Discovering America, part 3 What we’ve seen so far in our journey to look for America, is a tale that seems to have a certain sad inevitability to it. Once the Agricultural Revolution had led to standing armies, then all the rest of it -- unending cycles of mass warfare and conquest with attendant rape, pillaging, enslavement -- looks unstoppable. Europe seems to have been bound and doomed to do in the Americas exactly what it did do. But it wasn't unstoppable. It could have been different -- could easily have been different. It didn’t have to be this way. We had the wherewithal from early on to know better – and that’s the deeper tragedy. We had ideas of social justice going back to the Hebrew prophets. We had ideas of democracy...

Discovering America, part 2 The European powers’ shared Christianity helped motivate them to not fight among each other over the new lands. The earlier history of Crusades had accustomed them to the idea of Christians – despite constant wars among themselves – unifying to fight nonChristians. Then they started explaining to themselves what principles they were following to avoid fighting among themselves. Explanations, justifications – principles – can take on a life of their own, far beyond the immediate context they were formulated for. Sometimes this is a good thing. Philadelphia, 1776 We zoom in on the Continental Congress and see them signing the Declaration of Independence. It says that the colonies are separating from Gr...

The American Idea, part 3 The American Idea (1) is a fluke, (2) includes some values worth keeping and building on, and (3) is in mortal peril. Running through the American identity has been a certain historical account defining what being an American meant. It’s the story that ran along lines typified by Will and Ariel Durant's Story of Civilization – 11 volumes published over 40 years (1935-1975). The Durants, "basically told human history (mostly Western history) as an accumulation of great ideas and innovations, from the Egyptians, through Athens, Magna Carta, the Age of Faith, the Renaissance and the Declaration of the Rights of Man. The series was phenomenally successful, selling over two million copies." (David Brooks)As Ameri...

The American Idea, part 2 From Paul Simon's "American Tune": We come on the ship they call the Mayflower We come on the ship that sailed the moon We come in the age's most uncertain hour and sing an American tune When I heard that as a teenager, it didn’t occur to me to ask, “What ‘we’?” A lot of us who now share this land didn’t come on the Mayflower, and none of our ancestors did. For African Americans, of course, many if not most of their ancestors who weren’t born in the New World but who died here were brought here on slave ships. Others of us here today have ancestry among those who were here thousands of years before the Mayflower. And millions more have ancestry among people born in Asia, or in Latin America. And th...

An article by Yoni Appelbaum says, in essence: “The American Idea” asserts that universal and equal rights, freedoms, and opportunity is both a good idea – indeed, a moral imperative – and an American idea – that is, the U.S. bears a special responsibility to model a civic culture that embodies rights, equality, and democracy in a way the world had not seen before. Americans have been held together by the conviction that the United States had a unique mission, even as they debated how to pursue it. From the first, the American Idea provoked skepticism. How could people be allowed to define their own destinies without the stabilizing power of an aristocratic class? It bordered on absurd to believe that a nation so sprawling and ...

Forgiveness. Kavanaugh. Also Cowbirds. part 3 THE CASE OF KAVANAUGH Do we say, then, that a 17-year-old boy’s behavior shouldn’t be judged? I hear US Senators saying, “If true, he was just a 17-year-old kid.” Wait! That’s not what comes after, “if true.” I’ll tell you what comes after, “if true.” After saying, “if true,” what comes next is “what has he done to own the responsibility for the mistake? Is there sincere remorse? Is there apology?" When the allegations first come to light, does he say, "Oh, my God, Christine, I barely remember that night – I was intoxicated, I’d been taught all my life that women’s autonomy didn’t matter, that assault was no big deal. But hearing from you now, reading how tha...

Forgiveness. Kavanaugh. Also Cowbirds. part 2 COWBIRDS Our reaction to cowbirds gives us some insight into how the moral judgment part of our minds works. If you read this week’s e-Communitarian – the newsletter that CUUC emails out every week on Thursday or Friday – and if you read all the way to the bottom – you got the bottom where it says “message clipped – click here to view entire message” – and you clicked, and read all the way to THAT bottom . . . If you did that, then God bless you. That’s wonderful. If you did, then you found a little item at the bottom called “Your Moment of Zen.” I took the phrase from The Daily Show , and I’ve been putting a moment of zen at the end of all our e-Communitarian issues f...

When to let go? When not to? APOLOGY IS POWERFUL "Letting go" has many forms, and this month’s On the Journey issue shows. I'll be looking the kind of letting go that is forgiveness: letting go of the wrong committed against us. The blessing of forgiveness isn’t always in the forgiver’s hands. It can’t happen without the other party having contrition, apologizing. Sometimes, no matter how much we might want to forgive, the healing power can only be unlocked by sincere apology. Not always: sometimes we can forgive and let go without getting an apology, and other times apology isn’t enough. But there is a middle area where the apologizer’s willingness to let go of self-protection and defensiveness and acknowledge the wrong they...

Living Your Faith, part 3 Rosh Hashanah this year began in the evening last Sunday, Sep 9. Yom Kippur ended on Wednesday evening, Sep 19. In between were the Days of Awe and Repentance. It's the Jewish New Year. How are you going to live your faith this year? We have options for ways to exercise your caring and compassion muscle on behalf of justice for a bruised and hurting world. We have SJTs -- Social Justice Teams – pick one. Maybe two, but at least one. Our social justice teams each have a chair, or two co-chairs. They each have a leadership core of five people. Then there are the active members, who show up at the monthly meetings and at events that are the work of the team, who answer and share emails about the team’s activiti...

Living Your Faith, part 2 The "infirmary model" emphasizes to role of the congregation (and the practices and faith it helps its members develop) in tending to spiritual needs of the soul-weary and the heart-broken. The "gymnasium model" emphasizes the role of the congregation in encouraging the exercise that strengthens our spiritual muscles. The "insurance policy model" just says that if you pay the premiums of participating in your congregation and its faith and practices, then God will smile upon you -- in this life (as in, prosperity theology, especially), the next, or both. The interplay between "gymnasium" and "insurance policy" runs through the debate in the Christian tradition between between “salvation by works” versus “s...

Living Your Faith, part 1 There’s a saying about the function of a congregation, I've mentioned before. The two-fold function of the congregation is: to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. It sounds like two different things: comforting afflicted and afflicting comfortable. You might read this as separating the comfortable from the afflicted in much the same way the sheep are to be separated from the goats: the comfortable being the goats, are to be afflicted. I don’t believe in a separation of people into sheep and goats. I resonate with Alexandre Solzhenitsyn who wrote: “If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and de...

Why do we vote? I mean, those of us who do. I'll begin with something that appears completely different: the case of a German rueful about insufficiently resisting the Nazis in 1935. From there, we move to the broader question of Kantian fantasy -- and from there to our popular rationales for voting, and why they miss the point. Milton Mayer's book, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45 (originally published 1955) includes a story of a German who says, "The world was lost one day in 1935, here in Germany, and it was I who lost it."The man tells how, in 1935, Germany adopted the National Defense Law. The man was employed in a defense plant at the time, and the new law required him to take an oath of fidelity. The man opposed i...

Asking myself: What exactly do we do when we "let go"? It occurs to me that: We sigh. Sighing is the physical correlate of letting go. Or is it? I gave Science a call. Science and I chat regularly. She is particularly keen to bend my ear about climate change -- and she has quite persuaded me that the matter is indeed urgent -- but she is also happy to chat about lots of other things. About sighing, Science says that a sigh is a fundamental life-sustaining reflex. It’s not just a sign of frustration or despair. “A control system in the brain keeps humans sighing about a dozen times an hour,” says Science. Apparently our lungs have tiny sacs called alveoli, and regular breaths don’t inflate them fully. They need periodic full infla...

Dear "Spiritual But Not Religious" person, I'm encouraged by the interest in spirituality, in spiritual growth and development. There are lots of ways to walk a spiritual path: books, classes, spiritual directors and counselors, practices you can undertake by yourself, guided by a teacher, or books, or youtube videos. Even without intentional cultivation of spirituality -- without any books, classes, counselors, teachers, or videos -- "being spiritual" might just mean that you're open to, and value, those intimations of wonder and peace when they come: seeing a sunset, hiking in the woods, or strolling on a beach, say. My path happens to be more the intentional kind. I find that following some disciplines helps me be open to wonder. My p...

There was something telling in one word, a mere conjunction, buried in a sentence in the 19th paragraph of an article in this morning's New York Times . Under the headline, "The Daughter of a Maverick Goes to Battle" [it has a different title online], the Katie Rogers' article began: "As Meghan McCain delivered a eulogy for her father on Saturday, she was at times too grief-stricken to catch her breath. As she described his sickness from brain cancer or his love for her, she struggled to look up at a crowd full of boldface Washington establishment figures who had gathered at National Cathedral. But as Ms. McCain shared one of her father’s dying directives — “Show them how tough you are” — her voice stopped wavering. The warrior...