Maybe the healing America needs should start with me.

This week, the third one since the presidential election, I — like almost everybody else in America — spent more time thinking about the loser of that election than the winner.

If you don’t remember previous transition periods, it’s hard to get across just how strange that is. At this point in his administration, every previous one-term president in my lifetime — Bush the First, Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford, LBJ — was already starting to fade into history. Even exiting two-term presidents — Barack Obama, Bush the Second, Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan — were planning their moves back to wherever and leafing through proposals for their presidential libraries.

As for media coverage, it’s supposed to be like the Eagles’ song:

Where you been lately?
There’s a new kid in town.

All previous presidential transitions brought in lots of new kids. People from the victorious campaign, veterans from previous administrations, and prominent governors or members of Congress were either getting new positions or maneuvering for them. Remember Mitt Romney going to Trump Tower in hopes of becoming Secretary of State? That’s the kind of story that usually makes headlines in the weeks after an election.

Even the members of your party most skeptical of your candidacy come around like Flatnose Curry after Butch Cassidy wins the knife fight: “I was really rootin’ for you, Butch.”

And Joe Biden is playing his part. He has named his Covid-19 task force and his chief of staff. Cabinet nominations are due to start rolling out this week. Reportedly, the foreign policy team is already chosen: Antony Blinken will be secretary of state Linda Thomas-Greenfield ambassador to the UN, and Jake Sullivan national security advisor. (You remember, that’s Mike Flynn’s old job.) A treasury secretary is coming soon — quite possibly the first woman ever to play that role.

And yet, what are we talking about? Trump.

Why won’t he concede? Will he ever let the Biden transition officially begin? What’s going on with all these absurd lawsuits, rolled out by people who ought to be in asylums (Sidney Powell ) or in jail (Rudy Giuliani)? Is he staging a coup? Can it possibly work? (No.) Why is he calling local election officials and meeting with Republican legislators in states Biden won? Why is he replacing the leadership in the Pentagon?

Now, it’s hard to claim we shouldn’t pay attention. Trump is breaking the norms of democracy, sabotaging the next administration, and just generally putting his own interests ahead of the country’s — like he always does. If nobody paid attention to his coup attempt, it might even work.

These three weeks have been a microcosm of the last four years. Nobody wanted to read stories about the American government ripping children away from their parents and stashing them in cages, or about our President standing on a stage with an enemy dictator and siding with the dictator against our own intelligence services, or about that President’s even-handed assessment of Nazis and anti-Nazis.

But we felt we had to pay attention; public pressure was the only tool we had to set things right — or at least keep them from getting worse. Arguably, the reason the administration still hasn’t found the parents of hundreds of the children it kidnapped is that we let ourselves lose focus; after Trump’s people announced that the policy had been reversed, we moved on.

I feel the same way about covering Trump’s inept coup: People do need to pay attention to this, and to appreciate the disregard for American democracy it demonstrates.

And yet, when I introspect, I can tell that there’s more going on inside me than just the public interest. The news about Trump is intense. It makes me feel things — anger, frustration, fear. I don’t think he can overthrow democracy, but what if I’m wrong?

The Biden news, by contrast, seems flat. His Covid team consists of doctors and public health experts, without a charlatan in sight. He’s not going to be taking his advice from a radiologist or the My Pillow guy. Nobody’s pushing quack cures. They’re trying to get you to wear a mask and wash your hands, like experts have been saying for months and months. Nobody is telling you to inject bleach or lying about the death statistics or promising that the virus will go away like magic.

That’s all very sensible, but what should I feel about it?

Similarly, Biden’s foreign policy team is made up of foreign-policy types. They believe in alliances and treaties and international law. None of them have been making public appearances with Vladimir Putin or taking money from Turkey. They don’t come from corporations that stand to make billions if Russian sanctions get relaxed.

How does any of that keep my adrenaline pumping?

For four years now, I — and I think a lot of my readers as well — have been stuck in a relationship with the President of the United States that has not just been dysfunctional, it’s been downright abusive. Day after day, I have approached my news sources by armoring myself against attack. I have expected that each day I will somehow be insulted by my President, or that he will do or say something that will make me feel ashamed of a country I used to take pride in. He will involve me in sins that I can never make right.

Day after day, I’ve had to overcome a sense of “He can’t do that.” Again and again, I’ve been surprised as he disregarded some norm of democracy and good government that I had come to take for granted. He can’t ignore Hatch Act violations up and down his government. (Oh yes he can.) He can’t make a deal to commute Roger Stone’s sentence in exchange for Stone’s continued silence about collusion with Russia. (Oh yes he can.) He can’t dangle a pardon in front of Paul Manafort to induce him not to cooperate with the Mueller investigation. (Oh yes he can.) He can’t get the Justice Department to defend him in a lawsuit filed by a woman he raped. (Oh yes he can, but a judge can turn DOJ away.) He can’t ruin the careers of government officials in revenge for their role in exposing Russia’s effort to get him elected or his Ukraine extortion scheme. (Oh yes he can.)

As a result, I’ve walked around with a sense of dread. What else can he do that I have thought was impossible?

It will be a great relief to be rid of that dread, which I’m sure has pushed down my mood even when I wasn’t consciously thinking about it.

And yet … those strong emotions are so addictive. It’s typical not to know what to do with yourself when you first come out of an abusive relationship. If you’re lucky enough to form a new relationship with somebody sane and sensible and good-hearted (like Joe Biden), it’s hard to take it seriously. If you don’t cry over your relationship at least once a week, are you really in love? If nothing you do makes your partner crazy enough to send you to the emergency room, does he really care about you?

After that dysfunctional intensity, sane relationships seem flat. That could be why victims of abuse so often go back and give their abusers another chance. Or why ex-members of cults feel themselves being drawn back in.

I remember how it felt when my wife’s nine-month breast cancer treatment program drew to a close, and it started to look like she might beat this thing. (That was more than 20 years ago, and she’s doing fine.) For most of a year, we had lived with the constant awareness that some test we were waiting for could come back with a death sentence, or that some treatment could induce a disastrous side effect. And then suddenly there were no more tests and no more treatments. “Come back in six months.”

Normal life, long periods of time without life-and-death questions to answer — what do you do with that?

Soldiers return from war to confront a world where nobody will die if they make a mistake. A “bad day” means you got stuck in a traffic jam, or the team you root for lost a playoff game, or the report that was due Friday won’t actually come out until Monday. What do you do with that?

After four years of wondering whether we were living through the end of American democracy, can we really return to normal politics? If TV networks have to go back to discussing deficits and interest rates and cost overruns on the new weapons system, will anybody watch?

Matt Yglesias makes fun of the difficulties he faces as he starts a new for-money blog in the post-Trump era:

Tomorrow’s post is going to defy the woke censors and speak some plain truths about interest rate policy from five years ago. Trigger warning: Will feature some discussion of the difference between core and headline PCE inflation.

Joe Biden has begun his transition to the presidency by talking about healing. Most of us have jumped to the conclusion that healing has to start with attempts to make peace with the 70+-million Americans who voted for continuing the march towards fascism. Maybe Biden should seek peace by pardoning Trump like Ford pardoned Nixon. (Or maybe that’s a horrible mistake.)

Maybe we need another round of reporters visiting small-town diners and talking to Trump’s faithful, or more books like Hillbilly Elegy. Maybe we need to see that Trump voters are not deluded cultists brainwashed by Q-Anon, but thoughtful people whose interests and points of view we aren’t properly appreciating.

Here’s what I think: The very violence of my feelings about those questions tells me that healing really needs to start somewhere else. It needs to start with me, and maybe with you also.

The first step I can take towards healing America is to get over Trump. I need to stop looking to him for my political intensity, and stop looking for some new source of intensity to replace him.

I’ll be healed when I can begin a day without feeling an overhang of dread, without anticipating some new insult or threat or shame coming to me from the White House. I’ll be healed when I can appreciate the lack of intensity in our politics, and not experience it as a flatness or an eerie moment before the storm. I’ll be healed when a news cycle that doesn’t demand my immediate emotional response feels open and free rather than dull. I’ll be healed when I look forward to such days and think about how I want to shape them, now that I am not being constantly trolled and my feelings are truly my own.

When that day comes, then I’ll be able to look outward and think sanely about the next steps in healing America. But until then, I suspect that all my efforts will be contaminated by my continued entanglement in Trump

So I’d better start working on that.

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For five years or so now, we’ve been looking at Trump, first as a candidate and then as president, and recognizing that something truly abnormal was going on. In an ordinary candidacy or an ordinary administration, this wouldn’t be happening. There’s a whole genre of what-would-a-typical-administration-be-doing-now articles, to which I have contributed my share.

Well, I can’t help myself, I’m doing it again. This week I have to call attention to the fact that nearly three weeks after an election, nearly all our attention is focused on the loser rather than the winner. That’s really weird.

In an ordinary administration, we’d still be talking about the outgoing president a little, but mainly about how he’ll ride off into the sunset. What’s his legacy? How will history judge him? Where will his presidential library get built?

Instead, Biden’s cabinet announcements are barely causing a ripple while we focus on Trump’s desperate attempts to stay in power in spite of the voters and at the cost of American democracy. In some sense we should be focused on that, because it’s horrible and really unusual, and we need to make sure it doesn’t work.

But there’s also something else at play, and that’s what I’ll be discussing in the featured post: The whole country is coming out of a dysfunctional and even abusive relationship with Donald Trump. One defining trait of such relationships is their intensity. Even after you escape, your attention keeps being drawn back, because normal life seems so flat by comparison.

So Biden is out there being nice to people and talking about healing. He’s appointing doctors and public health experts to his Covid-fighting team rather than charlatans, and talking about sensible things like masks and hygiene rather than quack cures. His foreign-policy team is made up of, well, foreign-policy people. He’s about to appoint a treasury secretary, and all the names being thrown around are folks who know something about money and finance.

How dull. If I talk about that kind of stuff, who’s going to share my post? How do I get my own adrenaline pumping? What is there to be outraged about? Where’s the threat to our whole way of life?

Intensity is addictive. Even when the intense experience was unpleasant, people tend to get drawn back towards it. Abused spouses often give their abusers a second chance. Ex-members of cults get drawn back in.

So the point of the featured post is that the place for America’s healing to start is with me, and maybe with you. We need to get over Trump. We need to prepare ourselves to once again have a healthy relationship with the news and with the government.

I still have some work to do on that post, so let’s predict it to appear around 11 EST.

The weekly summary covers both the antics of the outgoing clown and the new President’s attempt to assemble a government. Meanwhile, the long-predicted fall surge in the virus is here and is setting records. A big chunk of the population is still in denial about it and treating public health measures like some kind of oppression that they need to resist. So the post-Thanksgiving period is set up to be apocalyptic.

Dark humor seems especially cathartic to me right now, so I’ll discuss Covid carols, including one I wrote myself. And I’ll close with a funny video making mask removal a kind of strip tease.

Note—On Tuesday Donald Trump is scheduled to perform the annual Turkey Pardon in a brief White House ceremony.  He has not had a public event on his schedule in 16 days, made just four official appearances since November 3, and only spoken publicly three times. With exception of golf outing like the one he did on Saturday when he ditched a virtual G7 economic summit event, buzzing a MAGA rally on the mall with his motorcade, a visit to Arlington National Cemetery on Veterans Day, he has not left the White House.  Presumably he has decided that the tradition is popular enough with his base to be worth the effort to tear himself away from Tweeting and plotting to subvert democracy to make the effort.  It may also offer an opportunity to ad lib some remarks that will scandalize most of the nation—perhaps riffs on pardons for his cronies or himself.  If he does his base will adore him even more.  But as I discovered five years ago Republicans had a different view of turkey pardons when Barack Obama did it.  Our divide was deep and festering even then as is plain from this blast from the Blog past.

It’s mid-afternoon and I am still working on the blog post I had planned for this morning.  Look for it tomorrow.  But on a breakfrom working on it I found a post on Facebookthat intrigued me.  But it was from PoliticusUSA, a liberal web site I have learned not to trust. It often skews news items, misrepresents the contents in headlines, exaggerates, and passes on from sources even less reliable.  Having been embarrassingly burned a couple of times I have learned no matter how much their stuff might appeal to my natural political leanings, positions, and prejudices not to pass it on or share on social media.  My conservative friends—and I still have a few—might do well to review their own sources of information confirming their preconceptions.  But then if they did so sites from The Drudge Report and Breitbart not to mention Fox News might go out of business.  Those have been proved to have their pants on fire repeatedly by neutral fact checkers.

But in the case of the post that grabbed my attention, I decided to investigate if there was even a morsel of truth in the Politicus meme.  And lo and behold this time there was.  The story checked out.  And it was too good, and revealing not to pass on from the original source material—Public Policy Polling (PPP)

PPP is a North Carolina based polling organization ranked for its reliability, accuracy, and methodologyas one of the best in the business.   The company only works for Democratic or Liberal campaigns which value it for telling them the truth about public opinion, not just parroting back to them what they want to hear.  Separate from the polls that they conduct for campaigns, the company of conducts “temperature measurement” polls which reveal the depth of ideological commitment of some voters—and often reveals remarkable gullibility.  Questions in these polls sometimes seem whimsical or ridiculous—but some voters take them with absolute seriousness.

They have polled questions like the approval rating of God, whether Republicanvoters believe President Obama would be eligible to enter heaven in the event of the Rapture, and whether hipsters should be subjected to a special tax for being annoying.  Although these polls are sensational enough to attract media attention and thus boost the PPP brand, they are conducted as straight forwardly as any campaign polling.  Unlike the notorious push polls favored by Republican operatives, the questions are not framed in inflammatoryor prejudicial language intended to push the pollee to the desired response.  They are put forward matter-of-factly an in neutral language.  They use Interactive Voice Response (IVR), an automated questionnaire used by other polling firms including SurveyUSAand Rasmussen Reports.  Sample sizes are large enough to be meaningful and guard against anomalies.

In other words PPP polls tend to reflect what people are really thinking.  Which can sometimes be frightening.  It’s a Bizzaro world out there folks.

The poll question that grabbed my attention asked “Do you approve or disapprove of President Obama’s executive action to pardon two turkeys rather than the customary one turkey at Thanksgiving?”

You might recall that last year to white gobblers named Macaroni and Cheese were saved in a holiday tradition dating back to John F. Kennedy spontaneously spared the turkey donated to the White House annually by the National Turkey Federation and the Poultry and Egg National Board on Nov. 18, 1963, just four days before his assassination.  Other presidents informally followed suit, making for a nice heartwarming annual story.  Ronald Reagan was the first to call it what the press already was—a pardon, but it was George Herbert Walker Bush who first drew up and issued a formal pardon.  The birds are generally donated to a local petting zoo.  The First Families, if they are so inclined, dine on a traditional non-celebrity turkey feast.

You would think such a charming little tradition would be non-controversial.  You would, of course, be wrong.  Nothing Barack Obama does is non-controversial in these hyper partisan times.  If Fox News were to suddenly report that Obama respires oxygen a significant portion of their viewership would be dead of asphyxiation by morning.

Let PPP itself report the outcome of their question.

The examples of the GOP’s reflexive opposition to President Obama’s agenda are many but this may be the best one yet: by a 27 point margin Republicans say they disapprove of the President's executive order last year pardoning two Thanksgiving turkeys (Macaroni and Cheese) instead of the customary one. Only 11% of Republicans support the President’s executive order last year to 38% who are opposed- that’s a pretty clear sign that if you put Obama's name on something GOP voters are going to oppose it pretty much no matter what. Overall there’s 35/22 support for the pardon of Macaroni and Cheese thanks to 59/11 support from Democrats and 28/21 from independents.

So there you have it.  Are you surprised?

PPP’s complete report on this round of polling also included questions on which Presidential Candidate would be the most likely to say something inappropriate at the table and ruin Thanksgiving Dinner (Donald Trump in a run-away), Thanksgiving menu choices (cranberry sauce or not turns into a generational divide) and Christmas issues—Americans are united in thinking the Starbucks coffee cup issue is ridiculousand in opposing too early playing of Christmas music.  Perhaps there is some dim hope for unity after all.  Check out PPP’s report a here.

*Just the sort of inflammatory headline to avoid like the plague.  This has been a Public Service Example.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211110191443/http://www.austinuuav.org/audio/2020-11-22_Healing_does_not_equal_Cure.mp3

I preached from this sermon manuscript online for the Universalist National Memorial Church, on November 22, 2020 using lessons from the Revised Common Lectionary: Ezekiel 34:11-16, 20-24 and Matthew 25:31-46.

Good morning and thanks to Pastor Dave Gatton for inviting me back to the pulpit and for you welcoming me.

The kingdom of God is such a basic Christian concept that sometimes it goes without careful examination. After a while, with our private thoughts, we might end up assuming entirely different concepts, some colored by cultural norms or personal desires. I'd like to defend us against that today, by dealing with some of the assumptions and conflicts we have when talking about, understanding and living in the kingdom of God. In the process I hope we will approach the kingdom of God not just as an idea of something to anticipate, but also participate in it as a practical reality today.

And it helps if we can consider this together. A kingdom, if anything, is communal. It's a political polity centered on a particular personality, and extended through family relationships. The kingdom of God is centered on our relationships with God, individual and collective.

But kingdom is a concept that's practically alien to us. Even a hundred years ago much of the world lived in kingdoms or in colonies subject to kingdoms. Some of those monarchs were constrained by parliaments or a shared authority, and others weren't. Some survive today, but they are the minority, and most of those are practical democracies.

It's easy then, perhaps a bit too easy, to speak of kings and queens and princes and princesses with a childlike glee or tasteful nostalgia; Disney has done its damage. While monarchies fell over the twentieth century, some were revived in order to bring about national unity (I'm thinking of Spain and Cambodia particularly) and proposed in other places. For the most part though, at least formally, more of the world is governed by the consent of the government than at any time in history. And recent events show how fragile and important this concept is. Making that work politically, while holding an idea of a divine kingdom religiously takes some work.

Why? Because attaining the kingdom of God can become an excuse for human beings to take on the divine prerogative in governing the world. Dystopian fiction (The Handmaid's Tale comes to mind) and real-life theocratic terror organizations (the so-called Islamic State, for instance) show that the kingdom of God can be made an ideological weapon. The profound moral collapse of organized Evangelicalism in the Trump administration rekindles fears of theocracy overcoming democracy in our governance. I can't blame anyone for resisting when religious people talk about God's plans for the world, myself included.

So we should be circumspect, perhaps cautious, not only for our neighbors' sake, but for our own as we approach the Almighty, who surely knows the hearts of would-be demigods and self-appointed spokespersons. For God has challenged prophets with power. Can we make life? Do we control the seasons or the rising of the sun and the setting of the same? Do our governments and still wonder and laughter? Do rulers comfort the inner soul?

The kingdom of God touches this world but is not restricted to it. And so as Christians we need to be careful to distinguish between what's God's and what belongs to the common human family, whether Christian or not.

But theocratic overreach is not only a problem with right wing and authoritarian power.

There's a temptation in liberal political and theological circles, even though these are different if someone overlapping things. That is, to hope for the kingdom of God without God, or to assume it would be more appealing if were described publicly as a strictly human endeavor. The twentieth-century rise of religious humanism made this transformation complete.

The problem is that there is no appeal to a higher authority when we start confusing what we like and what we esteem with what is actually good.

There's a little example from the history of our own church. Each week, we recite the declaration of faith that our church adopted a few years ago. It was based on a denomination declaration of faith from 1899, which itself was an authoritative interpretation of a statement of faith from 1803. (You'll hear more about these some other time.) The funny thing is that there was a denominational statement developed after 1899, the Washington Declaration of 1935, as an interpretation of the interpretation, updated for the modern age. As the name suggests was adopted by a convention in our own city: at the then-new Mayflower Hotel on Connecticut Avenue, to be exact. (There were religious services at our then-new church building.) But even thought it was officially adopted in the denomination, as far as I can tell it was never used (or used regularly) by our own church. I suspect because it was over-optimistic, a last gasp of pre-World War One, pre-pandemic, pre-ecomomic collapse theology, being sold in the depth of the Great Depression to local church members, some of which were surely in government service or came to town with the New Deal. (I remember of the last, now gone almost twenty years.)

The 1935 declaration declared as an essential feature of Universalist faith, belief in

the power of men of good-will and sacrificial spirit to overcome evil and progressively establish the Kingdom of God.

Certainly some people do good, but this affirmation (in context) suggest a concerted, almost tidal effort to overcome the past and enter a new age by the work of our own hands on God's behalf. We did not march shoulder to shoulder into the dawn. The Second World War and particularly the Holocaust, and other horrors enacted by a set of equally dedicated men put that misplaced hope to rest.

But kingdom isn't the only concept for us to work with, as we turn to today's lessons.

How many of us work regularly with sheep and goats?

I think the closest I get is a goat cheese sandwich. I have a friend who had a flock of goats come over to eat up the weeds in her backyard, and that was such a strange but delightfully comic situation that she took video to share. You might know something about their little square eyes and horns, or the different kind of sheep and the wool they produce but these are optional things to learn today. In Jesus' time, sheep and goats were central to the economy and therefore well-being of the people who heard him. They knew these beasts.

We can infer from the gospel lesson that sheep and goats are not well-behaved. There's only so much grass to be eaten. The pushy sheep gets more. The domineering sheep eats. So a big sheep is a metaphor for someone who takes at the expense of others. Jesus taught his that the kingdom of God inverts our expectations. In those days, God will push aside the greedy and give good things to those who have gone without. This relies on God's purpose and will, an eternal intention, and not our own. If we correspond to God's ways, we will see the rightness of living in goodness, and put aside our own pushy, domineering ways. The more selfish and domineering, the more violent and cruel the more there is to give up. But the final say is God's. This is what we should understand when we hear threatening of "eternal punishment." This is punishment from the Eternal, namely God. And I trust God will act with justice befitting deity and not a human tyrant.

How will this change take place? That part is less clear. Some of it will surely happen in God's ineffable and eternal way. But the fact that the prophets proclaimed this, that Mary sang it, that Jesus preached it but that for millennia even the richest and most powerful people in the world have not expunged it — indeed, some having been transformed by it — gives me hope. I believe the kingdom of God will be revealed to us individually and collectively. Our portion is not to construct it, but to anticipate it. As Jesus said, "the kingdom of God is within you" so how shall it be known and released.

How then? Conscience has a role, as does teaching the young and advising the mature. Societies have a role in constraining the violent and viscous. We better identify it by reflection and prayer. Be patient for it.

I suspect that patience is the last thing some of you want to give. What makes the last four years so hard is to think about all of the progress that we had made be reversed or destroyed. We've lost four years on a very quickly winding down climate clock, and I'm worried that future courts can undo lifetimes of work in a flash. Time, when gone, doesn't get a do-over. Also, the current crisis over the truth is very troubling. Elections come and go, but whether people can be trusted to see the good and do it depends on them understanding the truth and doing it. People resisting masks because they think it's a conspiracy or thinking that that QAnon might be true or that the president actually won reelection all discourages me gravely. But human nature comes with its own set of self-deceptions and I know that I've not been true to the facts, have chosen something that benefits me over others and I might finesse it in ways that make it sound like less than self-benefit. Mask-denying conspiracy-theory grievance-seeking neighbors are doing something bad and ultimately destructive, but I'm not immune to this way of thinking and acting and neither are you.

Patience, seeking and the understanding that follows is a better place to stand. So the kingdom of God, as an ideal rather than a lived reality, depends on us knowing that our actions are always approximate and tinged with failure.

We keep it as an ideal, in part because we trust God, but also knowing that our contributions have to be tested, reviewed and open to criticism. What seems right in the moment will have consequences, and many of them unintended. We wish to do good but will often find the easiest way to accomplish it even if the results are not very desirable. Think about all the wasted recycling that props up a plastics industry that never believed in it. Or think about all of the tailors in low in middle-income countries put out of work because of floods of used clothing from rich countries. Our good intentions are not enough. Our plans are not enough. We need that spiritual core that guides us with care towards the good.

Dearly beloved: the kingdom of God is within you. Within you, but hidden yet ready to grow. The law of God exists, but is not written on our hearts. The age which is to be is present to the Eternal One, but is so distant from us as to be distorted, or at best seen in fleeting glimpses.

But do not despair. Day by day, if we are careful, caring and kind, we shall make more sense of the promises God has made for us.

God bless us today and forever more.

 I ordered eight paperback copies of The Kringle Conspiracy to sell after my book signing party requested copies. And do you know what? I lost the list! AAAAAAAGH someone threw out the piece of paper I'd written them on. I can't believe it!

So now I'm asking my Facebook friends again who ordered copies. I think I've found most of them anyhow. Just missing two or three. 

I feel like such a flake sometimes! Maybe most of the time, but with all the stuff going on (teaching, grading, writing, rewriting, emotional meltdown over Trump's scary refusal to concede the election.) maybe I can't be blamed for being a bit flaky.

What is left to do before January 1st:

• Grade Case Management final case files
• Grade exams in Case Management and People Money and Psych (in a couple weeks)
• Meet with classes Monday via Zoom
• Edit (first round) Kringle in the Night
• Set up my pitches for PitMad December 3
• Narrate 8 presentations for Personal Adjustment (i.e. Positive Psychology)
• Finish setting up Personal Adjustment, Case Management, and People Money and Psych for spring classes
• Get those books out
• Rest (I don't do that very well)

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hvTE668iEGc]

“We give thanks for the gifts and graces, large and small, that we have received . . .”

SERVICE NOTES

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MUSIC CREDITS

“Come, Thou Fount,” from John Wyeth’s Repository of Sacred Music, Part II, 1813, arr. Larry Shackley. (Yelena Mealy, piano). Permission to stream the arrangement in this service obtained from ONE LICENSE with license #A-730948. All rights reserved.

“Give Thanks,” words: Anonymous, music: William Caldwell’s Union Harmony, 1837. (Nylea Butler-Moore, piano). Public Domain.

“The Lone, Wild Bird,” words: H.R. MacFayden, music: William Walker’s Southern Harmony, 1835. (Nylea Butler-Moore, piano). Public Domain.

“Now Thank We All Our God,” words: Martin Rinkart, trans: Catherine Winkworth, music: Johann Crüger. (Nylea Butler-Moore, piano). Public Domain.

“We Gather Together,” words: Dorothy Caiger Senghas & Robert E. Senghas, music: Adrian Valerius’s Nederlandtsch Gedenckclanck, arr. Edward Kremser. (UCLA Choir & Yelena Mealy, piano; Nylea Butler-Moore, Music Director; Rick Bolton, AV Engineer.) Words used by permission. music Public Domain.

“Give Thanks” by Henry Smith, arr. Mark Hayes. (Yelena Mealy, piano). Permission to stream song #370218336 in this service obtained from CHRISTIAN COPYRIGHT SOLUTIONS with license #10770.

“As We Leave This Friendly Place,” words: Vincent B. Silliman, music: J.S. Bach, adapt. from Chorale 38. (UCLA Choir & Yelena Mealy, piano; Nylea Butler-Moore, Music Director; Rick Bolton, AV Engineer.) Public Domain.

Permission to stream the music in this service obtained from ONE LICENSE with license #A-730948. All rights reserved.
Permission to stream music in this service obtained from CHRISTIAN COPYRIGHT SOLUTIONS with license #10770

OTHER NOTES

Call to Worship by Laura Horton-Ludwig**
Prayer by Naomi King**
Reading, “More Than We Deserve,” by Robert R. Walsh**
(music in reading: Brandenburg Concerto No. 2 (Allegro) – J.S. Bach; recording in the public domain via WikiCommons)

*permission granted through Soul Matters
** permission granted through the UUA

OFFERTORY

Our Share the Plate partner for November is the Roadrunner Food Bank. 100% of all offered this month will be given to our partner.

We are now using Givelify.com to process the weekly offering: https://giv.li/5jtcps

SERVICE PARTICIPANTS

Rev. John Cullinan
Tina DeYoe, Director of Lifespan Religious Education
Nylea Butler-Moore, Director of Music
Yelena Mealy, Pianist
Rick Bolton & Mike Begnaud, AV techs

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211110191422/https://www.ascboston.org/downloads/podcast/201122.mp3

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211110191253/http://www.dublinunitarianchurch.org/podcasts/221120-mor1.mp3

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211110191159/http://www.dublinunitarianchurch.org/podcasts/221120-address.mp3

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211110191253/http://www.dublinunitarianchurch.org/podcasts/221120-mor1.mp3

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211110191253/http://www.dublinunitarianchurch.org/podcasts/221120-mor1.mp3

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211110191159/http://www.dublinunitarianchurch.org/podcasts/221120-address.mp3

“A child’s world is fresh and new and beautiful, full of wonder and excitement. It is our misfortune that for most of us that clear-eyed vision, that true instinct for what is beautiful and awe-inspiring, is dimmed and even lost before we reach adulthood.”
-Rachel Carson, “Sense of Wonder”

How do you feed and rekindle your sense of wonder?

The Daily Compass offers words and images to inspire spiritual reflection and encourage the creation of a more loving, inclusive and just world. Produced by The Church of the Larger Fellowship, the Unitarian Universalist Congregation with no geographical boundary. Please support the publishing of The Daily Compass by making a $10 or $25 contribution (more if you can, less if you can't)! Thank you for your support!

She was without doubt the most famous—and romantic—single commercial aircraft ever to take wing, an icon of a shrinking world, and an honest-to-god movie star in her own right.  It all began on November 22, 1935 when the Pan American World Airways China Clipper lifted out of the water off of Alameda, California with a cargo of airmail bound for Manila in the Philippines. 

Heavily laden with cargo and fuel the mighty four-engine Martin M-130 struggled to gain altitude.  A scheduled loop around San Francisco for the benefit of an eager press and newsreel cameras had to be scrubbed and pilot Edwin Musick realized he could not get over San Francisco-Oakland Bridge, then still under construction, so he dramatically flew under the span.  It was a rocky start, but the plane was on her way.

It was epic, arduous and took seven days with lay-overs for fuel and to rest the crew at Honolulu, Midway Island, Wake Island, and Guam.  Setting down in Manila Baywith her cargo of 110,000 pieces of mail was cause for national celebration.  The Clipper was soon in regular scheduled service and also carrying passengers.

The flight was a long time coming.  It was the vision of Pan Am founder and President Juan Trippe, a swashbuckling Wall Street investor turned aviation entrepreneur.  After earlier forays into the infant industry, Trippe founded the Aviation Corporation of the Americaswhich opened Latin American air mail service with a flight from Key West to Havana in 1927 with Musick at the controls.  He saw the future of international commercial aviation was in flying boats and put Pan Am’s resources into helping develop and put them in operation.  With planes like the Sikorsky S-42 which made trans-Atlantic service feasible.  With well-established routes to South America, Africa, and Europe, which made Pan Am the unofficial United States flag carrier, Trippe turned his gaze east. 

But Asia was far away and regular service would require a new, larger, and more powerful aircraft.  Trippe commissioned a new plane from the Glenn L. Martin Company of Baltimore, Maryland.   The builder designated the new planes as the M-30 Martin Ocean Transports, all-metalflying boats with streamlined aerodynamics and four powerful Pratt & Whitney radial engines.  The planes could accommodate 36 day or 18 overnight sleeper passengers and carried a flight crew of 7 plus cabin attendants for passenger service.  Three were built for Pan Am.

The China Clipper was first built and was test flown on December 30, 1934.  It was delivered to the Pan Am fleet on October 9, 1944.  Her sister ships were the Philippine Clipper and the Hawaii Clipper.

Meanwhile Trippe sent Musick, now Pan Am’s chief pilot on two flights in a Sikorsky S-42 to scout routes to the Philippines and from Manila to China.  Musick was then one of the most famous aviators in the world holding more than 10 records for long distance and flying boats.  He was also, by far, the most experienced pilot in the world having racked up nearly 2 milliontrans-oceanic air miles. 

With the route laid out, Musick was the easy choice for senior captainon the inaugural flight of the China Clipper.  The rest of the crew were also respected veterans and included First Officer R.O.D. Sullivan and navigator Fred Noonan, later famed for doing the same duty on Amelia Earhart’s doomed round the world flight.

Weekly passenger flights across the Pacific began in October 1936 with Hawaii Clipper.  Connecting service from Manila to Hong Kong began in 1937 using S-42’s with the Clipper class Martins taking over that leg of the route a year later.  All three of the Martins flew these routes, but in the public’s eye they were all the China Clipper.  

A lobby card for Warner Bros. 1936 China Clipper starring Pat O'Brien, Humphrey Bogart, Henry B. Walthall, Ross Alexander and, of course, The China Clipper herself.

Public fascination with the Clipper was so high that Warner Bros./First National Pictures rushed into production with a film China Clipper starring Pat O’Brian as a thinly disguised Trippe single minded and ruthless in his aim to establish trans-Pacific service no matter the cost.  The turgid melodrama is noted for an early non-gangster role for Humphrey Bogart as a safety conscious pilot at odds with O’Brian who eventually saves the day by flying the plane safely through a storm and into a mail contract.  The film used much newsreel and stock footageof the real China Clipper, including dramatic footage of passing under the Bay Bridge.

The China Clipper was featured in other films including 1937 comedy Fly-Away Baby and the 1939 adventure film Secret Service of the Air and referenced in several others.  Later Alec Baldwin would play Juan Trippe in the bio-flick of his rival Howard Hughes in The Aviator starring Leonardo DiCaprio. It also figured in radio serials and popular pulp fiction.

The China Clipper and her sister ships as well as the famous pilot of that first flight all met disastrous ends, a reminder of how dangerous long distance air travel still was even in the most advanced aircraft.

On January 28, 1938 Musick and his crew of six died in the crash of the S-42 Samoan Clipper near Pago Pago, American Samoa, on a cargo and survey flight to Auckland, New Zealand.  A few months later in July the Hawaii Clipper disappeared between Guam and Manila with the loss of nine crew and six passengers.

The Philippine Clipper survived a Japanese air raid on Wake Island, an event depicted in the 1942 film Wake Island.  Pressed into wartime service for the Navy along with the China Clipper, she was lost in January 1943 between Ukiahand Boonville, California on a flight from Honolulu killing Pacificsubmarine force commander Admiral Robert H. English and 18 others. 

That left the original China Clipper the sole survivor of the fleet.  Released from Navy service she was assigned to the inaugural flight of Pan Am service between Miami and Leopoldville in the Belgian Congo via Rio de Janeiro.  The plane was attempting to touch down at Port of Spain, Trinidad with an inexperienced pilot at the controls but under the supervision of a veteran pilot.  After aborting one approach the pilot misjudged his altitude and came in nose downhundreds of yards short of his designated landing zone.  The plane hull smashed on impact, took water, and quickly sank.  All 28 on board were killed.

Trippe would go on to lead Pan Am for decades introducing new innovationslike the Boing 747, workhorse of international aviation.  He died in 1981 at the age of 81.  Mercifully he did not live to see the ignominious failure of what had been one of the world’s premier airlinesa decade later.