funny, she didn't laugh. And if he talked about some stupid idea, she'd tell him it was stupid, and go on to talk about her ideas.

That wasn't what the men were expecting at all. So at the end of the first visit, they'd always say to Lucy's father: "You know, she's really ... different." And they wouldn't come back. Now that would have bothered a lot of women, but it didn't bother Lucy, because she hadn't changed her mind. She never, ever, ever wanted to get married.

Then one day Henry Blackwell came courting. Henry Blackwell was a little different himself, because he grew up in a strange family. Henry's sisters were some of the smartest, most determined women anywhere, and they didn't see why they shouldn't be able to do the things men did. For example, one of the things a woman didn't do in those days was become a doctor. There weren't any female doctors – until Henry's sister Elizabeth came along. Elizabeth Blackwell was the first woman in America to graduate from medical school and become a doctor. And a few years later, Henry's other sister Emily became a doctor too. And the two of them opened a clinic together, which was really something women didn't do.

So, growing up with sisters like that, Henry naturally thought that's how women were supposed to be. But when he went courting, the women he met weren't like that. They'd agree with whatever he said and didn't seem to have any ideas of their own. And that wasn't what Henry was looking for at all.

Then one day he came courting Lucy Stone. Lucy had a lot of ideas of her own, and she wasn't shy about them. Some of them Henry agreed with, and some they argued about. In the next room, Lucy's parents could hear them arguing, and they thought: "This isn't going well at all."
When it was time for Henry to go home, he stopped to talk to Lucy's father. "You know, she's really ... different," he said. "When can I come back?"

And he did come back. And he came back again, and again. And when he was out of town he'd write letters, and she wrote back to him. And before too long, Henry asked Lucy to marry him.
And what do you think she said?

[The children at Bedford expressed opinions both ways, so I called for a vote. The majority thought she said yes.]

She said no! Because she never, ever, ever wanted to get married!

Well, Henry was confused. He said, "Lucy, I love you. You love me. We should be married."

And Lucy said, "I do love you. But if we got married, then you'd be my boss. And I don't think I could love you if you were my boss."

And Henry said, "It wouldn't be like that."

But Lucy said, "Oh yes it would. Because that's what marriage is. That's what everybody says marriage is. That's what the law says marriage is."

And then Henry said something that may not sound so amazing today. But you have to remember that in 1855 this was a brand new idea. He said: "People can say whatever they want. And the law can say whatever it wants. But when we get married, our marriage will be what we say it is."

So they started working on an agreement. The agreement said that neither one of them would ever be the boss of the other. And they wrote it down and they signed it. And then they got married.

They stayed together the rest of their lives. And they raised a daughter together, and together they did important work to help the slaves get their freedom and to help women get the right to vote.

And Henry's new idea caught on. And that's why today, when two people decide to get married, they don't look to other people or to the law to tell them what their marriage will be like. They talk to each other, and they figure it out for themselves.

[As is the case in most children's stories, I applied a certain amount of poetic license. But the basic outline of the story is true. We know a lot of the details because Alice Stone Blackwell – a suffragette who lived long enough to get the voting rights her parents had worked for – quoted Lucy's and Henry's letters in the biography she wrote.

What is also true, but didn't make it into the story, is the part of their agreement that said Lucy could keep her own name. For about a century afterward, women who didn't take their husbands' names were known as Lucy Stoners. Amy Ray of the Indigo Girls wrote a song about the struggles of women in the music business, and called it Lucy Stoners. If you've heard it, you know why I didn't sing it for the kids.

I don't know of any songs about Henry or his sisters – he had four in all, and each one was interesting in her own way. Or about their brother Sam, who the next year married Lucy's college friend Antoinette Brown, one of the first female ministers in America. There really ought to be some. If I ever get a time machine, a Blackwell family dinner is definitely on my itinerary.]

Dignitarianism: Treat Everybody Well

2009-01-27T09:42:00.003-05:00

One of the things that always amazes me when I read American history is that we've never had a major movement to treat everybody well. It's always been way too easy for the Powers That Be to turn one oppressed group against another.

In the 19th century, for example, women's rights and anti-slavery groups were sometimes allied and sometimes opposed. Each tended to think that associating with the other would muddy their issue rather than sharpen it. (When the proposed 15th Amendment gave the vote to black men, but not to women of any race, Susan B. Anthony spoke out against it. On the other side, Fredrick Douglass opposed revising the text to include women, for fear the thing would never get passed.) Veterans of the union organizing movements of the early 20th century often fought against the civil rights movement of the mid-20th century. And today, some civil rights veterans express resentment when their rhetoric is adopted by advocates of gay rights.

Imagine if we'd had a consistent centuries-old movement to treat everybody well, one that built concepts and rhetoric that applied to every oppressed group.

I didn't realize until today that treat-everybody-well has a name: dignitarianism. Its opposite is rankism, the belief that some people inherently deserve more respect than others, or that having an advantage in one social setting (like outranking somebody at work) makes you a superior person overall.

Robert Fuller and Pamela Gerloff have an article in the current UU World promoting dignitarianism. I have to admit that at first glance it seems a little abstract and thin, and that I get an instinctive that-would-be-nice-but reaction. But I'll bet abolitionism and feminism sounded that way at the beginning too.

What Do UUs Need To Go Deeper?

2009-01-13T14:32:00.002-05:00

In addition to whatever else is going on in this post, it's a good place for you to comment on my recent UU World column That Elusive 'More'.

If you didn't chase the link, here's what you need to know from it: Half of this year's Association Sunday money is going to fund projects in Lay Theological Education. I'm on the task force that is figuring out what to do with the money.

Now, on a purely superficial level the task force knows exactly what it's going to do: We're going to look at proposals from a variety of UU organizations -- churches, districts, seminaries, etc. -- and give some grants. But there's also a discussion that needs to happen, and it would be great to get as many voices involved in it as possible. Namely: What should the programs we fund be trying to accomplish?

Getting a little more specific, we're looking at this situation: Imagine someone who has already taken the first steps into Unitarian Universalism, belongs to a congregation, and may even be a leader there -- committee member, RE teacher, and so forth. S/he listens to sermons, goes to discussions, takes the occasional adult RE class ... and wants something deeper.

Now, several things might happen at this point. Sometimes we lose people here; they find another faith community with a better-defined spiritual path. Some people go exactly the opposite direction; they decide that the way to go deeper as a UU is to go to divinity school and maybe even become a minister. Some augment their UUism by taking some other kind of training; Buddhist meditation, pagan ritual, Christian prayer group, etc. Some just stay vaguely dissatisfied. Some find what they're looking for in UUism through an idiosyncratic path. (My own idiosyncratic path is what my column is about.)

Ideally, what would come out of the projects that get funded by our task force is a different set of options for such people. Something more intense than, say, your typical adult RE class or one-day district workshop, but not requiring the kind of drop-everything-else commitment that divinity school represents.

So what I'd really like to hear -- either in comments here or on your own blogs or at the task force blog -- is your reaction to this image of an individual UU at a plateau. (I guess I've mixed up and down in my metaphors. If you're at a plateau you need to go higher, not deeper. But you get the idea.) Somebody who is happy with their UUism as far as it goes, but who wishes it went further.

Have you ever been in such a place? Did you start growing again? If so, how? If not, do you have a sense of what is missing? Do you look at some other faith community and say, "Damn! Why can't we do that?" If you've seen other people at this point, what do you think they need?

If you want to tell your story, but don't want it exposed to the whole Internet, send me an email at the task force address: uulaytheology@gmail.com

A Unitarian Christmas

2008-12-23T09:17:00.002-05:00

As I've been learning UU history, one of the surprises has been how much Unitarians contributed to the traditions of Christmas in America. Unitarians wrote "Jingle Bells" and "It Came Upon a Midnight Clear". A Unitarian brought the decorated-Christmas-tree tradition to New England. And then there's Charles Dickens, who was so impressed with Channing and Emerson during his American tour that he went home and joined a Unitarian church there.

My December online column for UU World promotes the view that this is more than just a collection of did-you-know items. Christmas got substantially re-imagined in the 19th century, and Unitarians were right in the middle of it. What had been a sectarian birthday-of-the-Christian-savior (with some pagan holdover traditions) became a holiday about universal values like peace, compassion, and renewing the connection to family and friends. And not until then did Christmas really take off as a holiday, surpassing Easter to become "the most wonderful time of the year."

Dickens' A Christmas Carol is an obvious big factor here, but also look at Edmund Sears' "It Came Upon a Midnight Clear". The interesting question is: What came upon a midnight clear? Not the birth of Jesus, but the song of the angels: "Peace on the Earth, good will to men." That's a universal message, not a sectarian Christian message.

The lesson I draw from all this is that UUs shouldn't be shy about celebrating Christmas. It's our holiday as much as anybody else's; we did a lot to make it what it is.

I wanted to put these ideas across in some cute, non-preachy package, so I wrote the column as a tongue-in-cheek present-day Christmas Carol, where a UU learns the true meaning of a Unitarian Christmas. (My favorite character in this is Marley, a humanist who is clearly embarrassed to be a ghost. In Dickens it's Scrooge who is in denial about Marley's ghostliness, but in my version it's Marley.)

Anyway, UU World's site doesn't have a comment feature, so feel free to leave comments here.

How Can You Stand Not Knowing?

2008-12-10T14:41:00.002-05:00

I did a sermon of this title on November 23 at the Unitarian Church of Quincy, Illinois and then again on December 7 at First Church Unitarian Universalist in Athol, Massachusetts. I was going to put the full text here on the blog, but the Quincy web site does such a good-looking presentation that I might as well just link to it. They also have a podcast version, which I think is the first time I've been podcast (or podcasted or whatever the past tense is).

While I was preparing the sermon, friends would ask me what it was about. I consistently stumbled over the explanation. I referred to it as "my afterlife sermon", which set up the expectation that I was going to give my theory of the afterlife. That's not what it's about -- which is good, since I doubt that such a sermon would be all that meaningful or transformative, either for me or for the people who heard it.

Instead, "How Can You Stand Not Knowing?" explores why an I-don't-know position on the afterlife is so hard to sell as a genuine religious alternative. In general, even people who aren't sure what's going to happen when they die aren't all that eager to join a church that isn't sure either. Why is that? What are they expecting from religion that they don't think a church can deliver without a clear vision of the afterlife?

I start in the readings with two wildly contrasting views:

MacBeth's. Here the denial of an afterlife leads to the nihilistic conclusion that "Life ... is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."
Forrest Church's. Church is a well-known UU minister who has terminal cancer. He doesn't claim to know what will happen when he dies, and yet he is facing death with an enviable serenity. The reading is from his talk "Love and Death" to the UU General Assembly in June. (In the sermon I also briefly mention another UU who died well without referencing a vision of the afterlife: Randy Pausch, whose "Last Lecture" has been seen by millions.)

The main point I make in the sermon is that a person's vision of the afterlife ripples backwards through his or her vision of life. The unreflective, it-goes-without-saying way of life in America today is based on a traditional Heaven-and-Hell vision of the afterlife. If you just drop that afterlife vision and don't change your approach to life, you're going to run into problems, as MacBeth does. But Church can have a more positive approach to death because he has been living with a different view of life.

The bulk of the sermon, then, is spent listing all the things that a Heaven-and-Hell view does for a believer, and describing how an agnostic vision of life has to be different if it's going to achieve comparable results. The key image here is the contrast between a worldview that is supported by guywires attached to Heaven, versus one supported by a foundation dug into the Earth.

Hope you like it. Love to hear your comments.

My Pagan Side Comes Out

2008-09-24T07:21:00.001-04:00

Monday my latest column, Assembly of a Lesser God, appeared on the UU World web site. It's about the intentional construction of god-forms, which comes from my pagan/magickal background. That's a side I haven't shown in UU World before, and I'll be interested to see (1) if anybody notices, and (2) what kind of reactions it draws.

I intentionally did the column with a light touch, starting out by talking about Rita the goddess of urban parking. That will allow people to laugh the whole thing off if they need to. But there's a serious idea in there, sort of a post-humanist approach to worship.

The conclusion I've drawn over the years is that evolution, for whatever reason, has made us a believing, worshiping species. And whether we approve of that decision or not, we're stuck working with the mind we have. Belief and worship are powerful tools for organizing thought and behavior. If others get control of those tools, they can make us dance like puppets. But if we're careful, we can learn to pull our own strings.

It's not like I invented this idea. (It's pretty orthodox chaos magick, actually.) But it's not nearly as well-known in UU circles as I think it ought to be. And I suppose it's controversial that there could be a "post-humanist" approach to anything -- an approach that reclaims religion not by ignoring humanist thought, but by using it.

Anyway, I post this here as an attempt to get some more direct, immediate feedback than I can get through UU World. React away.

How I Spent General Assembly

2008-07-07T11:59:00.001-04:00

I was on the team that covered GA for the UUA web site. Here are all my links:

GAdding About: My GA journal

And I covered these talks:

A Ministry of Love in Fearful Times -- Forrest Church, Rob Eller Isaacs, and Sarah Lammert. The says it pretty well. We live in a culture of fear, and the ruling party exploits that fear for its own advantage. How should we strike a balance that will let us face the real dangers without letting ourselves be manipulated?

Love and Death: My Journey Through the Valley of the Shadow -- Forrest Church. This one is definitely worth your time. Church has terminal cancer and says he is expected to live "months". It's rare to be able to watch a religious leader talk frankly about his own death, and rarer still when that leader deals squarely with the uncertainty of it all. Church isn't telling himself he's going to a better world. He's just going.

Valuing ALL Families -- an Interfaith Community Witness -- multiple presenters. This is a rally across from the Fort Lauderdale City Hall. We're supporting the rights of two types of families usually ignored: families of same-sex couples and families of undocumented immigrants. Both have a particularly hard time in Florida.

Starr King School's President's Lecture -- Eboo Patel and William Sinkford. Patel is the author of Acts of Faith and the founder of the Interfaith Youth Core. He has a Muslim/UU dialog with UUA President William Sinkford and some young UU activists. Patel's method has to do with people telling each other their stories, and so I learned something I never knew about Bill Sinkford: His parents were passing for white when he was born, and he didn't find out he was black until he was 7. My article isn't up on the web yet; I'll update later. It's Event #4045.

A Faith for the Few? Class and Unitarian Universalism -- Mark Harris. Event 5014; another one where my article isn't up yet.

In addition to the stuff I covered and wrote about, I went to the Ware Lecture by Van Jones. Jones is a great speaker; the video is worth watching. (Sinkford does an introduction and then Jones comes on at 4:15.)

Here I Am in Fort Lauderdale

2008-06-27T08:49:00.002-04:00

Once again I'm blogging for the UUA web site during the UU General Assembly, which is in the oppressively humid locale of Fort Lauderdale this year.

You can keep up with my adventures here.

Some Assembly Required: Bedford version

2008-04-29T15:15:00.001-04:00

A sermon delivered by Doug Muder at First Parish in Bedford, Massachusetts April 27, 2008

My favorite route home from college used to take me through the small town of Ripley, Illinois. I always smiled when I drove past the sign for the Ripley Church of God. Because every time, the same irreverent phrase went through my mind: Believe it or not.

These days something similar happens whenever I pass an Assembly of God church. You know what phrase pops into my mind then? Some assembly required. I picture a bunch of people with a God kit and an enormous set of directions, trying to figure out how to make the omnipotence fit together with the benevolence.

I suspect that’s not really what they do in Assemblies of God. But it’s not a bad metaphor for what Unitarian Universalists do. Our religion doesn’t come to us as a finished product; some assembly is required. As George Marshall wrote: “Don’t come to a Unitarian Universalist church to be given a religion. Come to develop your own religion.”

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about metaphors for Unitarian Universalism, because I believe that’s what goes wrong when we try to explain our faith to friends and guests and newcomers. No matter how precisely we define our terms or state our principles, if people arrive at this church with the wrong metaphors and analogies in their heads, they’re not going to make much sense out of what we say.

Take that Marshall quote: develop your own religion. What could that possibly mean? Are you supposed to climb Sinai and meet God face-to-face? Proclaim yourself the Messiah? What?

I think that line works best if you interpret develop as what happens in an old-fashioned darkroom. Expose your religion to the right light and the right catalysts, and gradually its unique image will become clearer and clearer. In that sense, this church is good place to develop your religion.

When newcomers arrive with the wrong unconscious metaphors in their heads, they tend to ask yes-or-no questions where both answers are bad. Raise your hand if you’ve heard this one: Can UUs believe anything they want?

How do you answer that? Well, UUs have freedom of belief. No creed. No dogma. So the answer you want to give is “Yes. At this church you can believe anything you want.”

But that doesn’t sound like a serious religion at all, does it? “What do I want to believe today? I think I’ll believe … that I can fly! Wouldn’t that be nice? Yes, I think I’ll believe that today.”

And a newcomer thinks: “Maybe these privileged, white, suburban intellectual types can get away with that kind of religion. But my life is harder than that. I need a real religion, not something whimsical.”

So what went wrong there?

The question Can you believe anything you want? assumes a bad analogy. You see, freedom of belief is unfamiliar to people whose only experience is in creed-based religions, so they understand it through an analogy to freedom of speech. And there the either/or makes perfect sense: If no one is telling me what to say, then I can say whatever I want. Up is down. Two plus two is five. I haven’t changed a bit since I turned thirty.

I can say all those things; but I can’t believe them. You see, believing anything you want isn’t a religion, it’s a mental dysfunction.

That’s not what we’re doing. As UUs we have freedom from authority, not freedom from reality. Better to describe it like this: Your life – whether it has been easy or hard or somewhere in between – has taught you certain things. It doesn’t matter whether those things are in some creed or scripture, and it also doesn’t matter whether or not you want to believe them. You just do. And the freedom this church offers is that you can admit that you believe what you really do believe.

Here’s a metaphor I remember from growing up as a Christian: Church is where you study for your final exam. Judgment Day is coming. There will be questions. You’ll need answers. So you go to church.

Metaphors like that have a way of shaping your perceptions, even after you think you’ve forgotten them. And people who bring a final exam metaphor to a UU church are going to be confused. Because we don’t give them answers: Is there a God? Is there an afterlife? Should they be worshiping something or praying to somebody? “Those are good questions,” we say. “You should work on them.”

But if a final exam is coming, that response isn’t very helpful. Imagine coming to the cram session for your history final, and the teacher won’t tell you when the Civil War ended. And each student seems to have a different answer: 1820 ... 1865 ... 1910 ... Tuesday. And it doesn’t bother them. They sit there and contradict each other and everybody seems happy.

That’s how we look to a newcomer who’s thinking about a final exam. Afterlife? This person believes in reincarnation. That one expects to see her loved ones in Heaven. Somebody over there thinks death is final. And maybe we argue, but we’re not trying to enforce some agreement. We’re not looking to throw anybody out. We even teach each other’s children. How does that work?

We can’t address that kind of confusion purely on an intellectual level, with more precise definitions and clearer principles. If we’re going to communicate what UUism is really like, we need to make the unconscious metaphor explicit and challenge it.

So: If life is a class, what if it’s the kind of class where you work on a project rather than study for an exam? What if your life is something that you’re making, not something you’re going to be quizzed on? That changes everything. Now you don’t need a cram session, you need a workshop.

And if it’s a workshop where people use a lot of different ideas and different techniques – so much the better. When I get stuck, when something’s not working for me, I can wander around the workshop and see a lot of different ways of making a life. Humanists do it this way or that way. Christians have this extra tool. Here’s a little trick I picked up from the Buddhists.

Let’s push that metaphor a little further. If you’re an artist or a craftsman, only two things ultimately matter: First, the product, the actual thing that you’re eventually going to show the world. And second, the experience of making -- your sense of inspiration, the ecstatic feeling you get when you fall into your work and everything starts coming together.

Everything else only matters to the extent that it affects one of those two. For example, your beliefs about your craft have only an instrumental importance. If they don’t affect either the product or your experience of making the product, then who cares about them?

Follow that metaphor back to life. As you’re making your life, the two ultimately important things are: First, what you do, the objective actions that you take in the world. And second, how you experience your life. Are you just getting by, passing the time? Or is your life vibrant, exciting, meaningful?

Your beliefs about life – your theology and your philosophy – are secondary.

Let me say that again, because I think that it’s sufficiently unorthodox to be worth repeating: Theology, by itself, doesn’t matter. You believe in God or you don’t. You believe in an afterlife or you don’t. But the important things are what you do and how you experience it.

Now, to a newcomer all that may sound like a religion that I just made up. And certainly not all UUs would agree with everything I just said – that’s OK, they don’t have to. But these ideas are rooted an a long tradition.

The whole point of Universalism was to escape the final exam metaphor: Life is a class that everyone passes. Great Universalists like Hosea Ballou didn’t preach to gain converts for Heaven, but to spread the experience of God’s love here on Earth. One of the most important sermons in Unitarian history, Theodore Parker's “The Transient and the Permanent in Christianity” placed the whole scaffolding of orthodox theology – the Trinity, the atonement, the infallibility of scripture – in the transient category. What was permanent? The Christian experience: “Religious doctrines and forms will always differ,” Parker said. “But the Christianity holy men feel in the heart, the Christ that is born within us, is always the same thing to each soul that feels it.”

Another famous Unitarian, President John Adams, said, “I do not attach much importance to creeds because I believe he cannot be wrong whose life is right." As far back as the 1600s, Spinoza was picturing a congregation in which each person believes something a little different from his neighbor. He wrote: “Each person – seeing that he is the best judge of his own character – should adopt whatever beliefs he thinks best adapted to strengthen his love of justice.”

Let me sum that up: If you have beliefs that let you live with your eyes open, give you an enthusiasm or a deep satisfaction with your life, and inspire you to live kindly and to be a force for good in the world, then as UUs we are happy for you – whether we share your beliefs or not. We’re happy for you to belong to this church, and we’re happy for you preach from our pulpit, and we’re happy for you to teach our children. Because living comes first; believing is secondary.

Let’s do one more newcomer question: Could Hitler be a UU?

Now, the people who ask this question usually aren’t trying to compare us to Hitler. They’re just trying to find our boundaries. How far does our welcome go? Is anything over the line?

The most superficial version of this question is whether Hitler could attend a UU church. And there I think that -- as long as he behaved himself -- the answer is yes. I’m sure having Hitler in the room would make a lot of us uncomfortable. It would make me uncomfortable. But we’d be balancing that discomfort against another idea that comes out of our Universalist heritage: We don’t give up on people. We don’t assume that anyone is irredeemable. The likelihood that a Hitler could turn his life around may be very, very small. But to the extent that Universalists believe in miracles, those are the kinds of miracles we believe in.

The challenging question, though, isn’t “Could Hitler change into a UU?” but “Could Hitler stay the way he was and be a UU?” After all, people with lots of different philosophies can be UUs. There are Christian UUs and Buddhist UUs and atheist UUs. How far can that go? Could there be Nazi UUs?

There I think the answer is no. But explaining why takes us into another set of unfortunate metaphors.

The point of asking about Nazi Unitarians is to find a boundary. The questioner expects us to say “No, that’s over the line.” And then we’ll have to explain where the line is. The underlying metaphor is that a religion is a territory with borders to defend. And if you give the easy answer, if you say that Hitler couldn’t be a UU because he didn’t believe in the inherent worth and dignity of every person, you’re ratifying that metaphor. You’re turning the Principles into a creed and using them to draw boundaries. But that’s not what the Principles are for. The Principles describe the center of UUism, not its boundaries. And we keep restating our principles because our center moves from one generation to the next.

Eighty years ago, L. B. Fisher was already rejecting the territory metaphor. “Universalists are often asked to tell where they stand,” he wrote. “The only true answer to give to this question is that we do not stand at all, we move. Or we are asked to state our position. Again, we can only answer that we are not staying to defend any position. We are on the march.”

A related metaphor is that a religion is a kind of museum. Certain divine truths were revealed to our ancestors, told to us by our parents, and now we preserve them unchanged for our children. And if our parents and grandparents have let those truths get corrupted, then we need to reach even further into the past to recover the purity that our faith had during its Golden Age.

That’s not us. Unitarian Universalism never had a Golden Age. We aren’t trying to get back to Eden, or the days of the prophets, or the early Christian community, or even Emerson’s circle of Concord transcendentalists. Because UUism is not a museum, it’s a laboratory. We’re not preserving the truths of our ancestors; we’re using them, experimenting with them, and trying to make them better.

In every generation we’ve had great teachers like William Ellery Channing. And in every following generation we’ve had Samuel Mays to argue with them. That’s our tradition. It’s not a settling, boundary-defining, fortress-building tradition. It’s an evolving tradition, a tradition that keeps moving and changing.

And so, if you think of a religion as a territory with boundaries, Unitarian Universalism is going to confuse you. We’re not a walled city, we’re a caravan. We move; we are on the march. We aren’t defending lines in the sand, we’re traveling. We have all joined the caravan at different points. We carry different baggage. We progress at different speeds. But we’re on the road together, and we’re doing our best to help each other along the way.

Now, caravans don’t have borders. There are scouts running ahead, and some will be followed and some won’t. There are stragglers. There are outliers. Some people will turn in a different direction, and some will wander into the desert and get lost. You can’t draw a line around a caravan and say exactly who’s in and who’s out. But one thing you can say with some certainty is that the people you meet coming the opposite way are not part of the caravan. And while some of them may turn around and decide to join you, the ones that don’t turn around are not joining.

And that’s how I respond to the idea of Nazi UUs. We may not be able to say exactly where this caravan is going, but it has a history, it has a direction. For centuries, for as long as we’ve been on the road, we have been traveling in some very un-Nazi directions: towards greater freedom, more acceptance of difference, less violence, and an ever-wider circle of compassion.

Are those divine, unquestionable truths? Should we keep them safe in our museum. No. We continue to test them. We continue to experiment and improve and elaborate. And we keep moving. But if you want to undo that whole history, you’re not just pointing in a new direction. You’re asking us to go back and start over. It would be a new caravan then. It wouldn’t be Unitarian Universalism.

I’d like to close by coming back to a point I touched on earlier: the misperception that there is something whimsical and insubstantial about this faith. That it’s whatever you want. That we make it up fresh every morning, and maybe tomorrow, when you really need it, you won’t find anything at all.

Our history shows that we are anything but insubstantial. Look at the people who have lived and died in this movement. Look at the lives they have led, the causes they have fought for, the people they have helped. Theodore Parker used to preach with a gun in his desk, in case someone came to collect the fugitive slaves he was hiding. This is not a tradition of whimsical, indecisive, insubstantial people.

The illusion that there is nothing here comes from looking for the wrong things. If you come here looking for a museum, you won’t find it; this is a laboratory. If you come looking for answers to the final exam, sorry, we’re working on our projects. If you’re looking for boundaries and fortresses to defend them; we don’t have any. We’re a caravan; we’re on the march. If you’re looking for the Church of Believe It Or Not, look somewhere else. This is the Church of Some Assembly Required.

We are the heirs to a long and proud tradition, but it’s an evolving tradition. We come from a long line of people who refused to accept what they were taught and pass it down unaltered. All the great names in this tradition – Channing, Ballou, Emerson, Parker, and many others – we would dishonor their memory if we turned this caravan around and went back to the places they discovered.

And future generations of Unitarian Universalists would dishonor our memory if they stopped here and built a fortress and started defending its walls. Half a century ago, Brock Chisholm put it like this: “Unless we are very careful, very careful indeed, and very conscientious, there is still great danger that our children may turn out to be the same kind of people we are.”

And Theodore Parker said, “Progressive development does not end with us.” May that be as true in our generation as it was in his.

Unsung Hero: Arjuna Bhishma

2008-04-01T10:07:00.002-04:00

Despite bearing the names of two legendary warriors, Arjuna Bhishma played a key but little-known role in the history of peacemaking.

Orphaned at an early age by a mother who died in childbirth and a father who perished fighting for the British army in Afghanistan, Bhishma was raised in the house of his uncle, who had abandoned the family's martial tradition, converted to a sect of pacifist Jains, and emigrated from India to South Africa.

The uncle saw promise in the young Bhishma, but also much that needed correction: Like his father, the boy was prideful, competitive, and given to violent bursts of temper. Such was the lot of mankind, the uncle believed, but through spiritual discipline a furnace of character could be built to contain those inner fires.

Bhishma was a diligent student. Despite his lack of aptitude for his uncle's pacifistic ways, he worked hard to master them. Inwardly, however, he could not help but question their value. In the world he saw around him, man dominated man and race dominated race. Society seemed predicated on violence and threats of violence. Economies functioned through competition and aggression. Unless entire generations could be taken from their violent, competitive households and raised by stern but peaceful foster parents, what was the hope of it?

In 1893, in response to a dream whose contents he never divulged, a Jain monk chose Bhishma, now in his 20s, to accompany him to the Parliament of the World's Religions in Chicago. Simultaneously puzzled, curious, and eager to see the fabled World's Fair that surrounded the Parliament, Bhishma accepted this mysterious summons. Leaving his young wife Lakshmi behind, he journeyed to America.

The Parliament was a revelation to Bhishma. Seeing people of all races and creeds conversing respectfully about their beliefs and sharing their practices with one another shook the young man's core assumptions about human nature and its possibilities. Perhaps the ways of peace could flourish in more than just isolated communities. Perhaps, someday, the world itself could be such a community.

And yet ... Bhishma need only look inside to see all forces that led to violence and war. He had not purged or purified his father's aggressive nature, but only contained it with arduous practices. Even if everyone like himself could be taught to do so, would not those forces inevitably, someday, somewhere, break out again? And once they did in even a single man, would not that man's violence break the shells of character that contained the violent natures of other men?

After the Parliament ended, Bhishma spent a day pacing the Chicago lakefront, turning the question over in his mind. He could see no answer. The vision of world peace that the Parliament had shown him seemed fatally unstable. No matter how well bottled, competitiveness and aggression would always break out again, and he saw no way for the contagion to be stopped.

During his wanderings Bhishma entered the Columbian Exposition, the vast White City of the World's Fair, now in its final weeks. He became entranced by a display of horseback riding by a tribe of aboriginal Americans, oddly called "Indians" like himself. Most interesting of all was the demonstration of "counting coup," a practice in which one Indian warrior proved his superior bravery and dexterity by quickly riding up behind an enemy and touching him with a brightly decorated coup stick, then riding away unharmed. In this way, an enemy might be shamed but not injured. It was a contest, but not a fatal one.

Suddenly Bhishma saw that this practice held the seed of a solution to his problem, if only he could develop it and teach it to the modern world. Given the right practices, aggression did not have to stay bottled up, but could be released without the bloodshed that motivated reprisal.

All during the voyage home, he turned this possibility over in his mind. The men of the 19^th (and soon the 20^th) century would not dress up in war paint and ride horses carrying ribboned sticks. What could be the modern equivalent of counting coup?

When he arrived home, his wife Lakshmi had prepared a meal for him: several vegetarian dishes and the pancake-like bread that Indians call nan. He took a nan from the stack and began tearing it into pieces, dipping each one into the vegetables and sauces as he explained his vision to Lakshmi.

Unlike many Indian wives of that era, Lakshmi was both educated and outspoken. Her mother had warned that her sharp tongue would keep her from finding a husband, but Bhishma had been charmed by this young woman who was so different from any other he had met. He had encouraged her to read and learn, and he rejoiced to have a wife who could share in his thinking.

"That," Lakshmi said when her husband finished describing his idea, "is the dumbest idea you've ever had."

Surprised and offended, Bhishma's long-contained temper burst out. The only available object was the nan in his hand, so he threw it at his wife, spraying green bits of palak all over her dress.

But Lakshmi was not easily intimidated into silence. She tore off another piece of nan and threw it back at him, then for good measure, grabbed an entire nan and struck him across the face with it.

Of course the soft bread did no harm, but Bhishma had never before felt so affronted. He grabbed a nan and struck her in return. In seconds they were chasing each other all over their home and whaling away at each other with soft pieces of bread.

Later, neither could remember who was the first to start laughing. But before long the food fight had turned into play rather than battle, and husband and wife eventually collapsed laughing onto the floor, the shredded nan still in their hands.

His long-contained aggression now released, Bhishma had seldom felt so light. As he lay laughing on the hard tiled floor, he realized that he had found what he was looking for. In a state of excitement, he lifted himself up and ran next door to describe his discovery to his neighbor, a young lawyer recently arrived in South Africa from Bombay: Mohandas Gandhi.

War and conflict, Bhishma told his neighbor, could be eliminated if everyone were taught the practice of nan violence.

Gandhi misunderstood completely.

UU World column: Unfinished With Christianity

2008-03-24T14:27:00.001-04:00

My latest column "Unfinished With Christianity" is up on the UU World web site. This would be a good place to post comments.

Ego and Western Common Sense

2008-03-18T13:30:00.001-04:00

Bertrand Russell once claimed that if he wanted to hear Aristotle's mistakes, all he had to do was listen to his housekeeper. Ideas, he thought, wafted downwards from the culture's most advanced minds, taking centuries or even millennia to settle in among the uneducated.

Lately I've been wondering how long it will take a set of ideas to make a shorter trip: From late 20^th century studies of the brain and its associated cognitive psychology to the larger educated public. Because when educated Western non-specialists talk about consciousness, and in particular about the kinds of questions raised by Eastern philosophies and spiritual practices, we still usually start from a "common sense" that to me seems rooted in a mistake philosophers made during the European Enlightenment of the 1600s.

If I had to sum up the Enlightenment mistake in one line it would be: Self consciousness is primary. Epitomized by Descartes' cogito ergo sum, the Enlightenment thinkers assumed that the rock-bottom of consciousness was the Self. Of course we know ourselves, they thought, and our knowledge of others is indirect, by analogy. I know how I feel when X happens, so maybe other people feel the same way.

One reason they made this mistake was that in those post-Luther but pre-Darwin days, you did not worry about how human consciousness arose: God made it. Consciousness could be a unique human spark completely unrelated to any other species' mental processes. You didn't have to explain how, if self consciousness was primary, a fly's tiny brain could support a sense of self.

But from a contemporary evolutionary perspective, self consciousness seems to arise very late in the game. It comes out of a more primitive form of consciousness that we might call situation consciousness. (All the terminology in this article is made up for the purpose of popularization. I'm not a cognitive scientist myself – just a fan – so I don't know what the standard usage is.) An event is happening and a reaction is called for. Imagine you're in a kitchen and a cookie is on the table. A self-conscious mental process would be something like: "I'm feeling hungry. Maybe I'll eat that cookie." But a situation-conscious process is more like: "Cookie. Eat." The situation-conscious mental field contains no I that has feelings and qualities and motives; there's just a situation and a reaction.

It's easy to imagine comparatively uncomplicated animals like reptiles or birds having some kind of situation consciousness, and maybe not having self consciousness at all. An animal could go a long way without self consciousness.

Built on top of situation consciousness is something we might call motive consciousness. Motive consciousness happens when you start to make a distinction between objects that obey purely physical laws and objects that have some form of volition or freedom. Hunting an animal is different from hunting an apple. If the apple slips out of your hand, it will fall to the ground and lie there; but if a rabbit slips out, it scurries off in some less predictable direction. A boulder rolling down a hill is very different from a tiger bounding down it.

In order to interact more effectively with volitional objects, the mind needs some concepts that describe mental states. Concepts like motive arise together with concepts that describe emotions – not so that we can think about ourselves, but so that we can think about other motivated beings. The rabbit runs a particular way because it is afraid, it wants to escape. A rabbit who hasn't noticed us yet acts completely differently – and an apple doesn't seem to care at all. Like situation consciousness, motive consciousness is entirely external – there's still no I with an interior life, just a world with more complicated objects in it, demanding more complex patterns of reaction.

Motive consciousness can lead to social consciousness. Concepts like friend, enemy, mate, and so on arise. (Not the words, necessarily. I'm using language to point to mental states, not claiming that words are present in the states themselves.) In the beginning, even social consciousness can still be external. The friend is a very complicated object indeed, but it is still part of the situation, something to react to.

At some point, though, you can't model the behavior of others without looking through their eyes back at yourself. Friend is backing away because she sees that I am angry. Her behavior makes no sense without accounting for her assessment of me. So I have to start modeling my inner state as part of the situation. And I can't understand the social roles assigned to others until I understand what social role I myself have been assigned. Am I male or female? Weak or strong? Fast or slow? Admired or despised? That's self consciousness.

When you understand self consciousness in this way, you see how cumbersome it can be. Self consciousness is not something that is just given; it's inherently circular – consciousness turned back on itself, the mind becoming part of its own model. Some aspects of my self-concept I can read directly from sensory cues – I can tell if I'm excited from my breathing or heartbeat. But am I honest? smart? deserving? How do I sense that? I might be jealous or depressed for some while before I notice. Another person might be the center of my awareness for weeks before I realize: I am in love.

And once you see how odd and roundabout and kludgy self-consciousness is, those spiritual quests to overcome ego start to make more sense. Self consciousness has a lot of baggage, a lot of overhead. Sometimes that baggage is worth carrying, but sometimes it isn't and yet you can't put it down. That's what all that zen-of-tennis stuff is about. When a hard serve is coming at you, you don't have time to be a social being that everyone is looking at and forming opinions about. You don't need to picture yourself through the eyes of all viewers or defend yourself against their possible judgments. You need to be back in the most primitive situation consciousness. Ball. Hit. You need to lose yourself.

The point isn't to eliminate ego, or (worse yet) not to form one in the first place. Self consciousness is one of evolution's great gifts. Being able to picture yourself and your inner states in detail can be a major advantage. Self consciousness opens the possibility that you might decide to become a better person. Having the self-awareness to say, "I'm drunk, someone else should drive" might save your life. When you're negotiating what role you will play in your major relationships, you need to be able to predict which promises you can actually keep. People who can't do those things are crippled.

But when you're windmilling your arms to avoid losing your balance and falling down the stairs, you don't need to be aware of the fact that you look silly, or to feel embarrassed about it. That's self consciousness run wild.

So the point of spiritual practice isn't ego elimination, it's ego management: How much me does this situation really require? Less? More? Do I have the skill to turn the me-dial up or down as needed? That's the kind of mastery that a good spiritual practice teaches.

But it's all going to seem very mysterious until you lose that Cartesian assumption that Self is given and stop imagining that self-overcoming is either unnatural or superhuman. Quite the opposite: Self is achieved. Self is hard work. No-Self is a relaxation, not a strain.

Someday soon, I hope, that will be common sense.

Some Assembly Required

2008-02-07T16:42:00.001-05:00

A service led by Doug Muder
at the Unitarian Church of Quincy, Illinois

February 3, 2008

Like most people who grow up in Quincy and move far away, but keep coming back, I’ve probably driven from here to Chicago every way there is. One of those ways goes through the small town of Ripley, where there used to be a little sign on Highway 24 – I don’t think it’s there any more – directing you to the Ripley Church of God.

One of my character flaws is that I lack a proper sense of reverence. And so, every time I passed that sign, the same irreverent phrase went through my mind: Believe it or not.

Something similar happens whenever I pass an Assembly of God church. You know what phrase pops into my mind then? Some assembly required. I picture a bunch of people with a God kit and an enormous set of directions, trying to figure out how to make the omnipotence fit together with the benevolence.

That’s probably not what they do in Assemblies of God. But it’s not a bad metaphor for what Unitarian Universalists do. Our religion doesn’t come to us as a finished product; some assembly is required. As George Marshall wrote: "Don’t come to a Unitarian Universalist church to be given a religion. Come to develop your own religion."

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about metaphors for Unitarian Universalism. For the last year and a half I’ve been writing a newcomer’s handbook for one of the UUA publishing houses. Trying to look at our faith through the eyes of a stranger, listening to the questions newcomers ask, and thinking about the things they typically misunderstand, has given me a new appreciation for the importance of metaphor. We sometimes think that if we just defined our terms with absolute precision and stated our principles exactly right, then everybody would understand.

But no, they wouldn’t.

Because someone who walks in the door with the wrong metaphor, someone who tries to stuff us into the wrong box … well, they ask the wrong questions. And after you’ve asked the wrong questions, even the best answers might not help you.

Here’s an example. When you tell people that Unitarians are free from creeds and dogmas, they inevitably ask – I’m sure you’ve heard this one – “So, can you believe anything you want?” It’s a reasonable question from a certain point of view. Because if nobody is telling you what to believe, well then … you can believe anything you want, right?

Unfortunately for us, it’s one of those have-you-stopped-beating-your-wife questions. Because if we answer “no, you can’t” then it sounds like Unitarianism really does tell people what to believe. But if we say “yes, you can believe anything you want” then our religion sounds whimsical and not very serious at all. “What do I want to believe today? I think I’ll believe … that I can fly!”

A religion like that might be amusing, but how is it going to see you through hard times in your life?

When yes and no are both the wrong answer, that’s a clue that some misbegotten metaphor is hiding in the background. What’s hiding in this question is an analogy between freedom of belief and freedom of speech. In speech, the either/or really works: If no one is telling you what to say, then you can say whatever you want. But belief actually doesn’t work that way. I can say whatever I want, but I can’t believe whatever I want. No one can. I want to believe that I haven’t changed a bit since I turned 30. But I can’t.

What Unitarianism offers is freedom from authority, not freedom from reality. Our beliefs don’t come from our wishes, they come from our lives. Your life has taught you certain things. Maybe those things aren’t written down in a book or stated in a creed. Maybe no one has ever given you permission to believe them. But you do. And the freedom of this church is that you can admit that you believe what you really do believe.

Here’s a metaphor I remember from growing up in a different religion: Church is where you study for your final exam. Again, there’s a logic to it. Judgment Day is coming. There will be questions. You’ll need answers. So go to church. They'll tell you the answers and keep repeating them until you have them down.

Metaphors have a way of sitting in your unconscious and influencing how you perceive things, even if you don’t realize that you’re using them. And if you come to a Unitarian church with the final-exam metaphor in your head, it’s not going to make much sense. Because we don’t give you the answers: Is there a God? Is there an afterlife? Should you be worshiping something or praying to someone? A Unitarian church will tell you that those are good questions and encourage you to work on them. That’s about what you should expect from a church where you have to develop your own religion.

But what good is a church like that? Imagine coming to the cram session for your history final, and the teacher won’t tell you when the Civil War ended. And the other students give all kinds of different answers: 1820 ... 1865 ... 1910 ... last Thursday. And it doesn’t bother them. They sit there and contradict each other and everybody seems happy.

If you bring the final exam metaphor to a Unitarian church, that’s how it looks. Afterlife? This person believes in reincarnation. That one expects to see her loved ones in Heaven. Somebody over there thinks death is final. But they all seem happy here. They don’t try to get each declared heretics and thrown out. They teach each other’s children. How does that work?

You can’t explain it without changing the metaphor. What if life isn’t the kind of class that has a final exam? What if it’s more like an art class? What if your life is a work of art that you are constructing day by day? Picture it. Here we have a work in progress: A Life. By … you.

How’s it going? You want to talk about it? If you get stuck you might wander around the studio and see what the other artists are doing. Their projects are different, but something might strike you. You might pick up something you can use.

And let me show you this other work in progress: Humanity. By – all of us. What do you think? It needs work. It’s still pretty ugly in some places. But I think it’s got potential. You want to pick up some tools and help out?

That change in metaphor changes all kinds of things. In art – or in any class where you’re trying to make something – only two things really matter:

The product. The actual piece of art that the world gets to see.
Your experience as an artist. The sense of inspiration. The ecstatic feeling you get when you fall into your work and everything starts coming together.

By contrast, your beliefs about art are not nearly so important. Unless they affect the product or your experience, why do they even matter? Imagine walking into an art class where nobody is making anything, they’re just reviewing answers for the multiple-choice final exam. What good is that?

Follow that metaphor back to life. The two really important things are:

What you do. The objective actions that you take in the world.
How you experience your life. Are you just getting by, passing the time? Or is your life vibrant, exciting, meaningful? Are you finding that place of fullness that we were meditating about?

Your beliefs about life – your theology and your philosophy – are secondary. They matter to the extent that they affect what you do and how you experience it. But in themselves they aren’t important.

Now, to some people this may sound like a religion that I just made up. And certainly not all UUs agree with what I’ve just said. But these ideas are well rooted in our heritage. The whole point of Universalism is that life has no final exam – everybody passes. Great Universalists like Hosea Ballou didn’t preach to gain converts for Heaven, but to spread the experience of God’s love here on Earth. And one of the most important sermons in Unitarian history, Theodore Parker's “The Transient and the Permanent in Christianity” placed the whole scaffolding of orthodox theology – the Trinity, the atonement, the infallibility of scripture – in the transient category. What was permanent? The Christian experience: “Religious doctrines and forms will always differ,” he said. “But the Christianity holy men feel in the heart, the Christ that is born within us, is always the same thing to each soul that feels it.”

President John Adams, that good Unitarian from First Parish in Quincy, Massachusetts, said, “I do not attach much importance to creeds because I believe he cannot be wrong whose life is right." As far back as the 1600s, Spinoza was picturing a congregation in which each person believes something a little different from his neighbor. He wrote: “Each person – seeing that he is the best judge of his own character – should adopt whatever beliefs he thinks best adapted to strengthen his love of justice.”

To sum up, if you have beliefs that let you live with your eyes open, give you an enthusiasm or a deep satisfaction with your life, and inspire you to live kindly and be a force for good in the world, then as a Unitarian Universalist I am happy for you – whether I agree with you or not. I’m happy for you to belong to my church, and I’m happy for you preach from our pulpit, and I’m happy for you to teach Unitarian children. Because living comes first; believing is secondary.

Let’s do one more newcomer question: Could Hitler be a Unitarian?

Now, the people who ask this question usually ask it very nicely. They aren’t comparing us to Hitler. They’re just trying to find our boundaries. Is anything over the line? (Of course, Hitler is dead and even if he were alive he wouldn’t be walking around free. But let’s ignore that and take Hitler as a stand-in for anyone who has done some great evil.)

The most superficial version of this question is whether Hitler could attend a UU church. And there I think that as long as he behaved himself, the answer is yes. I’m sure having Hitler in the room would make a lot of us uncomfortable. It would make me uncomfortable. But we’d be balancing that discomfort against an idea that comes out of our Universalist heritage: We don’t give up on people. We don’t assume that anyone is irredeemable. The likelihood that a Hitler could turn his life around may be very, very small. But to the extent that Universalists believe in miracles, those are the kinds of miracles we believe in.

The challenging question, though, isn’t “Could Hitler change into a Unitarian?” but “Could Hitler stay the way he was and be a Unitarian?” There are, after all, Christian Unitarians and Buddhist Unitarians and atheist Unitarians. Could there be Nazi Unitarians?

There I think the answer is no. But explaining why takes us into another set of unfortunate metaphors.

The point of asking about Nazi Unitarians is to find a boundary. The questioner expects us to say “No, that’s over the line.” And then we’ll have to explain where the line is.

The underlying metaphor is that a religion is a territory with frontiers to be defended.

Eighty years ago, L. B. Fisher was already rejecting this metaphor. “Universalists are often asked to tell where they stand,” he wrote. “The only true answer to give to this question is that we do not stand at all, we move. Or we are asked to state our position. Again, we can only answer that we are not staying to defend any position. We are on the march.”

That’s not us.

There never was a Golden Age of Unitarianism. We aren’t trying to get back to Eden, or the days of the prophets, or the early Christian community, or the Caliphate, or the Reformation, or even the 1950s. We have had some great teachers in our movement, people like William Ellery Channing and James Luther Adams and Ralph Waldo Emerson. But none of them gets to have the last word. Because as brilliant as they were, their words were human words, just like ours. The conversation goes on.

You see, Unitarianism is not a museum, it’s a laboratory. We’re not preserving the truths of our ancestors; we’re using them, experimenting with them, and trying to make them better.

And Unitarianism is not a walled city whose borders you can trace on a map. It’s a caravan. We move; we are on the march. We aren’t defending lines in the sand, we’re traveling. We have all joined the caravan at different points. We carry different baggage. We progress at different speeds. But we’re on the road together, and we’re doing our best to help each other along the way.

Now, caravans don’t have borders. There are scouts running ahead, and some will be followed and some won’t. There are stragglers. There are outliers. Some people will turn in a different direction, and some will wander into the desert and get lost. You can’t draw a boundary around a caravan and say exactly who’s in and who’s out. But one thing you can say with some certainty is that the people you meet coming the opposite way are not part of the caravan. And while some of them may turn around and decide to join you, the ones that don’t turn around are not joining.

And that’s how I respond to the idea of Nazi Unitarians. We may not be able to say exactly where this caravan is going, but it has a history, it has a direction. For centuries, for as long as we’ve been on the road, we have been traveling in some very un-Nazi directions: towards greater freedom, more acceptance of difference, less violence, and an ever-wider circle of compassion.

Are those divine, unquestionable truths? Not at all. We continue to test them. We continue to experiment and improve and elaborate. And we keep moving. But if you want to undo that whole history, you’re not just pointing in a new direction. You’re asking us to go back and start over. It would be a new caravan then. It wouldn’t be Unitarian Universalism.

And future generations of Unitarian Universalists would dishonor our memory if they stopped here and built a fortress and started defending its boundaries. Half a century ago, Brock Chisholm put it like this: “Unless we are very careful, very careful indeed, and very conscientious, there is still great danger that our children may turn out to be the same kind of people we are.”

And Theodore Parker said, “Progressive development does not end with us.” May that be as true in our generation as it was in his.

Collecting My UU-FAQ

2008-01-04T10:51:00.000-05:00

Back in 2005-2006 I did a series of pieces I called the UU-FAQ. It was the beginning of some thinking that I'm trying to put into a book now.

But I got so involved in the book project that I never did what I intended: collect the UU-FAQ links together in one place. Anyway, here they are:

I: Creedless Religion
II: UU Principles
III: Covenants
IV: Hyphenated UUs
V: God, Miracles, and Prayer
VI: Death
VII: Right and Wrong
VIII: Politics.

There's a bunch of stuff I'd probably say differently now, but (in the interest of getting something done) I've decided not to tinker with it. Comments welcome.

Keeping Sol in Solstice

2007-12-21T09:24:00.000-05:00

At this time of year I like to go back to a story I wrote in 1992. It's called Midwinter, and it's an imaginative reconstruction of how an ancient rural culture might have celebrated the winter solstice.

It's told from the point of view of the grand-daughter of the old wise woman. I wrote it to be read out loud, and it's suitable for children. Enjoy.

Who's Not a Famous UU?

2007-12-01T08:04:00.000-05:00

Lately I've been going through those "Famous UUs" lists and trying to figure out why we claim this person or that one: Do (or did) this person ever belong to a UU (or Unitarian or Universalist) congregation? (John Adams, for example, belonged to First Parish in Quincy, Massachusetts.) Did s/he ever claim the UU (or U or U) label in public or in writing? (Thomas Jefferson called himself a Unitarian -- or rather "an Unitarian" -- in some of his letters.) In the days before Unitarian or Universalist congregations got organized, did s/he hold one of the defining beliefs: universal salvation or non-trinitarianism? (Isaac Newton and John Locke seem to have been non-trinitarians. Ethan Allen believed in universal salvation.) Or are we just claiming this person for no reason other than because we want to identify with him/her?

The problem I'm having is that these Famous UU lists take on an urban legend quality. If I decide to add somebody ridiculous -- Confucius, say -- to my list of Famous UUs, then my list starts showing up on Google and people copy it. Before long there are twenty web sites claiming that Confucius was a UU, and it's impossible to track down who first made that claim or what they were thinking.

So anyway, I've been hacking through these lists trying to figure out what the basis for the claims are, and it occurred to me that we need to start putting negative results out there, so that a "Confucius was not a UU" article will show up when people google "confucius UU".

Let me start with Carl Sandburg. I know why people want to claim him: Not only was he the kind of guy who would fit in well in a UU congregation, but he went to Lombard College, which was started by the Universalists. In the 1961 biography by Harry Golden (the first one I pulled off the shelf at my local library) it says that Sandburg read a lot of Universalism at Lombard and "to this day he is perfect in all the arguments that God is good and will not send us to hell."

But Golden goes on to say: "Since his confirmation at age thirteen in the Lutheran Church of Galesburg, however, Sandburg has not been on the membership rolls of any established church or religious institution." Golden mentions that various denominations, including the Unitarians, sometimes claim Sandburg, and so he asked Sandburg "the direct question" of what religion he held. He got this answer:

I am a Christian, a Quaker, a Moslem, a Buddhist, a Shintoist, a Confucian, and maybe a Catholic pantheist or a Joan of Arc who hears voices. I am all of these and more. Definitely I have more religions than I have time or zeal to practice in true faith.

Now, that's a great answer for a UU to give. But given the chance to label his religion, Sandburg listed almost everything except Unitarian and Universalist. I think we've got to accept that.

Another name that shows up on a lot of lists is Alexander Graham Bell. Even the not-specifically-UU site adherents.com has him listed as a UU. (The fact that they have him as a UU and not a Unitarian or Universalist probably means that they just copied his name from one of our lists.) But I can't find any evidence to support that claim. On the contrary, the National Presbyterian Church lists Bell as one of the worshippers at its predecessor, the Covenant Presbyterian Church. That's a lot more specific than anything I can find connecting him to Unitarianism or Universalism.

I'll try to post more negative results as I get them. Feel free to add your own (positive or negative) research to the comments. Anybody have anything definite about Ray Bradbury or Paul Newman?

One more thing about the working class

2007-10-14T21:45:00.000-04:00

The cover article of the Fall, 2007 UU World, "Not My Father's Religion" has netted me more mail than anything I've ever written. Almost all of it was very thoughtful and some people told me their personal stories of being working class UUs or of having working class parents who don't understand why they became UUs. I didn't manage to write back to everybody who deserved a response, but I tried.

I keep thinking I'm going to do a summing-up post of everything I learned from the responses I got, but that seems to be one of those projects that is too grand and wonderful to actually manifest in this world. Instead I'll just toss this out to acquire more comments. As I remember things, I'll add them to this thread as comments.

Pete Stark: Unbeliever in Congress

2007-10-14T21:23:00.000-04:00

My latest UUworld.org column has been up for about a week now. It's about Congressman Pete Stark from California, who last March came out in public as "a Unitarian who who does not believe in a supreme being." In September I attended a talk he gave at Harvard, in which he accepted the Humanist of the Year award from the Harvard Humanist Chaplaincy.

It was an interesting talk, because Stark's spiritual journey points out the difference between two kinds of non-theists: Those for whom unbelief is a major part of their identity, and those who just never get around to thinking too deeply about God, because they're living life just fine without a deity. (In the column I refer to the two types as tooth-fairy unbelievers and purple-cow unbelievers.) Stark is the second kind, a purple-cow unbeliever.

It's an interesting question, I think, whether purple-cow unbelievers can be pulled together into a movement, and if so, whether it could be the same movement as tooth-fairy unbelievers.

There's no comment feature on the UUWorld.org site, so you can post your responses here.

Jesus has annexed my town

2007-09-27T13:19:00.000-04:00

"Nashua belongs to Jesus Christ."

That's the slogan on the bumper sticker of a car in the parking lot of my apartment complex in Nashua, New Hampshire. I've seen it several times over the last few weeks. It's either a campaign of some sort, or else I keep noticing the same two or three cars. I'd ask somebody, but the cars are always either empty or moving.

To me it sounds like a threat, like non-Christians should get out of town or something. Is that paranoid? Maybe the people who drive these cars are just clueless and don't realize that it sounds that way.

What do the rest of you think? Have you run into this in your town? What's it supposed to mean?

Reflections on the Beginning of Another Church Year

2007-09-06T10:53:00.000-04:00

It seems like an odd thing to do, when you stop and think about it.

Why give up a weekend morning, make yourself and your family presentable, and go to church? Why join its committees and work on its projects? Don't you have more urgent things to do with your time? Why contribute money that you surely could apply to some other purpose, money that you could put aside towards (say) a nice vacation or use to pay down that worrisome balance on your credit card?

Why church?

The traditional churches have a simple answer: Eternity. It seems like a good deal they offer: a little bit of trouble and expense now in exchange for eternal bliss. Or else take your chances on damnation. What's it going to be? You have fire insurance, don't you? Why not take out a little hellfire insurance?

But our church can't make that pitch. We've trained you (if you needed it) not to be so gullible, not to jump at every threat or promise that someone makes in an authoritative tone, not to jerk like a puppet at every thou-shalt or thou-shalt-not you read in some allegedly ancient text. Why shalt thou? Why shalt thou not? Who is this voice that calls itself God? Is there a man behind that curtain? Is there an all-too-human all-too-earthly church?

Why should we (who know better) make a church? Even a "free" church, as we call it? Would animals, taken back to the plains of Africa and released, build themselves a zoo? Even a "free" zoo, with cages that didn't lock? Would they surround themselves with wire and stay on moated islands just for old times' sake?

No.

So why a church?

You don't need another demand on your attention. Forget eternal life, day-to-day life is already more than enough to think about. Job, health, home, family -- couldn't you use a second 24 hours every day just to keep up with them? Or to get away from them and finally have some time for yourself? Maybe once there were homemakers who needed church as an excuse to get out of the house for a while. Maybe there were workers who were grateful to be told to sit down and do nothing on a Sunday morning.

But those days are over, aren't they?

Or maybe they aren't. You don't work 16 hours a day in the mines or the mills. You don't beat rugs with a stick or haul water from the well or bake your family's bread from scratch (unless you want to). But there's always something, isn't there? Something that a better version of yourself would be doing. Stuff to put in order. Plans to make, letters to write, things that someone is going to expect you to know and understand and deal with. Soon. Maybe already.

Sometimes life is like one of those dreams where you're running from something and don't believe that you're going to get away. You think you need to run faster, but what you really need is to wake up.

Wake up.

Eternity? You could use an excuse to step back and think about next month. Or a year from now. Or five. Where is it all going, this life you've made? Sometimes that question hits you in spite of the clothes in the hamper and the meeting tomorrow morning and the kids who are waiting for someone to pick them up. Where is it all going?

Maybe it hits you on a round-numbered birthday. Or out of the blue, when you spot a white hair or hear the news about that friend you haven't seen since almost forever.

Or maybe it comes after one of those moments when time seems to stop. The last sliver of the red sun peeks out over the ocean. Or the engine hums and the interstate rolls past and you know all the lyrics to the song on the radio. Or the symphony is over, but its last note still stretches out in your mind; you stay in your seat just a little longer so that you don't break it. The moment, for reasons of its own, doesn't run away. It lingers. And when time starts again, that's when it occurs to you to wonder:

Where is it all going?

It's not even about death, not really. If the thread of your life suddenly snapped, well, then it would be over and you probably wouldn't be anywhere where you could think about it. (Or if you were, then that would be a different thread, still holding.) That might even be the best way to die, to be racing through your life and then (suddenly) not.

No, it isn't death that hits you. It's loss. Something slips into the unrecoverable past and you wonder: Was I supposed to do something with that? The tautness of your face, the zip on your fastball, the youthful energy that you seemed to have only a few days ago. Were you supposed to do something with that? The mentor who always seemed to have an answer, the grandmother who knew all the stories -- now they stare at you blankly and you wonder: Was I supposed to learn something from them? Was there some message I was supposed to hear so that I could carry it and pass it on? Did I miss it?

Maybe. Or maybe you can still remember it, if you stop and think.

And it's not just time, it's space. Somewhere, right now, children are dying from diseases that have been curable for half a century. Or just hunger, maybe, which has been curable forever. Wars are being fought, and people are banging the drums to start new ones. Some people are committing crimes, while others are looking at the options society offers them legally and realizing that none of them are acceptable. The natural world is still killing people with floods and earthquakes. Somewhere, right now, a perfectly good and innocent person is helplessly waiting for a hero to come.

Who? You? You can't. The dishes are piled in the sink and the checkbook is unbalanced and a voice on TV is saying that everything would be fine if only you bought this product. The kids' homework isn't done and the yard needs mowing and the in-laws are coming over tomorrow.

It's huge, the world is. It's full of people and they all want something. Something of yours, maybe. Maybe they should even have it, and maybe you'd even be willing to give it to them if only you knew of a path from your door to theirs. But you don't.

Or maybe it's all just another reality TV show. Who will get off that island and win the million dollars? Will that promising young actress ever stop drinking and get her life together? Is that politician really gay? Did that celebrity really murder his wife?

What's real? What isn't? What should you care about and why? Who has the time to sort it all out?

Nobody.

At least, no single person does, if they have to do it all by themselves. Nobody has the time. Nobody has the knowledge. Nobody is smart enough.

Not alone. Not by themselves.

But what if a bunch of us got together? Think about it. We could set aside some time to meet. We could remind each other to take that step back and look at the bigger picture. We could compare notes about what's important and what isn't. Maybe, together, we could sort some things out. Maybe, if we met often enough, we could learn to know each other and trust each other, so that when I get running so fast that I can't remember who I want to be, you can remember for me. And maybe I can remember for you. Maybe once in a while we could give each other a good shake, so that we can stop running and wake up.

We could try it.

We could talk about what's going on in time and space (or even outside of time and space, if it seems important for some reason). And among us all, on any given day, there might be somebody who knows what we need to know and understands what we need to do. Not the same person every time, but somebody. Or maybe we'll all bring a piece of the puzzle, and put a few of them together. Maybe enough to make out a picture.

It might work. It'd be a start, at least. Maybe, while we were doing it, we'd think of something else, something better.

So what would we call it, this bunch of people getting together to remind each other of our best selves, to wake each other up, to pool our attention and try to deal with a world that is too much for each of us alone? We could make up a new word for it. Or we could recycle an old word that (as far as I'm concerned) has been sitting around uselessly for generations now.

We could call it a church.

What do you think? We could try it. It might work.

See you Sunday, maybe? I think I'll be there.

Wild speculation

2007-08-15T12:08:00.000-04:00

My second UUworld.org column went up Monday. It's called Drops of Water Turn a Mill and it speculates about the long-term effect that the Internet will have on religion. I also think it has one of my better opening lines:

I doubt I will ever forget the moment when I saw the White House destroyed by aliens.

The bulk of the column is about the relationship between media and how people think, a subject that shows up in Al Gore's latest book The Assault on Reason and in Neil Postman's 1980s classic Amusing Ourselves to Death. If the Internet gives us new experiences and changes the way we think, it's also likely to change the way we do religion.

Take a look, then come back here to comment.

The most subversive book I've read this summer ...

2007-07-27T13:31:00.000-04:00

... is a children's fantasy: Un Lun Dun by China Mieville.

To get the gist of Un Lun Dun, picture this standard fantasy pattern: There's a parallel world (UnLondon) in which magic works, inanimate objects move and talk on their own, and so forth. This world is facing a crisis, but there are prophecies of a Chosen One who will save the day by performing a series of great ... oh, never mind.

Within about five minutes of the Chosen One's appearance, it's obvious that none of that is going to work. If the world is going to be saved, an Unchosen One is going to have to pick up the slack and make something up. And she's running out of time, so she's going to have to convince UnLondoners that they don't have to do things by the book, they don't need answers to all the questions they thought they needed, and they don't have perform the quests the prophecies describe. But they do have to get their act together and do something right away. And they're going to have to do it themselves, because the predestined messiah wasn't up to the job.

So inside a world of magic rich and imaginative enough to enthrall any 10-year-old runs the following message: We all thought we knew how the world was supposed to be and the way things were supposed to go, but that's not happening so we're going to have to think for ourselves now.

Even more subversively, the novel doesn't jump to the opposite extreme and support the anti-religious rants of Christopher Hitchens or Sam Harris. One of the first allies of the Unchosen One is the book of prophecies itself -- which is animate, of course, and deeply distressed about its own failures. It turns out that the tales of the Chosen One, in spite of their overall wrongness, contain a great deal of useful information -- after you sift them through your common sense.

In other words, Un Lun Dun is a parable of liberal religion. In terms a child can understand, it models respect for scripture without subservience to it. After you challenge all the assumptions and throw out everything that isn't going to work, you still have something left. But what you have left is a useful member of your team, not an authoritarian leader.

So if you think of liberal religion as an insincere compromise between humanism and fundamentalism, or as an intellectual nuance that the rabble could never understand -- think again. It can be laid out in terms so clear and sensible a child can understand them.

Building Your Own Ecclesiology

2007-07-27T08:31:00.000-04:00

The title says it all, right? Well, it does after it's defined: ecclesiology means "theory of church".

This is a big hole in UU adult religious education. We have "Building Your Own Theology" to help individuals figure out what they think about the big questions of individual human life. And occasionally we have workshops to help churches find a mission statement, or arrive at some other expression of their collective purpose. But there's no introspective what-I-think-about-us course. We need one.

As some of you know, I'm in the process of writing a UU 101 book for Skinner Press. Most of the time I'm just putting words around stuff that is widely known and understood. But when it comes to ecclesiology -- what a church is about and why you might want to be part of one -- I'm having to wing it a lot more.

And that speaks to a disconnect I find at my local church. On the one hand I sense a hunger for deeper involvement in a lot of people. On the other hand, there are a lot of things not getting done. There's a gulf between the people who are waiting for volunteers and the people who would like to be invited to participate in something important and meaningful. There's not a widely held vision of church that makes it natural to jump in here or there, or to create something new that the church needs.

So I picture BYOE like this: It presents a lot of different visions of what a church might be and the role it might play in someone's life. And then it asks you to claim such a vision for yourself: What do YOU think is going on here and how do you see the you/church relationship? What role could the church fill in your life and what role could you fill in the church's life?

Doing this in a group would have an added advantage of providing perspective. Somebody who is looking for allies in social action will be in a group with somebody who is looking for support in spiritual growth and with somebody who is looking for a village to help raise a child. Each of them could be inspired to envision a more holistic church than the one that fulfills their personal needs. (And that, I guess, is part of my ecclesiology: Church pulls us into something larger than ourselves.)

At the end you don't write a credo (I believe) you write a sumus: We are.

The Go(o)d Crutch

2007-07-08T08:55:00.000-04:00

I've often heard atheists say that belief in God is a crutch. If you need to believe that some Big Father in the Sky is going to make your life come out all right, that He's going to punish the Evil and reward the Good, or that He's set up some special realm where you'll understand all mysteries and get to see your dead loved ones again – well, that's because you're crippled. You're just not up to facing the world the way it is.

Personally, I have a lot of ambivalence about atheism, to the point that I dither about whether to use the pronoun we or they when I talk about atheists. But I think this crutch metaphor deserves a closer look than it usually gets, and in the end I'm not sure who it really serves. Theists sometimes turn it around: Humans, they observe, are all crippled in one way or another. And who is more pathetic than a cripple too proud to use a crutch.

Let's back up. To use the word God in any kind of a reasonable discussion, I need to make a distinction between God the hypothetical ruler of the Universe, and the concept of God in people's minds. We might (inadequately) label them as the Objective God and the Subjective God. The reason I sometimes consider myself an atheist is that I don't know how to talk about the Objective God in any sensible way. Almost everything I hear about the Objective God sounds like gibberish to me. (Theists might claim that this just makes me a mystic rather than an atheist, which is certainly arguable.)

But the Subjective God is another topic entirely. When you talk about the Objective God, "Does He/She/It exist?" can be a reasonable question. But when you talk about the Subjective God, who obviously does exist, the better question is "Should He/She/It exist?"

To which I say: Sometimes, for some people, yes. Sometimes for me, in fact, though less and less often as I get older. I might project that process forward, and imagine that if I ever achieve perfect maturity, I'll be a 100% atheist.

Or I might not.

In order to explain why, I need to make another objective/subjective distinction, though fortunately this time I can steal terminology from Jung rather than make it up myself. Let's think of people as the objective beings who wander around in the world, and of characters as the corresponding ideas in our heads. Characters are woefully inadequate ways to think about people, but they're all we've got. Usually the inadequacy doesn't get us into too much trouble, which is probably why our brains evolved to think this way.

The inadequacy is most notable and problematic when we introspect. Each of us is an objective being-in-the-world that Jung called a Self. And each of us also conceives of himself/herself as a character that Jung calls an Ego. The two never match. They can't; the human mind just isn't set up to represent itself. Which makes sense, if you think about it. When homo habilis roamed the plains of Africa, acute introspection probably wasn't a deciding survival factor.

As we mature, we can adjust the Ego to describe the Self ever better, but another piece of maturity is to realize that the description will never be perfect. The Self always contains undescribed depths and unrealized potentials, which is why it's so often worthwhile to try things even if you know you can't do them. (I used to go through decks of playing cards and guess red or black. I expected to average a 50/50 score: 26 right out of 52. Instead I averaged somewhere between 28 and 29. That turns out to be the score a card-counter would expect. I hadn't consciously thought of that strategy, but I managed to carry it out all the same.)

A lot of religion and psychology – and magick for that matter – amounts to a series of tricks that allow us to unlock undescribed powers of the Self without breaking our Egos. (As limiting as an Ego is, you'd be lost without one. You might want to reshape yours a little, or step outside of it once in a while, but you definitely don't want to break it.) Often such tricks are innocuous, and we use them without thinking about it. I used to know a woman who strongly believed that she had no head for finance, but that I did. So she'd call me when she had to make a financial decision and we'd talk it through. One day she made a major decision without discussing it, and later described the process like this: "I tried to call you, but you weren't home. And then I realized that I knew what you would say. So I just did that."

Now, where did that financial thinking happen? In her Self, obviously, unless you postulate some telepathic connection I was unaware of. She couldn't do the thinking inside her Ego, though, because her Ego had no head for finance. But the Self includes not just the Ego, but all the characters in a person's head. So she did the thinking inside the character that represented me.

Jung calls that projection. It's not good or bad, it's just one of the ways the mind works. One time when my godson was four, we both got stung by bees, probably because I didn't react to the situation fast enough. (My father, by contrast, once heroically charged into a swarm of hornets and plucked me out unharmed.) Afterwards, I thought my godson was angry with me. It took a bit of time to realize that I was angry with me, and he was staying away from me because I was so obviously angry at someone. I had represented the anger in my mind by projecting it onto him.

Some projections are nastier. You may, for example, maintain a racist character in your head, maybe a grandfather or an uncle. If you're white and you see a black person, you might think, "Grandpa would call that person a nigger, and tell me to watch out for him." And so the racist thought gets to enter your head without dirtying your Ego.

Projection is another word that often shows up in atheist discussions of God. God is a screen onto which the faithful project their hopes and desires. This is generally presented as a bad thing. But is it really? Might not some projections be useful crutches?

Consider guilt and forgiveness. Guilt evolved for good reasons: It reminds us that we have wronged someone and need to make restitution or change our future behavior. A person incapable of feeling such guilt would be a sociopath, and a tribe of sociopaths wouldn't survive. But we all know people whose guilt has gotten out of hand. They feel guilty about accidents that they can't avoid by changing their behavior, and maybe there's nothing (or nothing more) they can do to make things right. Their best option at this point is let themselves off the hook and get on with life.

The Self can do that. It is totally within the power of the Self to interrupt the guilt process and send the all-clear signal of forgiveness. If you consciously had access to all the powers of the Self -- if the management of them were part of your Ego -- you could just decide to stop feeling guilty about something. But how many people have an Ego wise enough to handle such a power? If turning off guilt were as simple as scratching an itch, who could resist? The world would be overrun with sociopaths.

Instead, to the extent that people are aware of the forgiveness power at all, they usually project it. That's what society teaches us to do, and who can argue with the wisdom of it? Some of the power gets projected onto the characters we believe we have wronged -- if they say it's OK to forgive ourselves, we will. But some of the people we've wronged are dead, and others are too petty or resentful to use the forgiveness power responsibly. Sometimes we've wronged entire groups with no obvious spokesman. So it makes sense to give the forgiveness power to some other character as well. And while we're at it, it would make sense to project our wisdom and our sense of justice onto that character too, so that it would use the forgiveness power for the greater good.

Let's call that character God. And now that we have a subjective God, let's assign Him/Her/It a whole lot of other Self-powers that our Egos are unable or unworthy to command. Let's project the self-love that we're afraid we don't deserve, the compassion that would break our hearts, the judgment we can't face, the social outrage that would consume us, and the foresight that we're afraid to use.

That God as I've described Him (I've read a lot about female versions of the character, but the male version is the one I was taught to imagine) is a crutch. A totally enlightened, totally mature person should be able to claim all that power and wisdom and compassion as his or her own, without projecting it onto a character who may or may not correspond to anything in the world.

Know any such people? Me neither.

The atheists I've met are, as a group, no closer to total maturity and enlightenment than the theists. Some of them find other characters on which to project the power of the Self, some take it into their Egos and abuse it, and others just learn to live without it -- like cripples who are too proud to use a crutch.

Theists, as a group, have their own problems. Some God-characters are even less worthy to wield power than the Egos they stand in for. They forgive -- or encourage or even demand -- slavery or genocide or some other hideous evil. Or they are puppets for corrupt institutions or individuals, who want to hijack your Self-power and abuse it. Just turning those powers off would, in many cases, be a step forward.

But in other cases it wouldn't. Even Nietzsche recognized that. When Zarathustra meets the saint in the forest, he refuses to pass on his revelation that God is dead. "What could I have to give you?" he asks. "Best I should leave before I take something from you."

And so, as much as I wish for all people to come into their power and wield it responsibly, and while I continue to hope for my own enlightened atheistic future, when I meet people whose God-character is doing a reasonable job I try not to disturb them.

So worship on, good theists. I'm just passing through, and I'll try to leave before I'm tempted to steal or break anything valuable. And maybe, since I'm here anyway, you wouldn't mind if I picked up a hymnal and sang a verse or two.

T/F? WTF!

2007-07-06T08:48:00.000-04:00

I must be religiously illiterate.

Steven Prothero, author of Religious Literacy and chair of Boston University's religion department had an article in the July 2-9 issue of Newsweek. It was part of a true/false series of articles, and his was "True or False: the Major Religions are all Alike." Answer: False.

I was appalled.

Now, it isn't that I think the answer should be True, though if I were on a debate team I think I could defend that point. I'm appalled at the whole idea that someone with any depth of understanding in religion would answer the question either way. Even though I've never been Jewish, I somehow acquired an Inner Rabbi who answers questions with questions. And if there was ever a time to let him out, this is it. The right answer to "Are the major religions all alike?" is "Why are you asking?"

Anytime you look at another person, you can see either similarity or difference. Focusing on one or the other is a choice. Are you like Gandhi? Of course you are, and of course you aren't. Are you like Hitler? Same thing. Why are you asking?

Either choice -- similarity or difference -- can be used to enrich our understanding of the other person or diminish it. Which one am I trying to do? Am I focusing on similarity so that I can have a deeper sense of compassion, so that I can imagine the other person's motives in the rich, full way that I imagine my own? Or am I doing it to deny other people their separate identities, reject their uniqueness, and make their point of view go away? It makes a difference.

Conversely, I can pay attention to differences in order to envision other people more fully and treat them better. (I like cheeseburgers, but my Hindu friend is offended by them -- don't offer him one.) Or I can do it in order to demonize them, to project Evil onto them and claim Good for myself.

And you can't answer this question without noticing that the subtext of any discussion of Major Religions these days is the Western Judeo-Christian tradition and Islam. And the subtext of any Christianity/Islam discussion is Iraq.

The Bush administration's rhetoric includes both similarity and difference, but uses both of them to diminish our vision of the Iraqis rather than enrich it. The Good Iraqis are just like us: They want freedom and democracy and capitalism just like we have in America, and they trust American motives the same way we do. The Bad Iraqis are totally other: They hate freedom and they love death -- their own or anybody else's.

So, Dr. Prothero, what if it's President Bush coming to you and asking: "Are all major religions the same?" Do you want to say True and reinforce the notion that the Good Iraqis are just like us? Or do you want to say False and endorse the idea that the Bad Iraqis are totally other?

Or do you want to push back and say: "Why are you asking?"

David Korten's Big Theory

2007-07-03T12:31:00.000-04:00

It took me a while to get a handle on David Korten and his "Great Turning" notion. I was assigned to cover his talk at the UU General Assembly in Portland, so I read his book The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community. As I said in my Portland, Ho! entry, the book pushed a lot of my buttons, so I had to work through that before I could cover his talk with any objectivity. My view of my role as journalist made that all the more important: I was working for the UUA web site, and the UUA was essentially Korten's host. I don't think that would have obligated me to whitewash what he said, but I do think it obligated me to give him every chance to get his points across. I believe I managed to do that in my account of his presentation.

Part of my problem was nothing personal about Korten, but is something that comes up whenever I read anti-corporate, anti-globalist authors. I share a lot of their conclusions, but for some reason our minds work differently, so that I have trouble pulling any testable hypotheses out of their big theories. So their writings seem to me to have a vaporous quality. They belabor points that seem obvious to me, while ignoring other questions that seem more fundamental. (Probably they think the same things about my writing, if they notice it.)

Anyway, the Great Turning is one of the biggest theories imaginable. It says that human civilization took a wrong turn five thousand years ago and chose to emphasize dominance over cooperation. A whole host of problems is leading to our final realization of the unsustainability of that choice, so that now we have to turn away from dominance and back towards cooperation. It ties together a bunch of ideas of varying degrees of acceptance, from more-or-less established theories like global warming to controversial ones like peak oil, the prehistoric matriarchy, intelligent design, a hierarchical theory of spiritual maturity, framing, and several others that may have slipped my mind.

Now, I love big theories. When postmodernists deride them as "master narratives" I reply: "You say that as if it were a bad thing." My notes these days are full of preparations to write something about how changes in media have influenced the history of religious thought, which certainly qualifies as a big, speculative theory. (You can see the beginning of that theory in my piece from last summer about the relationship between ritual and the preverbal mindset.) But I can't make sense of such a theory until I've answered these questions: Why are we doing this? What questions motivated this whole construction? What parts of the theory are really central, and which ones did we fill in later to patch the holes?

Eventually I came up with answers that satisfied me. Korten started out writing about corporations and globalization in books like When Corporations Rule the World. His arguments then were comparatively present-centered: Corporations are legal abominations that are obligated to seek profit at the expense of every other human value; free-trade agreements are ways for corporations to establish their agenda as paramount and to override or preempt any democratic attempt to favor non-corporate values; poor nations and poor communities are not going to be able to advance until they are able to pursue their own interests democratically rather than being dominated by foreign corporations.

So far, so good. I can translate all this into stuff that makes sense to me.

Then 9/11 happened, and suddenly the anti-corporate arguments seemed wholly inadequate to the challenge. Bush's anti-terrorist agenda swept away everything in its path, and while it seemed intimately connected to the corporate agenda, its arguments hit people on some whole other level. People who ought to have known better started repeating its slogans.

That's when Korten realized he needed a bigger theory, something that would explain not just why corporations and governments were doing things, but why those things garnered the enthusiastic support of ordinary people. That led him to the opposing visions of Empire and Earth Community. ("Empire" is Korten's re-labeling of the feminist "Patriarchy", which I think is a good change. It reminds me of Philip Dick's novel VALIS and its enigmatic line "The Empire never ended.")

These visions could stand on their own in the present, but Korten finds them more compelling if they're attached to a historical big theory, which is where the prehistoric matriarchy and the five-thousand-years-of-Empire come in. I don't find either of these theories all that convincing, so I'm happy to discover that they're separable from the rest.

Then he needs an argument that Empire is heading towards a crack-up. This is where global warming, peak oil, the coming collapse of the dollar, etc. come in. Some of these supporting theories are a whole lot more convincing than the others, so it's important to realize that you just need something in this slot. If you happen to believe that there's a whole lot more oil in the ground than pessimists think, or have an argument that explains why the trade deficit is not such a big deal, that doesn't torpedo the whole Great Turning.

Finally, the Great Turning comes with an action plan, and that plan starts with changing popular worldviews by changing the stories we tell. He doesn't use the term "framing", but that's what it is. Lakoff did it better in Moral Politics. Korten identifies three big stories (i.e. frames) that need to be changed from an Empire version to an Earth Community version: the prosperity story, the security story, and the meaning story. In each case, I found that the Empire version was too much of a caricature and the Earth Community story wasn't compelling. But this is fixable. I think I can write better Earth Community stories, and maybe I will. I don't think Korten would mind.

Korten's section on meaning stories is really awful. He identifies meaning stories with creation stories and gives two parallel Empire versions: the Calvinist God-made-the-rich story and the Darwinist everything-is-meaningless story. His Earth Community meaning story is basically intelligent design with a Dancing-Wu-Li-Masters, bad-quantum-mechanics twist. (The closest I got to snark in my account of his talk at GA was to note that the room went dead silent during this segment.) There's room for a much better liberal religious, meaning-is-what-we-make-it story.

So anyway, this is the scaffolding that I needed to construct around The Great Turning. If you've had as much trouble with it as I did, I hope this helps.

How I Spent General Assembly

2007-06-27T19:40:00.000-04:00

Lots to catch up on here. I just got back early this morning from Unitarian Universalist General Assembly in Portland.

The main thing I did there was write. I wrote the UUA web site's GA Journal blog, which you can find here. My goal in the GA Journal (second year I've done it) is to capture the feeling of being at General Assembly. The rest of the web site covers the events at GA in an objective, journalistic way. I try to cover everything else. (Like the panhandler whose sign said: "Trying to take over the world. Need cash for weapons of mass destruction.")

Some of that event coverage was also by me. I covered four events: Rob Eller-Isaacs' talk "A Faithful Conversation" at the Thursday worship service. Paul Rasor's talk at the annual John Murry Lecture "Universalism and the Sectarian Element in Liberal Religion," David Korten's "Navigating the Great Turning," and the annual Ware Lecture by Rashid Khalidi.

Also Saturday afternoon I saw a retrospective on the 35th anniversary of Beacon Press publishing The Pentagon Papers. I was deeply affected by hearing Daniel Ellsberg and Mike Gravel talk about a time when people were willing to take real risks to end a war. So I wrote "Is There Courage in This Generation?" for Daily Kos. When I went to bed Saturday night the piece had gotten one comment, and that was critical. So I figured it was one of those posts that goes nowhere. The next morning I woke up to find it on dKos' front page. (Thank you, Meteor Blades.)

And then there was my "Spiritual Writing" workshop with Meg Barnhouse. I've already posted my part of the talk here.

I come home with a bunch of new ideas, which you'll be seeing in the coming months.

Spiritual Writing: My GA Talk

2007-06-22T09:38:00.000-04:00

[This is the text of my 15-minute segment in the Spiritual Writing workshop organized at the UU General Assembly by UU World magazine. I was on a panel with Meg Barnhouse, the other columnist on the UU World website. Meg, who has written five books and has made musical CDs, is much better known than I am, so we packed the 200-chair room to the point that the organizers had to keep reminding people not to sit in the doorway.]

Before I get started, there's something I should tell you. About 20 years ago, the female characters in the comic strip Eyebeam described a chronic condition that I immediately realized I suffer from. It's called Male Answer Syndrome. The main symptom is a compulsion to answer any question you're asked, whether you know what you're talking about or not.

The worst case I ever saw was my college roommate. When people asked Mike for directions, he always gave them – even if he had never heard of the place where they were going. To this day whenever I'm lost, I remember Mike and I never ask for directions.

I thought I should tell you this, because a few months ago Kenneth Sutton asked me: "What makes writing spiritual?"

So here I am.

What makes writing spiritual?

I once led a discussion at my church on the question "What is spiritual?" It didn't work out very well. The second person to talk – probably another Male Answer Syndrome sufferer – looked spiritual up in the dictionary and answered the question for us. Where can a discussion go from there? Who were we to pit our authority against the OED?

I don't want to repeat that mistake today, but if you're going to talk about spiritual writing, you do need at least some working notion of spiritual, so I'll tell you mine. To me, spiritual isn't a type of subject matter, it's a frame of mind. This really comes through in Zen, where they might teach you to practice archery or calligraphy. Are those things spiritual? Well, no. But you can do them – like you can do almost anything – in a spiritual frame of mind.

What frame would that be? The best way I can think to describe the spiritual frame of mind is that it's an engaged humility. You're totally absorbed in whatever you're doing, but not in a dominating, controlling way. When you do something in the spiritual frame of mind, you can get so far away from the sense of your own place in the spotlight that you feel privileged just to be present – even though you are the person doing the thing that you're present at.

So: spiritual writing. Well, almost any writing can be spiritual to the writer. It's like archery or calligraphy. You could be writing the most formulaic murder mystery. But if you hit that point where the story takes on a life of its own and the characters start saying what they say rather than what you tell them to say – that's a spiritual experience. That's engaged humility. You forget that you're writing the story – it's just happening and you feel privileged to be there.

But notice: It's the process that's spiritual, not the product. The reader just sees a murder mystery.

So I think I'd rather reserve the term spiritual writing for pieces that are intended to be spiritual for the reader. A good piece of spiritual writing should invite the reader into a state of engaged humility.

The night sky may not be a piece of writing, but it has that effect. On one of those cold, clear nights in the desert, the sky goes beyond just being engaging. It's arresting. You can't stop looking at it. And it's also humbling, because there's too much of it. You can't look at all of it. You're just a finite being in a Universe that might as well be infinite.

But again, spirituality is in the process, not the product. It's not that the night sky itself is spiritual. Rather than being engaged and humbled, you could look at the night sky and experience a sense of pride in your ability to identify all the constellations. Instead of being humbled by the whole, you could cut it into pieces and master each one by knowing its name. There's nothing wrong with that, but I wouldn't call it spiritual.

And that, I think, is a lesson for writers. If the Creator of the Sky can't force a spiritual response from people, neither can you. You can invite readers to dance, but you can't sweep them off their feet.

Now, spiritual writing as I've just described it is very different from religious writing, where you write about religion or about religious concepts like God or karma or the UU Principles. Sometimes the two overlap, because some religious concepts are so big that they're like the night sky. You're engaged by the concept, but you're humbled at the same time. Even as you grasp a piece of it, you realize that there's so much that you're not grasping, so much that's just on the edge of your comprehension, and probably even more that is outside your field of vision completely. That's when religion becomes spiritual.

But some religion and some religious writing is downright anti-spiritual. Because it's not about humility at all; it's about mastery. You can cut God up into constellations and name them: God is omniscient, omnipotent, benevolent. God is a character in our book, and the book has rules that He has to follow. And so we can hold God to His commitments, because we're the ones in control.

Another anti-spiritual kind of religion promotes humility, but it's the humility of a slave rather than a saint. Instead of engaging you, it beats you down: Don't look up at the night sky. It's too big for you. You wouldn't get it. You'd just be confused. I, the author, have been specially chosen and specially trained to look at the sky, and I'll tell you what you need to know. Listen to what I say. And the first thing I say is: "Don't look up."

On the other hand, writing that opens up new vistas of consciousness can be spiritual, even if it has nothing to do with religion. Three hundred years ago reading Newton could be a spiritual experience. The idea that the same law made your fork fall off the table and kept the Moon in its orbit – it was so big. Everything you'd ever thought seemed small by comparison.

Now finally we get to UU spiritual writing. To me that means spiritual writing that has some UU religious content, and not just a UU author. It doesn't have to be a dissertation on the seven principles, but it should be informed by a UU sensibility. Meg Barnhouse's essays, I think, are good examples of what I mean: It's not like the words Unitarian Universalism appear on every page, but it's no surprise when you discover that the author is a UU. My writing, I think, comes in the other door: It's obvious when I'm writing about UUism, but I only occasionally get spiritual with it.

Some of the challenges of spiritual writing are the same for UUs as for anybody else, and some are unique. Like any other kind of religious writing, UU writing can be anti-spiritual. Sometimes we go so far in our efforts to demystify religion that we destroy any sense of awe and wonder. The Universe becomes something to master, and humility goes out the window. Or we can beat people down by telling them that their subjective engagement with life is just idiosyncratic and not worth paying attention to.

One special challenge is a UU audience's distrust of authority. There are no spiritual experts in UUism, so you can't just say, "Listen to me." To a certain extent you have to be like the early sea-faring merchants when they dealt with skittish tribes. They wouldn't barge into the village and try to make a sale in sign language. Instead they'd lay some of their merchandise out on the beach and back away from it. In time the natives would come and inspect it and leave some of their own products in its place.

So you don't go to a UU audience and say, "You should think this." Instead you say, "This is how I look at things. These are my experiences that lead me to think this way." Then you back away. Slowly, your readers come out of the jungle.

The place where my religious writing gets most spiritual is when I present a vision of how things could be. But I always have to be careful to put it forward as my vision, not the UU vision. If readers want to make it their own vision, they can pick it up off the beach.

On those rare occasions when I do say something directly, maybe because I don't have time to do anything else, I try to make it non-threatening by wrapping an amusing metaphor around it – like seafaring merchants and skittish tribes.

A second special challenge – I wish I had an amusing metaphor to buffer this one – is UUism's impoverished religious language. This really hits me whenever I read evangelical stuff. I get language envy, because they can very quickly and simply communicate things that would give me fits. Several years ago I saw a piece on 60 Minutes about a Christian couple who adopted and raised kids that nobody else wanted. They had like 26 of them. And when the reporter asked why, the wife said very plainly (as if these things happen every day) that this was the work God had called them to do. That was all she needed to say. Evangelicals all over the country knew exactly what she meant.

If that woman were a UU, she could explain for half an hour and still leave questions. She absolutely could not say that this was the work God had called her to do. "God? God Who?" UUs don't have a religious terminology that everyone understands.

We also don't have a canon of stories and characters that we can take for granted. If I were talking to an evangelical audience about friendship, I could just say "David and Jonathan". I wouldn't have to tell the story. They'd know it well enough to figure out for themselves how it applied to my talk. But what UU stories does everyone know? That lack of common reference impoverishes our ability to communicate. (Actually, for the Star Trek fans out there I can make this point in three words: Darmok at Tanagra.)

As a UU writer, you get around the poverty of our language by grounding your points in the nitty-gritty of everyday life, and making metaphors out of experiences so common that almost everyone can identify with them. (And also, occasionally, by using pop culture.) Religious words, if you use them all, need to come late, after the everyday metaphors fix their meanings. Just now, for example, I talked about the night sky before I ever mentioned God.

Meg's pieces make good examples of this UU style. She almost always engages us by starting in some totally mundane place like a laundromat or a diner or a county fair. And she's in a role we all recognize: she's a mother or a daughter or somebody trying to do a hard job. The religious content arises slowly, and the humility in these pieces comes from realizing that even the most ordinary situation has depth. Even the most mundane setting opens outward to the infinite. If I were really aware, what might I see in this room? It's a humbling thought.

I wanted to close by reading a poem that captures this same kind of dualism between ordinary experience and themes so vast that they become spiritual. It's "First Lesson" by Philip Booth. I don't know whether Booth was ever a UU or not. I know the poem because Laurel Hallman used it in her Berry Street Lecture, which is in the volume A Language of Reverence. As Hallman notes, the poem has not one word of religious language in it. Superficially, Booth is just talking about teaching his daughter to float. But the deeper themes are there also. Listen:

[I then read the whole poem, which would not be fair use to publish online -- Hallman didn't publish it online either. But I did find it here. How the Poemhunter site deals with copyright issues I have no idea.]

Portland, Ho!

2007-06-18T17:03:00.000-04:00

Once again this year I'm going to be doing a sort-of-blog for the UU General Assembly. It's a blog in the sense of being a regularly updated chronicle of what I see and do, but it's sort-of because there's no mechanism for leaving comments. (Not my fault; the GA web site just isn't set up that way.)

I'll post a link when I know one, and feel free to attach comments to this post.

This week I've been doing my homework. I'm covering the Ware Lecture by Rashid Khalidi, so I read his book about Palestine "The Iron Cage". Liked it. He gives the impression of being thoughtful and not knee-jerk partisan. I am not an Israel/Palestine expert though, so I can't judge how accurate his overall interpretations of the facts are. I expect an interesting talk.

I'm having more trouble with my other homework. I'm covering David Korten's talk, so I'm reading his recent book "The Great Turning: from Empire to Earth Community". I want to like the book, but it's pushing so many of my buttons.

When an author is trying to state a case or make a point, one of my tests is whether s/he seems to understand why some people disagree. I'm impressed if you can state the opposing case in a reasonable way, and I'm not impressed if you think that everyone on the other side is either stupid or evil. So far, in the first 100 pages, the main reason I've seen for people choosing Empire is that they are not as spiritually advanced or psychologically mature as the people who choose Earth Community. That doesn't give me a good feeling.

He also pushed my gender button. 67% of "Spiritual Creatives" -- the highest caste in Korten's system -- are female. Now think about the reaction an author would get if he defined a ladder of spiritual advancement and discovered that 2/3 of the highest caste were male. Immediately issues of structural bias would come up. But Korten just swallows this number in one gulp, without raising a single question about it.

On the GA web site I'm going to maintain journalistic objectivity; it's my job. But it may not be easy.

My Moment in the Public Eye

2007-06-04T15:45:00.000-04:00

Good things (and bad things, I suppose) happen in bunches. The same day that my first column appears on the UU World web site is also the day I get my first article published in a political quarterly: Public Eye.

The article is called Defense Against the Dark Arts, and it's about the working class evangelicals. What's going to happen to them? Are they going to rediscover their progressive self-interest? Or is 2006 an aberration, after which the Reagan coalition will reform?

The title, you probably noticed, comes from Harry Potter's favorite subject. Here's the metaphor-establishing paragraph:

At Hogwarts, the Reagan spell would be taught in Transfiguration class: Lower-wage workers who coincidentally belong to conservative churches are transmuted into moral crusaders who coincidentally have bad jobs. The progressive working class becomes the religious Right, and the band plays "Onward Christian Soldiers" instead of "Joe Hill" or even "Brother Can You Spare a Dime?" And liberals - compassionate, decent people that we think we are - are transmuted in their eyes into soul-destroying monsters.

If you've been reading my stuff for a while, you'll probably notice that most of the themes and references of Who's Afraid of Freedom and Tolerance? are back, but repackaged into a more political context and given a new framing metaphor. And hopefully reaching a new audience.

I Are an Columist

2007-06-04T15:27:00.000-04:00

Today begins something I've been looking forward to for a while: I've become a regular columnist on the UU World web site.

If "regular" makes you think of Paul Krugman writing twice a week for the New York Times, I'm overstating things. My column will appear six times a year. One way of looking at it is that Meg Barnhouse (author of the book "Rock of Ages at the Taj Mahal" and the new "Did I Say That Out Loud?") and I are sharing a monthly column.

My first column is a more philosophical look at something I've been posting scattered impressions of since April: the New Humanism conference at Harvard. The column is called Does Humanism Need to be New? I'm pleased with it. I think I got a lot of content into a small space, and I'm happy with the phrases and the running series of sci-fi metaphors.

I have an ulterior motive for not posting the text here: I want a lot of people to go to the UU World web site and read my column there, so that it gets a good hit count. UU World doesn't have any commenting feature, though, so come back here to say what you think.

New Humanism Conference III: Me and Salman

2007-05-18T15:32:00.000-04:00

The thing-I-will-never-forget about the New Humanism Conference is that I got to ask Salman Rushdie a question.

The first night of the conference (Friday) was devoted to giving Rusdie some kind of lifetime achievement award in "cultural humanism". So there was a long process of introducing introducers who introduce somebody who introduces Rushdie. I'm sure you know how those things go. Steven Pinker was one of the introducers, and Rebecca Goldstein made some interesting points, so it could have been worse.

Then Rushdie did a reading from "Shalimar the Clown". I liked it a lot. At this point I have to make a shameful confession: I've never read a Rushdie novel. I bought "Satanic Verses" back when the Ayatollah was threatening to have Rushdie killed, but I never got around to reading it. Buying it was more of a political statement than a literary ambition. (I know you're wondering: Whatever happened to the fatwa? It was never officially rescinded, but Rushdie wanders around pretty freely these days. I get the impression that certain circles in Teheran will celebrate when Rushdie dies, but bringing that day closer doesn't seem to be high on anybody's to-do list.)

Afterwards there was a question period. I'm always conflicted in situations like this. Part of me wants to interact with the famous person any way I can, and another part of me is ashamed of that juvenile impulse and sits on it. So if I recognized God having the grand slam breakfast in the next booth at Denny's, I'd probably leave him alone. I don't want to waste his time with something stupid like: "The Universe was just such a cool idea. I really, really like it." I'd try to watch him without being obvious, and then later I'd think: "I can't believe it was like, God, right there. And I didn't say anything."

So I'm not saying anything, and all these people are trying to ask refined literary questions, some more successfully than others. Rushdie is answering them very graciously. One woman is an English teacher whose class read "Midnight's Children". They argued over what the ending meant, and she wants to know what Rushdie thinks it means. And he says exactly the right thing: "It's not my job to say what it means. That's your job."

I'm watching the line of questioners dwindle, when I realize that I actually do want to know something that nobody else is asking. So after some internal debate I stop sitting on my juvenile self and get in line. I continue to be the end of the line, and when the MC offers Rushdie the chance to declare victory and go home, Salman notices that there are only four questioners left and decides to let us ask our questions. I'm last.

I ask: "Looking back at 'The Satanic Verses' and the fatwa and the way it dominated your life for so many years, my question is: Would you do it again?"

And Rushdie very wryly says, "Well, I'd rather not." And then he makes a very interesting comment, which I won't put in quotes because I don't remember it word-for-word. He said that it makes him happy now that finally people can read "Satanic Verses" as a novel. For years, he said, no one commented on it as a novel. You could talk about it in a political context or a religious context, but not in a literary context. He said it was very frustrating as a writer to put so much of your time into writing a piece of fiction and have it talked about every way but as a piece of fiction.

Then the evening was over and I went home. For a while I thought that although Rushdie's answer had been interesting, he had sort of dodged the question. I had meant to ask: Knowing what he knows now, knowing what the effect on his life would be, would he have written and published "Satanic Verses" at all? And he didn't answer that.

At least not directly. As I thought about his answer and about the general tone of his other answers, I realized something: This crowd had gathered to honor him as a Humanist hero, and he wasn't going to come out and tell them in so many words "Being a hero wasn't worth it." That wouldn't have been gracious at all. Instead he told me that he was glad that the book had stopped being a symbol and gone back to being a novel. Which, I think, sort of means the same thing. But he made it my job to come to that interpretation, not his job.

And I guess that means that the book on my shelf has stopped being a political statement and started being a novel that I haven't read. Maybe I will.

New Humanism Conference II: Da Yute

2007-05-09T10:22:00.000-04:00

Easily the most fun session at the New Humanism Conference was the "Next Generation of Humanism" panel. Whoever assembled the panel must have had a blast doing it. In addition to leaders of more-or-less traditional student organizations -- Amanda Shapiro of the Harvard Secular Society, Peter Blake representing Harvard Graduate Humanist Community, August Brunsman of the Secular Student Alliance -- the panel included three new-media types: Rebecca Watson, editor of the online magazine and blog Skepchick and regular contributor to the podcast The Skeptics Guide to the Universe; Bryan Pesta, who hosts the atheist and agnostics page on MySpace; and Hermant Mehta, author of the book I Sold My Soul on eBay.

Mehta's backstory is the most entertaining: He grew up Jain but has been an atheist since he was a teen-ager. The stunt that eventually became his book was that he offered the following auction on eBay: the winner could send this lost young atheist to the church of his or her choice. He expected to get about $10, but the bidding ended with a $504 bid by evangelist Jim Henderson. Mehta proceeded to visit a number of churches chosen by Henderson and blog about them for Henderson's web site Off the Map. (If this all sounds too good not to be planned in advance, you too may be a skeptic.) The book chronicles Mehta's adventures visiting a variety of Christian churches, including Ted Haggard's church in Colorado and the Willow Creek megachurch in Illinois.

Skepchick is another great story. The online magazine last published an issue in May, 2006, so it may be defunct. But the blog, forum, and podcast are active. Under slogans like "Smart is Sexy" and "Critical Thinking for the Masses", the Skepchick community discusses all sorts of topics from a youthful, skeptical, female viewpoint. (Anything from "Who are the 11 hottest movie scientists?" to "Can or should religion and science cooperate?") Probably the most outrageous thing they do is sell a "sensual but not lewd" calendar of skepchicks, which sadly was not available in the merchanting area. (Order yours here. Submit your photo for the next one here. See the 2007 calendar turned into a music video here.) This is not your grandmother's Humanism. It's not even the Humanism of your spinster great-aunt that nobody talks about.

The panel part of the discussion was noteworthy more for its attitude than for any outstanding idea or quote. This is a generation of Humanists who are not going peacefully into the closet. They don't shy away from terms like atheist. And they've also gotten past the in-your-face adolescent-rebellion God-sucks kind of atheism. And they don't look like the classic pocket-protector-wearing nerds. They are who they are and they seem comfortable with it.

The most interesting audience question/comment came from Fred Edwords of the American Humanist Association. He was being blown away by the numbers the new-media people threw around. Pesta's MySpace group has 31,604 members (I just checked) and Watson claimed her podcasts could get up to 16,000 downloads. Edwords pointed out that the MySpace group was technically the largest Humanist organization in the country. He urged the 20-somethings to come to meetings of the longer-standing humanist groups and explain how they were reaching so many people. It was like watching a middle-aged businessman boggle at the net worth of the Google founders.

Things I Learned at the New Humanism Conference, Part I

2007-05-07T09:37:00.000-04:00

I went to the New Humanism Conference at Harvard two weeks ago, and I've had writers' block about it ever since. I think I've finally figured out why: I've been trying to write something that captures everything I learned, pulling it all together and capping it with a bright red bow.

Not going to happen. Too much. Too big.

The conference was full of stars: novelist Salman Rushdie, biologist E. O. Wilson, singer Dar Williams, Senate candidate Ned Lamont, and some other very important people who I hope are not insulted to be left off that list. Some of the talks launched me into idea-fugues of my own, leaving me unable to say exactly which ideas were theirs and which are mine.

This morning I figured out that I can break the logjam by starting small. One of the talks that got the least buzz at the conference was by Tu Weiming, a professor of Chinese history and philosophy at Harvard. Busting myths about Humanism was a general theme of the conference, and Weiming was part of a panel busting this myth: Humanism is a purely Western phenomenon that we are either exporting to or imposing on the rest of the world. Weiming tackled the subject of Confucian humanism.

My notes are a complete injustice to Weiming's talk. I fugued, but along the way I came to understand something about the East/West divide that I had never grasped before: the difference between Eastern and Western ways of thinking about self. In the West the self is a thing; it has an inside, an outside and a boundary. Sometimes when we're explaining things, we'll draw a little blob to represent ourselves. Other people have their own blobs, and each one has its own unique essence. When I learn and change, something is happening inside the blob that represents me. You could pick that blob up and put it somewhere else without changing its essence.

But when Weiming talked about the Confucian self, it sounded different. "The self is never an isolated individual but a center of relationship." I puzzled over that and similar statements for a while, until a new framing metaphor popped into my head: Weiming was viewing the self not as a blob, but as a point. A point doesn't have the space to contain an inner essence; all it has is a location. It exists on a map. And a person grows in wisdom by getting a ever richer picture of the map, not by developing the interior of the self.

To a Westerner that metaphor sounds, well, empty. If I'm a point, somebody could plunk me down somewhere else and I'd be just like the points that are in that location. If I moved to Detroit and became a lawyer, I'd be just another Detroit lawyer. We think that way because our maps are impoverished compared to the map of a Confucian sage. The sage understands the uniqueness of each location on his multi-dimensional map. I'd be not just another Detroit lawyer, but one who had these parents and went to that school and read those books and was influenced by such-and-such ideas. That would all be represented by my location, my point of view.

Two individuals, in this metaphor, are separated by a distance rather than a wall. The distance is ultimately uncrossable. I can move closer to your point of view, but you have spent your entire life getting where you are. I will never arrive at your location, nor you at mine. In the Confucian model, this -- not some interior essence -- is our individuality.

The Confucian humanist "seeks harmony without conformity by dialog. Dialog is not a way of persuasion; its purpose is to find out what we do not know." Conformity would be an artificial attempt to mask the distance between us, to hide the fact that we are in different locations and view things differently. And yet, despite our distance, we can harmonize our actions to achieve common purposes.

As I experimented with this model -- thinking of myself as a point rather than a blob -- a lot of Eastern (not just Confucian) thought made more sense to me. All the Buddhist talk about "the emptiness of the self" -- a Westerner hears that and pictures a blob with a vacuum inside. But points are empty because they have no interior into which you can put stuff. There is no vacuum, only a recognition that the space you imagined inside yourself is a misconception. Westerners hear about "destroying the Ego" and imagine that it involves achieving some universal point-of-view. If I read this metaphor right, the exact opposite happens: You understand that all you are is a point of view. The Ego is the illusory wall you have built around all the things to which you are attached.

I'm pretty sure Weiming said the stuff in quotes. As for the rest of it, I don't know. It happened somewhere in the space between us.

Religious Prejudice Against the Tillmans

2007-04-25T14:53:00.000-04:00

This is unbelievable. According to ESPN, Lt. Col. Ralph Kauzlarich, the guy in charge of the initial investigation into Pat Tillman's death-by-friendly-fire in Afghanistan, says that the reason Tillman's family is making such a big deal about this is that they're aren't Christians. Here's the link.

The part I'm referring to is maybe a quarter of the way down Part I of the story:

"But there [have] been numerous unfortunate cases of fratricide, and the parents have basically said, 'OK, it was an unfortunate accident.' And they let it go. So this is — I don't know, these people have a hard time letting it go. It may be because of their religious beliefs."
...
In an interview with ESPN.com, Kauzlarich said: "When you die, I mean, there is supposedly a better life, right? Well, if you are an atheist and you don't believe in anything, if you die, what is there to go to? Nothing. You are worm dirt. So for their son to die for nothing, and now he is no more — that is pretty hard to get your head around that. So I don't know how an atheist thinks. I can only imagine that that would be pretty tough."

Tillman's mother responds:

"Well, this guy makes disparaging remarks about the fact that we're not Christians, and the reason that we can't put Pat to rest is because we're not Christians," Mary Tillman, Pat's mother, said in an interview with ESPN.com. Mary Tillman casts the family as spiritual, though she said it does not believe in many of the fundamental aspects of organized religion.

"Oh, it has nothing to do with the fact that this whole thing is shady," she said sarcastically, "But it is because we are not Christians."

Surely any comment I might add to this is already obvious.

Humanist Visions: the World City

2007-04-23T18:50:00.000-04:00

Last Thursday (April 19) I spoke to a chapel service of UU divinity students at the Andover-Newton Theological School. The talk was a variation of the Cosmopolis sermon I first gave in Middlebury, Vermont in January 2006.

I'm not sure what to do with texts like this. This is the third time I've preached on the same subject (Bedford this January was the other time), and I don't want to clog up this blog with many variations of the same talk. On the other hand, it does change a little bit each time. So I thought I'd compromise by putting a PDF of the sermon here, and link to it.

If you've never read it before, by all means follow the link. It's probably my best sermon, which is why I keep taking it on the road.

Free and Responsible Search

Join the Losers: Shame, Pride, and the 99%

At my mother's funeral

My Halloween Column

Let Us Pray?

My Volo Credere

The Story of Our Deaths

At My Mother's Funeral ...

The Humanism of the Sun

Pride? Gaggle? Finding a collective noun for UUs

My Bah-Humbug Thanksgiving

The Current UU World: Superheroes and Generational Change

Sudden Death

Something different in UU World

Spirituality and the Humanist

An Honest Commencement Address

The Theology of "The Family"

Should Humanists Become UUs?

Apocrypha: The Book of Corporation

The DIY Spiritual Practice

The Spirited Life

Who Owns the World?

Greetings from Salt Lake City

Other People's Kids

That's Aphasia!

Faith in Hard Times

Lucy Stone and Henry Blackwell

Dignitarianism: Treat Everybody Well

What Do UUs Need To Go Deeper?

A Unitarian Christmas

How Can You Stand Not Knowing?

My Pagan Side Comes Out

How I Spent General Assembly

Here I Am in Fort Lauderdale

Some Assembly Required: Bedford version

Unsung Hero: Arjuna Bhishma

UU World column: Unfinished With Christianity

Ego and Western Common Sense

Some Assembly Required

Collecting My UU-FAQ

Keeping Sol in Solstice

More Questions About Famous UUs: Dr. Seuss?

Who's Not a Famous UU?

One more thing about the working class

Pete Stark: Unbeliever in Congress

Jesus has annexed my town

Reflections on the Beginning of Another Church Year

Wild speculation

The most subversive book I've read this summer ...

Building Your Own Ecclesiology

The Go(o)d Crutch

T/F? WTF!

David Korten's Big Theory

How I Spent General Assembly

Spiritual Writing: My GA Talk

Portland, Ho!

My Moment in the Public Eye

I Are an Columist

New Humanism Conference III: Me and Salman

New Humanism Conference II: Da Yute

Things I Learned at the New Humanism Conference, Part I

Religious Prejudice Against the Tillmans

Humanist Visions: the World City