This week marked the third anniversary of the mass murder at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh on October 27, 2018.  I was asked to do the Chalice Lighting at the Tree of Life Unitarian Universalist Congregation in McHenrythe next day.    The topic for the morning was sanctuary.  I threw away what I had carefully prepared.  I was planning on reading this new poem instead which was totally inadequate to the situation but due to a scheduling mix up, I didn’t read it that day.  Instead, I read it for the first time a year later at the Tree of Life Coffee Houseat the church.  The poem also referenced other ugly, hateful episodes the same week.

Sanctuary in a Very Bad Week

Headlines: 

Trump Attempts to Erase Transgender Identity

Two Blacks Killed at Walmart by Angry Racist

14 Bombs Sent to Targets Denounced by Trump

11 Dead at Tree of Life Synagogue Mass Murder

Sacred shelter—A haven offered or sought, 

   a holy obligation and a desperate resort.

The Church once offered it to those fleeing

   the wrath of a king or war lord.

Today we are called to offer it to

   immigrants and refugees,

      the homeless and unwanted,

            the despised of color, gender, faith,

               abused women and families,

                  all the wretched.

Know this—Sanctuary can fail.

   Ask Thomas Becket, Ann Frank,

      the four little Girls of Birmingham,

            the frozen bum,

               the murdered wife,

                  the deported asylum seeker,

         the immigrant children in cages,

            the dead Jews of Tree of Life.

But failure does not cancel hope or duty.

   time to step up,

      to take our chances,

            to become a People of Sanctuary.

—Patrick Murfin

A few years ago, I noticed that Dylan Thomas and Sylvia Plath shared a birthday, October 27—1914 in Wales for him, 1932 in Boston for her.  They had little in common except that they wrote poetry—although poetry very different in form, theme, style, and substance—and died young each in a kind of pitiful squalor.  Each had crossed the ocean and died in the other’s country, a nice cosmic balance.

That year—2012—their common birthday also coincided with a new moon and where I was, at least, a howling storm of darkness. 

You know me.  I am a sucker for cosmic coincidence.  So, I scribbled a poem for the occasion.

Writing poetry about poets, both infinitely more gifted than I, is an act of terminal hubris for which I shall be justly punished.  But here it is anyway.

How Black the Night

October 26, 2011—New Moon, Dylan Thomas and Sylvia Plath

Even the New Moon hides behind the howling clouds.

Happy Birthday Dylan—

Why did you not

            rage, rage against the dying of the light

            in that pool of your own black vomit

            at the Chelsea?

Happy Birthday Sylvia—

The same year, you dewy goddess,

            you emptied the medicine vials

            and crawled under your mother’s porch.

Not ships passing in the night,

                    but traversing the same black ocean

                    away from home

                    to something else.

Did you find what you were looking for

                    in worship and whiskey,

                    in broken love and madness?

As Dylan moldered under Laugharne,

                    Lady Lazarus, you wrote.

                   Dying

   Is an art, like everything else.

   I do it exceptionally well.

But laying your head in an oven

             is no art

             and posthumous poems

             no resurrection.

How black the night, dead poets,

                    how black the night?

—Patrick Murfin

Tania Márquez

Continue reading "A Thousand Voices"

Sunshine Jeremiah Wolfe

Continue reading "UU Pittsburgh Assembly to Explore the 8th Principle"

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211111043052/https://whitebearunitarian.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/10-24-21-audio.mp3

Way back when dirt was new and I was an exceptionally earnest high school student, we learned that before there was William Shakespearethere was Geoffrey Chaucer, period.  In those distant days students were generally assigned at least a chunk of The Canterbury Tales to read and try and decipher.  We were told it was English, but it was Greek to most of us.  I remember that after some hours of labor, I got a hazy idea of what he was writing about.

English literature prior to the 20th Century apart from a medicinal dose of the Bard, a dollop of Dickens, and a few lines from a dreamy Romantic poethas long been banished from most high school curricula.  You might not even encounter Chaucer today in many introductory survey level English Lit. courses in College.  Certainly, you would have to be an English major and toiling in the 200-300 level courses before you really encounter him.

Perhaps things are better for Geoffrey in England. One hopes so.

I bring this up because October 25 mark the anniversary of Chaucer’s passing in 1400.  He was then the resident of the Inne of the Shrews in Greenwich.  After a lifetime as a mostly successful courtier, he had been out of favor and broke, but was recently restored to Royal favor.  But he may have been murdered by those who did not take kindly to his portrayal of the clergy, or so some stories have it.  None-the-less, he was respectable enough to be buried in an unimportant corner of Westminster Abby.  In later years other literary men asked to be interred near him in what eventually became the revered Poet’s Corner.

Today his fans celebrate his life on his death day because no one knows exactly when he was born.  It was about 1342 or ’43 in London.  He came from a Normanfamily whose name originally meant shoemaker.  But the family fortunes had risen.  His father was a successful wine merchant and minor courtier—deputy to the King’s Butler.  Nothing is known of his education except that it was quite good.  By the time young Geoffrey was ready to enter the service of the noble and highborn himself at about age 13 he could already read and write Latin, French, and Italian.

That career started with an appointment to the household of Elizabeth, Countess of Ulster and Prince Lionelin 1357.  Two years later he was a soldierin France fighting for King Edward IIIin the 100 Years War.  He was evidently a good and valuable soldier because after being capturedby the French he was paroled under the terms of the Treaty of Brétignyin 1360.  The King himself and other courtiers contributed to raising the substantial ransom of £16.  It was during his presumably not too-uncomfortable imprisonment that Chaucer completed, according to some sources his first literary work, Romaunt of the Rose, a translation from the French into the Anglo-Norman language of the court.

Around 1337 Chaucer apparently married very well indeed.  His wife, or at least the mother of his two sons, was Philippa Roe, the sister of the future wife of John of Gaunt, third surviving son of Edward III.  Due to this happy circumstance, he enjoyed the support and patronage of the Prince as long as he lived.

In 1369 he would re-work that earlier Romaunt of the Rose into vernacular English, what we now know as Middle English in The Book of the Duchess, dedicated to his sister-in-law after her death.

Such connection earned him more important and lucrative appointments.  From 1338-78 he traveled extensively in Europe on several diplomatic and commercial assignments.  He was said to have met the Italian Poet Petrarch on one such trip.  He was also exposed to Dante’s Divine Comedy, which was written in vernacular Italianrather than Latin.  This was supposedly an inspiration for Chaucer to work in vernacular English but as we have seen, he was already working in that language.

Back in England he was awarded the very lucrative post of Comptroller of the Customs and Subside of Wools, Skins, and Tanned Hides for the Port of London, just the kind of position where money could not help but fill the purse of a poor, but honest public servant.  He survived a charge of rape by Cecile Champaigne and was able to get her to withdraw her suit after a hefty private settlement. 

He could survive scandal, but not the shifting sands of politics.  With John of Gaunt out of favor, so was he.  He lost his post and free housing.  But he moved to Kent, got a minor sinecure as Postmaster, and eventually was elected to Parliament.  Away from London and the demands of court Chaucer devoted himself more and more to literature.  He composed Troilus and Criseyde, a long poem based on a Trojan romance by the Italian poet Boccaccio. 

When his wife died and with John out of favor, Chaucer was sued for debt.  Several friends and acquaintances were executed.  But in 1389 John returned to power and influence over his nephew Richard II, who in turn favored the poet with a new appointment as Clerk of the King’s Works responsible for the upkeepand repair governmental buildings in and around London.  He was the beneficiary of Royal gifts and pensions in the 1390’s.

It was during this period that he did most of his work on his magnum opus, The Canterbury Tales.  The loose collection was said to have been inspired in some ways by Dante’s journeys through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise.  But Chaucer’s tales were grounded in the real, even mundane world. 

A group of 30 pilgrims gather for a journey to the grave and shrine of Thomas à Becket in an Inn much like the one in which Chaucer himself resided.  It was a remarkably diverse group cutting across the rigid class lines of England at the time.  Included in the group and telling their stories at the behest of the inn keeperwere a knight, a monk, a prioress, a plowman, a miller, a merchant, a clerk, and an oft-widowed wife from Bath.  The stories, some of them borrowed from earlier tales and sources, were often humorous and sometimes bawdy.

Chaucer never lived to complete the work.  Perhaps because he was interrupted by another episode of political intrigue. 

After Chaucer’s patron John died, Richard II disinherited his son, Henry ofBolingbrook.  Henry returned from exile in France in 1399 to supposedly re-claim his lands and titles.  He quickly gathered a large army against the king.  He deposedRichard and seized the crown.  Chaucer was reportedly in Henry’s service at the time, ever loyal to the line of John of Gaunt.  As Henry IV the new king rewarded such loyal service with a generous increase in his annuity. 

But he never received either lands or title and remained until he died the next year, as he had lived, a commoner with uncommon connections to Royalty.

For those who may have forgotten—and for those who have never seen it, here is a sample of Chaucer’s most famous work:

Here begins the Book of the Tales of Canterbury

Whan that aprill with his shoures soote

The droghte of march hath perced to the roote,

And bathed every veyne in swich licour

Of which vertu engendred is the flour;

Whan zephirus eek with his sweete breeth

Inspired hath in every holt and heeth

Tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne

Hath in the ram his halve cours yronne,

And smale foweles maken melodye,

That slepen al the nyght with open ye

(so priketh hem nature in hir corages);

Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages,

And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes,

To ferne halwes, kowthe in sondry londes;

And specially from every shires ende

Of engelond to caunterbury they wende,

The hooly blisful martir for to seke,

That hem hath holpen whan that they were seeke.

Bifil that in that seson on a day,

In southwerk at the tabard as I lay

Redy to wenden on my pilgrymage

To caunterbury with ful devout corage,

At nyght was come into that hostelrye

Wel nyne and twenty in a compaignye,

Of sondry folk, by aventure yfalle

In felaweshipe, and pilgrimes were they alle,

That toward caunterbury wolden ryde.

The chambres and the stables weren wyde,

And wel we weren esed atte beste.

 And shortly, whan the sonne was to reste,

So hadde I spoken with hem everichon

 That I was of hir felaweshipe anon,

And made forward erly for to ryse,

To take oure wey ther as I yow devyse.

But nathelees, whil I have tyme and space,

 Er that I ferther in this tale pace,

Me thynketh it acordaunt to resoun

To telle yow al the condicioun

Of ech of hem, so as it semed me,

And whiche they weren, and of what degree,

And eek in what array that they were inne;

And at a knyght than wol I first bigynne.

—Geoffrey Chaucer 

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211111043031/http://www.austinuuav.org/audio/2021-10-24_Healing_Power_of_Truth.mp3

“The Land of Memory” (October 24, 2021) Worship Service

The artist Etel Adnan, wrote that her memories were like a forest with unstable boundaries. Adnan was born in Lebanon, lived in France, then moved to California, living at the base of Mount Tamalpais, where she wrote and painted for many years. Her paintings were a way to explore memories and make meaning of them. Navigating the land of memory can be complex and challenging. But it can lead us into a deeper understanding of who we are, and how to live more fully into our lives as we make our way forward.

Rev. Alyson Jacks, Associate Minister; Richard Davis-Lowell, Worship Associate; Reiko Oda Lane, Organist; UUSF Choir; Mark Sumner, Music Director; Wm. García Ganz, Pianist

Shulee Ong, Camera; Jonathan Silk, Communications Director; Joe Chapot, Live Chat Moderator; Thomas Brown, Sexton; Athena Papadakos, Flowers; Alex Darr, Les James, Tom Brookshire, Zoom Coffee Hour

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211111042948/https://content.uusf.org/podcast/20211024AJSermon.mp3

The Tree of Life Unitarian Universalist Congregation, 5603 Bull Valley Road in McHenry, Illinois has appointed a new interim Music Director to aid the congregation in providing quality musical programing while it continues to conduct Sunday morning services via Zoom due to the continued of the Coronavirus pandemic.  Although the congregation hopes to return to in-person services as soon as it is safe and possible, that is weeks or months away.

Dr. Jie Yi is currently the Music Directorof the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Huntington, New Yorkand will continue in that position as well. 

Jie holds a Doctor of Music Arts degreein conducting from Manhattan School of Music. He is the authorof Chinese for Singers, the first comprehensive guide for Western singers to use in singing Chinese texts. Jie conducted Messe de Minuit by Charpentier, Musikalische Exequien by Schütz, and Missa O quam gloriosum by Victoria at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in 2018 and 2019. He also conducted Handel’s coronation anthem Let Thy Hand Be Strengthened at Riverside Church in 2018. In 2015, he made his Carnegie Hall debut, conducting Xian Xinghai’s Yellow River Cantata. He was Chorus Masterand Assistant Conductor at the Shanghai Opera from 2008 to 2013.

Jie is a recipient of the Asian Culture Council Fellowship (2011) and the U.S. China Cultural Institute Fellowship for Young Conductors (2006). As pianist and vocal coach, he performed at La Lingua della Lirica Festival in Italy(2015–16) and performed Bellini’s opera I Capuletti e i Montecchiat Manhattan School of Music (2013).

Jie will be able to work remotely from Huntington because he is especially adept at the technical aspectsof creating videos blending the voices of many individual singers recording their parts from their homes. He has already begun work with members of the Tree of Life Choir and together they expect to create music for services two times a month and prepare a Christmas/Yule/Solstice/Winter holiday music service in December.  He will work closely in planning services with Tree of Life’s Interim Minister, the Rev. Jenn Gracen.

The congregation’s choir is one of the most highly regarded in McHenry County and is known for its wide repertoireincluding not only hymns and other traditional worship music but also jazz, pop, folk, Broadway, international music, and classical. They toured internationally to Romania (Transylvania) in 2016 and have performed in both McHenry County choral music programs and with regional Unitarian Universalist choirs.  The ensemble includes several outstanding soloists as well.

Tree of Life is also still conducting a searchfor a permanent Music Director who will be able to lead the choir and coordinate other music as the congregation returns to live, in-person worship.

Tree of Life Sunday services are currently held via Zoom at 10:45 am.  Visit the congregation at https://treeoflifeuu.org/ for links to the services. 

Yesterday Facebook's memory dredge hauled up a status report from way back in 2010.  I had completely forgottenabout it but after years of ever increasing American polarization and its attendant personal trauma I found it more relevant than ever.  It was also found versemaking a poem simply by breaking up the lines exactly as originally written.  I have discovered of few of the over they years.  At least they are shortand sweet and don’t drone on forever.

An Encounter

Discovered in a Facebook status from

October 21, 2010

Pleasantries with a wave and nod acquaintance of some years. 

Don’t know each other’s last names.

You know—weather, sports, a bit of family trivia.

A passing word betrays an affiliation. 

The eyes narrow, the jaw sets just so. 

In an instant the other, the enemy, the sub-human. 

Whose eyes, whose jaw?

—Patrick Murfin

It was the most brutal and flagrant on-field racist attack in NCAA college football history.  The irrefutable evidence was splashed on front pages across the country.  The leading contender for the 1951 Heisman Trophy was severely injured and knocked out of a game causing his undefeated team to lose its only game of the season.  Yet no action was taken against the player who assaulted Johnny Bright, the coach who ordered the hit and drilled the assault in practice, or the administrationwhich apparently approved, defended, and covered up the attack.  In fact, for decade after decade the University denied any wrongdoing and refused to apologize to the wounded player or the team they cheated.  It was not until September 28, 2005 that an Oklahoma State University President acknowledged wrongdoing in a letter to the President Drake University.  The apology came almost 54 years after the assault and 22 years after the victim’s death.

Johnny Bright was born to a working class African American family on June 11, 1930 in Fort Wayne, Indiana.  He was raised with three brothers and a sister by a single mother.  At the city’s Central High School, he was an excellent student and lettered in football, basketball, and track and field, leading his football team to a city title in 1945, and helped the basketball team to two state tournament Final Four appearances.  He also played local league softball and was a successful amateur boxer.

Bright was one of the most heavily recruited high school athletesin the nation when he graduated in 1947.  He accepted a scholarship at Big Ten powerhouse Michigan State University (MSU.)  It was not a good fit.  As a freshman he was unhappy with the direction of the football program and disappointed that coaches seemed to actively discourage “wasting time” on academics instead of concentrating on football. 

Bright dropped out of MSU and accepted a track and field scholarship at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa a smaller but prestigiousuniversity.  Bright’s scholarship allowed him to try out for the football and basketball squads, but because he was a transfer he was redshirted for football in his freshman year.  During his college career he letteredin all three sports.

Drake competed in the Missouri Valley Conference (MVC), then considered a second tier college conference.  Within the conference Drake was a traditional powerhouse.  Once he became eligible for varsity play in his sophomore year, Bright quickly helped the program step up to a whole new level.  In 1949, his sophomore year he rushedfor 975 yards and threw for another 975 to lead the nation in total offense.   The Drake Bulldogs finished their season at 6–2–1.  In Bright’s junior year as a halfback/quarterback he rushed for 1,232 yards and passed for 1,168 yards, setting an NCAA record of 2,400 yards total offense and again led the team to a 6–2–1 record.

Early in his freshman year Bright became the first Black player to compete against MVC rival Oklahoma A&M at Lewis Field in Stillwater.  A&M, which would later become Oklahoma State University, had just, extremely reluctantly, become officially integrated that year.   Bright, then unknown, had competed without incident or controversy and led his team to a victory over the Aggies.  In his sophomore year Drake hosted the contest between the two teams and once again Bright had romped over the Oklahoma team.

Before the beginning of the 1951 season and Bright’s senior year, he had become a genuine national star.  He was rated by sports writers as the hands down favorite to win the Heisman Trophy.  As his team began to roll up victory after victory, Bright became an open target at A&M.  The student newspaper, The Daily O’Collegian, and the Stillwater News Press, reported that Bright was a marked man, and several A&M students were openly bragging that Bright “would not be around at the end of the game.”  A&M Coach Jennings B. Whitworth, an Arkansas native, exhorted his team repeatedly during practices to “get that Nigger!”  He ran special drills featuring his toughest defenseman, tackle Wilbanks Smith practicing how to do just that.

On the day of the game, Bright led a 5-0 team and was the nation’s leading collegiate scorer.  But in the first ten minutes of the A&M game bright was knocked unconscious three times by Smith.  The third time, after Bright had handed the ball off to Drake fullback Gene Macomber, and well behind the play, Smith smashed into his face with his elbow, breaking Bright’s jaw.  Despite the pain, Bright was able to stay in the game long enough to complete a 61-yard touchdown pass to Drake halfback Jim Pilkington a few plays later.  But he was unable to play after the first quarter.  For the first time in his college career Bright had less than 100 yards total offense.  Without their star player, the Bulldogs fell to the Aggies 27-10.

No penalty was called on Smith for the flagrantly late hit.  After the brouhaha over the attack reached national proportions the MVC refused to take any action.  A&M President Oliver Willham denied anything happened even after evidence of the incident was published nationwide.  Drake withdrew from the Conference in protest.

The evidence that caught the nation’s attention was a series of photographs taken byDes Moines Register cameramen John Robinson and Don Ultang.  They had picked up on rumors sweeping the stadium that day that Bright would be targeted.  They set up their cameras specifically to follow him in play.  In six shots they captured the whole sequence of the play from Bright’s hand-off to Smith’s elbow smashing into his face which ran on the front page of the next day’s paper.  The photos were so dramatic that they also ended up on the cover of Life magazine.  Robinson and Ultang won the Pulitzer Prize for their effort.

The Register followed up with an in-depth investigation by reporter Bob Spiegel who interviewed many spectators at the game who confirmed the threats circulating and quoting comments from a A&M player on the bench which confirmed that the attack had been planned and drilled.

The NCAA investigated the incident but took no action against Smith or A&M, much to Drake’s outrage.  They did tweak rules about late hits and illegal blocking and established a new rule requiring ball handling players wear helmets with face guards.

After the game Bright’s jaw was wired shut.  He most likely also suffered a concussion, although those kinds of head injuries were not well understood at the time.  He was only able to see limited action in the team’s remaining three games, but he earned 70 percent of the yards Drake gained and scored 70 percent of the Bulldogs’ points over the whole season anyway.  The limited action in the last games probably costBright the Heisman.  He finished fifth in voting anyway.

Bright was taken fifth in the NFL Draft, picked by the Philadelphia Eagles.  Bright would have been the first Black on the team.  He was concernedthat he would not be well receivedby the many Southerners on the team.  He was not eager, he told people later, to be “football’s Jackie Robinson.” 

Instead after playing in the post-season East-West Shrine Game and the Hula Bowl, Bright unexpectedly accepted an offer from the Calgary Stampeders of the Western Interprovincial Football Union, the precursor to the West Division of the Canadian Football League, leading the Stampeders and the WIFU in rushing with 815 yards his rookie season.  In his third season in Canada, Bright was traded to the Edmonton Eskimos.  He would go on to win three Gray’s Cup Championships with the team, be elected CFL’s Most Outstanding Player in 1959, and establish numerous offensive records in a 13 year long pro career.  When he retired in 1964 he was the League’s all-time leading rusher with, had five consecutive 1,000 yard seasons, and led the CFL in rushing four times.  He is a member of the Canadian Football Hall of Fame, the College Football Hall of Fame, the Missouri Valley Conference Hall of Fame, the Edmonton Eskimos Wall of Honour, the Alberta Sports Hall of Fame, and the Des Moines Register Iowa Sports Hall of Fame.

But the football honors were only part of the remarkable legacy of Johnny Bright.

Like most Canadian football players of the era, Bright held down a full time off-season job.  Using his Drake Bachelor of Science degree, Bright became an Edmonton school teacher.  Over the years he turned down several offers from the NFL because it would have meant giving up teaching.  Bright eventually became principal of D.S. Mackenzie and Hillcrest Junior High Schools in Edmonton.  In profound gratitude for the opportunities Canada provided him, Bright became a citizen in 1962.

Bright was frequently asked about what had become known as the Johnny Bright Incident.  He expressed surprisingly little bitterness toward Wilbanks Smith.  While acknowledging that there was “no way it couldn’t have been racially motivated…What I like about the whole deal now, and what I’m smug enough to say, is that getting a broken jaw has somehow made college athletics better. It made the NCAA take a hard look and clean up some things that were bad.”

Bright died of a massive heart attackon December 14, 1983 at the age of only 53, at the University of Alberta Hospital in Edmonton, while undergoing surgery to correct a knee injury suffered during his football career. He was survived by his wife and four children.

In 2006, the football field at Drake Stadium, in Des Moines was named in Bright’s honor.  Four years later his second career was recognized with the opening of Johnny Bright School, a kindergarten through grade 9 facility in Edmonton.

And what of the villains?  There seems to be some kind of karma and rough justice in the case of Coach Whitworth.  He left Oklahoma A&M after four years as head coach in 1954 with a losing 22–27–1 record. Then he went on to coach his alma mater, the University of Alabama from 1955 to 1957 where he posted miserable a 4–24–2 record that included a 14-game losing streak from 1955 to 1956.  He was firedand replaced by the legendary Bear Bryant.  Whitworth could only get an assistant job at Georgia, where he worked for one year.  He died in 1960 at the age of 52.

Wilbanks Smith was said to have had a successful career in engineering and to have been devoted tocommunity service.  He was said to have taken “personal responsibility for the incident” mainly to deflect criticism of his coach, team, and the University but he never expressed any regretat injuring Bright or made any attempt to contact him or make amends. 

With typical grace, Bright shrugged it off, saying he felt “null and void” about Smith, but adding “The thing has been a great influence on my life. My total philosophy of life now is that, whatever a person’s bias and limitation, they deserve respect. Everyone’s entitled to their own beliefs.”

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211111042813/http://www.austinuuav.org/audio/2021-10-17_Cultivating_Relationship.mp3

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211111042747/https://whitebearunitarian.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/10-17-21-audio.mp3

"Right Thinking, Right Feeling and Right Relations" (October 17, 2021) Worship Service

Twins and co-authors of a recent book "Burnout", Emily and Amelia Nagoski talk about patterns of thinking and dealing with stress that lead to burnout. However, they also go deeper, to patterns of thinking, feeling and being in relationships that undermine our own and one another's health, joy and, I'd say, derail us on the journey to Beloved Community. In our work to hold ourselves accountable for the proposed 8th Principle of Unitarian Universalism, they offer some very tangible ways we can untangle from problematic habits of heart and mind! 

Rev. Vanessa Rush Southern, Senior Minister; Mari Ramos Magaloni, Worship Associate; Reiko Oda Lane, Organist; UUSF Choir; Mark Sumner, Music Director; Laurel Sprigg, soprano; Wm. García Ganz, Pianist; Jon Silk, Drummer

Eric Shackelford, Camera; Shulee Ong, Camera; Jonathan Silk, Communications Director; Joe Chapot, Live Chat Moderator; Thomas Brown, Sexton; Athena Papadakos, Flowers

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211111042708/https://content.uusf.org/podcast/20211017VRSSermon.mp3

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211111042537/https://www.ascboston.org/downloads/podcast/211017.mp3

I woke to a crash of thunder about 7 a.m. this morning, with a driving rain pounding against the wall and window near the head of my bed. What a beautiful sound to start the day! The rain only lasted about an hour, and then the skies were gray, but the air was lit by leaves of gold and orange encircling our back yard. We’ve had no frost yet, and the October transformations are unfolding with beauty and grace.  

I’ve been surprised by how low in the sky the sun travels at this time of year—even at noon it is lurking behind the tree canopy shading the back half of the yard. You’d think after all these years I would be used to it by now. I’ve also been surprised by new raspberries ripening fat and delicious. Usually our “everbearing” raspberries don’t ripen in the fall—there is not enough sun and warmth in their spot to bring them to completion—but perhaps taking out the (invasive) Norway maples near the fence helped them to get more morning light. They taste better than any of the summer raspberries.

October is also a month for ancestors, leading up to Samhain on the 31^st. I have continued to search for more information about Marie-Madeleine, my Innu great-great-great grandmother. I’ve been lucky that I emailed two people who seemed to have some resources, and they both replied and sent information. Magic! One told me that, from looking at his records, Marie Madeleine Manitukueu could not be my ancestor, because she married someone else in 1815, and then that person remarried in 1825 after her death. So that was incredibly helpful. Most of the work will be eliminating the women who cannot be my ancestor.

Then he also sent me a list of 17 “Marie Madeleines” or “Madeleines” recorded births from 1790 to 1818 at the Postes du Roi, from the databases he had access to, and agreed with me that it seemed most likely that she would be born closer to 1800, rather than 1789, since her last child (Marie Sylvie) was born in 1846. (The 1789 date is based on her death record stating that she was about 60 years of age at her death in 1849.)

I believe that going by child-bearing years is the best guide. A late baby in her 40s is more possible than in her 50s. The child before the one in 1846 was born several years earlier in 1839 (Sophie)—so it seems also more likely that 1846 was a late baby. Her prior children were about 3 years apart. Her first documented child was born around 1828, but it is possible that she was the mother of earlier-born children of her spouse Peter McLeod.  (Most sources say that he had an earlier Montagnais woman spouse, but there is less agreement about which children had which mother.) To go by a childbearing age of about 16 to 50, it seems like her own birth would be between 1796 and 1812.

This leaves 11 women on the chart—stretching slightly to include Marie Madeleine Katshisheiskuet (born 11/11/1795). So, the next thing I did was explore GénéalogieQuebec.com, to see if I could do research on each of the women. But I ran into a problem immediately. The records of the Postes du roi included on that site seem to be missing many of these vital years, not yet indexed, and none were available in direct images. I could not seem to find access to the databases to which my email correspondent had access. To complicate things a bit more, the parents listed for Marie Madeleine Katshisheiskuet in GénéologieQuebec are different from my earlier resource, and I think the only way to clear that up would be to look at an original record.

So, I feel stuck again—there is such a distance between Quebec and the United States—so much knowledge does not cross the border. I would like nothing better than to pore over these old records looking for the lives of these 11 women, seeing if I could find other marriage and death records that would steer me away from some, and toward my own ancestors. I don’t know why I think I can succeed where prior genealogists have not found a link. But maybe they didn’t have the same motivation. I’ve sent an email to the GénéologieQuebec site asking about the Postes du roi records. I also think I found some at the Catholic Archdiocese of Quebec, but not published or indexed.

It’s like the detective stories I’ve been reading—so many mysteries, so many clues. Why do I write about it here? I’m putting some magic out into the universe, hoping that some kind of thunder might open the cloudy skies between me and the past, between me and the place my ancestors are from. I’ve learned a lot in the process. It has been my experience that when I reach out to my ancestors, they reach back—more so when I have actually traveled to Quebec, but since that is not possible, I hope they will reach across the border.

For those of us who grew up in North America, the Monarch was the most recognizable of all butterflies.  Large and brilliantly marked with a rich orange/gold and black pattern they could be seen by the millions twice a year in their migrations between Canada and a single Mexican forest region.  Their metamorphosis from a milkweed munching caterpillarspinning their cocoons to emergenceas a regal flyer was a staple of grade school science curricula.  But all of that is under a dire threat as populations collapse with the rapid alterations in their critical Mexican nesting grounds due to global climate change and threat to their essential milkweed due to dramatic climate change all along their long migration routes. 

Nearly ten years ago a report on the Canadian Broadcasting System (CBC) explained:

Monarch butterflies appear headed for a perhaps unprecedented population crash, according to scientists and monarch watchers who have been keeping tabs on the species in their main summer home in Eastern and Central North America.

There had been hope that on their journey north from their overwintering zone in Mexico, the insect’s numbers would build through the generations, but there’s no indication that happened. Only a small number of monarchs did make it to Canada this summer to propagate the generation that has now begun its southern migration to Mexico, and early indications are that the past year's record lows will be followed by even lower numbers this fall. Elizabeth Howard, the director and founder of Journey North, a citizen-scientist effort that tracks the migrations of monarchs and other species, says one indicator for the robustness of the monarchs is the number of roosts they form in late August and September, something Journey North monitors throughout the migration periods. “During migration, monarchs form overnight roosts in places like Point Pelee or Long Point [in southern Ontario], where the monarchs are congregating before crossing the Great Lakes, places where people generally see huge overnight clusters of monarchs gathering.” Howard told CBC News that at this time in 2011, Journey North had already received 55 reports of roosts, followed by just 25 in 2012. This year, only 17 reports of roosts came in. “This is really a proxy for peak migration because this is where people see really large numbers of monarchs and we’re just not getting the reports, it’s looking pretty bad,” she says.

The monarch butterflies that are now flying south are the fourth generation of those that left the few hectares in central Mexico where millions of monarchs spend the winter.

Several years ago, while I was working as a school custodian in Cary, Illinois, the visit of a lone Monarch on its southward migration, a pioneer, inspired a poemthat was included in my 2004 Skinner House Books collection We Build Temples in the Heart and was also anthologized by Edward Searl in his compilation In Praise of Animals A Treasury of Poems, Quotations, and Readings.

Some of the science is fuzzy—a single insect does not make the whole epic journey, it takes four generations—but the sense of awe and wonder remains. 

And to think we may be the last generation to experience it…

Migrations

Later they will come,

            the legions of Canada

            on the edge of cutting cold,

            backs scraping stratus slate,

            arrayed in military majesty,

            dressed in ranks and counting cadence,

            squadron after squadron, an air armada,

            single minded in their migratory mission.

But now,

            when September sun lingers and

            lengthened shadows hint ferocity to come,

            the first glints of gold and black flit

            with seaming aimlessness,

            pushed here and there by the faintest zephyr,

            the pioneers of a nation,

            descended from Alberta prairies

            and Minnesota Lakes.

One will linger

            briefly on my shoulder

            if I am blessed, then be off again.

Then, if she is lucky

            she will pause to rest with

            the millions along the bend of the Rio Grande

            before finding a winter’s respite of death

            amid deep Mexican forests.

And it will turn again next spring—

egg to larva,

            larva to silken slumber

                        pupa to Monarch

                                    Monarch to migration.

            Oh ye proud Canada,

                        mute your boastful blare—

the mighty bow before true courage.

—Patrick Murfin

All right everybody let’s all gather ‘roundand sing a rousing happy birthdayto Abe Lincoln’s Beard.  On October 15, 1860 an 11 year old girl wrote the famous letter that got Lincoln to put away his razor making this the anniversary of the most famous whiskers since Jesus.

Grace Bedell was the daughter of a supporter from Westfield, a western New York village on the shores of Lake Erie now best known as the home of the Welch’s Grape empire.  Grace wasn’t too impressed by a picture of the candidate that her father brought home.  She wrote:

Dear Sir

My father has just home from the fair and brought home your picture and Mr. Hamlin’s. I am a little girl only 11 years old, but want you should be President of the United States very much so I hope you won’t think me very bold to write to such a great man as you are. Have you any little girls about as large as I am if so give them my love and tell her to write to me if you cannot answer this letter. I have got 4 brother's and part of them will vote for you any way and if you let your whiskers grow I will try and get the rest of them to vote for you would look a great deal better for your face is so thin. All the ladies like whiskers and they would tease their husband’s to vote for you and then you would be President. My father is going to vote for you and if I was a man I would vote for you too but I will try to get every one to vote for you that I can I think that rail fence around your picture makes it look very pretty I have got a little baby sister she is nine weeks old and is just as cunning as can be. When you direct your letter direct to Grace Bedell Westfield Chatauque County New York

I must not write any more answer this letter right off Good bye

Grace Bedell

When the presidential candidate received the letter he was in a quandary.  In the whole history of the Republic there had never been a President with a beard.  Martin Van Buren and his impressive muttonchops had come close, but then he had been run out of Washington after one term for being a dandy and a fop.  And if there is one thing a self-proclaimed Man of the Peoplecannot afford to be it is a fop.  And he had to remember that it was the very first log cabin candidate, William Henry Harrison—who had not really been born in a log cabin at all—that sent the Red Fox of Kinderhook packing back to Albany.

On the other hand, facial hair was becoming all the rage back East, and not just the sign of an ignorant backwoodsmanwho couldn’t afford arazor. 

But if he grew one, what sort should it be?  A stylish Imperial like Louis Napoleon and his old client the President of the Illinois Central Railroad George McClellan? Neck whiskers like Horace Greeley?  The full patriarchal bush a la John Brown? No, none of those would do.  And Lincoln wasn’t even sure he could raise a decent beard at all.  Still, the girl had a point.  He wrote her back:

My dear little Miss

Your very agreeable letter of the 15th is received—I regret the necessity of saying I have no daughters—I have three sons—one seventeen, one nine, and one seven years of age—They, with their mother, constitute my whole family—As to the whiskers, having never worn any, do you not think people would call it a piece of silly affection if I were to begin it now?

Your very sincere well wisher

A. Lincoln

Despite the non-committal nature of the letter, Lincoln decided to give growing whiskers a try.  By the time he left Springfield for his train trip to Washington, he was sprouting a semi-respectable stubble.

The train made a whistle stop in Westfield.  As was his custom the President-elect stepped to the rear platform to address the crowd.  He asked if Grace Bedell was present and called her forward.  He gave her a chaste kiss on the cheek and told the crowd that she was the inspiration for his new look.

Lincoln and his beard were photographed many times over the next few years.  He settled on a middle-ground kind of beard—a strip of hair that hugged his jaw and chin but still required the attention of a razor to his upper lip, cheeks, and neck.  It aged with him.  Sometimes it was a little longer, sometimes he let the fuzz on his cheeks fill in.  At least once he shaved a little between his sideburns and chin. 

Grace was right, by the way.  He did look better with it. 

Fall nights are getting cooler and rain is on the way.  Compassion for Campers, the programthat provides camping gear and equipment to the homeless, will have what is needed by those who are sleeping outdoors including warm clothing at the Community Empower Shower event this Friday, October 15 at Willow Crystal Lake, 100 S. Main Street from 10 amto 2 pm.  The following distribution will be held there on Friday, November 5 during the same hours.

Compassion for Campers also has gear available at Warp Corps, Benton Streetin Woodstock, for daily walk-up availability. 

Community Empower Shower provides wide-ranging services for the homeless and those who are facing housing crisis and are held on the first and third Fridays of each month.  

This week and on every third Friday Algonquin Township if providing shuttle bus service to the event from the Fox River Grove Metra Station at 9:30 am and the Crystal Lake Jewel/Osco at 9:45. The shuttle will leave Willow Crystal Lake for the pick-up spots a 1:30 pm.

This week showers will be offered inside the building.

Organizers have included even more groups, agencies, and services for the homeless population.  The Empowerment Shower is a collaborative effort of many organizations and agencies including the Crystal Lake Food Bank, Consumer Credit Counseling, Family Health Partnership Clinic, Home of the Sparrow, Live 4 LALI, McHenry County Housing Authority, Pioneer Center, Prairie State Legal Services, Salvation Army, St. Vincent DePaul Society, Veterans Path to Hope, Willow Crystal Lake, and Warp Corps.

Services offered at no cost include:

Showers

Laundry Facilities

Camping Supplies including Tent, Stove, Sleeping Bags

    Toiletries/Personal Care items

Clothing

Onsite Meal

Food

Haircuts

Transportation

Assistance obtaining IDs, birth certificates, Social Security cards

Assistance with SSI/SSDI (Disability)

Assistance with Medical coverage, SNAP, TANF

Medical Access—Doctor care, Covid-19 vaccine

Debt Management Services/Advocacy

Shelter and Housing Referrals and Linkages

Domestic Violence support

Veteran’s Services

Substance Use/Harm Reduction Tools and Support

Mental Health, Spiritual, and Social Support Referrals

Contributions to support Compassion for Campers are urgently needed to continue to purchase supplies for both of the locations sending a check made out to the Tree of Life UU Congregation, 5603 Bull Valley Road, McHenry, IL 60050 with Compassion for Campers on the memo line. The donations are placed in a dedicated fundand not used for any other purpose.  Tree of Life also donates all the administrative expenses of the program so 100% of all donations go directlyto client assistance.

For more information contact Compassion for Campers coordinator Patrick Murfin at 815 814-5645 or email pmurfin@sbcglobal.net.

https://www.shorelineareanews.com/2021/10/duwamish-plaque-dedication-at-shoreline.html

This past Sunday my congregation dedicated a plaque. Set on our grounds as a reminder that the Duwamish, Chief Seattle’s people, are still here and that the area of Shoreline and Eliot Bay were not given the land they were promised in the treaty of 1855, nor in later agreements. In my sermon I talked about their dispute with the Muckleshoots and the US Federal government. I also encouraged people to visit the Duwamish Long house on Marginal Way, get to know the Duwamish and the Muckleshoots, pay Duwamish Real Rent, and encourage our legislators to help heal old wounds.

On October 13, 1792 the cornerstone of the President’s Palace was laid in the virtual wilderness of the Federal District designated as the future Capitol of the infant United States.  President George Washington was in the temporarycapitol of Philadelphia and did not dignify the occasion, as he had when the cornerstone of the Capitol Building was laid by presidingin his Apron for a full Masonic ceremony.  Indeed there was no ceremony at all.

With the cornerstone in place the workforce of mostly slaves hired from their Virginia masters, Black freemen from the Georgetown area, and a handful of immigrant artisans began digging the foundations.  FewAmerican citizens with full rights were ever employed on the project which took eight years to complete at a cost of $232,372—$ 2.8 million in 2007 dollars.  To save money, common brick was used to line the exterior walls which were then faced by sandstone blocks.  The stone masonry was largely the work of Scottish craftsmen employed by the architect, Irishman James Hoban.

Although some interior workand details remained unfinished, the house was deemed habitable when the Capitol was transferred to Washington City.  President John Adams and his dismayed wife Abigail officially moved in on November 1, 1800, just days before the election that would send him packing the next year and leave the building to his archrival, Thomas Jefferson.

Jefferson, an amateur architect of some accomplishment, may have had mixed feeling about the building himself.  He had anonymously submitted one of nine designs competing for final selection for the building.  He was disappointed when Washington selected Hoban’s design.

Of course, that competition would not have been possible without the delicate political maneuvering that located the future capitol city on the banks of the Potomac instead of the bustling commercial centers of New Yorkor Philadelphia.

 It was also a tribute to the enormous prestige and influence of the first President.  The authority to establish a federal capital was provided in Article I,Section Eight of the Constitution, which designated a “District (not exceeding ten miles square) as may, by cession of particular states, and the acceptance of Congress, become the seat of the government of the United States.”

In what later became known as the Compromise of1790, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and Jefferson with the benign approval of Washington, came to an agreement that the federal government would assume war debtcarried by the states, on the condition that the new national capital would be in the South.  The precise location, personally selectedby Washington, was designated in the Residence Act on July 19, 1790.

Washington commissioned French military engineer Pierre Charles L’Enfant to lay out the future city.  He envisioned the spokes-of-a-wheel plan with broad ceremonial avenues and the Capitol Building and President’s house on opposite ends of one such grand boulevard. 

At the site selected by the President, L’Enfant sketched in the footprint of a truly grand palace on the European scale for the President.  His building would have been five times larger than the one that was eventually built.  Those plans quickly proved to be impractical—both too expensiveand too difficult to acquire the necessary amount of building stone.  It was also politically unacceptable to those who demanded that the new government be housed in edifices of sensible republican simplicity.

As Secretary of State, Jefferson advertised the architectural competition which he entered anonymously.  The final selection was to be made by the official commission overseeing construction of public buildings in the new capital, but in fact it was Washington who personally selected the design submitted by Hoban.

Hoban was one of the few—some say the only—trained architects in the county.  He had emigrated from Ireland after the Revolution and first established a practice in Philadelphia.  But after moving to North Carolina, he began to get commissions for important public buildings, like the Charleston County Courthouse which Washington saw and admired on his presidential tourof the Southern states.  He personally invited Hoban to submit a design to the contest.

For inspiration, Hoban drew on the Georgian country houses of the Anglo-Irish aristocracyand particularly on Leinster House, the Dublin seat of the Duke of Leinster and destined to become the home of the Irish Parliament in the 20th Century.  Despite winning the competition, Washington demanded substantial changes from his architect.  He ordered the elevation changed from three to two floors, but that the dimensions of the building be expanded by 30% and include a large ceremonial space for balls and public receptions—the commodious East Room. Hoban’s surviving drawings reflect these changes—the originals submitted for the competition having been lost.

Upon completion the porous sandstone was sealed with a whitewash consisting of a mixture of lime, rice glue, casein, and lead.  This belies the popular story that the building was only painted white to cover the scorch and smoke damage from the burning of Washington by the British during the War of 1812.  Informal references to the building as the White House have been found as early as 1811.  It is possible that the original whitewash was fading or dirtiedby the time the British put a torch to the building.  At any rate, the fresh white paintapplied during the restoration undoubtedly contributed to the informal use of the name.

Jefferson rejected the name Presidential Palace preferred by Adams as too aristocratic.  Under his administration it was commonly simply called the President’s House and for the next century the house was officially named the Executive Mansion.  Theodore Roosevelt changed the official designation to the White House in 1901.

The building has undergone many modifications over the years, starting with the colonnades that Jefferson had constructed out from each side of the house to screen the stables, greenhouses, and domestic outbuildings—including slave quarters—from view from Pennsylvania Avenue.  The southportico was constructed in 1824 during the James Monroeadministration and the north porticowas built six years later.  Both followed plans originally drawn by Hoban. 

In 1881 Chester Arthur ordered a significant remodel of the building’s interior.  Theodore Roosevelt added the West Wing, which his successor William Howard Taft expanded, and the Oval Office was added.  Herbert Hoover added a second floor to the West Wing following a fire there and added extensive basement office space for an expanding staff. Franklin Roosevelt moved the Oval Office to its present location by the Rose Garden.  Harry Truman added the still controversial balcony to the South Portico.

During Truman’s administration the building was found in danger of collapse from neglect.  The President moved to near-by Blair House for two years as the interior was gutted and reconstructed.  In 1961 First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy began her interior restoration of the building to its French Empireinspired appearance during the later Madison and Monroe years.

The White House now routinely undergoes modifications with the coming of each administration.  President Barack Obama ordered the instillation of solar panelsto replace those put up by Jimmy Carterand taken down by Ronald Regan.  His wife Michelle built extensive vegetable gardenson the grounds which had not been used for agricultural purposes since sheep were kept browsing the lawn.  Of course, among the former Resident first fits of spite and revenge was to remove the solar panels and obliterate the gardens.  He also trashed up the interior with his beloved gaudy gold bling wherever he could, and Melania famously maimed the Rose Garden.

Joe Biden has so far been too busy undoing the Cheeto’s disastrous policies and trying to get his ambitious agenda through Congress to spend much time re-doing the official offices and dwellings beyond hangingand displaying art and making the private residence rooms more modestand comfortable.

There is continual work expanding or improving the vast underground complex that now extends below much of the White House lawn and houses offices, communications centers,and, reportedly, a hardened bunkercapable of withstanding a nuclear attack. 

But the core of the building remains as Hoban and Washington imagined it more than two hundred years ago. 

For those of us of a certain vintage, the image of the evil dictator of Communist Russia, an ugly little man who resembled a pig, pounding his shoe on a table at the United Nations confirmed our worst fearsthat the possibility of a nuclear World War III was in the hands of a crude mad man.  And that’s exactly what we were supposed to think.

According to most of the almanacs I consult regularly in preparation of these blog posts, it was October 12 1960 when Nikita Khrushchev, First Secretary of the Communist Party and Premier of the Soviet Unionthrew that famous temper tantrum.

But it turns out that it may have been September 23 or 29, or October 13 during the Plenary Meeting of the UN General Assembly in New York.  It may have come in protest to a speech by British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan or remarks by Philippine delegate Lorenzo Sumulong.  He was visibly upset by statements of both men.

He may have banged his shoe at the podium…or at his seat in the Soviet delegation…or perhaps not at all.

And the old man was not really a dictator, as in the single,unquestioned authority of the nation in the way of Hitler, Stalin, or Third World generalissimos.

How could we have gotten it so wrong?

The trouble is, there is no documentation of the event in the official records of the United Nations.  In the daily press it was not mentioned in reports on any of the possible dates.  No footage could be found in the archives of NBC and CBC, both of which covered the General Assembly regularly and often broadcast important speeches live.  Nor has any authentic photograph of the episode been found—more on that later. 

Fuzzy accounts of the event have been pieced together from memories and memoirs, many of which don’t agree.

In retrospect, it is astonishingthat the leader of one of the most powerful nations on Earth came to the major city of his chief rival to sit for hours daily over a span of weeks for the meeting of the Security Council.  And he wasn’t the only one—Macmillan was only one of the topWestern leaders who did the same, as did a parade of presidents, prime ministers, kings, and despots from lesser nations.  If Dwight Eisenhower elected only to attend briefly to make his annual speechand to consult with world leaders in private meetings, the United States was represented at the top level by Secretary of State John Foster Dulles as well as the Cabinet level Ambassador to the world body.  It shows how important the UN was viewed in those distant days.

Most historians now discount the possibility that the shoe came off in September.  He did take to the podium, pounding his fists, in angry denunciation of Macmillan’s speech that day.  Later an AP photo of that diatribe would be altered by someone, and a shoe inserted into Khrushchev’s fist.  It was released and widely circulated by the mediawithin weeks of the alleged event and not questioned at the time.  Who made the alteration and how did get to the media?  No one seems to know, but it has all the earmarks of a classic intelligence service disinformation operation.

The consensusnow is that it was Sumulong’s speech on October 12 that was the trigger—if the event happened at all.  The Philippine delegate rose in support of an anti-colonial resolution that had the supportof the Soviets and their allies.  The delegate spoke as a representative of a nation with a colonial past which had achieved its independence.  Of course, the Philippines, while independent, were known as a staunch ally of their former colonial master, the United States.  Although the resolution was tailored to the remaining colonial holdings of the Westernpowers, Sumulong strayed from the topic at hand to offer a slap at the Soviet Union:

 …It is our view that the declaration proposed by the Soviet Union should cover the inalienable right to independence not only of the peoples and territories which yet remain under the rule of Western colonial Powers, but also of the peoples of Eastern Europe and elsewhere which have been deprived of the free exercise of their civil and political rights and which have been swallowed up, so to speak, by the Soviet Union.

An enraged Khrushchev was recognizedon a point of order and rushed the podium. He shoved the Philippine diplomat aside and launched an extended diatribe calling Sumulong a “jerk, a stooge, and a lackey…a toady of American imperialism” and demanding that he be ruled out of order.  Assembly President Frederick Boland of Ireland did caution the Sumulong to “avoid wandering out into an argument which is certain to provoke further interventions.”  But Sumulong was permitted to continue his speechand Khrushchev returned to his seat in the Soviet delegation.

At least one person remembersthe Soviet premier as using his shoe at the rostrum in this confrontation.

But most agree that it happened after he sat back down.  As the Filipino continued to speak, Khrushchev pounded both fists angrily on his desk, joined obediently by other members of the Soviet delegation and Eastern Bloc nations.  In fact, he pounded so hard that his watchstopped or flew off his wrist—not speaking well of qualityof Soviet consumer goods.  According to a memoir by Khrushchev’s daughter Nina, confirmedby interpreter Viktor Sukhodrev who sat next to him, he looked down and saw his shoe, which he had removed for some reason earlier and spontaneously picked it up and began pounding the table.  He never, as some reports had it, removed the shoe from his foot, a virtual impossibility in the cramped spaceof the desk and given his girth.

Decorum at the session soon broke down and it was gaveled to adjournment by President Boland, who was being abused and booed from the Soviet bloc seats.

However, other accounts do not remember or mention the shoe at all.

To make matters even more confusing in his own memoirs Khrushchev remembered a shoe pounding incident but placed it in an entirely different context—a protest to remarks by a diplomat from Franco’s Spain.  A later published edition, however, contained a footnote saying that the incident was misremembered.

That United Nations trip is also remembered for Khrushchev’s own addressto the world body in which he famously said of the United States, “We will bury you.”  That was played in the U.S. press as a threatof nuclear annihilation.  In fact, translators and linguists are unanimous that he had a different, less threatening meaning.  He was quoting a well-known Russian proverb that means “we will survive you and see you in your grave.”  It was a prediction of the triumph of Communism over capitalism as inevitable, but not a threat of war.

No matter what happened, Americans were soon convinced that Khrushchev was an arch-villain and dictator.  In fact, although he had consolidated considerable power in the Party, Khrushchev was never able to rule alone.  He was answerable to the Presidium of the Party and to the larger Polit Bureau, each of which included powerful rivals who limited his freedom ofaction.

Moreover, in the Soviet sense, Khrushchev was a liberal and reformer.  He had presided over de-Stalinization of the Party.  He had also loosened economic regulations, liberalized the still restricted freedom of writers and intellectualsto express themselves, and broke with the most aggressive military ambitions of hard liners.  Western intelligence agencies undoubtedly knew all of this.

In fact, four years later Khrushchev was deposed by the hardliners led by Leonid Brezhnev.

But to keep up public supportfor continued high defense spending and the proclaimed policy of aggressive containment of Communism, it was necessary to paint the Soviet leaders in the same stark terms as the U.S.’s late enemies in World War II.

All of this should be kept well in mind as one after another leaders of smalland weak nations are portrayed to the American people as, inevitably, Hitlers.

While Harjo's series is a hit across the country and beyond, here at home in Oklahoma, Native Americans are experiencing a deep connection to the series. Many, including myself, have been watching Harjo’s career and feel pride to see his creativity and authentic, indigenous storytelling be recognized by the world.

The post OK’s Indigenous Filmmaker brings Authentic Stories to the Screen appeared first on BeyondBelief.

Today is celebrated as Indigenous People’s Day in most of the Americas and in other parts of the world.  I first blogged the still spreading and growing recognition that has its official origins in the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in 2007.  But in the United States Native Americans have been staging actions, protests, and alternative events to a Federal Holiday on the Second Monday in October for decades.

That’s right, your calendar probably marked today as Columbus Dayin recognition of Cristoforo Colombo/Cristóbal Colón/Christopher Columbus.  I’ve blogged about him, too, and his alleged discovery—alleged because he didn’t know where he was going, “found” what was never lost, claimed what wasn’t his to take, and didn’t even know where the hell he was.  When just about everyone else in Europe had figured out that he never reached the East Indies or Asia he continued to lie about it.

None-the-less the mercenary mariner was rewarded with fancy titles—Admiral of the Ocean Sea for one—and made Viceroyover half the damned world.  And he screwed that up by being so brutal that he virtually wiped out the once numerous Carib peoples who inhabited the islands under his immediate effective sway.  He also bullied and oppressed potential rivals—would be Conquistadors of even richer realms on the mainland, many of whom had better connections at Court than a Genoan hireling.  He was stripped of his titles,wealth confiscated, and shipped to Spain in disgrace and chains.

Not much to celebrate there.

Yet despite the fact that Columbus never set foot in North America—the closest he got was wandering around portions of Central America after being abandoned by mutineers and quite typically lost—he somehow became an iconic folk figure and symbol of the New World to the English and overwhelming Protestant colonists hugging to the Atlantic shore far to the north of any of his voyages. 

Amerigo Vespucci, another Italian sailor with even less to justify it, swooped in and got his name attached to two continents just because he knew the right cartographer.  But Columbia was a popular alternative name for Western Hemisphere lands and some Patriots wanted to officially adopt it for their new country.  Think of the song, once almost an unofficial national anthem, Columbia the Gem of the Oceanand other evidence.  When Thomas Jefferson’s pal Joel Barlow, a diplomat and literary dabbler, wanted to create a national epic poem he churned out The Columbiad, a turgid contemplation of Columbus and the new world.

Around the 400th anniversary of the alleged discovery in 1892 interest in him was elevated by events around the world, but particularly at Chicago’s World Columbian Exposition.  American Catholics—a struggling and despised minority—looked to the notoriously pious Columbus who had slaughtered all of those natives in the guise of converting them to the One True Church to establish their bona fides as worthy Americans.  Thus, the Knights of Columbus became the Catholic answer to the WASP Masonic Lodges.

But it was urban Italians, among the last European immigrants to become White, in the big cities of the East Coast and Midwest who made Columbus Day and lavish annual parades and answer to the earlier immigrants—especially the Irish—in their struggle for a fat slice of the patronage and privilege pie of the Democratic Party machines.

As protests against honoring a figure who represented centuries of land theft,colonial subjugation, genocide, and cultural annihilation has grown, support for the holiday has waned.  City after City and several States have officially dumped Columbus Day, and most have adopted some form on Indigenous Peoples Day in its stead.  Support had dwindled to indignant Italian civic organizations and the kind of cultural fuddy-duddies who cannot stomach change of any kind.

More recently, however, a sub-set of the Alt-Right and neo-fascist movements who claim to honor and preserve European culture and secure its dominance in American society, have begun to make war on the anti-Columbus Day warriors, especially attacking Native Americans and a “cultural elite of race traitors.”

This year President Joe Biden proclaimed the second Monday in October as Federal Indigenous Peoples Day.  That did not, however, erase Columbus Day which was created and recognized by Congress.  The two celebrations are like bitterly divorced spouses forced to continue to live together in the same house.

Anyway, all of that is more than I intended to write about Columbus.  By now you know the story.  So I celebrate Indigenous Peoples Day.  I hope you do too.

In honor of the occasion, I am revisiting a verse I wrote in 2016 just during the most important Native American resistance in decades—the campsto block the Dakota Access Pipeline which threatened to pollute the Missouri River and defile traditional Sioux lands.  May their long and valiant prayerful witness be inscribed in the sacred winter count and sung of around the campfires for all of the generationsthey were trying to protect.

Tonto Will Not Ride into Town for You

For The Camp of the Sacred Stone 9/30/2016

Tonto will not ride into town for you, Kemosabe,

            and be beat to pulp by the bad guys

            on your fool’s errand.

Pocahontas will not throw her nubile, naked body

            over your blonde locks

            to save you from her Daddy’s war club.

Squanto will not show you that neat trick

            with the fish heads and maize

            and will watch you starve on rocky shores.

Chingachgook will save his son and lineage

            and let you and your White women

            fall at Huron hands and be damned.

Sacajawea and her babe will not show you the way

            or introduce you to her people,

            and leave you lost and doomed in the Shining Mountains.

Sitting Bull will not wave and parade with your Wild West Show

            nor Geronimo pose for pictures for a dollar

            in fetid Florida far from home.

They are on strike form your folklore and fantasy,

            have gathered with the spirits of all the ancestors

            to dance on the holy ground, the rolling prairie

            where the buffalo were as plentiful

            as the worn smooth stones of the Mnišoše,

            the mighty river that flows forever.

They are called by all the nations from the four corners

            of the turtle back earth who have gathered here,

            friends and cousins, sworn enemies alike,

            united now like all of the ancestors

            to kill the Black Snake, save the sacred water,

            the soil where the bones of ancestors rest,

            and the endless sky where eagle, Thunderbird, and Raven turn.

Tonto has better things to do, Kemosabe…

—Patrick Murfin

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211111042451/http://www.austinuuav.org/audio/2021-10-10_Celebration_Sunday.mp3

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211111042357/https://whitebearunitarian.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/10-10-21-audio.mp3

"Who is Earth to Me?" (October 10, 2021) Worship Service

Robin Wall Kimmerer in her book "Braiding Sweetgrass" opens with a simple description of this act of weaving, braiding the supple green stalks of a plant, but what unfolds is layers of relationship and story and a paradigm that has saving grace.

Rev. Vanessa Rush Southern, Senior Minister; Daniel Jackoway, Worship Associate; Sam King, Worship Associate; Reiko Oda Lane, Organist; Mark Sumner, Music Director; Jon Silk, Drummer; Asher Davison, Soloist

Eric Shackelford, Camera; Shulee Ong, Camera; Jonathan Silk, Director of Communications; Joe Chapot, Live Chat Moderator; Thomas Brown, Sexton; Dan Barnard, Facilities Manager; Judy Payne, flowers

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211111042312/https://content.uusf.org/podcast/20211010VRSSermon.mp3

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211111042217/https://www.ascboston.org/downloads/podcast/211010.mp3

Joseph Labadie with his flowing moustache and imperial goatee cut quite a dashing figure as a young man and after his adoption of big wide-brimmed hats in his later years looked like he might have toured with Buffalo Bill Cody and Ned Buntline.  But he was one of the late 19th and early 20th Century’s leading anarchists and the only one to have a long careerat the very center of the labor movement.

His background was strikingly different from most of the better known figures of the movement—the German Johann Most who introduced the European model featuring the idealizationof the propaganda of the deed or immigrants like most of the Haymarket Martyrs,Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman, and Carlo Tresca.  He was also unique among home grown anarchist figures like Bostonian Benjamin Tucker and former Confederate trooper, Texas Radical Republican, and Chicago labor leader Albert Parsons and his bi-racial wife Lucy Parsons.

He was born as Charles Joseph Antoine Labadie on April 18, 1850 in Paw Paw, Michigan into a Frenchfamily who settled on both sides of the Detroit River when the land was claimed as New France.  Even at this late date the area was still frontier-like and as a boy spent much time fishing and hunting with the Potawatomi tribes in southern Michigan, where his father served as interpreter between Jesuit missionaries and the native tribes.  He deeply admired their culture, especially a sense of communalism. 

His only formal schooling was a few months in a parochial school.  But he was bright, inquisitive, and read everything he could lay his hands on.  He must have had some informal apprentice training because by his late teens he had become a tramp printer, literally packing a small press and type font cases on his back or in a pushcart as he made a circuitof small towns and farming villages.  The life on the road was an eye-opening experience in and of itself.