About sixty workers and their supporters turned out this evening to attend the meeting of the New Bedford city council. The city councillors were planning to vote on a resolution urging the Eagle manufacturing plant to keep jobs in New Bedford, for as the New Bedford Standard-Times reported yesterday, “The labor union organizing a union drive at Eagle Industries says it has changed tactics and is now trying to keep the South End military apparel plant from potentially leaving New Bedford and taking with it 330 jobs.” Eagle is the company that took over for Michael Bianco, which was the company that hired illegal immigrants to work in sweatshop conditions, and that was shut down by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in March, 2007, in a raid that made national headlines.

Anyway, there we all were tonight, standing around in the chilly dampness in front of City Hall. Zach Lutz, the UNITE HERE! union organizer said a few words, Cynthia Rodrigues from the Central Labor Council named all the unions that were represented — UNITE HERE, Carpenters, SEIU Local 1199, AFT, UWUA, etc. — and I gave the invocation. But the important speakers, the ones we came to hear, were some of the people who work at Eagle Industries. One woman gave specifics of which parts of the factory have been shut down. Another woman told how she had been fired because she was considered disruptive, because she was helping organize the workers. A couple of them spoke in Spanish, while one of their co-workers translated into English. Everyone cheered them after they spoke, and you could see them stand up a little straighter at that — although I suspect those momentary cheers will be small comfort tomorrow when they’re back at work.

The mayor of New Bedford came out of City Hall, and told the crowd that he has contacted both U.S. senators from our state, and our U.S. representative, and they are all committed to making sure all 330 jobs at the Eagle plant stay in the city; then he left quickly for another event. Suddenly someone noticed that one of the supervisors from Eagle, a woman named Dana, was sitting in a parked car watching the rally, keeping an eye on which workers were in attendance. Someone from one of the other local unions (I think he was from the Carpenter’s Union) started chanting, Shame on Dana! and everyone took up the chant for a moment. A guy beside me muttered disgustedly, That’s where our tax dollars go — what he meant was: The only work that the plant gets is from the Department of Defense and they’re using tax dollars from government defense contracts to pay their managers to spy on their workers.

By then it was time to troop upstairs to the Council Chambers. Those who could squeezed in on the main floor, and the rest of us milled around outside the door or slipped upstairs to the balcony. I had to leave early for an event at the church — when I left, everyone was sitting there waiting for the Council meeting to begin, waiting for the city council to resolve to keep jobs in New Bedford, hoping that our city wouldn’t lose another 330 jobs just because the absentee owners of Eagle Industries decide they can get cheaper, more compliant workers at their plant in Puerto Rico.

Leona, Amy, and I went up to Boston’s City Hall today so we could join in the “Join the Impact” demonstration against California’s Proposition 8. There were dark clouds, and it looked like rain. As we walked from the Park Street subway station over to city hall, we wondered aloud about how many people might be there. “They’ve got 3,000 on their Facebook page who’ve signed up to be there today,” said Leona. “Yeah, but with the rain I’ll bet it’s half that,” I said, “although there will be people there who forget to sign up, so what, maybe 2,000?” Leona still thought it would be more.

There were a lot of people at City Hall Plaza, more than I expected; and more streaming in every few minutes. Early on, one of the speakers said there were 5,000 people there — but I suspect there were more than that at the peak of attendance. We wound up standing up at the top of the amphitheatre, pretty far from the stage.

Miraculously, the rain held off. Down on the stage, a woman shouted, “Who’s here from Boston?” and all the Bostonians shouted back. She listed off various regions of Massachusetts, and the people who were from those regions shouted back at her. But of course she didn’t mention the south coast (people in Boston don’t even know that we exist), so when she was done and there was a little lull, I shouted, “We’re from New Bedford!” and since I have a really big voice a bunch of people laughed, including the woman on the stage.

About two minutes later, someone touches my arm, and I turn around, and there’s Donald, an old friend. “I thought that loudmouth who shouted had to be you,” he said, grinning. I haven’t seen Donald for years, so we chatted a little bit. He pointed out some of the home-made signs people were holding up: “Don’t Forget Us, Obama!” and “Mormon Families Support Gay Families” and “Str8 against H8” and some others. We both noticed the sign that read, “Hey California, WTF!?”

They had a lot of speakers. Some of them were pretty good. State representative Byron Rushing quoted Frederick Douglass to great effect. Niki Tsongas, congresswoman representing Lawrence and Lowell, was short and to the point. Congressman Ed Markey got the crowd all revved up. The speakers went on for over two hours — maybe a couple too many speakers, and a little bit of live music would have been nice.

But it felt like time well spent. There were events like ours in every state. 5,000 of us turned out in Boston to demonstrate our dismay that California would take away rights that used to be granted under their state constitution. Maybe 6,000 people turned out in Seattle, more than 10,000 turned out in San Diego (those are the only cities the news outlets are reporting right now). With only six days’ notice, thousands of people showed up in front of City Halls nationwide — let’s hope that makes the politicians sit up and take notice.

Between one thing and another, I didn’t get outside to take a walk until it was almost four o’clock, and already getting dark. It was windy, and overhead dark clouds were blowing across the sky. As I got down to the waterfront, the sky cleared out in the west, and across the harbor suddenly the town of Fairhaven was all alight, the towers of the Congregational church and Town Hall and the Unitarian church, a big white ferry docked at the Steamship Authority maintenance terminal, all shining bright against the dark clouds. I looked up, and the bottoms of the clouds were being lit up here and there with rosy light. I walked down to Merrill’s Wharf and along the New Bedford side of the harbor all was in shadow, except the smokestack at the old power generation plant, and a big American flag flying over one of the housing projects glowing redly. The light shining on Fairhaven faded out. The clouds overhead glowed orange-pink, then pinkish-gray, then they were just gray. I walked back home, and I could feel the cold air coming in, and I took big deep breaths of it — dry cold air from the north sweeping out the damp, warm, moldy air that has been hanging over the city for days. I could feel myself coming alive again with the new air, and I hoped for snow. It was nearly dark by the time I got home.

If you look at the Unitarian Universalist Historical Society’s online biographical dictionary, you’ll find the name of Mary Rotch. As is true of many of the names listed on the UUHS site, no one has yet written a biography of her. But she is an interesting Unitarian person, and worth knowing more about. Since she attended our church here in New Bedford, I decided to preach a sermon about her life and religious thinking. It’s not quite a real biography, but it does have footnotes and other annotations of interest to UU history geeks. The sermon appears below; scroll way down for the endnotes and other annotations.

Mary Rotch, An Inspired Life

This sermon was preached by Rev. Dan Harper at First Unitarian Church in New Bedford. As usual, the sermon below is a reading text. The actual sermon as preached contained extemporaneous remarks and improvisation. Sermon copyright (c) 2008 Daniel Harper.

Readings

The first reading is a letter from Margaret Fuller to Mary Rotch. [Due to copyright restrictions, only a portion of this letter is included here.]

“I am anxious to get a letter telling me how you fare this winter in the cottage. Your neighbors who come this way do not give very favorable accounts of your looks, Aunt Mary, and if you are well enough I should like to see a few of those prim, well-shaped characters from your own hand…

“I wore your black dress at Niagra and many other places where I was very happy and it was always an added pleasure thuse to be led to think of you. — I wish, dear Aunt Mary, you were near enough for me to go in and see you now and then, I know that, sick or well, you are always serene and sufficient unto yourself, and that you have a most affectionate friend always by your side [i.e., Mary Rotch’s companion, Mary Gifford], but now you are so much shut up, it might animate existence to hear of some things I might have to tell….”

[from “My Heart Is a Large Kingdom”: Selected Letters of Margaret Fuller, edited by Robert Hudspeth (Ithaca: Cornell University, 2001), pp. 187-188. This book contains three other letters to Mary Rotch.]

The second reading is from Orville Dewey’s Autobiography. Dewey was minister of our congregation from 1823 until 1834:

“I should like to record some New Bedford names here, so precious are they to me. Miss Mary Rotch is one,– called by everybody “Aunt Mary,” from mingled veneration and affection. It might seem a liberty to call her so; but it was not, in her case. She had so much dignity and strength in her character and bearing that it was impossible for any one to speak of her lightly. On our going to New Bedford, she immediately called upon us, and when she went out I could not help exclaiming, “Wife, were ever hearts taken by storm like that!” Storm, the word would be, according to the usage of the phrase; but it was the very contrary,– a perfect simplicity and kindliness.”

[Orville Dewey, Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D., edited by Mary E. Dewey (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1883), p. 67.]

Sermon

A few years ago, the Quaker writer Parker Palmer wrote a book called Let Your Life Speak; and it seems to me that the title of that book is good advice. I don’t care so much what you say, because people really tell about their deepest values in the way they live their lives. This morning I’d like to tell you the life story of Mary Rotch, who was part of our church from 1824 until she died in 1847. She wasn’t a writer like her friends Ralph Waldo Emerson and Margaret Fuller; nevertheless, she still can speak to us through her life story, and it is in that story that we shall find her deepest spiritual values expressed.

Mary Rotch was born on Nantucket to a Quaker family on October 9th, 1777. Her mother was Elizabeth Barney, and her father was William Rotch, and at birth she had three older brothers and two older sisters. It started out as a prosperous family — William Rotch was a shipowner and merchant in the lucrative whaling trade. But during the Revolutionary War, all those involved in the whaling trade on Nantucket went through hard times because they were caught between the American navy and the British navy, and subject to raids and confiscation. Beyond that, William Rotch lived out his pacifist Quaker principles in spite of great pressure to support the American revolution — for example, during the revolution, he threw a large number of bayonets into Nantucket harbor rather than let them be used in the Revolutionary cause. This did not make him popular with his countrymen; and his strength of character in the face of adversity helps us understand how the same strength of character later manifested itself in his daughter Mary.(1)

After the Revolutionary War ended, the British slapped a huge duty on all imported whale oil. William Rotch had to sell whale oil at a loss in the British market, and the British market was nearly the only market there was.(2) Rather than lose money, William Rotch relocated his business to Dunkirk, France, and in July, 1790, he and his wife Elizabeth and their daughters set sail and moved their household to France.(3) Mary Rotch was just 13 years old.

Not long after they moved to Dunkirk, the French Revolution began to erupt around them, and war between England and France was imminent. As William put it in a memoir, “it was time for me to leave the country, in order to save our vessels if captured by the English.”(4) The family left France in January, 1793, and stayed in England through 1794 so that William could oversee business there,(5) returned to Nantucket for a year, and then settled in New Bedford in 1795. Thus, by the time she was 18 years old, Mary Rotch had lived through two revolutions, and had lived in Nantucket, Dunkirk, London, and New Bedford.

When they came to New Bedford in 1795, the Rotch family moved in to a house William had had built, a house called “Mansion House” on account of its size and grandeur. You can see what this house looked like in William Wall’s painting “New Bedford in 1810,” which hangs in the Whaling Museum — it’s the house on the northeast corner of Union and Second streets.(6) By coincidence, 1795 is the same year our congregation built a new church building in the growing village of New Bedford, at the northwest corner of William and Purchase, just a block or so from the Rotch’s house.

Not that the Rotches went to the Unitarian church! They were Quakers, or members of the Religious Society of Friends, and they worshipped at the Friends meeting house. Indeed, William Rotch was what is known as a “weighty Friend,” that is, a prominent Quaker, who more than once represented New Bedford at the New England Yearly Meeting. Mary Rotch was also a weighty Friend, a prominent Quaker, and when she grew up she became an elder of the New Bedford Friends Meeting.

But Mary Rotch did not limit her reading to Quaker writers, as did many Quakers of her day. By 1812, when Mary was in her mid-30’s, “she and others formed a discussion group, wrote papers, and read books by such writers as Dugall Stewart and Johann Kaspar Lavatar.”(7) Stewart was a philosopher in the Scottish Common Sense School of philosophy; Lavatar was a Swiss mystic. This was intellectually challenging reading, and well beyond what the average Quaker of the day would read.

We get a more personal picture of Mary in an 1818 letter from one Anna Shoemaker of Philadephia. Shoemaker describes her visit to the William Rotch household in December, 1818, saying, “…Mary (Rotch’s) mother treated me with great cordiality, and Mary, herself, paid me the most grateful attention. She is a lovely girl and dressed as plain as Anne Paxson but on her it looks very well, her figure is so large and majestic….”(8) Apparently, all that generation of Rotches “were physically very big, with large frames.”(9) And yes, at age 41 Mary was still living with her parents, for she never married and lived there in Mansion House until both her parents died.

…

Now we come to the time when Mary went through a major spiritual crisis in her life. In order to understand that crisis, you have to understand a little bit about early 19th C. American Quakerism.

The Quakers had a number of peculiar practices that tended to keep them apart from the rest of the world. They were strict pacifists; and so we already heard how, during the American Revolution, Mary Rotch’s father lived out his pacifism. Quakers adhered to strict plainness in their clothing, staying away from bright colors, ornaments, anything that tended to set one person above another person. They used the old words “thee” and “thou,” because when Quakerism formed in 17th C. England, to say “you” was to elevate another person to a higher social level than yours. And all Quakers of that era were required to adhere to a strict written code of religious discipline, which codified what they were and weren’t allowed to do and say, and even think.

But by 1816, Mary Newhall and other Quakers in Lynn, Massachusetts, were evolving some new and liberal ideas. Mary Newhall and her followers were soon called the “New Lights”; the more conservative Quakers became known as the “Old Lights.” Mary Newhall and her followers accused the Old Lights of sinking into a “dead formality.”(10) The Old Lights accused the liberals of being, well, liberal. The Old Lights managed to eject Mary Newhall from membership with the Quaker meeting in Lynn, using some questionable parliamentary procedures. But that didn’t stop Newhall. She continued to preach her new liberal religious ideas wherever she could.

In January, 1823, Newhall came to New Bedford to preach, and here she found that the liberalization process was already well begun. She preached in the brick Friends meeting house at the corner of Spring and Seventh streets. On February 9, she preached; was denounced by some of the New Bedford Old Lights; was defended by one Samuel Rodman; and finally Newhall sank to her knees to “appear in supplication,” as the Quakers of that day put it — we would say, “knelt in prayer.” When a Quaker appeared in supplication, the custom was that the rest of the Quakers present would stand, showing they were united with the prayer. Mary Rotch, who was by then an elder of the New Bedford Quaker meeting, and most of those present rose to their feet to show unity with Mary Newhall — but the determined Old Lights did not. Two days later, Mary Newhall preached in our old church building at William and Purchase streets — and after Mary Newhall spoke, Mary Rotch also spoke, thus emerging as the leader of the New Lights in New Bedford.(11) The battle was joined, and continued for some months. Finally, in March, 1824, the Old Lights maneuvered the meeting to officially disown Mary Rotch. The meeting should have reached consensus, but even though nineteen members of the meeting disagreed, the Old Lights pushed it through — Mary Rotch was no longer a Quaker. (12)

Why did the Old Lights consider Mary Rotch and the other New Lights so heretical? It was because of their liberal religious beliefs. The New Lights believed that what they called “the Light Within” was a sufficient guide for all religion, and that the Light Within was far more important than any rules or disciplines that might be imposed upon individuals by organized religion. The New Lights believed that the Bible is less important than this Light Within; and they also believed that the Old Testament is not the literal truth, but rather it is allegory. The New Lights did not believe the Devil existed; nor did they believe in heaven or hell, except insofar as heaven and hell are states of mind here and now on this earth. The New Lights believed that Jesus was not divine; and they did not believe that Jesus’s death somehow atoned for the sins of all humanity.(13) If you think that these New Light Quakers sound like Unitarians, I think you’re absolutely right. And in fact, most of the New Light Quakers came over and joined with the Unitarians.

Here is what Job Otis, one of the chief Old Light Quakers, said in 1825 about the New Light defection to the Unitarian church: “The disaffected party generally have withdrawn from us, and left our meetings, both for worship and discipline, quite undisturbed. Some of them occasionally attend the Unitarian Congregational meeting…. But a withering evidently attends them all, and their reputation as religious characters is very much lost with all sober and reflecting people. Most of them, even to Mary Rotch…, have thrown off all regard to plainness, and the younger part attend places of music and dancing. Much confusion, contradiction, and inconsistency appears among them in their principles, professions, views, and reasonings; and but little else than vain speculations, abstract reasonings, impiety, and unbelief.”(14) Let me translate that for you: Job Otis is saying that the New Lights have gone over to the Unitarians, which isn’t really a church; that they now wear bright-colored clothing on occasion, listen to music, and go dancing, all of which is very bad; and instead of blind faith, they rely on Reason, which is also very bad. Or, from our point of view, no wonder the New Lights felt comfortable in the Unitarian church!

As comfortable as they might have felt in their new church home, surely it must have been a terrible thing to leave behind friends and relatives, some of whom perhaps would no longer speak to them. And surely a string of deaths in Mary’s family only made things worse for her: her sister Lydia died in Salem in 1822; her brother Thomas died in Ohio in 1823; and her mother died at Mansion House in May, 1824.

…

Now we come to a most interesting part of the story — how Mary Rotch influenced the poet and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, and the feminist Margaret Fuller. We’ll start with Emerson.

Sometime around 1830, Emerson came down to the New Bedford church as a substitute preacher — this is some years before his well-known stay here in 1833-1834. On this visit to our congregation, “Emerson had been deeply impressed by the sight of the leading Quaker of the town, Miss Mary Rotch, quietly leaving the church when the rite of the Last Super was about to be observed.” Most of Emerson’s biographers agree that Mary’s example influenced him in 1832 when he resigned from Second Church in Boston.(15) Emerson resigned from Second Church because he said he could no longer in good conscience preside at communion, then a monthly feature at every Unitarian church. This became the subject of his most famous sermon; and it became one of his most important theological points, that inner truth is more important than empty ritual. So Mary Rotch had a deep and early influence on Emerson.

When Emerson came back to New Bedford in the winter and spring of 1833-1834, he got to know Mary Rotch better. At that time, Mary Rotch told the young Emerson something of the controversy between the New Lights and the Old Lights, and Emerson wrote in one of his notebooks that she had been “driven inward, driven home, to find an anchor, until she learned to have no choice, to acquiesce without understanding the reason when she found an obstruction to any particular course of action.”(16) That is to say, she learned to be self-reliant, to rely on her own inner strength, her own inner light; ideas which Emerson would integrate into his own thinking and writing.

Mary Rotch told Emerson another story. A little girl came to her and asked to do something. “She replied, ‘What does the voice in thee say?’ The child went off, and after a time returned to say, ‘…the little voice says, no.’” This story affected Emerson greatly.(17) It affirmed for him that each of us can know what is right and what is true, if we would just listen to “the voice in thee.” Many years later, Emerson quoted (or perhaps paraphrased) Mary Rotch in his essay titled “Greatness,” expressing this same point in a different way:

”  ‘I do not pretend to any commandment or large revelation, but if at any time I form some plan, propose a journey or a course of conduct, I perhaps find a silent obstacle in my mind that I cannot account for. Very well, — I let it lie, thinking it may pass away, but if it do not pass away I yield to it, obey it. You ask me to describe it. I cannot describe it. It is not an oracle, nor an angel, nor a dream, nor a law; it is too simple to be described, it is but a grain of mustard-seed, but such as it is, it is something which the contradiction of all mankind could not shake, and which the consent of all mankind could not confirm.’  “(18)

If we assume that this is a fairly accurate transcription of Mary Rotch’s actual words, this gives us the very heart of her religious faith. When the voice within you tells you not to do something, then don’t do it.

Now, you might want to say that that voice within is the voice on conscience, or you might say that it is the voice of God. Orville Dewey said this about Mary Rotch: “when speaking of the Supreme Being, she would never say ‘God,’ but ‘that Influence.’ That Influence was constantly with her; and she carried the idea so far as to believe that it prompted her daily action, and decided for her every question of duty.”(19) So perhaps we don’t have to draw a distinction between God and that internal influence; perhaps Mary Rotch is telling us that God can be interpreted to mean exactly that inner voice that prompts us towards right action.

So that is how Emerson was influenced by Mary Rotch. I’d like to mention briefly the ways in which Mary Rotch influenced Margaret Fuller.

Margaret Fuller met Mary Rotch through Mary’s niece Eliza Rotch Farrar. Eliza had lived in Mansion House with Mary from about 1819 until 1828, when Mary’s father died. Within a few months of old William’s death, young Eliza had married Professor John Farrar of Harvard College. They were married by Orville Dewey in Mansion House, and then the young couple went up to Cambridge to live, where Eliza soon met Margaret, and began to serve as something of a mentor to Margaret.(20) I’m not sure when Eliza introduced these two amazing women, but it probably earlier than 1840.

The relationship between Emerson and Mary Rotch appears formal; but the relationship between Margaret and “Aunt Mary” seems to have been much closer. By about 1840, Margaret was staying with Mary Rotch at Mary’s summer house.(21) No later than 1842, Margaret was staying with Mary Rotch here in New Bedford, in the house that Mary had built for herself and her companion, Mary Gifford, on South Sixth Street (our church later bought that house as a parsonage in the 1890s). They wrote many letters to one another, and we heard one of those letters as the first reading. Emerson’s letters to Mary Rotch tend to concern ideas and thinking. Margaret fFuller’s letters to Mary Rotch talk about health, and travel, and clothing; they are letters one friend would write to another. Margaret’s letters to Aunt Mary show a real love existed between the two.

How did Mary Rotch influence Margaret Fuller? With Emerson, we can find specific influences; with Margaret Fuller, the influence seems less specific but broader. I imagine that Mary Rotch could have been a role model for Margaret Fuller. Mary Rotch was a strong, confident, self-possessed woman who lived alone and who didn’t feel the need to marry a man (indeed, one of Fuller’s biographers senses a cooling of their relationship once Margaret married).(22) Mary was not afraid of being an intellectual, and had organized her own discussion group here in New Bedford, not unlike the “Conversations” for women for which Margaret later became so well-known. We may not be able to trace a direct intellectual influence, as in the case of Emerson, but we can certainly claim Mary Rotch had a profound personal influence on Margaret Fuller.

…

There is only a little more to tell about Mary Rotch. She lived the remainder of her life peacefully in her house on South Sixth Street, attending church here in this building, quietly walking out before communion was served — I imagine that by setting that example of leaving before communion began contributed to the weakening of that ritual in our congregation, so that it is not at all surprising that communion died out completely here in the 1860s, without any fuss at all. In 1843, when she was 65, Mary ordered a grand tea service from Paris, quite elaborate and richly decorated, and copies of letters to and from Paris regarding this tea service are in the Whaling Museum’s Research Library. Five years later, Mary Rotch died, on September 4, 1848, at age seventy.

I suppose sermons are supposed to have a solid moral, or summing-up, at the end of them. I don’t have a moral, but let me sum up this sermon by saying, quite simply: I wish I knew more about Mary Rotch. Even though she spoke through her life, through the way she lived her life, I wish someone would ferret out some of her letters and publish them, so we can read her own words. I wish someone would write about her, not as a footnote to Emerson or Fuller, but for her own sake, as a deep religious thinker, as one of the most interesting members of our church. Hers was truly an inspired life; and her 19th C. life continues to inspire our lives today.

References and additional information

Notes

(1) William Rotch, “Memorandum Written by William Rotch in 1814 in the Eightieth Year of His Age,” online version of manuscript at Quaker.org, accessed 15 November 2008.
(2) Rotch, accessed 15 November 2008.
(3) John M. Bullard, The Rotches (New Bedford: privately printed, 1941), p. 36.
(4) Rotch, accessed 15 November 2008.
(5) Bullard, p. 115.
(6) Christine Arato and Patrick Eleey, Safely Moored at Last: Cultural Landscape Report for New Bedford Whaling National Historical Park (Boston: National Park Service, 1998), vol. 1, p. 13.
(7) Robert D. Richardson, Emerson: The Mind on Fire (University of California Press, 1996), p. 160.
(8) Bullard, pp. 37-38.
(9) Bullard, p. 113.
(10) Frederick B. Tolles, “The New-Light Quakers of Lynn and New Bedford,” New England Quarterly, Sept., 1959, p. 297.
(11) Tolles, pp. 305-206.
(12) Tolles, p. 313.
(13) Tolles, pp. 317-318.
(14) Hodgson, William, The Society of Friends in the Nineteenth Century, vol. 1, pp. 96-97.
(15) Gay Wilson Allen, Waldo Emerson, pp. 224-225.
(16) Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, edited by Edward Emerson and Waldo Forbes, vol. 4, pp. 263-264; quoted in Allen, p. 225.
(17) Moncure Daniel Conway, Emerson Home and Abroad, (Osgood, 1882), p. 87.
(18) Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Greatness,” The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, edited by Edward Waldo Emerson (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1904), v.8, pp. 309-310. In an endnote, the editors state, “These were the words of Miss Mary Rotch of New Bedford, and they made deep impression on Mr. Emerson, when in 1834 he was invited to preach for a time in that city.”
(19) Orville Dewey, Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D., edited by Mary E. Dewey (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1883), p. 68.
(20) Bullard, p. 130. Bullard quotes Thomas Wentworth Higginson: “She [Eliza] took to mould her [Margaret] externally, to make her less abrupt…. She had her constantly at her own house, reformed her hair dresser….” Paula Blanchard, in Margaret Fuller: From Transcendentalism to Revolution (Delacourte Press, 1978; reprint ADdison Wesley, 1987), pp. 61 ff., goes into more detail on exactly this point.
(21) Blanchard, p. 176. Note that Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli (R. W. Emerson, et al., editors [Boston:, 1852], p. vol. 1, p. 320), contains only one reference to Mary Rotch: “She found a valuable friend in the late Miss Mary Rotch, of New Bedford, a woman of great strength of mind, connected with the Quakers not less by temperament than by birth, and possessing the best lights of that once spiritual sect.”
(22) Blanchard, pp. 302-303.

Published writing by Mary Rotch

“Letter from Mary Rotch to her sister-in-law, Charity Rotch, in Kendal, Ohio,” in John M. Bullard, The Rotches (New Bedford: privately printed, 1941), p.360-361.

Additional reading

Bullard’s The Rotches has a short biographical essay titled ”  ‘Aunt Mary’ Rotch” by William Emery, reprinted from the New Bedford Morning Mercury, 25 December, 1941. This essay contains some factual errors.

Murray Gardner Hill, ”  ‘A Rill Struck Out from the Rock’: Mary Rotch of New Bedford,” Bulletin of Friends Historical Association, 45 (1956), pp. 8-23. I was unable to locate a copy of this article in time for the sermon.

Emerson mentions reading a manuscript account of Mary Rotch’s conflict with the Old Lights; this manuscript is apparently now in the Rhode Island Historical Association library.

I have only been able to find two letters written by by Mary Rotch. There is a typescript copy of a letter in the Old Dartmouth Historical Association’s research library regarding her purchase of the tea set in Paris; and there is the published letter mentioned above. Some of her letters may still be in the hands of Rotch family descendants; others might possibly be found in with the papers of Emerson and Fuller; others may be found in other libraries or collections. Further research is needed in this area.

Further biographical information about Mary Rotch can probably be deduced from her letters, and from letters to her by Emerson, Fuller, etc. Additional information may also possible be gleaned from other historical records.

Mary Rotch’s Unitarianism

Most of the church records from the early 19th C. are now missing, and probably perished in a fire in the church office in 1927. I have not been able to find any mention of Mary Rotch in the extant records. However, even if the records existed, it is not clear that she would have appeared in them:– women were not allowed to vote or own pews during that era, so it is unlikely that she would have appeared in the records of the society; and while Mary Rotch could have become a member of the church, church membership was often associated with the communion ritual, in which she did not participate.

Curiously, Mary Rotch’s name does not appear on the list of names of persons who contributed to the salary of Orville Dewey, although other New Light Quakers do appear on this list. Since her father was still alive in 1823, and he apparently remained a Quaker, she may not have been able to make a financial contribution (I don’t know whether she had control of any money of her own at that point).

But Mary Rotch is widely recorded as having attended worship services at what was originally the established “congregational” church in New Bedford, then beginning 1824 legally named First Congregational Society of New Bedford, now called First Unitarian Church in New Bedford. She was disowned by New Bedford Friends Meeting in 1824, but her affiliation with the Unitarian church might have begun earlier — Orville Dewey says that she called on him when he first arrived in New Bedford, which was in December, 1823, and there is some indication that the New Light Friends began to affiliate with the Unitarians before they were officially disowned by the Meeting. Although she continued to use Quaker forms of speech (“thee” and “thou”) for the rest of her life, she attended the Unitarian church until her death. I have no evidence one way or another as to whether she called herself or thought of herself as a Unitarian.

This afternoon I went to talk with someone in hospice care, someone I just met, someone just a few years older than I am. I don’t know how to describe her except to say she is someone with real spiritual depth. I knew this because I could see how she made the nurses and health aides feel good just by being in her presence. She and I talked for nearly an hour, and though I couldn’t tell you what exactly we talked about, I still feel good from listening to her.

I took a walk down by the waterfront late this afternoon. It was already getting dark. A thought came to me as I was walking — I can only remember the shape of that thought, not any of its content except it was about something I saw and heard. My older sister, the writer, always carries a notebook around and would have written that thought down. But I didn’t write it down, and it got lost in all the mundane and even trivial thoughts about my job, about shopping, about how I don’t exercise enough.

My partner Carol read my blog the other day and gently mocked me for writing about trivia. She’s right, I do write about trivia. But that’s where I find the transcendent, that’s where my religious life unfolds. Some people need to see the face of a divine being, or have an out-of-body experience, but I’m fine just sitting at home doing nothing.

Mr. Crankypants here, with some moral commentary about the political scene. Yes, campers, Ted Stevens, Senator from Alaska for some 40 years lost his re-election bid and finally conceded defeat. This means we avoid the specter of an 85 year old convicted felon serving in the Senate. Which is probably a relief for Ted Stevens. What would he do, show up on the Senate floor in his orange jumpsuit, with officers from the Anchorage Correctional Complex standing guard over him? After all, he knows perfectly well orange is not a color that does anything for him. (And no snarky comments about how the only difference between Ted Stevens and some other U.S. Senators is merely that he’s a convicted felon.)

Did you notice that Ted Stevens almost won the election? No, that wasn’t one of Mr. Crankypants’s jokes — Mark Begich, the winner, beat Stevens by only about 4,000 votes. This means there are lots of voters in Alaska who think it’s OK to have a man convicted of corruption and crimes of moral turpitude representing them in Congress, a man who had to vote for himself (assuming he was stupid enough to vote for himself) on a “questioned ballot” because his legal voting status was in question. Either the brains of those Alaskan voters froze from the long winters up there, or they somehow think Ted Stevens would look good wearing an orange jumpsuit.

Humanity is notorious for putting foxes back into henhouses. We catch ’em with their hand in the cookie jar and we say, Hey guess you like cookies, well I’ll just leave that cookie jar right there on the counter for you. So what if all the hens are dead and the fox is picking chicken meat out of his teeth? –such a nice fox, and only doing what comes natural. We get all cranky an hour later when we find that the cookie jar is empty and there aren’t any eggs for breakfast.

Mr. Crankypants only wishes that he had been an Alaskan voter, so he could have voted for Ted Stevens. That’s right, campers, voted for Teddy Stevens. That way Mr. C. could have proved to everyone that Ted Stevens would not look good in an orange jumpsuit, because his skin tone is so wrong for orange. And this, dear friends, is the real moral issue to be addressed — as long as you look good, then all your moral turpitude should be forgiven.

Out, as usual at this time of year, about an hour before sundown. I went out behind our building to look at our little raised bed of Swiss chard. The cold snap of the past few days has pretty much conquered the chard. One or two plants were still standing up, but the rest had fallen over, and the leaves had a dull look, no longer the bright shiny yellow-green of early this week. I planted the seeds too late, and even though it stayed unseasonably warm up until a few days ago, there weren’t enough hours of daylight to allow the plants to flourish. They never got much bigger than three inches tall. Late last week, Carol said we could eat them even though they were small. Lulled by the weeks of warm weather, I decided to wait. And now the plants are pretty close to dead.

I got to the Fairhaven side of the harbor, and walked into the parking lot of the motel right off Route 6. I was walking towards a black pickup truck when I saw a small head peering over the hood at me. It was a Mute Swan. It had extended its neck all the way up, until it was nearly five feet high. When I got around to the other side of the truck, there was its plump white body waddling around on big black webbed feet; its neck, incredibly long when sticking straight up, accounted for about two thirds of its height. I walked past it quickly — Mute Swans can be aggressive, and I didn’t relish the idea of having an absurd-looking bird pecking me in the chest. I walked down to the edge of the parking lot, and there, squinting into the setting sun, I saw a flock of Buffleheads — the cold weather had finally driven some of the wintering waterfowl to the ocean.

On the way back, I walked through the park on Pope’s Island, startling a couple dozen gulls into flight. They settled down and fluffed out their feathers. As I passed the little playground in the park, there was a used condom lying on the ground, torn and disintegrating. I thought, What a hell of a place to have sex, so cold and bleak. Then I thought, Well maybe that condom has been there since summer when it was warm. Then I thought, Even if it was warm, it’s still a hell of a place to have sex. Much better to have sex in a nice comfortable bed.

I paused briefly to watch a reefer ship being unloaded at the Maritime Terminal. A couple of people were standing around, maybe on break, dressed in coveralls and hardhats. I remember those first really cold days of late fall, when you’re working an outdoors job — it was always tough for me to get used to it. Then after a few days you get accustomed to it, and it feels good. I miss working outside in winter. True, when it gets really cold, well below freezing, it wears you down. Even then, it’s better than sitting indoors all winter long, except for the hour you can steal to get outside and take a walk.

Yesterday I wound up walking past the fast food joint at the corner of Elm and County. No, I didn’t go in to the fast food joint — even though I crave fatty food with the onset of cold weather, I’ve sworn off fast food for a while because of what it does to my digestive system (you don’t want to know). I walked under the old beech tree that grows along Elm Street across from the fast food joint, a big old tree that somehow survived the decline of the neighborhood. Its branches spread out over the sidewalk, and the sidewalk was almost entirely covered in beech nut shells. A fat Eastern Gray Squirrel idly hopped towards the tree, just out of my reach, keeping a weather on me the whole time. I thought, That’s what I should be doing for fatty food instead of fast food hamburger products, I should be eating nuts.

But then when I was in the supermarket tonight, I forgot to buy a jar of nuts.

…is the headline of this BBC news story. I think the Brits obsess on Sarah Palin because she’s got the same last name as Michael Palin of Monty Python fame, and having two adbsurdist public figures (one intentionally absurd, the other not) is too good a coincidence for them to waste. Speaking of absurd, click the link above to see a photo of Sarah Palin smiling vapidly while behind her stands a man holding a bloody turkey carcass. There’s something almost metaphorical about that image… if I could just figure out the metaphor….

Hosea Ballou is one of the theological giants of my religious tradition, Unitarian Universalism. Back in 1805, Ballou wrote A Treatise on Atonement, still the major exposition of North American Universalism (you can read it online here). Unfortunately, Ballou was not what you’d call a great writer. When trying to describe his writing style, the adjective “clunky” comes immediately to mind.

Because he was a mediocre writer, hardly anyone reads his Treatise any more, and hardly anyone bothers to sing any of the hundreds of hymns he wrote. This is unfortunate, because buried in Ballou’s clunky prose is a vision of a universe run by Love, where someday the power of Love is going to make everything turn out well.

I recently discovered that one of Ballou’s hymns is still in print — not in the current Unitarian Universalist hymnal, but in The Sacred Harp, a songbook widely used by shape-note singers. It’s number 411 in The Sacred Harp, and it goes like this:

1. Come, let us raise our voices high,
And from a sacred song,
To him who rules the earth and sky,
And does our days prolong.
Who through the night gave us to rest,
This morning cheered our eyes;
And with the thousands of the blest,
In health made us to rise.

2. Early to God we’ll send our prayer,
Make hast to pray and praise,
That he may make our good his care,
And guide us all our days.
And when the night of death comes on,
And we shall end our days,
May his rich grace the theme prolong,
Of his eternal praise.

Hosea Ballou, 1808 (C.M.D.)

No, I’m not proposing that we include this hymn in the next edition of the Unitarian Universalist hymnal. In The Sacred Harp book, Ballou’s hymn is set to a fuguing tune, fairly complex music that is far beyond the singing ability of the average American congregation (though it might be fun for a church choir), and the hymn itself is not quite good enough for me to want to go to the trouble of finding another, easier, tune for it. But it’s nice to know that people still do sing this old Universalist hymn, even though most of those who sing it probably have no idea who Hosea Ballou was, or what Universalism might be.

Saba, my first-cousin-once-removed, goes to Sunday school at Unviersity Unitarian Church in Seattle. Except not this year, because her mom, Nancy (my cousin) is a Fulbright Fellow in Nairobi, Kenya. After the U.S. presidential elections, we got an email message from nancy which read in part: “Dr. Wangari Maathai, Nobel Laureate and founder of the Green Belt Movement, invited Saba to plan a tree with her, for President-elect Obama!”

How cool is that?

In an old Unitarian Universalist Sunday school curriculum called From Long Ago and Many Lands, religious educator Sophia Lyon Fahs wrote out three miracle birth stories for upper elementary children: the wonder stories of the birth of Buddha, Confucius, and Jesus. I like to present these stories during the worship services leading up to Christmas, during the “story for all ages” (or “children’s sermon” or whatever your church calls it). Each of these stories tells of miraculous events that happen before the birth of these three great religious teachers. Children pick up on the parallels between the stories — angels and prophecies and miraculous animals — and it helps them to better understand the wondrous aspects of the two familiar birth stories of Jesus from the books of Matthew and Luke.

Problem is that Sophia Fahs’s stories are really too long to tell in a worship service — as written, they can last a good ten minutes. Each year, I edit them down by sticking little bits of Post-It notes over the parts I don’t want to read, and then I take the bits of Post-It notes out and forget about it until next Advent season, until I have to do it all over again. This year, I got smart and decided to write out a condensed version of Fahs’s “Birth of Buddha” story and keep it in my files. Then I also took out my copy of The Story of Gotama Buddha: Jataka-nidana, and from that I pieced together a short and fairly coherent narrative of Buddha’s birth.

And as long as I had done all this work, I figured I’d post both stories here, in case someone else might find them useful. Both stories should last a little over five minutes when read aloud. You’ll find the condensed Fahs story at the very end of this post, and my own version immediately below….

Introduction to both stories

At Christmas we like to remember the old story of the miraculous birth of Jesus of Nazareth. But did you know that there are other miraculous birth stories of other great religious leaders? Today I’m going to tell you about the miraculous birth of Buddha, a story with angels and wonderful animals and wise men. See if you think this story is at all like the story of Jesus’s birth….

The Miracle Birth of Buddha

Here is the story of the miracle birth of Buddha:

The people of the city of Kapilavatthu were celebrating a spring festival, and the queen of the city, Queen Maya, celebrated with them. One day, she arose early, gave money to many beggars, ate a delicious meal, and then went back to the palace to sleep.

As she slept, she dreamed that the four Guardian Angels of the world lifted her up and took her to the highest mountains in the Himalayas. They set her down under a huge Sala tree. Four more angels came forth, clothed Queen Maya in heavenly garments, and led her to a silver mountain. Inside the silver mountain was a house of gold, and there the queen lay down to rest. It was not long before a great and gentle white elephant came into the silver mountain, carrying a white lotus flower in his trunk. The elephant trumpeted, walked around the bed where the queen lay, and gave her the lotus flower.

When the queen awakened the next morning, she told her dream to her husband, King Suddhodana. The king called sixty-four wise brahmins. After serving them food in gold and silver bowls, the king told them the dream and asked them what it meant. The brahmins told the king, “Do not worry, great king. This dream means that Queen Maya will soon give birth to a baby boy. If this child chooses life at home he will become the greatest king the world has seen; but if instead he chooses to forsake home life and become a hermit, then he will become a great religious teacher.”

When it came time for Queen Maya to give birth, she told King Suddhodana that she wanted to go to the city where her parents were the king and queen. King Suddhodana called a thousand officers to carry the queen and escort her on the journey. Along the way was a beautiful place called Lumbini Park, and at that time of year the trees were covered with blossoms, and flocks of singing birds flew among the flowers. The queen asked to stop to enjoy the beauty. She got down from the palanquin, and as she reached up to grasp a blossom of a Sala tree, she knew it was time for her to have her baby. The officers set up a curtain around her for privacy. As she stood there holding the branch of the Sala tree, the queen gave birth.

Immediately, the four great Brahmas appeared with a fine golden net, and they carefully laid the new baby into this net. Presenting the child to Queen Maya, they said, “Be joyful, O Queen, for a great son is born unto you.” The four Brahmas prepared a soft antelope skin, and placed the child on it. The baby stood up and looked towards the east. Voices were heard saying, “O Great One, there is no other like you!” The baby gazed in all directions, and then took seven steps towards the north, while the Great Brahma held a white umbrella over him. And when her baby was born thirty two miraculous things happened as signs that this baby was unique.

Queen Maya brought the baby home. The king rejoiced to see his new son, and they named their baby Siddhartha Gotama. Now a hermit who lived nearby, a man with great spiritual wisdom, heard about this new baby. He came down to the palace and said to King Suddhodana, “O King, I have heard that a child is born to you, and I would like to see him.” They brought the child out, and upon seeing him the hermit knew the baby would grow up to be a great man, and he stood and paid homage to the baby. Then the hermit smiled, and proclaimed that the baby would become the Buddha when he was 35 years old.

And that is exactly what happened. Although King Suddhodana tried to convince his son to become a king, when Siddhartha Gotama was old enough to decide what to do with his life, he left the palace and went out into the world. He got his food by begging, and he went to learn from the greatest spiritual teachers. At last, he sat down beneath a tree to meditate, and he achieved enlightenment, and became the Buddha, the Enlightened One, the one who awakened to the Truth of the ages. Buddha spent the rest of his life teaching others how they, too, could calm themselves and awaken to the truth. And even today, thousands of years after he lived, there are still millions of people who follow the Buddha’s teachings.

Adapted from The Story of Gotama Buddha: Jataka-nidana, translated from original Pali texts by N. A. Jayawickrama (Oxford: Pali Text Society, 2002 corrected edition), pp. 66-72.

Condensed version of Sophia Fahs’s “The Birth of Buddha”

This is the wonder tale about the birth of Buddha. It is an older story than the one about the birth of Jesus.

Buddha’s mother was a Queen who lived in a grand palace in the faraway country of India. Queen Maya was beautiful as a water lily, and as pure in her thoughts as a lotus flower.

One day the Queen lay down to rest. Soon she was fast asleep and dreaming. She dreamed that four beautiful and strong angels lifted her up and flew up into the air with her, higher and higher, until they were near the top of a very great mountain. The angels showed her a palace gleaming like gold. They showed many beautiful rooms. In her dream, she lay down in one of the rooms to rest. A pure white elephant quietly entered the room. Gently, he came and stood beside her. At the end of his trunk, he carried a large lotus flower, and he gave it to the Queen. The very moment when the Queen took the flower, the room was filled with a heavenly light. Trees at once began to bloom with new flowers. Lotus flowers of all colors burst into bloom everywhere.

In the morning when the Queen awoke from this dream, she found herself in her own bedroom in the palace as if nothing had happened. She told the King about her dream. They decided to ask the sixty-four royal counselors what the dream meant.

The chief counselor answered: “The dream is a good one, O King and Queen. The Queen is going to have a baby boy. When he grows up, this child will either become the King after you; or he will become a great teacher who will teach the people of many countries to know what they do not now understand.” When they heard this, the King and Queen were very pleased, for they both wanted a child who would rule over the land after them.

Months later, when Queen Maya realized that her baby was about to be born, she decided to go to the city of her parents. The royal procession stopped at a most beautiful park. Upon catching sight of the masses of flowers, Maya the Queen got down out of her royal chair and walked under the trees and through the flowers.

She had never seen a lovelier spot. As she walked, she began to feel that her baby was going to be born. When the baby was born, four angels appeared holding in their hand the four corners of a golden net. Into this net the baby was laid as if in a cradle. The angels spoke sweetly to the mother, and said: “Be joyful, O Lady. A mighty son is born to you.”

Then four kings stood beside the four angels, and the kings laid the baby down on a soft antelope’s skin. The mother thought she saw the babe lift himself up on his feet. He stood for a moment and looked around in all directions. He took seven steps, while one angel held a white umbrella over him and the other angels laid garlands of flowers before him. Then the child lay down and fell asleep just like any other baby.

When the King saw the baby, he was overjoyed. Now he had a son who would some day rule the kingdom after him! But the baby did not grow up to become king. When he was old enough to choose for himself, he decided to leave the palace. Walking from town to town, begging for his food in the streets, sleeping in the woods, he searched for people who could teach him wisdom.

And it came about that this young man became wiser than those who tried to teach him. Even today, after two thousand five hundred years, this man is honored by millions of people. He is called the Buddha, and name which means “the man with a light.” Buddha’s Light is no ordinary light, it is a Light for the heart and mind; it is the Light of Truth that you feel inside yourself when you know you are at peace with yourself.

Adapted from “The Birth of Buddha,” in Sophia Lyon Fahs, From Long Ago and Many Lands (Boston: Beacon, 1948), pp. 187-192.

North Unitarian Church was established in 1894 by First Unitarian Church as a Unitarian mission, or settlement house, in the North end of New Bedford. Operating in rented space at first, First Unitariana built a building to house this mission in 1903. Beginning in 1920, it became a separate and legally incorporated institution under the name “The Unity Home Church,” although First Unitarian continued to own the building. The Unity Home Church included large numbers of immigrants and children of immigrants in its membership. North Unitarian Church merged back into First Unitarian c. 1971.

I’ve been doing some research into this small Unitarian church of immigrants, and I’m going to include some of the results of my research here in a series of posts. This first installment is an incomplete list of ministers who served the church….

Some of this information comes from an unsigned manuscript in our church archives, and the rest from various published or online sources.

Unity Home, a mission of First Unitarian Church

1904-1904 —- Brunton. Worship services began at Unity Home in 1904: “In 1904 we start [sic] having the first church services at night. Mr. Brunton was the minister….” [unsigned manuscript] Could this have been Rev. William Brunton, then minister of the Fairhaven Unitarian church?

1904-1904 —- Ives [unsigned mansucript]

1905-1906 Rev. Bertram D. Boivin. “In 1905 Mrs. & Mr. Boivan came to Unity Home.” [unsigned mansucript] Who’s Who in New England (A. N. Marquis, 1915) has the following information: “b. Athol, Mass., Oct. 16. 1873; … descendant on maternal side of William Cox, of the Boston Tea Party; … student Tufts Coll.; S.T.B., Tufts Div. Sch., 1901; post-grad. work Harvard Div. Sch., 1904-5; m. Carrie E. Fairbanks, of Leominster, Mass., June 18, 1901. Ordained Unitarian ministry, 1898; pastor Annisquam (Gloucester), 1901-4, New Bedford, 1905-6, East Bridgewater, 1906-12, Mlddleboro, 1912-15, 1st Parish, Gloucester, since Feb. 1, 1915.” The 1915 General Catalog of Harvard Divinity School says he was ordained as a Universalist minister in Hinsdale, N.H., in 1898, and served in Southold, N.Y., from 1898-1899.

1906-??? Bernard Morrison. In the December, 1906, issue, the Quarterly Bulletin of Meadville Theological School, has the following notice: “With the church in New Bedford, Mass., is connected Unity Home, of which Bernard Morrison, who graduated here last summer, has just been made pastor or superintendent.”

1906-1910 Further research needed.

1910-1912? George H. Howes. In 1910, “Mr. and Mrs. Howes took charge.” [unsigned mansucript] Howes is listed as minister in the 1911 AUA Yearbook; ordination date 1905; settled at New Bedford 1910.

1913-1915 Rev. Louis Henry Buckshorn. “In 1914 Mr. Buckshorn came he was minister for about 2 years.” [unsigned mansucript] The 1915 General Catalog of the Divinity School of Harvard lists Buckshorn at Unity Home, New Bedford. Buckshorn was in the class of 1896 of the Divinity School, having graduated Meadville Theological School in 1895. He served Westford’s First Congregational Parish (Unitarian) 1896-1900; and (probably Unitarian) churches in Concord, N.H., 1900-1909; Vineyard Haven, 1909-1913; and back to Westford 1915-1919. A posting on an amateur genealogical Web site states: “He was minister of the First Congregational Parish (Unitarian) here in Westford from 1896 to 1899, and again from 1915 to 1919. Louis d. 7 Jul 1919, suicide, at Westford.”

Reorganized as North Unitarian Church

According to a story written for the New Bedford Interchurch Council by David O. Rankin, “It was in 1917 that the members, apparently feeling that religion should play a more integral part in the affairs of the Home… voted to form a religious society. The Rev. Leon Pratt was installed as the minister and regular worship services were conducted in the chapel on Sunday mornings. It was not until 1920, however, that the organization was legally incorporated as the North Unitarian Church of New Bedford.” Rankin’s dates may be inaccurate; the 1916 AUA Annual Report states that Unity Home in New Bedford “has been greatly enlarged and improved, and has been re-organized as the North Unitarian Church of New Bedford.”

1916-1917? Rev. Leon Sherman Pratt. From the Harvard Graduates Magazine, vol. XXVI 1917-1918 (Harvard University, 1918): “1916 Rev. L. S. Pratt is minister of the North Unitarian Church, New Bedford, Mass.” The 1917 AUA Yearbook lists Pratt at North Unitarian. The unsigned manuscript inaccurately places Pratt’s tenure c.1923-1924: “After that [i.e., after 1923] Mr. Pratt came and he was ordained a minister at Unity Home.” The 1919 AUA Yearbook lists Pratt at Andover, N.H., 1917-1919.

1917-1919 Further research needed.

1919-1923 Rev. Samuel Louis Elberfeld (1869-1953). “In about 1919 or 1920 Mr. Elberfeld came…” [unsigned mansucript] AUA Yearbooks have Elberfeld at Peterborough, N.H., 1913-1919; New Bedford 1919-1923; East Boston, 1923-1939; Warwick, Mass., 1940-1944; Bernardston, Mass., 1944-1946; and East Boston again 1946-1953. According to The Boston Religion by Peter Tufts Richardson (Rockland, Maine: 2003), Elberfeld served First Unitarian Society of Hyde Park (Boston) from 1906-1907. An amateur genealogist’s Web site gives the following information: b. in Pomeroy, Ohio, the son of German immigrants; m. Isobel Ross Holton in 1901 in Quincy, Ill.; d. in East Boston; graduated from Meadville Lombard, and later also attended Harvard Divinity school; ordained Unitarian 1897; and according to an unsourced obituary, “He has held pastorates and youth work positions in Revere, New York City, Quincy Illinois, Salem, Danvers, Hyde Park, Charlestown N. H., New Bedford, Warwick and Bernardston, Massachusetts.”

1923-1924? —- Wood. “…then in 1923 Mr. Wood [came].” [unsigned mansucript]

1924-1939 No minister. “…during that time there were no church services.” But the Sunday school continued under Mrs. Florence Cross. [unsigned mansucript]

1939-1940 Robert J. Holden, student minister. With help from Rev. Duncan Howlett of First Unitarian, church services began again in 1939. Howlett assigned student minister Holden to serve North Unitarian Church. Holden became minister of First Unitarian after Howlett left, from 1948-1953. Holden worked at M.I.T. from 1953-1982; he was associate dean of students from 1962-1982. He died in 1988.

1940-1943 Rev. Maja Capek (1888-1966). More on Maja Capek here, and about her husband Rev. Norbert Capek here.

1943-1944 Max Gaebler, student minister. Max Gaebler (1921-   ) became one of the most prominent Unitarian ministers of his generation. Gaebler served as minister of First Unitarian Society of Madison, Wis., from 1952-1987. The Madison congregation grew substantially during his ministry there. After the merger of the Unitarians and Universalists in 1961, Gaebler spent a year at the UUA helping deepen relations with Unitarians and Universalists around the world. Along with Dana Greeley, Gaebler was invited to be a Unitarian Universalist observer at Vatican II. More on Gaebler here.

1944-1946 Rev. Orval Clay. Clay tried to grow the church to the point where it could sustain a full-time ministry, but apparently became discouraged and soon resigned. He was a teacher at Beamer School, Woodland, Calif., in 1946-47, then was called as minister of the Community Congregational Church in Salida, Calif., in 1948. He last appears in the 1950-51 directory of the American Unitarian Association; presumably after that he was in fellowship with the Congregationalists.

1946-1947 Dewey Pruett, student minister. The unsigned manuscript says, “Mr. Lovell and Dewey Pruett were with us a short time both being students,” but I find no other record of Mr. Lovell.

1947-1949 Charles J. Speel II, student minister. Speel (1916-2000) graduated from Brown in 1939, worked as a machinery designer in Providence, R.I., and joined the U.S. Navy Aircorps during the Second World War. After the war, he attended Havard Divinity School from c.1947-1956, earning his B.T.S., M.T.S., and Ph.D. He was ordained and installed as pastor of First United Presbyterian Church in Cranston, R.I., and after a few years there became professor of Bible at Monmouth College in Monmouth, Ill., where he stayed until his retirement in 1986. [from Monmouth College Web site]

1949-1951 Henry Niles, student minister.

1951-1952 Donald A. Stout, student minister. Stout was ordained 1953 Louisville, Ken., later minister of the Unitarian Congregation of South Peel, Ontario.

1953-1954. Rev. A. Robert Shelander. Shelander had retired as minister of the Sharon, Mass., Unitarian church in 1949.

1954-1955 David Wellington Brown, student minister. David W. Brown is still listed in the UUA directory. After being ordained in 1956, he went on to serve congregations in West Upton, Mass., Dallas, Texas, Orlando, Flor., and Northampton, Mass.

1955-1956 W. A. Stevens, student minister. The unsigned manuscript has his name as “Warren Stevens.”

1958-1965 Rev. Charles Hodges. Not listed in the A.U.A. directory. From the financial records, Hodges appears to have been hired to preach, but nothing more.

1965-1968 Rev. Donald James. Again, preaching only.

1968 on, no minister.

We got up early so we could take a walk before we started driving up to my sister’s house for Thanksgiving dinner. It was unusually calm; in places the water of the harbor was almost completely smooth, in other places it was barely riffled by the smallest breeze; the barges, cranes, fishing boats, and heavy machinery along the Fairhaven side of the harbor were beautifully reflected where the water was still. Some blue sky began to show in the west, and it grew bright enough to cast shadows. Carol decided to turn back about halfway to Fairhaven. A dozen or so Buffleheads bobbed in the water between Pope’s Island and Fairhaven, the black and white of the males showing brilliantly in the growing sunlight. A couple of roofers stood on the flat roof of the old motel on Route 6, ripping up the old roofing; supposedly the new owner of the building is going to renovate it, and reopen it. I kept walking, but by that point my mind settled down and stopped thinking.

We left Carol’s parents’ house quite late and headed down Interstate 495. It was ten thirty so traffic was light. We drove along smoothly, listening to the news from Mumbai. Suddenly brake lights flashed red in front of us. Cars around us began slowing down. Ahead of us I could see stopped traffic. “What is it?” Carol said. “Must be an accident,” I said, moving over to the middle lane of the highway. We could see blue lights of a police car. But when we got closer, we saw that it wasn’t an accident. Cars were waiting to get onto an exit ramp, and I remembered I had seen one of those flashing traffic signs with a message about parking for the outlet malls. “It’s people going to the outlet malls, the ones that are going to open at midnight,” I said. “That’s crazy,” said Carol, “and look at all the traffic jam on the other side of the highway!” It was even worse on the northbound side.

Starting at midnight (right about now) it’s Black Friday, the day when retail stores supposedly make enough money to finally put them in the black for the year, the day when millions of crazed Americans drive around spending lots of money to buy Christmas presents. As for me, I’ll be staying home.

I’ve just finished a minor rebuild of the entire Web site, including improved navigation on the main site. I made minor design changes on the main site to improve legibility, and make it look more consistent with this blog and my sermon archives.

Most importantly, there’s now a Site Map to give an overview of the whole site.

Additionally, I added lots of new content here — songs and arrangements from our church’s Folk Choir.

Second in an occasional series of posts about North Unitarian Church in New Bedford, Mass.

Samuel Louis Elberfeld was minister at North Unitarian Church in New Bedford from 1919-1923. The Web site of John Elberfeld, his grandson, has an abridged version of one of Samuel Elberfeld’s sermons. It is a pulpit-pounding, fire-breathing, Unitarian social justice sermon — one of those social justice sermons that is supposed to make you squirm and feel very uncomfortable. So of course I can’t resist posting the abridged version here…

Abridged version of Rev. S. L. Elberfeld’s farewell sermon to the Unitarian Church in Charlestown, N.H., 1912. As reprinted in a supplement to The News Review, Charlestown, NH, August 5, 1976 (scanned by John Elberfeld, proofreading and minor edits by me).

It is needless to say that the Charlestown [New Hampshire] of the past and the Charlestown of today are different, and in the minds of some, vastly different. Formerly it was all residential and agriculture — today, it is part residential and part manufacture — and even the character of the farms and farming has changed. We have changed; but can you say that the change has been toward progression?…

We are not as cultured as we formerly were, but there are greater activities. As the old residents of the town die off their wealth dissipates to outside recipients and the Town must seek new ways of revenue and people, and the easiest way is to bring in manufacturing concerns. These factories bring people who help to populate the town and increase business. In the glow of an incoming factory I was even told by an enthusiast that it would add to our church number; but not a single addition has come to us through business boom. The gain has been elsewhere…

But no matter who loses or gains, the change has come about and must be accepted as a fact and we must adapt even our churches to the changed conditions…

If all the disreputable things were true about people in your midst that have come to me by hearsay in the four years that I have been with you, this community would undoubtedly be the worst morally on the fact of the globe…

You might criticize my being so far away from you on Sky Farm, but it is the best thing that could ever have happened to you who have listened to me so many Sundays. I was nearer heaven there than the maelstrom of gossip would ever permit me to get here. When some of the things that were mauled over here in the privacy of secret confab and repeated to other secret gatherings did finally reach me, I thanked God from the bottom of my heart that I did not have to live in the center of that evil talk, living apart from it all. I retained my ideals and my respect for the most of you and I preached those ideals of man, of religion, of God…

The keenly alive, uneducated or unscholarized human brain is just as valuable in the solution of town problems as the scholarized brain. It is the man as well as the brain that we are after; and let us not forget the heart which is often of more value when dealing with children. Cut out the heart and sympathy is done away with; and sympathy for and with the child is more than your knowledge of the details of running a school. Think of a parent bringing up a child by the brain process and no heart, no sympathy, with the child in that which interests it….

What is needed, then, is that the supervision of our schools be placed directly in the hands of those who have children of their own. For instance, take a case directly in hand. A driver of one of those long rides in the transportation of children from a distant farmhouse to a far distant school center thought it within his province to keep the children from talking, laughing, and singing on the way of the long drive. Arguments arose between the driver and the children whereupon the driver pushed his fist in the face of a child;– or as the child said, “Hit me in the face with his fist.” This, without investigation, was termed by some in authority over the schools as discipline. Heart, sympathy, for the child there was none. The father of the child took the matter in his own hands, interviewed the driver in a special manner and the children were allowed to talk, laugh and sing. They became respectful to the driver, and there was no more punching or depriving the children of their dinner pails and school dinner…

Permit me to say something on the transportation of pupils to the school centers. This is of importance to the town, for had you proper transportation those deserted farms in the outlying districts would have occupants. To know the importance of transportation you must realize how it affects real estate. Try to sell an outlying farm and the first question that is asked is how far to the school; what accommodations have you for carrying the children? Answer truthfully and the prospective buyer with children immediately gives up the idea of buying your farm.

I know of good farms going to ruin and helped to ruination by poor transportation and the centralization of education into school centers. Give me, not the old, but the New District school. Hardly a magazine but has something in it on this question and in favor of the New District School.

The town ought to own its own vehicles, covered in summer and covered and closed in winter. Let me describe to you how our children and some of the others were carried to school last winter…

The movement of a moving picture machine would have had to have been quickened many thousand times to have detected movement in the horse and sleigh that carried them through the biting cold and drenching rains of those long winter drives to the North Charlestown School. No cover overhead, not enough covering for the knees, for I furnished one robe; and they were always damp. A little one-horse sleigh with three children sitting with backs to the horse and curved dash of an improvised seat made of a seven-inch width board; one child seated with the driver who kept one foot out of the sleigh to allow the child to remain in. This lightning express left home at 7:30 a.m. and arrived at school about 9 a.m. with the children sometimes wet to the skin to sit out the day…

Ten weeks of travel morning and night through the bitter winter weather under those conditions enforced upon every man in this audience would cause a special town meeting to be called to consider purchasing vehicles for school transportation…

Many have asked why we don’t stay on the farm and become constant residents of Charlestown and we answer that you carry your calves and cows to market in winter better protected than your children to school. Money could not hire us to submit the children to another winter’s cruelty of transportation…

I am reminded here of a story told of a clash in the Senate between Senator Biley and Senator Borah of Idaho. One of Bomb’s measures “is a law providing for a bureau for children.”…

“I assume,” said the supercilious Biley, “that this bill, of the senator from Idaho is somewhat similar to that provision in the agricultural appropriation bill which makes some sort of a similar arrangement for calves and pigs!”

“Exactly,” smiled Borah at the Texan. “My bill seeks to have the government do for the children what it has already done for the calves and pigs.”

Whereupon Mr. Biley sat down heavily and became absorbed in Jeffersonian thought. Let us agree with Senator Borah to give to our children at least equal public advantages that we give to our calves and pigs…

When a measure for the advantage of the children comes up you will always find those brought up in the rigid school of home economics crying,– “We can’t afford it!” If we agree with them we must say then, that we can’t afford to give the boy who will in a few years become the man and the citizen, and the girl who is to become the mother of a succeeding generation, the best advantages educationally and morally.

That bugaboo Economy is the worst bug that ever worked itself into the human brain and heart! Economy! Shame! Let us be generous even to a fault when dealing with the matter of education and morals for the growing generation of boys and girls.

You needed town water and you got it; North Charlestown put up the same cry of its needs, they got it; you cry for good roads over which to send the automobiles, you get them while the farmer bumps his bumpity way to town; but when the cry goes out from the majority of the townspeople for the best of schooling, both grammar and high, for the young, both hands go up in horror. “We can’t afford it!”

We need a high school here in town and four years of it; two to start with and the other two to follow later. In sending the boys and girls away to other towns to receive their education you are weaning them away from the town, for all their interests are fixed outside of the home town — educational and social. The town spirit of the boys and girls is at very low ebb; the school hasn’t even a school yell. Who’s to give it to them and drill them in it? The girl school teachers and the janitor?

You need a man educator to start the first two years of high school and this man educator can allow you to dispense with an outside superintendent whose principal business is taking care of another town’s schools. This man educator can just as well take over the supervision of your schools and they will receive a more thorough supervision than they are now getting.

Many of you here believe in the liberal church but you contribute little or nothing to it. You’ll spend seventy-five cents for a seat in the theatre, besides the car fare, and expect to buy a reserved seat in heaven for twenty-five cents. You, boy, will spend ten cents for candy and drop one cent in the contribution box. The whole matter is that people pay for the pleasure they get out of a thing and not for the good they might do for themselves and others.

Common labor is paid from $550 to $600 a year and you cannot expect a minister who has spent years preparing for a pastorate of a church where all has gone out and nothing much in the way of earnings come in during that preparation to work for less than the price of common labor.

It is up to you, then, who expect to be married and buried by a liberal minister to help keep him in the community. You may not attend church once, twice, or a dozen times a year, but your money is good and the risk of taint will be run. Every one can afford to contribute weekly ten-cents, at least, five cents.

A final note: John Elberfeld’s Web site records that when the Elberfeld family moved back to Charlestown during the First World War, there was by then a high school, and one of the Elberfeld boys went to that high school. Presumably, then, Samuel Elberfeld’s farewell sermon had at least some effect.

This morning when I got to the office, we all complained about our allergies.

“I’m getting these headaches here [pointing to sinuses in forehead] and here [pointing to ears],” said Claudette.

“I wake up in the morning and my eyes are all itchy,” said Linda, pointing to her slightly reddened eyes.

“I can’t breathe today,” I said, coughing.

We compared the benefits of Sudafed (I don’t like the way it makes me feel) and Claritin (it makes Linda drowsy), and talked about eye drops (Claudette said you shouldn’t use them more than three or four times a week).

“I just want a good cold snap,” I said. “Then I’ll be able to breathe again.”

“It’s all these rotting leaves on the ground,” said Linda.

This is the downside to global climate change. Warm autumns mean much worse allergies.

I’ve been listening to Ruth Crawford Seeger’s Nine Preludes online recorded by pianist Rosemary Platt, at the wonderful Art of the States new music Web site. Really wonderful music by a composer who is (unfortunately) best known as Pete Seeger’s stepmother.

I wound up talking to an old friend today, someone I hadn’t talked to in two years. We exchanged news (she now has a grandchild!), and then she said something about being sorry about not having called me. Well, I said, it’s not like I called you, and besides we’re both workaholics. That’s true, she said. But what I really called you about, I continued, is this…

…and then we got down to work, because of course I didn’t call her just to socialize. At this point, I guess I’m supposed to apologize for working all the time and not socializing enough. In his book Walden, Henry Thoreau opines, “Men say that a stitch in time saves nine, and so they take a thousand stitches today to save nine tomorrow. As for work, we haven’t any of any consequence.” The hell with it, I’m not going to apologize to the likes of Henry Thoreau. I like to work, and if I take a thousand stitches today it’s because it gives me joy and pleasure to do so.

jfield passed along a link to a great article titled “The Tyranny of Structurelessness.” It’s a critique of feminist group process that replaced the tyranny of hierarchy with… another kind of tyranny? When I have time to read the article carefully, maybe I’ll find time to write more about it.

The British comedy troupe Monty Python was admired for its movie “The Life of Brian,” an iconoclastic biopic of Jesus that ends with a song and dance number on crucifixes. Alas, Monty Python is no more, but what if they had taken on other major religious figures? Some of you may remember Monty Python’s famous “Penguin on the Television Set” skit, which begins with the characters listening to a radio drama called “The Death of Mary, Queen of Scots.” I have adapted that radio drama into an iconoclastic take on the Zen Buddhist dictum: “If you meet the Buddha on the street, kill him!”

Announcer: And now the BBC is proud to present a brand new radio drama series, “The Death of Siddhartha Gotama, the Buddha.”

[music: fade up and out]
[sound effect: door opening and closing]

Voice One: [deep gruff man’s voice] You are Siddhartha Gotama, the Buddha?

Voice Two: [high reedy man’s voice] I am!

Voice One: Take that, Siddhartha Gotama, the Buddha!!

[sound effects for 60 sec.: sound of a heavy blow on the word “that,” followed by sound of violent blows, crunching noises, smashing noises, things being broken.]
[Throughout all this, we hear Voice Two grunting and screaming in pain.]

Announcer: We will return to the new radio drama production “The Death of Siddhartha Gotama, the Buddha,” in just a moment.

[music: fade up and out]
[sound effects: saw cutting, with other violent sounds as before, with Voice Two screaming.]
[Then: sudden silence.]

Voice One: I think he’s dead.

[beat]

Voice Two: No, I’m not!

[sound effects: violent sounds and screaming start again, suddenly stop]

Voice Two: Hah! Missed me! It’s not so easy to stop the endless cycle of rebirth! Aauugh!!

[sound effects: violent sounds and screaming again]
[music: fade up over sound effects, then down and continue under Announcer…]

Announcer: That was episode one of “The Death of Siddhartha Gotama, the Buddha,” adapted for radio by Hugo Smof Gernsback. Tune in next week for the dramatic conclusion.

Below you’ll find the miraculous birth story of Confucius, abridged from the version told by Sophia Fahs in her book From Long Ago and Many Lands (Boston: Beacon, 1948), pp. 193-197.

I changed some minor aspects of Fahs’s story. For example, Fahs calls Confucius’ mother the “wife” of Kung, his father — but it’s pretty clear that this young woman was a concubine at best, certainly not a wife of Kung, so I do not use the word wife. Also, I’m not very happy with this story because I don’t think Fahs used the best sources — some day I hope to do some more research and come up with a more accurate telling of the myths surrounding Confucius’s birth. But in the mean time, here’s a story that’s a little long but suitable for use in UU worship services…

The Miracle Birth of Confucius

Last week, we heard the miracle birth story of Buddha. Next week, we’ll hear the miracle birth story of Jesus. We love these stories for their deeper meaning — that each and every child is wonderful and miraculous. And now, here’s the story of the miracle birth of Confucius…

The man who became the father of Confucius lived in China very long ago, and was called Kung. Kung was living in China when Buddha was born in India.

When this story begins, Kung was an older man. As he thought back over the years of his life he knew he ought to feel contented. Yet his one most important wish had never come true. All his nine children were girls, and he wanted a son. But now old Kung was living with a woman who was beautiful and young.

This young woman, the woman who would become the mother of Confucius, also wished for a boy child. She believed that somehow a child is always a gift from heaven. She even climbed to the top of a high mountain to make her wish. Perhaps she felt nearer to heaven, the creator of all life, when she could stand and look up at the wide, blue sky above and then look down on the broad, green earth below.

She returned home and waited patiently week after week. Before long she could feel the baby moving inside her body, and she was happy.

One evening as she was sitting alone in her garden in the dimness of the moonlight, she had a surprising dream. She saw a beautiful little animal coming towards her. What kind of animal was it? The animal’s body shone in the moonlight. Its tail spread out like a fan and on its head was one turned-up horn. Could it really be a Unicorn?

She threw a small silk scarf over the animal’s one horn just to see if it were really there. Yes, the horn was there. The unicorn had in its mouth a long piece of jade. It came closer until she could reach out her hand and take the stone tablet from its mouth. Her hands trembled as she read the words that had been carved into the jade:

“A son of the Great Spirit is to be born. Someday he shall rule the land of Chou as a good and wise King.”

The young woman was frightened. She looked up to ask the Unicorn what the words might mean, but the strange animal was gone. The young woman was left alone in her garden in the moonlight. She awoke trembling with wonder at what she had seen.

Not many weeks after this the longed-for day came. It was evening. Kung and the young woman were waiting for the final moment when their child would be born. In the garden outside the little cottage some of their friends were also waiting and hoping, moment by moment, for the good news.

Then they, too, had a surprise. High above them they saw two great dragons curling their long snake like bodies in and out among the clouds. Their fiery eyes turned this way and that as if they were watching the people on the earth. Said one of the waiting friends:

“Surely these good dragons are keeping guard over the blessed mother and over the child about to be born.”

And beside the two long, fiery-eyed dragons, five old but wondrous men appeared in the sky, walking upon the clouds. Said one of the waiting friends:

“These five old men of the sky are the five immortals who never die. They have come down from the five planets to celebrate the birth of this great child.”

And beside the two long, fiery-eyed dragons, and beside the five old men from the five planets, there appeared also in the sky among the soft clouds five musicians with pipes and harps in their hands, playing wondrous music and singing as they played. The words came down from the sky like the clear ringing of a bell, saying, “A child is born, who shall be a great King, who shall make good laws and shall help people to do the right.”

And at that moment, the child was born.

This is the very old story of the birth of Confucius. Kung-fu-tze, the Chinese call him, meaning Kung the Master, or Kung the Teacher. We say Confucius for short.

But this Chinese boy child of long ago did not become a King. Instead he taught other men how to rule their people wisely. Confucius also taught that being able to rule oneself is more important than ruling others. So Confucius had wise words for everybody, big and little, rich and poor. Even after more than two thousand years millions of Chinese still honor Confucius and follow his teachings. All over the world he is regarded as one of the wisest and greatest teachers who has ever lived.

Today I happened to run into someone who is in the helping professions, and our conversation quickly turned to the state of the economy. “It’s getting bad,” he said, “and it’s going to get worse.” We both admitted that we’re feeling the pressures in our jobs — it feels like there’s an increased demand for everyone in the helping professions, while at the same time given the economic situation we’re all worried about funding cuts (not so much cuts in our salaries, but cuts in programs we manage or depend on).

Almost immediately after that conversation, I happened to be talking to someone else who said she has noticed that people are becoming less polite and less courteous. It feels, she said, as if people are a little on edge. Or maybe, I said, as if they’re angry. Yes, angry, she said. This economic mess we’re in is enough to make anyone angry.

Just because I’ve had these two conversations doesn’t mean my feelings have a firm basis in reality. So tell me what you think: Is the economic situation getting to people? Are you noticing a diminishment in politeness? If you’re in the helping professions, are you feeling a little more stressed than usual?

A bunch of us from the Folk Choir of First Unitarian in New Bedford will be singing Christmas carols and other seasonal songs (along with some other people) in downtown New Bedford tomorrow evening as part of the city’s annual Holiday Stroll. I put together some Christmas/solstice songs which meet the following criteria: (1) playable by folk instruments like guitar, soprano recorder, mandolin; (2) words which won’t stick in the throats of Unitarian Universalists (in several cases, words are taken from the 1937 Unitarian Universalist hymnal, Hymns of the Spirit); (3) guitar chords that actually work (we have actually played through all these songs); (4) songs pitched for medium-to-low voices (too many Christmas songs are pitched for sopranos and high tenors). We’re not going to be singing all of these, but I thought others might be interested in this collection.

Now up on my main Web site here: Folkish songs for Christmas.

Songs/carols include the following:

Key to song list:
* = little or no traditional Christian content;
# = social justice slant to Christmas

“Bring a Torch, Jeanette, Isabella” (with French and English words; harmony part for recorder or mandolin)
* “Cornish Wassail” (tune included for this unfamiliar song; sung a capella, or with instruments doubling the voices on the melody)
* “Deck the Halls”
“The Friendly Beasts” (harmony part for high voices)
“Go Tell It on the Mountain” (with great 4th verse from Diana Ross)
“God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen” (harmony part for recorder)
“Good King Wenceslas”
* “Here We Come A-Wassailing”
# “It Came Upon the Midnight Clear”
* “Jingle Bells” (all three verses)
“Joy to the World”
“O Come All Ye Faithful” (with Latin and English words)
“O Come, O Come, Emmanuel” (with harmony part doubling bass voices and recorder)
* “O Christmas Tree” (with German and English words)
“We Three Kings”
“What Child Is This?” (with harmony part for recorder)

Randy reminds me that this is the year of the Elliot Carter centennial. Randy went to one of the concerts at Symphony Hall in Boston this week, and wound up witting behind Gunther Schuller (who told Randy about playing Harry Partch’s big marimba, but that’s another story). Anyway, if you’re like me and can’t make it to one of the concerts, there’s still the Elliot Carter centennial Web site.

This afternoon, I went up to an ordination in Canton (congratulations, Rev. Megan Lynes!), at which Carl Scovel preached the ordination sermon. I always enjoy hearing Carl Scovel preach, even when I find myself in complete disagreement with him — he’s that good a preacher.

And this afternoon, I found myself in complete disagreement with one thing Carl Scovel said in his sermon. He said that in the New England church tradition, a pulpit robe is the outward mark of an ordained minister. Well, that may be true for some New England ministers, but it is not true of all New England ministers — it is certainly not true of me. I think there’s a case to be made for ordained ministers not wearing any distinguishing clothing at all. In brief, my arguments against robes for ministers run roughly as follows: (1) robes are expensive, like $500 and up, and I’ve got better things to spend my money on; (2) the typical pulpit robe dates back 500 years to John Calvin, which by now, for us, is merely an arbitrary date — why not go further back and wear an alb, or come forward a few hundred years and wear a business suit?; (3) robes are, well, idolatrous — they’re the sartorial equivalent of graven images; (4) to paraphrase Henry Thoreau, any job that requires you to buy a new set of clothes is a job you should be wary of; (5) I spent too much time with the Quakers, really started to believe in the plain-dress-living-simply thang, and robes are definitely not plain dress; (6) um, hate to admit this, but pulpit robes look silly.

Now I admit that I do own a robe. I bought it used, at the used robe place in the basement of Sheehan’s in downtown Boston, and it cost sixty buck ten years ago (they told me they got it from a monk who had died). It’s an alb, which dates back two thousand years, cause if I’m gonna be even vaguely in the Christian tradition I might as well take the historical re-enactment thing all the way back to Jesus’s time; and if I think of it as historical re-enactment, then it’s not idolatrous. Besides, I never wear the thing except when once in a while for the occasional wedding.

That’s my take on ministers’ robes. Now excuse me while I duck behind this stone parapet while other ministers, the ones who like robes, throw things at me. Or, more likely, leave strongly-worded comments below….

Don’t forget — December 10th is A Day Without Gays. The organizers are urging all GLBTQ folk to “call in gay,” and not go to work that day. Links: adaywithoutgays.com — and if you’re in California, check out Courage Campaign, people organizing to fight Prop. 8.

Yesterday, it felt like winter. The temperature was down in the teens, there was a biting wind, snow on the ground, early sunset.

Today, it no longer feels like winter. The temperature got up over fifty, fitful breezes barely ruffled the water of the harbor, the snow disappeared. The only thing to keep me from thinking that it was springtime was the early sunset.

This appears to be the new pattern for winter here — wild variations in weather, springlike days mixed in with bitter winter days. Global climate change is an ongoing process, so we will have to see how this new pattern will evolve and change.

Over the past week, I’ve had more than the usual number of pastoral visits and conversations. I spent half an hour sitting with a dead woman, waiting for her family to arrive. I sat beside the hospital bed of someone who is in the midst of serious health crisis. I talked with someone who is under stress and having problems with his/her spouse. I listened to someone tell me about the illness of a grandchild’s parent. And quite a few more besides.

My older sister is a non-fiction writer, and professor of writing at Indiana University East. Recently she told the students in one of her writing classes that they should always keep a notebook on hand, “a little book you jot things down in when they occur to you… because everything must be turned into writing. Everything.” I used to keep such a notebook, but I don’t any longer. The change came when I started working as a minister. The spoken word demands a different kind of thought process than does the written word — it is less precise, it requires more repetition, it is more formulaic, it is inherently improvisational (even if you speak from a text as I do), and it is rooted in memory not in written notes. Because of this, most preachers are not particularly good writers of prose, although some preachers wind up being pretty good poets.

Oh, and something else happened to me this week. I was driving somewhere with a member of our church, and a small silver sports car pulled right out in front of me without even looking and I jammed on the brakes hit the horn swerved missed the idiot by about two feet and shouted through the windshield at the other driver (who didn’t even look until the last minute!), What the $%&#, buddy!?! Yep, I dropped a big loud f-bomb right where a church member could hear it (fortunately he’s the son of a preacher and so has no illusions about the ministry). If ever there was an incident worth recording in the notebook I do not carry, that was it.

Tucked in a large zippered portfolio that was given to me by a pretty and wealthy girl when I was in college — but that’s a different memory, let’s not get diverted by other memories quite yet….

In that large zippered portfolio, I have a poster that a friend gave me in high school. “BANANA MAN” says the poster in large, cheerful letters. Above that is a cartoon portrait of a caped superhero, arms crossed, big goofy grin over his big goofy chin, a bulbous nose, stern eyes gazing out from behind a bright yellow mask loosely tied behind his head, all under a mop of unruly black hair. The poster is a lithograph drawn and printed by the guy who gave it to me, and there’s his signature in the bottom right corner: Karl E. Friberg.

Karl was a year ahead of me in high school, about the only student from art class I hung out with outside of class. Karl was always drawing Banana Man cartoons, some of which ran in the high school newspaper, and I admired and copied his drawing style to the best of my ability. We had a free period together at some point, and I remember watching him bring out the “Banana Box,” a slim box filled with an unruly collection of drawing implements: pencils, pens, erasers, a ruler, felt-tip markers. As soon as I saw it I started assembling my own portable box of drawing implements.

“I’m going to make a lithograph of Banana Man,” Karl announced one day. He was taking an industrial arts class in printing. “I’m making Banana Man T-shirts.” Wow! What could be better than a Banana Man T-shirt! A few days later, Karl appeared with an armful of T-shirts, shouted, “Laundry!” and tossed me a Banana Man T-shirt. God knows what happened to that T-shirt, but he also gave me the Banana Man poster which is still in my portfolio….

Karl graduated from high school a few months later, and I completely lost touch with him. Did he go on to a career in commercial art as he dreamed of doing? Does he still draw Banana Man? After he graduated, I inherited his place as the cartoonist in the high school newspaper, and I drew a humorous melodrama called “Rabbit Man,” the main character of which was a shorter, dumpier, stupider version of Banana Man. I never was as good a cartoonist as Karl had been.

It’s worth mentioning that Karl Friberg’s Banana Man predates the British cartoon character Bananaman by four or five years.

Low gray clouds come and
go. The wind shifts from east to
southwest then to west.

The turn of seasons
seems to be stalled. It’s fall, then
it’s winter, then fall.

Midafternoon, just
before sunset, the clouds broke,
and turned orange pink,

a solstice sunset
in shirtsleeve weather with a
winter’s cold west wind.

Blogger Tallturtle was living in the Haight-Ashbury section of San Francisco when Harvey Milk was assassinated thirty years ago, and he’s written a short memoir of his impressions of the incident, from his perspective as an ordinary San Franciscan of that day.

Tallturtle has a couple of observations that I hadn’t heard before:– First, that Dan White, the guy who murdered Milk and George Moscone, was fairly clueless when it came to politics, and possibly even too honest in a peculiar sense of the word:

This next part is merely my speculation. White was a political amateur. He didn’t understand how politics was played in San Francisco. He didn’t realize that as a conservative Supervisor, he was valuable to the commercial and financial elites of the city. He didn’t know there were many perfectly legal ways that rich people could reward their friends. Heck, he may not have known that these people considered him his friend….

And second, that San Franscisco of that day was not a coherent city, but rather a collection of many smaller communities that didn’t really communicate with one another. This last point leads to the moral of the story for Tallturtle — but rather than spoil the moral for you here, you should just go and read the post yourself.

This took place back somewhere around 1984, when I was working as a yardman in a lumber yard.

One of the truck drivers — we’ll call him Skipper — was a young guy, maybe twenty or twenty-two, with sandy hair down to his shoulders and a friendly open face. Like all of us, he always wore a baseball cap, and like most of us younger guys he always wore shorts and a T-shirt in the summer; like me, he wore wire-rimmed aviator glasses of the type that were popular back then.

But he was a little louder and more cheerful than the rest of us, and he had a wicked west-of-Boston accent, and above all he partied much harder than anyone else who worked there. He was late for work more than once because he was hung over, or he slept through the alarm clock, or (so it was said) he was still drunk or stoned when he got up in the morning and couldn’t get it together enough even to drive to work.

Skipper managed to make it work for a couple of years; he wasn’t the best driver we had, but he was good enough. Then he started getting worse. One morning, Bob, the senior driver, came back from a delivery just before lunch. “Where’s Skipper?” he said. “I don’t see his truck.”

One of the other drivers said that Skipper wasn’t back yet.

Bob, a master at sounding disgusted, said, “Jesus, he just had to go up to Carlisle, and he left before I did.”

Pretty soon everyone, even the kid who came in to work after school, was aware that Skipper was screwing up. The other drivers were resentful because Skipper wasn’t pulling his weight. Georgia, the yard foreman, would make a point of checking his watch when he saw Skipper driving into the yard. It became obvious that the shipper and the vice-president were also keeping an eye on him. Skipper didn’t seem to care; he was the same happy-go-lucky, half-stoned, cheerful guy as usual. This went on for a few weeks: tension building around Skipper, while he seemed utterly unaware of it.

One day, late in the afternoon, several of us were standing around in the coffee shack, pretending to wait for customers but really waiting for five o’clock to come around. One of the drivers came out of the shipper’s office. “They caught Skipper.” “What? Whaddya mean, they caught him?” He told us what he had heard, a bare-bones account of what had happened: Skipper was driving one of the box trucks; the vice-president shadowed Skipper in a car, followed him to a jobsite, a place where there was no delivery scheduled; Skipper was selling drugs off the back of his truck.

That’s all we ever heard about it. Nobody had to say that they fired Skipper, we all knew that. But was he just selling marijuana, or was it something more serious? Were the cops called? Was he arrested? I never found out, and no one ever talked about it. Skipper never came back, and I never saw him again.

At 19:16 GMT (i.e., 2:16 p.m. EST, less than 3 hours ago), the BBC Web site reported that an Iraqi threw shoes at George W. Bush. Shoes? Yes, shoes….

An Iraqi journalist was wrestled to the floor by security guards after he called Mr Bush “a dog” and threw his footwear, just missing the president.

The soles of shoes are considered the ultimate insult in Arab culture….

In the middle of the news conference with Mr Maliki, a reporter stood up and shouted “this is a goodbye kiss from the Iraqi people, dog,” before hurtling his shoes at Mr Bush, narrowly missing him….

Correspondents called it a symbolic incident. Iraqis threw shoes and used them to beat Saddam Hussein’s statue in Baghdad after his overthrow….

Link to story and video.

What a wildly improbable story, and what an interesting example of political theatre. I guess peace rallies on the Mall in Washington are just too Old School, so nowadays the really cool protesters throw shoes.

I shouldn’t be so flippant. That journalist is dead meat, and is probably having the crap beaten out of him even as I write this. Watch the video — security is going easy on him because there are cameras watching, but they are not being nice to him — wait until there aren’t any cameras trained on them.

…to evangelical churches, that is. Mainline Protestants and Catholics don’t see as many newcomers when the economy gets bad — this according to the New York Slime, which not a trustworthy source when it comes to American religion.

Update on yesterday’s post:

Today the BBC reports: “An Iraqi official was quoted by the Associated Press as saying that the journalist was being interrogated to determine whether anybody paid him to throw his shoes at President Bush.” Given the stated policies of the current U.S. administration, the word “interrogated” could mean what the rest of the world would call torture.

The BBC also reports that the man’s name is Muntadar al-Zaidi, and they give an English translation of what he shouted at Bush: “This is a farewell kiss, you dog… This is from the widows, the orphans, and those who were killed in Iraq.”

Special take-home quiz: Who is on the moral high ground here, George Bush or Muntadar al-Zaidi, and why? Ten bonus points for citing verses from both the Koran and the New Testament.

Update: Leona’s selling T-shirts (see comments).

One of the high schools in this area requires all seniors to complete a senior project on a topic of their choice. The project includes a written research paper, an oral presentation, and 15 hours of work with a mentor. This year, one senior asked me to be his mentor for his senior project on world religions.

This particular high school senior is fun to work with — he has a flexible and curious intellect, is willing to push himself, and is open to new ideas. Tonight we determined that he takes an essentialist approach to religion while I take a functionalist approach, and then we talked about the phenomenological approach to studying religion. In the course of all this we started on some basic scholarly skills like learning how to underline in books, how to ask critical questions while reading, how to hold a different opinion than the author or one’s mentor, and how to look for the internal structure and unspoken assumptions of a piece of writing.

I realized that what I was really doing was introducing him to the intellectual tradition in which I was originally trained, an Americanized version of critical theory. I also realized that I’m taking on the role of one of my primary intellectual mentors, Lou Outlaw — even down to not worrying about whether the student agrees with me, and instead worrying that they understand and find a new perspective on the world.

All of which got me remembering my own mentor, and reflecting on how I’m passing on this tradition to another generation, in my own way. One result of this reflection was a quick Web search, which led me to this thoughtful video interview with Lou Outlaw. My favorite bit in the video [at about 11:30] is when Lou says: “This is ludicrous. What do you mean you don’t criticize socialism? Criticism is central to the management of social, political, democratic life. You gotta have criticism.”

Which pretty much sums up the intellectual tradition that I’m now trying to pass on to the next generation, even though I’m now doing theology instead of political philosophy.

Carol and I were driving along Route 6 back from the supermarket in Fairhaven. The swing bridge was closing to traffic just as we got to the Dunkin Donuts on Pope’s Island, so we stopped and sipped some decaf until the traffic started moving again.

Carol backed her car out of the parking place, and was just about to put it in gear when we heard a faint voice: “Wait! Wait!” A young woman was running towards us from a green pickup truck parked in front of Dunkin’s — I say she was running, but it looked like she had on high heels under her jeans, so she didn’t move very fast. Carol rolled down the driver’s side window.

“Hi, we were in Dunkin’s and they declined my credit card when we tried to buy coffee,” said the girl breathlessly. She had a low throaty voice, as if she smoked a lot. “And we’re out of gas, and…”

Carol stopped her, speaking in a matter-of-fact tone: “You don’t understand. We live in New Bedford and we get scammed all the time for money.”

“Oh, but I live in Fairhaven,” the girl said.

“Yeah, but that’s not the point,” said Carol. “We hear this kind of thing all the time here.”

“Oh,” said the girl. “I’m new to Fairhaven. I just moved in with my boyfriend,” she went on, “it’s my dad’s business credit card, and I don’t know why it got declined. We’re puttering along on fumes, and we have to get back to Fairhaven.”

“You’re not going to be able to buy gas here anyway,” Carol pointed out. “All the gas stations near here are closed now. The nearest gas stations are going to be back in Fairhaven.”

That stopped the girl for a moment. I bent down so I could see her face and said, “Do you have a Triple-A card? because they’ll come out with a gallon of gas for you.”

She looked at me and smiled crookedly. “No, I wanted to get one, but my boyfriend didn’t want one.”

“You’re not going to be able to buy gas here anyway,” Carol said again.

“I guess we could call my boyfriend’s mother,” the girl said.

“Good luck,” said Carol, rolling up her window.

We drove away. “It sounded like a scam, but I wonder,” she said.

We passed Fish Island Gas Station, which was closed and dark. “It sounded like a scam to me,” I said. “I’ll bet she saw us walking to the car, assumed I was driving, and thought she’d show a little cleavage and convince me to give her some money.” Which was a pretty cynical thing to say.

“She had on a lot of make-up,” said Carol, thinking out loud. “but her hair was a little stringy as if she hadn’t washed it today. Her looks were good enough that she didn’t need all the make-up.” We passed the exit to Route 18, and went up the S-curve into downtown New Bedford. “All the details she gave us made me think maybe it wasn’t a scam.”

“Maybe, but the con artists who come to the church always give lots of details,” I said. “Besides, even if she wasn’t trying to scam us, that’s not something serious enough to ask for money from strangers. They can call someone they know. They have to take some responsibility for their life.”

“But someday something could happen that’s serious enough that you do need to ask for help,” Carol said.

“That’s true,” I said. “Anyway, we treated her with respect.” There’s a good chance the girl was honest, but it sounded too much like the scams we hear day after day — Could you give me ten dollars for a bus ticket to Boston? We’re driving to ——— and ran out of gas, could you give us twenty dollars to buy gas to get out of New Bedford? — and then the same exact people come back a month later with the same exact story all over again.

The traffic light at the intersection of Route 6 and Pleasant Street was green for once, and we sailed through it and turned onto North Sixth, then left on William Street. By the time we passed City Hall, we were talking about something else.

The new Muppets Christmas special is up on Hulu.com. While it’s not one of the best features the Muppets have done, the scene at airport security ranks up with some of their best sketches:– Fozzy Bear tells a stupid joke (“What brings toys to baby sharks?”), but it is against Federal law to tell bad jokes in airport security, so Fozzy gets jumped by half a dozen security guards. Meanwhile, Gonzo — ah, why spoil it for you, go watch it yourself.

Here’s a photo taken from one of the windows of our apartment about five minutes ago. You’re looking at the lights on the trees outside the Whaling Museum. (You can also just make out the figure of Carol walking down William Street.) We have about six inches of snow so far — but now the snow seems to be tapering off, and mist and fog are mixed in with the snow.

I officiated at a wedding this afternoon, and during the service one of the wedding party fell over in a dead faint. Yes, it was just a faint — the groom’s father had had EMT training, and checked to be sure — and yes, a visit to a medical professional has been promised. I have to say that it was a very well-done faint — it happened just before the vows so it was at a convenient break in the service; and far more importantly, no permanent damage resulted.

Now that I think about it, a wedding has all the ingredients for fainting — uncomfortable, restrictive clothing that keeps you from breathing properly; not getting enough sleep the night before; forgetting to eat before the service; standing for long periods of time; and plenty of emotional tension — so it seems to me that people should faint at weddings, and on a fairly regular basis. Yet somehow this is the first time I happen to have seen someone faint at a wedding.

Later note: Still don’t really know what happened, but I’ll bet this faint was actually the first signs of the stomach bug that’s been going around….

This morning at about 1:00 a.m. EST, one of the plug-ins I use on this blog created about 50 iterations of the same post. Problem has been solved: I have deactivated this plug-in, and deleted the extraneous posts. If you use RSS to subscribe to this blog, I apologize for clogging up your RSS reader.

All of a sudden, it’s snowing heavily, and blowing like sixty. 11:21 a.m.

On State Pier, heavy snow. 1:05 p.m.

Snowing heavily. 4-6 inches already. It looks very Christmas-y. 4:15 p.m.

It stopped snowing half an hour ago. Carol went skiing on the city sidewalks. I put a carrot nose on someone else’s snowman. 8:30 p.m.

Now we’re getting ocean-effect snow: big, fat, fluffy flakes lazily falling, covering the sidewalks with crystalline white. 6:35 p.m.

Snow mixed with sleet, making ankle-deep slush on the sidewalks and streets. 1:36 p.m.

The snow has turned to rain. Yuck. What a mess. 1:44 p.m.

Out for a walk. Slop, slush, half-frozen puddles, cars splashing us. It’s good to be outdoors. 4:12 p.m.

The rain stopped, cold wind
blew in; now wet snow and slush
get frozen solid.
11:16 p.m. Dec. 21st

“This is unbelievable,” said the woman coming down the hill.

I was headed up the hill. Whoever owns the property on the southwest corner of William Street and Acushnet Avenue never bothers to shovel the sidewalks. This weekend’s storm left those sidewalks covered in about an inch and a half of solid slippery ice. The woman and I were both walking very carefully; the footing was bad that I did not look up at her when she spoke; but then she wasn’t talking to me, she was complaining to the absentee landlord.

“Look at this shit,” she muttered. “This is unbelievable.”

Down the street, I could hear the whir of automobile tires spinning on ice, as a driver tried to get traction pulling out of a parking space. A man came walking down the middle of the road, because at least there was sand and salt on the road. Winter is here, with a vengeance.

I’ve been using the “Bible Study Cheat Sheet” below in my Unitarian Universalist Bible study groups. I’m about to put it through another revision, and thought I’d post it here and see what kind of reaction it gets from you, dear readers….

Ask: Where are the women? Often, those who wrote the Bible tend to diminish the role of women. Yet often the women are there, if you just look for them. (And sometimes the Bible gives us the actual words women wrote or spoke or sang.) Our assumption: the Bible was not originally intended to keep women down, but later editors and commentators and churchmen have interpreted it that way.

Ask: Where are the poor and the dispossessed? Some of the stories in the bible are about kings, and queens, and rich and powerful people. But frequently Bible stories tell about ordinary people like shepherds, carpenters, and laborers. Our assumption: originally the Bible was written to be meaningful to all people, no matter what their socio-economic status, but later editors and commentators and churchmen have interpreted it differently.

Ask: How are the experts biassed? Various self-proclaimed experts have interpreted the Bible as supporting slavery in the United States, subjugation of women, ongoing racism, homophobia, etc. Such experts include: scholars who translate the Bible out of the original languages; preachers; pundits. Our assumption: any time you come across a person who claims to know something about the Bible (including Unitarian Universalist ministers; including yourself!), that person is going to have some kind of bias.

Above all, ask: What does this have to do with my life? Lots of people claim they have the exclusive right to interpret the Bible. These people will claim their interpretation is the only correct one and then try to shove it down our throats. But there’s no reason to pay any attention to those people. Great literature like the Bible does not have one simple-minded interpretation, because great literature interacts with the specifics of our individual lives. Our assumption: the Bible, like any great work of literature, is supposed to make our lives better — richer, more humane, more grounded in compassion.

Notes for Bible geeks: The first item is basic feminist theology, making the case for a feminist hermeneutic of suspicion. The second item is basic liberation theology, introducing the hermeneutical privilege of the poor to a First World audience. The third item uses tools from critical theory for a critique of domination and power in Biblical studies. The fourth item is standard Gadamerian philosophical hermeneutics. The whole cheat sheet comes out of a functionalist view of religion, and a critical theory perspective.

I’ve always liked the song “The Mary Ellen Carter” by Stan Rogers, but I didn’t realize until today that Rogers wrote this song as a sort of gospel hymn for atheists. According to a posting by Charlie Baum on the Mudcat folk music Web site, this is why Rogers wrote the song:

I saw Stan Rogers give a concert at the Sounding Board in West Hartford, Connecticut, [writes Baum], and I still remember his introduction to “Mary Ellen Carter.” When he was young, he saw the Grand Ole Opry (or some such show) and remembers at the end of the show, Tennessee Ernie Ford looking up and staring into the blinding spotlights and singing with earnestness and large voice, a gospel hymn of great inspiration, of triumphing over all odds with the help of the Almighty. He decided then and there that he wanted to write a hymn of great inspiration, except without god in it.

Now I know there are plenty of you out there who still have a traditional God to lean on, but please don’t criticize this song because it doesn’t have God in it. You folks already have lots of good songs, but those of us who don’t lean on your God can have our own good songs. Anyway, you might like this song too, because it’s a song that literally saved someone’s life. When the ship “Marine Electric” went down in the Atlantic on the stormy night of February 13, 1983, her chief mate, Robert Cusick, kept himself alive by singing “The Mary Ellen Carter.” Here’s how he tells the story on a documentary film:

I was on a ship that,– we were carrying coal from Norfolk Virginia to a place near Fall River, Massachusetts [Somerset], and we got caught in a very bad storm. It was an old ship, and we didn’t have very much warning — about two o’clock in the morning we saw the ship was starting to get into trouble and go down by the head. And we called the Coast Guard and they were on their way out as quick as they could. And the ship cracked up and rolled over at four fifteen a.m.

The water was very cold, it was thirty-nine degrees. I had heard enough stories about a vortex and whirlpools sucking people down when a ship sunk, so I started trying to swim away as fast as I could. So it was prob’ly the best part of an hour that I’d been doing this, that I ran across a swamped life boat, and I managed to get into it. As the night wore on, and the seas kept smashing down on top of me, and I fin’lly got the feeling that I just couldn’t make it any more. And I was just about ready to give up, when all of a sudden the words came into my mind, “Rise again, rise again. No matter what you’ve lost, be it a home, a love, a friend, like the Mary Ellen Carter, rise again.”

And I just kept saying that over, and the water cleared away, and I’d shout it out, and sing it out. Then another sea would come down on top of me. And I firmly believe that if it wasn’t for that happening to me, I just was in a position where I couldn’t have come through. And that song made the difference, and me living through that night. There isn’t any question in my mind whatsoever about it.

You can watch Cusick tell the story on YouTube, in his comforting southeastern New England accent. After Cusick tells his story, there’s concert footage of Rogers singing the song.

So what’s the song you’d sing if you were in Cusick’s position? What song would carry you through such adversity?

Hey, it’s Christmas day, and for the last hour you’ve been sitting and watching your cat rip ornaments off your Christmas tree. Suddenly you ask yourself, “But wait, how is it that the German custom of Christmas trees got imported to North America?” Well, different people brought it to different regions, but here in New England it was a Unitarian, Charles Follen (1796-1840), who introduced the huge green cat toy custom of the Christmas tree to us.

Follen was born in Germany, was a professor there for awhile but was too radical for the political authorities. He fled to escape political persecution, and arrived in the United States in 1824. By 1829 he was a professor at Harvard. Harriet Martineau, a prominent British Unitarian, visited him at his house in Cambridge, and she wrote this account of the first Christmas tree in New England (although as you will see, it was really a New-Year’s-Eve tree):

“I was present at the introduction into the new country of the spectacle of the German Christmas-tree. My little friend Charley [Follen], and three companions, had been long preparing for this pretty show. The cook had broken her eggs carefully in the middle for some weeks past, that Charley might have the shells for cups; and these cups were gilt and coloured very prettily. I rather think it was, generally speaking, a secret out of the house; but I knew what to expect. It was a New-Year’s tree, however; for I could not go on Christmas-eve; and it was kindly settled that New-Year’s-eve would do as well.

“We were sent for before dinner; and we took up two round-faced boys by the way. Early as it was, we were all so busy that we could scarcely spare a respectful attention to our plum-pudding. It was desirable that our preparations should be completed before the little folks should begin to arrive; and we were all engaged in sticking on the last of the seven dozen of wax-tapers, and in filling the gilt egg-cups, and gay paper cornucopia; with comfits, lozenges, and barley-sugar. The tree was the top of a young fir, planted in a tub, which was ornamented with moss. Smart dolls, and other whimsies, glittered in the evergreen; and there was not a twig which had not something sparkling upon it. When the sound of wheels was heard, we had just finished; and we shut up the tree by itself in the front drawing-room, while we went into the other, trying to look as if nothing was going to happen. Charley looked a good deal like himself, only now and then twisting himself about in an unaccountable fit of giggling.

“It was a very large party; for besides the tribes of children, there were papas and mamas, uncles, aunts, and elder sisters. When all were come, we shut out the cold: the great fire burned clearly; the tea and coffee were as hot as possible, and the cheeks of the little ones grew rosier, and their eyes brighter every moment. It had been settled that, in order to cover our designs, I was to resume my vocation of teaching Christmas games after tea, while Charley’s mother and her maids went to light up the front room. So all found seats, many of the children on the floor, for ‘Old Coach.’ It was difficult to divide even an American stage-coach into parts enough for every member of such a party to represent one: but we managed it without allowing any of the elderly folks to sit out. The grand fun of all was to make the clergyman [i.e., Charles Follen] and an aunt or two get up and spin round. When they were fairly practised in the game, I turned over my story to a neighbour, and got away to help to light up the tree.

“It really looked beautiful; the room seemed in a blaze; and the ornaments were so well hung on that no accident happened, except that one doll’s petticoat caught fire. There was a sponge tied to the end of a stick to put out any supernumerary blaze; and no harm ensued. I mounted the steps behind the tree to see the effect of opening the doors. It was delightful. The children poured in; but in a moment, every voice was hushed. Their faces were upturned to the blaze, all eyes wide open, all lips parted, all steps arrested. Nobody spoke; only Charley leaped for joy. The first symptom of recovery was the children’s wandering round the tree. At last, a quick pair of eyes discovered that it bore something eatable; and from that moment the babble began again. They were told that they might get what they could without burning themselves; and we tall people kept watch, and helped them with good things from the higher branches.

“When all had had enough, we returned to the larger room, and finished the evening with dancing. By ten o’clock, all were well warmed for the ride home with steaming mulled wine, and the prosperous evening closed with shouts of mirth. By a little after eleven, Charley’s father and mother and I were left by ourselves to sit in the New Year. I have little doubt the Christmas-tree will become one of the most flourishing exotics of New England.”

[Retrospect of Western Travel, Harriet Martineau (London: Saunders and Otley, 1838), volume III, pp. 182-184. I added several paragraph breaks for onscreen readability.]

And that is how the Christmas-tree (which was actually a New-Year’s-tree), was introduced to New England.

Not long after that, Charles Follen lost his professorship at Harvard because of his radical abolitionist views. Influenced by William Ellery Channing, Follen then became a Unitarian minister. He served for many years in East Lexington, Massachusetts, at what is now known as the Follen Community Church — it’s still a Unitarian congregation, they still meet in the octagonal meetinghouse that Follen designed for them, and every year they sell Christmas trees out in front of the church.

OK, now you can go back to watching your cat rip the ornaments off your Christmas tree.

Jerry Stone, adjunct faculty at Meadville Lombard Theological School, and retired professor of philosophy at William Rainey Harper College in Chicago, sent this email message today:

“Friends — I have just found out that my new book, Religious Naturalism Today: The Rebirth of a Forgotten Alternative is now available from SUNY Press for orders placed in December for a 20% discount plus free shipping (WOW!). I apologize for the late notice. Orders can be placed at sunypress.edu.”

“Discounted price” means it’s US$60 instead of US$75. Big bucks for a book, but those who are interested in process theology (Bernard Loomer apparently looms large in this book), or contemporary humanism, or connections between religion and environmentalism, might want this book. I know my local library isn’t going to get it, so I just ordered my copy. (It’s also available in a downloadable version for US$20.)

If you want to know more about Jerry’s work in this area, try this article from Process Studies, or this article on the Meadville Lombard Web site, or my report on a 2006 lecture by Jerry. For those who might be interested, I’m placing Jerry’s abstract of the book below.

Abstract supplied by Jerry Stone

Religious naturalism, a once-forgotten option in religious thinking, is making a revival. It seeks to explore and encourage religious ways of responding to the world on a completely naturalistic basis without a supreme being or ground of being. This book traces this story and analyzes some of the issues dividing religious naturalists.

Part One covers the birth of religious naturalism, from Santayana to Wieman. Chapter One deals with philosophers, Chapter Two with theologians. Chapter Three analyzes some of the issues debated between these early naturalists and presents a variety of attempts to develop a naturalist view of the mind. The Interlude between the first and second parts briefly explores religious naturalism in literature and art.

Part Two depicts the rebirth of religious naturalism following the publication of Bernard Loomer’s The Size of God in 1987. Over twenty current writers are presented. Chapter Four analyzes three different sources of religious insight among contemporary religious naturalists, including experiences of grace and obligation, nature both as appreciated and as the object of scientific study, and the hermeneutics of religious and literary traditions. Contested issues are discussed in Chapter Five, including whether nature’s power or goodness is the focus of attention and also on the appropriateness of using the term “God.” Chapter Six sketches the contributions of other recent religious naturalists. Chapter Seven ends the study by exploring what it is like on the inside to live as a religious naturalist.

A couple of days ago, Carol and I were walking down along the waterfront. Carol headed off towards the south side of State Pier. “Let’s go up here,” I said pointing to the north side of the pier, where the Martha’s Vineyard ferry docks. “I haven’t seen any seals yet this winter. Maybe we can see seals from up there.”

Carol turned, and started walking in that direction. She has already seen seals several times this winter.

It sounded questionable even as I said it. “Or we don’t have to go up there. I mean, we almost never see any seals up there.”

But Carol, being a good sport, was already heading up to where the ferry was docked. We got to the end of the pier, and looked out towards Fairhaven between the ferry on one side and the fishing boats on the other side. “Look,” I said, “It’s a seal!”

“Where?” said Carol. “Oh, I see it!”

The seal played on the surface of the water for a minute or so, and then slipped under the water and disappeared. We kept walking. It was a gray, raw, gloomy day. Inside, I was happily repeating to myself: I saw a seal! I saw a seal!

A few year-end observations about this blog:

Readership continued to slowly increase this year. Late last spring I noticed that I had over 5,000 unique visitors to my Web site in one month, and probably four fifths of them visited this blog. I am mildly shocked that so many people visited this blog — that’s far beyond my most optimistic goals for this site. Oddly, I find I have stopped paying attention to readership statistics.

More numbers: The 1,500th post went up sometime in December. Even as my readership goes up, my Technorati ranking drops — it’s now at 23, half what it was when I started out — go figure. The index to this blog now contains more than 225 entries.

Historical factoid: This blog began its life as an AOL blog. For a long time after I transferred all the posts to this site, I maintained the original blog as hosted by AOL. But this fall, AOL finally did away with its blog hosting service, and the original blog is now finally gone.

Sturgeon’s Law predicts that 90% of anything is crap, which would imply that there were some 36 good posts on this blog this year. Some of the best posts were based on material sent in by blog readers, like this parody of “Spirit of Life”. I think one of my best posts was a video attack ad. One of my favorite posts documented local religious history. Another of my favorite posts simply documented ordinary life.

The absolute best part about writing this blog has been hearing from you, the readers. Some of your comments here on the blog have been extraordinarily insightful. Your email messages to me have ranged from intellectually stimulating to poignant to hilarious. And every once in a while, I get to talk to a reader face-to-face, which is most fun of all. I love hearing from you — that’s what really makes this whole endeavor worth my while.

They say it’s a Web site for runners, but really it’s a Web site for us walkers. Gmaps Pedometer let’s you calculate your fave walking routes using Google Maps. I used the hybrid satellite/map view at high magnification so I could map out all the little off-street detours I take. (Now I know that our regular walk to Slocum Park in Fairhaven is about 3.2 miles round trip, and our regular walk to the Fairhaven boat ramp is also about 3.2 miles.)

You can now watch Dr. Horrible’s Sing-along Blog free online. Created for the Web. Very cool half-feature-length production. Great to watch when it’s snowing outside and you can’t go anywhere, like me right now. Thanks for the link, Leona.

There was good news and bad news in 2008.

First, lots of bad news:

The economy: From my perspective, it was already going downhill last January. I knew something was up when the minister’s discretionary fund at church was out of money, more people were asking me for money, and no one could afford to donate any more money. In September, Wall Street and the media finally woke up to the fact that our economy has been driven by predatory lending and Ponzi schemes for the past decade, and suddenly we were in a “global financial crisis.” The Dow Jones industrial average fell 34% in 2008, the biggest one-year drop since 1931.

War: The war in Iraq went nowhere. The much-vaunted surge didn’t seem to change anything except that the federal government was spending even more money over there, and the few people who were willing to be soldiers were going over for their fourth or fifth deployment. No improvement, just a slow ongoing decline. Blessed would the peacemakers be, if we had any peacemakers.

Climate: Summer was hot, hotter than ever. Yeah, I know that global warming is “just a theory” and “not really based on facts.” Even if it is true (and it is indeed a well-proven theory), we’re supposed to be calling it global climate change. Well, the result of global climate change here in New England is that it was hot last summer, and it is freakishly warm this winter.

But also quite a bit of good news:

Green technology: “On October 3, President Bush signed into law the Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 that included the hoped-for 8-year extention of the solar investment tax credit. The act also lifted the $2,000 cap on the tax credit for residential systems, granting both commercial and residential systems eligibility for a 30% tax credit…. The law will encourage rapid growth for the solar industry….” (Distributed Energy: The Journal of Energy Efficiency and Reliability, November/December, 2008, p. 50.) The lousy economy is driving us to become more energy-efficient, and to develop renewable energy sources.

Green religion: One of the more interesting things to come out of the presidential campaign was that about half the Christian evangelicals are now promoting what they call “Creation care.” It’s a little weird that they can’t bring themselves to say “ecotheology” or “environmentalism,” but at least they’re headed in the right direction, and are starting to catch up with liberal and moderate religious groups.

Personal: This marked year 19 with Carol, which is better than I can express. I have wonderful extended family, great friends, and a job that I love. I know 2008 was a tough year for many people, but from my selfish point of view it was a great year.

The president: Obama is no saint, by world standards he is pretty conservative, he has far too many ties to the corporate puppet-masters, but — he is Not-George-Bush. And as for George Bush, the shoe incident sums it up for me:

Yup. At great personal cost, Muntadar al-Zaidi became an instant folk-hero by summing up what many people around the world think about George Bush. (Image courtesy Dependable Renegade.)

raw wind, stinging snow,
the old year leaves as it came:
nasty, brutish, cold

Back when I was an art student, I spent a year when all I did was shoot Polaroid 600 film. I loved (and still love) the color and the depth of the film. But Polaroid film will soon be extinct. First, Polaroid went into Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on Dec. 18, and then this is the last month they’ll make instant film. Of course B&H Photo is still selling some Polaroid film, for now. What to do? You can join Save Polaroid , or Facebook’s save-Polaroid group, or give up and buy a Fuji Instax instant film camera (the film is lots cheaper).

Today I was reading one of those horrible year-end reviews articles in the Boston Globe, and in the long list of people who died in 2008, I saw the name of Alain Robbe-Grillet, the French novelist.

Somehow back in 1989, I no longer remember how or why, I read Robbe-Grillet’s novel Jalousie. The novel mostly consists of very precisely-described scenes, often things half-seen through the wooden slats of the jalousie windows of a banana plantation in a French colony somewhere in the tropics; and through these descriptions, written landscapes and still-lives as it were, Robbe-Grillet revealed one man’s intense jealousy towards his wife’s friendship with another man.

It was the right book at the right time for me. I saw that you could write precisely and carefully about one thing, while you were really telling your reader something else altogether. I learned that some things can only be precisely described in this oblique manner.

Later, I tried to read some of Robbe-Grillet’s other books. They were dry and pointless, sometimes to the point of being silly. I have never tried to go back and re-read Jalousie, for fear that I would find that it, too, is a dry, pointless, and silly book — I would rather remember it as the right book at the right time, that taught me exactly what I then needed to learn about writing. So even though I will never read his novels again, here’s a new year’s toast to Alain Robbe-Grillet (b. August 18, 1922, d. February 18, 2008).

It’s time for the annual Moby-Dick Marathon. The marathon takes place each year on the anniversary of the date that Herman Melville shipped out of New Bedford harbor on board the whaleship Achushnet. Over some twenty-five hours, volunteers read Moby-Dick aloud in its entirety. We live right across the street from where the Marathon takes place, and Carol has spent quite a bit of time at the Marathon already, but the way my schedule worked out I had to write my sermon today. I finally went over at about ten o’clock.

It was the usual late-night Moby-Dick Marathon scene: everyone there was quiet, maybe half the people were following along in their own copy of the book, and a few people were dozing. Not exactly a hopping Saturday night scene, but exactly the kind of scene many of us book sluts wouldn’t mind seeing every Saturday night. Unfortunately, I have to get up early tomorrow morning to go to work, so I left after about half an hour.

Tonight, I was talking with my dad, and he mentioned that he was going to take his Christmas tree down on Twelfth Night (January 6), figuring that was the traditional ending of Christmas.

“Well, actually there’s another tradition that says you take down your Christmas greens on Candlemas Eve,” I said, “which is February 1. There’s a poem by Robert Herrick about it.”

“Well, your mother always said that Christmas decorations should stay up until February,” dad said.

“That’s right,” I said, “and all these years I’ve uncharitably thought it was just because she was procrastinating, but maybe she was just living out some old Christmas custom.” Mom was full of old New England customs, so full that I think there were times she didn’t realize that she was following some old, time-hallowed custom. Mom was also very fond of Robert Herrick, so perhaps she had read his poem on the subject:

Ceremonies for Candlemasse Eve

Down with the Rosemary and Bayes,
   Down with the Mistleto;
Instead of Holly, now up-raise
   The greener Box (for show).

The Holly hitherto did sway,
   Let Box now domineere;
Until the dancing Easter-day,
   Or Easters Eve appeare.

Then youthfull Box which now hath grace,
   Your houses to renew;
Grown old, surrender must his place,
   Unto the crisped Yew.

When Yew is out, then Birch comes in,
   And many Flowers beside,
Both of a fresh and fragrant kinne,
   To honour Whitsontide.

Green Rushes then, and sweetest Bents,
   With cooler Oken boughs,
Come in for comely ornaments,
   To re-adorn the house.

Thus times do shift; each thing his turne do’s hold;
New things succeed, as former things grow old.

(This version of the poem from The Poems of Robert Herrick, Oxford University Press (1902/1920), p. 267.)

In short, if you choose to leave your Christmas greenery up for another month, you can cite Robert Herrick as your authority for doing so. And is you want to sing while you’re taking down your Christmas greenery, it turns out that there is a Candlemas carol that sets Herrick’s poem to an old West Gallery folk tune. Here’s my adaptation of this carol, or you can find versions online in a higher key, and in four-part harmony.

This Saturday, January 10, I’ll be headed up to Boston to attend a demonstration against the federal “Defense of Marriage Act” (DOMA). It’s one of dozens of demonstrations that will take place across the country, to tell president-elect Barack Obama that he must keep his campaign promises on LGBTQ rights.

“Join the Impact,” the organizers of the demonstration this Saturday, organized a similar protest on November 15, part of a nation-wide series of protests against the passage of Proposition 8 in California. Half a dozen members of Massachusetts’ Congressional delegation attended the November 15 demonstration in Boston, which tells me that they are paying attention to how much public support there is for same-sex marriage rights.

Speaking of the demonstration this Saturday, the organizers write: “This demonstration will ONLY be successful if it rivals the scope and scale of the one in November. We must show lawmakers that November 15th was not a one-time-only event.”

I think that statement is correct. I don’t know what’s going on in your state, but the Massachusetts Congressional delegation is clearly paying attention. There were over 5,000 people in Boston’s City Hall plaza on November 15 — it would be good if we could double that.

For more information, check the national Join the Impact Web site and click on the link for January 10th DOMA protest to find links to what’s happening in your state on Saturday. If you’re in Massachusetts, go to the Mass. Join the Impact Web site, and click through to their Facebook page for the most up-to-date info.

I’m down with the flu today (it’s been there for a few days, finally caught up with me), and in between naps today I beefed up my Web page of children’s stories for worship services. There are now something like 38 of my own stories-for-all-ages, and direct links to 31 stories on the Church of the Larger Fellowship Web site, including quite a few great stories by Sophia Fahs. This has been one of the most-used pages on my Web site, and I hope this adds to the page’s usefulness.

Still down with the flu. At about three this afternoon, I hauled myself up out of the chair where I’d been dozing, and stumbled down to the kitchen to make some tea. It has been a gray, rainy day, so I turned on the lights in the kitchen.

A memory kicked in: those winter afternoons back when I was in elementary school, my older sister and I would arrive home on a gray day at about three in the afternoon, and walk into the kitchen where mom would have the lights turned on. I’d have an apple for a snack, I don’t remember what my sister would eat. Then I remember watching public television while it got dark outside, kid’s programs like Zoom, and then there was a time when we watched an exercise program called The Beautiful Machine, and then when my younger sister got a little older we’d watch Sesame Street and Electric Company. Then it would be dark.

The memory lasted for just an instant. For a moment I craved an apple, and started walking towards the refrigerator to get one, but my stomach rebelled. Then the memory was gone. I made a pot of tea, drank it, tried to read the newspaper but couldn’t concentrate, ignored the headache, dozed again.

The Wall Street Journal reports on the best and worst jobs. The top three jobs are math-related: Mathematician, Actuary, and Statistician. The bottom three are Lumberjack, Dairy Farmer, and Taxi Driver (hi, Craig!). Best jobs are rated according to work environment, income, employment outlook, physical demands, and stress.

I got curious about my own line of work. Somewhere around 1994, I decided to get out of carpentry, and move into church work; now it looks like that was a good choice. Carpenter is rated at #176 (out of 200 jobs rated); whereas Clergy is rated at #70. Better yet, Clergy is rated as the #1 most satisfying job — so while we clergy will never make as much money as the people with math degrees, on average we’ll be happier.

Executive summary: We’re seeing the biggest birth rate since the Baby Boom. Liberal churches need to pay attention to this demographic trend, by welcoming multiethnic families with young children.

So what’s the biggest news for liberal religion in the U.S.? No, it’s not the lousy economy that’s tempting churches into cutting hours for religious educators and other staff members. No, it’s not the election of Barack Obama as U.S. president, which is already changing people’s perceptions of race and racial boundaries.

The biggest news for liberal religion in the U.S. is contained in a report released this month by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Here’s the relevant quotation from the report’s abstract:

“In 2006, births and fertility rates increased for most states, age groups, and race and Hispanic origin groups. A total of 4,265,555 births were registered in the United States in 2006, 3 percent more than in 2005, and the largest number of births in more than four decades.” [emphasis mine] Link to full report.

In short, 2006 saw the largest number of babies being born since 1961 — the largest number of babies being born since the Baby Boom. Some of the implications for liberal churches are obvious:

(1) Good child care: We had better have good child care in place on Sunday mornings, so that when all those toddlers born in 2006 show up, their parents see clean, safe, pleasant play areas staffed by professional, friendly child care providers.

(2) Increase DRE hours: Many liberal churches are facing budget shortfalls, and have to cut staff salaries in order to balance the budget. The obvious course of action is to cut the minister’s hours or salary, while increasing the line item for the Director of Religious Education. (I say this as a minister in a cash-strapped church, because I know the long-term solution to our immediate revenue problems involves attracting families with young children — if I want to have a job at all, I had better make sure there are lots of kids in my church.)

(3) Become a multiethnic church: The birth rates of white folks are not rising as fast as some other ethnic groups. To have access to the biggest potential pool of newcomers, liberal churches cannot be limited to being ethnic churches, e.g., it’s not going to be enough to be a white folks’ church any longer. Barack Obama’s election broke the second-to-last big racial barrier, the last one being all-white churches. To survive and thrive, white and other racially limited churches have to break that last racial barrier.

(4) Improve kid’s programming: Liberal churches need compelling religious education programs that make kids want to come to church, that help kids learn more, and (key point) that make parents believe that church is vital for their kids. I think that means going beyond limited models of Sunday school. More of my thoughts on this here, but here’s one key point: “For school-aged children, the mix of programs might include multi-generational activities (common worship experiences, social events, intergenerational choirs) along with mixed-age programs for children (workshop rotation, and special projects such as young people’s choir and plays) in addition to closely graded classes containing only one age group.”

(5) Finally, pay attention to demographics: We all know that there are condo complexes that are limited to “active adults over 55,” and some liberal churches might be able to exploit that same idea to build thriving churches of aging Baby Boomers. But my bet is the most secure demographic niche to target right now is white and non-white families with young children — that’s where the growth is, and that’s where the future of the liberal churches lies.

Mass. Equality Action is sponsoring a party they’re calling Gayla: The Political Party Everyone Can Agree On. Too bad I’m already tied up, this one sounds good.

…LiveJournal with more bells and whistles. I’m not sure all the bells and whistles make it any better, they just make it more.

George Brecht died just over a month ago, on December 5, 2008; I’ve finally gotten around to writing a brief appreciation. A conceptual artist, Brecht created “scores” of events to be performed. I am particularly fond of Brecht because most of his scores are simple enough that you can recreate them yourself; yet they are no less beautiful than the art you see in museums. Like this one:

CHAIR EVENT

  on a white chair

    a grater
    tape measure
    alphabet
    flag

    black
      and spectral colors

Sometimes you don’t have to do anything to perform one of his scores, you just have to pay attention to beauty that’s already there; as with this one:

TWO DURATIONS

  Red
  Green

It’s art for the common folk, because you can afford to have one of Brecht’s works in your house (whereas I doubt you could afford any art done by, say, Hockney). Even though he hadn’t done much work in recent years, his death is a real loss.

One last example: here’s my version of Brecht’s “Exhibit.”

Two of us from First Unitarian in New Bedford drove up to Boston today to attend the demonstration opposing the so-called “Defense of Marriage Act” or DOMA (info about the demonstration here). It was cold — I saw one thermometer over a bank that read sixteen degrees. The cold kept a lot of people away — I would estimate that less than a thousand people showed up for this demonstration.

There may only have been a thousand of us, but we were enthusiastic, not least because you stay wormer when you’re enthusiastic. Just a few politicians braved the cold: Barney Frank, congressman from our district; Tom Menino, mayor of Boston; Denise Simmons, mayor of Cambridge. After Barney Frank spoke, the two of us from New Bedford made sure to say hello to him, and tell him we voted for him. He even posed for a picture:

That’s Jean K. posing with Barney Frank. Frank and several of the other speakers reminded us that now is a good time to start writing to your representatives and senators, telling them that we want DOMA repealed (heck, even the conservative legislator who wrote DOMA now wants it repealed). With a new president and a new congress, we have a much better chance of getting equal marriage rights over the next two years, but they do need to hear from you, their constituents.

Here’s one more photo, showing us walking through downtown Boston past King’s Chapel, one of the Unitarian Universalist churches in Boston:

Finally, I note the following: I didn’t see any other Unitarian Universalist ministers or laypeople at this demonstration, but there was someone from the Boston Metropolitan Community Church handing out refrigerator magnets advertising their church.

Will Shetterly is talking about creating a peace group online. Will just floated this idea today, so it’s still a pretty malleable project. Read his blog post, and if you want you can sign on in comments.

This crazy war in Iraq and Afghanistan has begun to really gnaw at me, and I’ve been trying to figure out how to take action. I’m planning to go down to Washington to participate in the Christian Peace Witness for Iraq’s worship and witness event April 29-30. I’ve been considering heading down to the Olive Branch Interfaith Peace Partnership’s Washington celebration of MLK on January 19 (hey, E, can I stay at your place if I come down?)

But I’m not sure worship and witness is enough. So I told Will I’d help him out with his online peace project.

What about you? What do you think might be an effective way to bring pressure to bear on Washington to end the Iraq/Afghanistan war — and go beyond that to truly promote peace in the world? Street demonstrations seem outdated, but will Web 2.0 movements be enough? What do you think?

Doug Muder, who is a member of the Unitarian Universalist Lay Theological Education Task Force (UULTE) wants to ask you a question about how to spend a big chunk of money. Doug writes:

I’m a member of the Unitarian Universalist Lay Theological Education Task Force (UULTE). We’re supposed to figure out what to do with half the money that was collected for Association Sunday — the half earmarked for “lay theological education.” I’m asking for your blog’s help in starting a discussion about what needs “lay theological education” ought to satisfy. The UULTE task force is soliciting proposals from various organizations, and I’m sure we’ll get plans for a lot of good stuff. (Curricula, new resources, online infrastructure, and so on.) But will we get the stuff that Unitarian Universalists need? If we get it, will we recognize it?

What I’m hoping to see is a lot of testimony by and discussion about individual Unitarian Universalists who find themselves at a plateau. They’re happy with Unitarian Universalism as far as it goes and as far as they understand it, but they feel a call to go deeper and they don’t know how to answer it. Maybe they’ve been trying to answer by doing more: joining committees, starting projects, and so on. But outer work at some point needs to be balanced with some inner work. And how do you do Unitarian Universalist inner work? Or how do you make the leap from being a Unitarian Universalist fellow traveler to feeling like you are really part of the UU tradition?

There are bunch of ideas to disentangle here. Some people talk about “education.” Some talk about “faith development” or “spiritual maturity” or “finding a Unitarian Universalist identity.” I encourage you not to get hung up on words and labels. Think about that person at a plateau: What does s/he need that the community could offer?

In the discussions the task force has had among ourselves, we talk a lot about the gap between the kinds of adult education you’d find at a typical Unitarian Universalist church, and the far more arduous program of a divinity school. What could we offer the person who wants to go deeper, but can’t take years out of his/her life and spend tens of thousands of dollars? That’s the “lay” part of “lay theological education.” You shouldn’t have to become a minister to find yourself as a Unitarian Universalist.

Anyway, you’d be doing me a favor — and helping the Unitarian Universalist Association get insight — if you’d raise these issues on your blog.

Thank you, Doug, for raising these issues, and asking for our responses. A fair number of my readers are not Unitarian Universalists, but I think they should feel free to comment, too.

I finally put my UU handfasting ceremony up on my Web site. I put it together some years ago for a couple who then chickened out and went with a traditional marriage. Then I forgot about it. So here it is now, a handfasting with a distinct Transcendentalist flavor.

I’ll be headed off to Arisia in Cambridge this weekend (Fri-Sat, maybe Mon). I don’t know how many readers of this blog know what Arisia is, but if you’re going to be there, look for me.

Martin Luther King would have been 80 today. On February 25, 1967, not long before he was killed, he spoke about the Vietnam War and its effects on our country. The following excerpt from that speech could easily be delivered today, with just a few minor changes:

“This confused war has played havoc with our domestic destinies.

“Despite feeble protestations to the contrary, the promises of the Great Society [anti-poverty program] have been shot down on the battlefield of Viet Nam. The pursuit of this widened war has narrowed domestic welfare programs, making the poor, white and Negro, bear the heaviest burdens both at the front and at home.

“While the anti-poverty program is cautiously initiated, zealously supervised and evaluated for immediate results, billions are liberally expended for this ill-considered war. The recently revealed mis-estimate of the war budget amounts to ten billions of dollars for a single year. This error alone is more than five times the amount committed to anti-poverty programs. The security we profess to seek in foreign adventures we will lose in our decaying cities. The bombs in Viet Nam explode at home: they destroy the hopes and possibilities for a decent America.

“If we reversed investments and gave the armed forces the antipoverty budget, the generals could be forgiven if they walked off the battlefield in disgust.

“Poverty, urban problems and social progress generally are ignored when the guns of war become a national obsession. When it is not our security that is at stake, but questionable and vague commitments to reactionary regimes, values disintegrate into foolish and adolescent slogans.”

Full text of the speech on Stanford’s Web site. Crossposted on PaxPac.

Liveblogging from a science fiction convention

Richard Stallman was a member of a panel discussion called “Copyright: Theory and Practice Today and Tomorrow.” I have never seen him in person before. He is extremely articulate and plays with his long hair when he is not speaking. He said: “Never use a product with DRM [Digital Rights Management] unless — you know how to break the DRM.”

At the same panel discussion, a librarian stood up to speak about orphaned works, that is, works which are covered under copyright law but where the copyright owner can no longer be found. “Librarians want to make orphaned works available,” she said. Librarians, she claimed, want to reach as wide an audience as possible, but under current copyright law it is illegal for them to digitize orphaned works; this limits how libraries can make information available to the people they are trying to serve. She wore a costume that you might see in an 18th C. historical re-enactment: white blouse, bodice, full skirt.

This is one of those conventions where people wear costumes. Earlier, I saw a woman wearing leopard-skin-pattern cloth over most of her body, a wide black belt, and an orange cape passing by a man in black leather pants and a black leather coat and a fuzzy red lobster hat. Just now, a woman walked by wearing a very short latex miniskirt. Now a man just walked by wearing a large grey tri-cornered hat, and a colorful quilt as a cape.

The film series here at Arisia has been excellent so far. Highlights this evening: Our Man Flint, a 1966 parody of the old James Bond films, which is subtler and much funnier than the Austin Powers franchise. We saw it in a 35 mm print that was in poor condition; but even in poor condition, I still prefer film to digital video. Also fascinating was a six-minute film in 16 mm called “Heave Away.” It looked like an amateur film, with bizarre footage of the decommissioning of a NASA spacecraft; the soundtrack was a recording of a sea shanty performed by obscure folk singer Helva Peters. This film represents what people did before YouTube videos. And later this evening, they’ll be showing a new print of Metropolis, with live organ music.

Carol just arrived. “This is fantastic,” she said. This means: Boy, there is unbelievably good people-watching here.

I had to leave Arisia around three this afternoon, because tomorrow is a work day. I attended one particularly thought-provoking panel discussion, “the Changing Face of SF/F Magazines,” on the future of future of paper-based magazines. The panelists included two publishers, one of whom publishes online and the other of whom publishes on paper, and two authors. All the panelists agreed that it’s becoming more difficult, financially speaking, to publish a magazine devoted to short fiction — costs of paper, printing, and distribution keep going up. The consensus among the panelists was that eventually we’re going to see paper-based magazines die out in favor of some sort of Internet-based printing and distribution system.

But the panelists reached no consensus as to what is going to replace paper-based magazines. You can find Web-based science fiction magazines, but they typically don’t have enough money to pay authors well (or at all). There are authors, like the writers’ cabal behind Shadow Unit, who self-publish some of their work online and solicit donations. The panelists agreed that authors now have to worry about “branding” themselves; readers don’t just buy a work of fiction, they tend to buy an author’s “brand.” But no one was willing to predict the future of fiction periodicals; and all the panelists agreed that it was going to become harder to earn a living by writing short fiction.

The discussion broadened beyond paper-based magazines, and turned to books:– paper-based books are facing the same economic realities as paper-based magazines. There was more consensus about the direction books are going in:– books are now being published in multiple formats (e-books, other downloadable files, print-on-demand, and traditional books), and that trend will continue. But the situation is still very much in flux, and no one knows quite how it’s going to turn out.

I wonder if the monks who were scribes had these kinds of conversations among themselves when Gutenberg started printing books on his printing press.

I finally got around to reading the July, 2008, issue of the Independent Book Publisher’s Association newsletter (Carol is a member of IBPA), and read about the Espresso Book Machine, which “starts with a PDF and 15 minutes later produces a finished bound book.” You can buy one from On Demand Books to put into your bookstore or print shop — for about $50K, which is so expensive you’re unlikely to see one in your home town next week.

But I’ll bet the price is going to come down quickly, and I’ll bet that there’s going to be an ongoing demand for paper-based books for quite some time. So here are four possible scenarios: (1) Libraries will start installing one of these next to the copy machines, allowing library patrons to produce paper-based copies of books in the public domain. (2) Bookstores will install these, and they’ll get especially heavy use at author signings, so you can get your favorite author to sign his or her out-of-print books. (3) Colleges and universities will install these, allowing their professors to assign out-of-print books to students, and allowing easier publication of dissertations. (4) A few big megachurches will install these machines, allowing them to print out the latest inspirational tome by their senior pastor, as well as the church cookbook.

So — those of you who are writers, readers, librarians, professors, and ministers — do you think there is a bright future for printing on-demand bound books on-site?

In 1964, a BBC interviewer asked Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., if he thought there would be a “Negro president” in forty years. Here’s a partial transcript of King’s reply:

“Well, let me say first, to make it perfectly clear, that there are Negroes who are presently qualified to be president of the United States; and many who are qualified in terms of integrity, in terms of vision, in terms of leadership ability. But we do know there are certain problems and prejudices and mores in our society which would make it difficult now. However, I am very optimistic about the future. Frankly, I have seen certain changes in the United States over the last two years that surprise me…. So on the basis of this, I think we may be able to get a Negro president in less than forty years….”

It took longer than forty years, of course. But King could hardly have foreseen the overwhelming re-segregation of the United States, and the carefully concealed increase in systemic racism, during the Reagan and Bush years. Link to the BBC video clip.

Some trivia for you: As I was reading “The Caucus Blog” report on the Opening Inaugural Celebration at the Lincoln Memorial, I realized that two Unitarian Universalists played a key role. (1) Unitarian Universalist singer-songwriter Pete Seeger sang all of Woody Guthrie’s verses to “This Land Is Your Land.” (2) Unitarian sculptor Daniel Chester French created the huge statue of Abraham Lincoln that kept a watchful eye on the proceedings.

Rick Warren’s prayer at the inauguration wasn’t a prayer, it was PrayerLite (TM). Gag me. To get the stale taste out of your mouth, go read Rt. Rev. Gene Robinson’s Prayer for the President. You’ll be glad you did.

Want to celebrate the end of the Bush era? What better way to celebrate than to listen as Beaker (from the Muppets) sings Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy.” I laughed so hard, I forgot about the 43rd President.

The Eternal Law of Right

It may be asked, Why do so many people still believe in an angry God?

The answer is, that some people believe what they are taught, and neither dare nor care to question its correctness.

Others believe God is literally angry. A criminal, it is said, fancies he hears the footfall of the pursuer in every unexpected sound.

Our feelings are projected upon everything around us. On this principle, to the wicked, God must seem to be angry.

We reject their fear-inspired notions, and are compelled to believe the testimony of the best thinkers and clearest seers.

We should shape our conduct, not to please or displease the immovable Calm, but to conform the eternal law of right; because in keeping this law “there is great reward.”

Adapted from Through the Shadows (Universalist Publishing House, 1885, p. 45) by Rev. Isaac Case Knowlton, minister of First Universalist Church of New Bedford.

Just posted on PaxPac, the peace blog to which I contribute…. Hey, don’t just sit there, go read it.

I got asked to serve as the guest editor for the summer number of uu & me, the four-page insert for children that’s in each issue of UU World, the Unitarian Universalist denominational magazine. I talked the editorial board into devoting this issue to Jesus.

Jesus is a big topic, and we knew we couldn’t cover the topic comprehensively in four kid-friendly pages (and we knew that there will be future numbers of uu & me in which to cover other aspects of Jesus). So we decided to do a general introduction to Jesus, and then focus on the parables. The parables, we felt, are among the core teachings of Jesus on which we Unitarian Universalists tend to place most importance, and the parables present wonderful little moral dilemmas that can get kids thinking about Jesus’s teachings.

Jane Rzepka, the minister of the Church of the Larger Fellowship, is on the editorial board of uu & me. Like me, she was raised as a Unitarian Universalist, and that meant we both learned a lot about Jesus and Socrates in Sunday school. During the course of today’s editorial meetings, we both kept drawing parallels between Jesus and Socrates. For me, the parables of Jesus sound a lot like dialogues of Socrates: they raise more questions than they answer, they are ambiguous, and when you get done reading them you feel as though you’ve learned how to see the world in a new way. Which makes it hard to teach Unitarian Universalist kids about Jesus’s parables: it’s tempting to tell kids what the parables are supposed to mean, but to do so is to bypass the whole purpose of the parables.

Today’s meeting has got me thinking about the parables in a new light. Now I want to go back and re-read them all, and think about how I might present others of Jesus’s parables to school-age children.

What I think I remember is standing in the coffee shack, or maybe next to it, waiting for a customer to come out in the lumber yard waving a yard ticket. Or maybe I was waiting on somebody. Wherever I was standing was someplace out of sight of the bay in the back of the building where the loading dock was for paint and hardware. The paint and hardware was kept on the second floor, so you had to drive the pallets of paint or hardware into the bay, and then raise them up to the second floor loading dock, which could be a little tricky at times.

I definitely remember when Scooter started yelling. Screaming is more like it. Everyone within earshot heard it, and knew instantly that something had gone wrong. I was around the corner fast enough to see Scooter hopping on one foot, while the other foot dangled, hanging by the Achille’s tendon, the white end of the bone showing. The forklift was slowly rolling backwards behind him. Scooter had gotten his foot stuck in the forklift somehow, and it had ripped his foot off. There wasn’t much blood.

Jack Crane got to Scooter first, and made him lie down. Someone else ran inside and called the ambulance. The little yellow Clark forklift was still slowly running backwards so I ran over and turned it off, put on the parking brake, and lowered the blades.

A few of us gathered around Scooter. Jack was holding his head. “How bad is it?” said Scooter. “Am I going to lose my foot?” Scooter was just eighteen that summer. Jack told him it was going to be O.K. I looked at the foot hanging there, and wasn’t so sure; but I wasn’t going to say anything like that out loud. In between saying it hurt, Scooter said he was lifting a pallet of paint up to the loading dock, when some of the cans started to shift, so he stood on the tire of the forklift, but he hadn’t put on the parking brake, so it started to roll back, and had caught his foot. He was crying, and kept saying it hurt, and you could tell he was wondering inside, would his foot be all right?

The ambulance came really quickly, and they took Scooter away. After they were gone, we talked what had happened. I could see it in my head, see just how it must have happened. When those five-gallon cans of paint started to shift, he should have stepped gently on the brake and come to a stop while slowly lowering the blades, because when a forklift starts rocking if you lower the blades you can often stop the rocking. And then keep lowering them slowly: if a few cans of paint fell, well then they would fall, but the less distance they had to fall the less likely they would break open. But Scooter had a tendency to act quickly, before he thought everything through. He quickly got up out of the driver’s seat to try to brace the cans, and to reach them he stepped farther than he meant to and stepped on the tire of the forklift. But he hadn’t put on the parking brake, and the forklift started rolling back, and his foot got caught between the fender and the tire, and — God almighty, what a horrific image that was.

I was the first one who had to use the little yellow Clark forklift after the accident, and I didn’t much like doing it. We talked over what had happened again and again, convincing ourselves that we wouldn’t have done what Scooter had done. The more we talked about it, the less vivid was that image in our minds, Scooter’s foot being pulled — even today, my mind backs away from that thought. We kept talking about it, and even though no one said so, we all knew that there but for the grace of God went each one of us.

They managed to reattach Scooter’s foot. He was in the hospital for quite a few weeks. Of course we took up a collection right away, and Art went out and bought Scooter a Sony Walkman, so he could listen to music while he lay in his hospital bed. I remember going in to Emerson Hospital with a bunch of the guys from the yard to give it to him. He gave one of his big goofy grins when he saw what it was.

This happened twenty-five or thirty years ago. I can’t remember if he came back to work that summer, but he was pretty much completely recovered by the time came for him to go back to college. Scooter came back to work the next summer, and then he moved away. I stayed in town, working at the lumber yard, and since Scooter’s father was a carpenter I’d see him around, and every once in a while I’d ask how Scooter was doing; he was always doing fine. Finally I moved away.

About five years ago, I went back to town for the big annual parade, and who should I run in to but Scooter, standing there watching the parade and looking about the same as he had twenty years before. I was in a rush to meet my dad somewhere, so I couldn’t stop to talk; all we did was say, Hi, hey good to see you! Then we said, Take care, good to see you! — and as we did I thought about his foot but didn’t say anything.

Every now and then, that accident comes back into my mind. I happened to think about it this afternoon, for no good reason, while I was out taking a walk. When that happens, then for just an instant I relive that day: summer day, blue sky, sun shining down, Scooter yelling, the ambulance, then standing around talking about it and getting back to work and finishing out the day just like every other day at work, until finally you punch out and go home.

I think Jane Austen would like this. In a sick kind of way.

Today is the 250th birthday of Robert Burns, that great Scots poet. Och, we’d love to claim him as a Unitarian, but he never joined a Unitarian chapel. So we claim him as one of our spiritual ancestors: an anti-Calvinist and religious liberal not unlike some of our New England Arminians, except more anti-clerical, and a better poet. Some of Burns’s burlesques on religion are brilliantly observed, and beneath the scathing satire is a true sympathy for the common people. (I think he might have gotten along with proto-Unitarian Ebenezer Gay of Massachusetts.)

On Burns’s birthday, one is supposed to attend Burns supper. I didn’t do that: I went to a Portuguese feast instead (after all, I live in New Bedford). But the drop of Scots blood in me calls on me to include three of his poems, which you’ll find below: first, a grace to be said before meals; second, the complete poem “Auld Lang Syne”; and finally a longer poem which I would describe as a non-Calvinist religiously liberal poem on morality. Read ’em aloud, and think of Robbie Burns on this, his 250th birthday.

I’ve included glosses on some of the more obscure words from Scots dialect; the definitions in standard English are in square brackets at the end of the lines of poetry, and the Scottish words are marked by a caret (^).

Some hae meat and canna eat,
And some wad eat that want it;
But we hae meat, and we can eat,
Sae let the Lord be thankit.

Auld Lang Syne (1788)

Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
And never brought to mind?
Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
And auld lang syne^! [long since, long ago]

Chorus. — For auld lang syne, my dear,
For auld lang syne.
We’ll tak a cup o’ kindness yet,
For auld lang syne.

And surely ye’ll be your pint stowp^! [you’ll pay for your pint]
And surely I’ll be mine!
And we’ll tak a cup o’ kindness yet,
For auld lang syne.
For auld, &c.

We twa hae run about the braes^, [slopes of the hills]
And pou’d the gowans^ fine; [wild, or mountain, daisies]
But we’ve wander’d mony a weary fit^, [foot]
Sin’ auld lang syne.
For auld, &c.

We twa hae paidl’d in the burn,
Frae morning sun till dine;
But seas between us braid hae roar’d
Sin’ auld lang syne.
For auld, &c.

And there’s a hand, my trusty fere!
And gie’s a hand o’ thine!
And we’ll tak a right gude-willie waught^, [good-will draft, drink]
For auld lang syne.
For auld, &c.

Address To The Unco Guid, Or The Rigidly Righteous (1786)

My Son, these maxims make a rule,
An’ lump them aye thegither;
The Rigid Righteous is a fool,
The Rigid Wise anither:
The cleanest corn that ere was dight
May hae some pyles o’ caff in;
So ne’er a fellow-creature slight
For random fits o’ daffin.
(Solomon. — Eccles. ch. vii. verse 16.)

O ye wha are sae guid yoursel’,
Sae pious and sae holy,
Ye’ve nought to do but mark and tell
Your neibours’ fauts and folly!
Whase life is like a weel-gaun^ mill, [well-going]
Supplied wi’ store o’ water;
The heaped happer’s^ ebbing still, [hopper, of a mill]
An’ still the clap plays clatter^. [noise, babble]

Hear me, ye venerable core,
As counsel for poor mortals
That frequent pass douce^ Wisdom’s door [sedate, sober, prudent]
For glaikit^ Folly’s portals: [foolish, thoughtless]
I, for their thoughtless, careless sakes,
Would here propone defences —
Their donsie^ tricks, their black mistakes, [vicious, bad-tempered]
Their failings and mischances.

Ye see your state wi’ theirs compared,
And shudder at the niffer^; [exchange]
But cast a moment’s fair regard,
What maks the mighty differ;
Discount what scant occasion gave,
That purity ye pride in;
And (what’s aft mair than a’ the lave),
Your better art o’ hidin.

Think, when your castigated pulse
Gies now and then a wallop!
What ragings must his veins convulse,
That still eternal gallop!
Wi’ wind and tide fair i’ your tail,
Right on ye scud your sea-way;
But in the teeth o’ baith^ to sail, [both]
It maks a unco lee-way.

See Social Life and Glee sit down,
All joyous and unthinking,
Till, quite transmugrified, they’re grown
Debauchery and Drinking:
O would they stay to calculate
Th’ eternal consequences;
Or your more dreaded hell to state,
Damnation of expenses!

Ye high, exalted, virtuous dames,
Tied up in godly laces,
Before ye gie poor Frailty names,
Suppose a change o’ cases;
A dear-lov’d lad, convenience snug,
A treach’rous inclination —
But let me whisper i’ your lug,
Ye’re aiblins^ nae temptation. [perhaps]

Then gently scan your brother man,
Still gentler sister woman;
Tho’ they may gang a kennin^ wrang, [a very little]
To step aside is human:
One point must still be greatly dark,–
The moving Why they do it;
And just as lamely can ye mark,
How far perhaps they rue it.

Who made the heart, ’tis He alone
Decidedly can try us;
He knows each chord, its various tone,
Each spring, its various bias:
Then at the balance let’s be mute,
We never can adjust it;
What’s done we partly may compute,
But know not what’s resisted.

I live in a city which is very, shall we say, traditional. Many people do not bother with computers, unless they have to use them at work. Whereas all my media consumption happens online. Here’s a conversation I had recently:

Other person: So did you watch the inaguration?

Me: Yeah, I watched it on the BBC Web site.

Other person looks at me like I have two heads. Pause. Other person: Oh. So, um, did, you hear Obama’s speech? …obviously assuming I had not…

Me: Oh, yeah, great speech, loved it.

Yet while I spend hours each day online, I never watch broadcast television, I don’t play video games, I don’t go to movies, and I hardly ever listen to the radio. As a result, my media consumption is pretty much out of synch with the surrounding community. Another typical conversation:

Other person: So why don’t you ever print up copies of your sermons?

Me: I put nearly all my sermons up on my Web site.

Other person looks at me like I have two heads.

Me: Um, you can get to them from the church Web site.

Other person looks at me like I have two heads.

Me: Um, just call the church office and tell Linda which sermon you want, and she’ll mail you a copy.

Other person: OK, thanks!

Me, sotto voce: I’m such a geek.

I’m slowly assembling biographical notes on the original pewholders of the 1838 meeting house of First Congregational Society of New Bedford (now First Unitarian Church in New Bedford). They were all white and all male (women were not allowed to own pews in 1838), and they ranged in economic status from small business owners to wealthy merchants. Within those limits, they were a fascinating cast of characters, and they were tied together by a web of business interests and kinship ties. I am interested in trying to document that web of relationships in these biographical notes. Here’s the first installment in a series of biographical notes on these pewholders.

This post is mostly a collection of random notes. Head to part two for more interesting stuff.

Pew 77 (left side of left center section, 3 pews back): James B. Congdon

Anti-slavery activist, as documented by the New Bedford Whaling National Historical Park in “Behind the Mansions: The Political, Economic, and Social Life of a New Bedford Neighborhood” p. 68:

“While he was chair of the city’s board of selectmen, James Bunker Congdon also hired lawyers ‘of the highest standing’ in the 1849 case of Henry Boyer, the black steward aboard the coaster Cornelia who was accused and ultimately jailed on the charge of having assisted a Norfolk boy to escape slavery aboard the vessel. In 1859, Congdon introduced to a small New Bedford audience the black physician J. B. Smith, who was then promoting a colonization plan that brought back to life Paul Cuffe’s interest in establishing a black-run economy competitive with the South. Congdon noted that the society would further the cultivation of cotton in Africa, and, should the effort succeed, it ‘would prove a greater blow to the system of slavery and the slave trade than all the moral efforts that had been used in this country.’ Congdon’s brother Joseph and his sister Mary T. Congdon were also active in antislavery, the latter having been one of ten delegates to the New England Anti-Slavery Society meeting in 1839.”

Congdon also owned pew 111.

Pew 101 (left side against wall, 12 pews back): Zachariah Hillman and Abraham Gardner

Hillman, with his brother Jethro, owned a shipyard. They are best known for building the ship Charles W. Morgan, now at Mystic Seaport in Connecticut; the ship was named after another pewholder of the 1838 meetinghouse.

Pew 36 (right side of right center section, 3 pews back): Ichabod Clapp

Clapp owned a livery stable on Fifth St., which he sold in 1845.

Clapp also owned pews 53 and 97.

Pew 12 (right side against wall, 12 pews back): Benjamin Lindsey

Lindsey was a printer who published the newspaper The Daily Mercury, as well as the weekly Whalemen’s Shipping List and Merchants’ Transcript. Daniel Ricketson, in his “The History of New Bedford, describes Lindsey thus:

“Mr. Lindsey was a man of great energy and industry, an editor of the old school. His constant devotion to his profession much impaired his health, and for many of his last years, as remembered by the writer, he bore the appearance of a valetudinarian; but he retained his quick step and industrious habits to the last.’ His appearance was remarkably editorial, but decidedly of the olden time, and like his predecessor, John Spooner, of the Franklin school of printers. The New Bedford Mercury during his editorship was of the Federal school of politics, and was ever one of the most consistent and able journals in the State. During the latter part of his life, he was assisted by his eldest son, the present editor, who established the Daily Mercury, not without the distrust of his father for its success, in 1831.”

Lindsey also published books, most notably The Life and Sufferings of Leonard Black, a Fugitive from Slavery, Written by Himself in 1847.

Lindsey also owned pew 15.

Pew 44 (left side of right center section, 6 pews back): Joseph Grinnell

The following appears on the Biographical Dictionary of the United States Congress:

“Grinell, Joseph, (brother of Moses Hicks Grinnell), a Representative from Massachusetts;… elected as a Whig to the Twenty-eighth Congress to fill the vacancy caused by the death of Barker Burnell; reelected to the Twenty-ninth, Thirtieth, and Thirty-first Congresses and served from December 7, 1843, to March 3, 1851; declined to be a candidate for renomination in 1850….”

Pew 45 (left side of right center section, 6 pews back): Moses Hicks Grinnell

The following appears on the Biographical Dictionary of the United States Congress:

“Grinnell, Moses Hicks, (brother of Joseph Grinnell), a Representative from New York; born in New Bedford, Mass., March 3, 1803;… elected as a Whig to the Twenty-sixth Congress (March 4, 1839-March 3, 1841); unsuccessful candidate for reelection in 1840 to the Twenty-seventh Congress; presidential elector on the Republican ticket in 1856….”

He also owned pew 98.

Among the original pewholders of the 1838 church building of First Congregational Society of New Bedford (now First Unitarian Church), there were those who actively opposed slavery through word and deed, but there were also those who did not support the anti-slavery movement. Here are some capsule biographies of some of the pewholders in 1838, with comments on the extent to which they opposed slavery:

Benjamin Lindsey (pew 12): Lindsey was a printer and publisher. He published and wrote for the New Bedford Mercury, a daily newspaper. By the 1830s, Lindsey was not supporting abolition in the columns of the Mercury, because he thought abolitionism was too revolutionary and would lead to chaos. Yet he also was willing to print anti-slavery books; in 1847 he published The Life and Sufferings of Leonard Black, a Fugitive from Slavery, Written by Himself, a fugitive slave narrative.

Joseph Grinnell (pew 44) served in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1843 to 1851. New Bedford Abolitionists grew angry with Grinnell in 1850; Grinnell was absent when a vote came up on the Fugitive Slave Law. One New Bedford abolitionist wrote, “I am ashamed of him…. When the most important bill of the whole session was up for consideration, and he knew it, he was not in his place, but at the Treasury Department….” (Grover, p. 218). Grinnell had been one of the original investors in the Wamsutta Mill in 1846, which manufactured cotton cloth; we can imagine that he was perhaps torn between a desire to represent New Bedford’s opposition to the Fugitive Slave Law on the one hand, and his interest in maintaining a supply of cotton on the other hand.

James Arnold and his wife Sarah Arnold (pew 66) were some of the many New Bedford Quakers who had become Unitarians in the 1820s. The Arnolds became very wealthy, and as time went on turned their attention to philanthropy. During the 1850s, our church supported Rev. Moses Thomas as a minister-at-large to work with the city’s poor people; when the church withdrew its support of Thomas c. 1859, the Arnolds came forward and employed him full-time to carry out their philanthropic work; Thomas worked for them until he retired.

While it is documented that the Arnolds opposed slavery, their main social justice interests were elsewhere. Most importantly, they were concerned with alleviating the effects of poverty; they also engaged in other philanthropic ventures such as endowing the Arnold Arboretum in Boston. Even if anti-slavery work was not a priority for them, it is hard to hold this against them given the extent of their anti-poverty work.

Charles W. Morgan (pew 68) is best known today for the whaling ship that bears his name, now at the Mystic Seaport in Mystic, Connecticut. Morgan was a prominent ship owner and merchant who owned an oil refinery and candleworks on South Water St.; his house stood on County St. at the head of William St., where the headquarters of the New Bedford Public Schools now stands. He was another of the liberal Quakers who became a Unitarian in the 1820s.

Morgan was also an anti-slavery activist, although it is not clear how active he was. According to historian Kathryn Grover, Nathan Johnson may have come to New Bedford with Morgan. It is not clear whether Johnson was a fugitive slave when he came to New Bedford, but if he was then Morgan was active in the Underground Railroad. Nathan Johnson and his wife Polly Johnson later became prominent African American citizens of New Bedford and conductors on the Underground Railroad — Frederick Douglass spent his first night of freedom in their house — and Nathan Johnson became a member of the Universalist church in New Bedford.

Andrew Robeson (pew 43) was a ship owner, and a merchant with business interests in New Bedford, Fall River, and Boston. He was involved both with the whaling industry and the textile industry, with a whale oil refinery on Ray St. in New Bedford, and a printing plant in Fall River for printing designs on calico fabric. Robeson’s house now stands on William St., across from the National Park Service headquarters.

Robeson was a strong abolitionist. It was Robeson who nominated one Mr. Borden, an African American man, for membership in the New Bedford Lyceum in 1845. The Lyceum sponsored a popular lecture series, bringing such luminaries as Ralph Waldo Emerson to New Bedford to speak. The Lyceum members, who were all white, refused to admit Mr. Borden into membership on a close vote. Ralph Waldo Emerson then refused to speak at the Lyceum, while the New Bedford abolitionists left the Lyceum to form a competing lecture series. The resulting controversy got national attention for the rights of African Americans to participate freely in society.

In his Life and Times, Frederick Douglass mentions Robeson, alongside such prominent abolitionists as Wendell Phillips and Theodore Parker, as one of those “friends, earnest, courageous, inflexible, ready to own me as a man and brother, against all the scorn, contempt, and derision of a slavery-polluted atmosphere…”

Loum Snow (pew 47) was an agent for whaling ships, a mill owner in Falmouth and Middleboro, director of the Mechanics’ National Bank, trustee of the New Bedford Institution for Savings, and director of the United Mutual Marine Insurance Company.

Snow was a conductor on the Underground Railroad. There are at least two documented instances of Snow helping African Americans escape from slavery. In 1850, Snow arranged for Isabella White, then a slave, to be shipped to New Bedford in a barrel labeled “sweet potatoes.” Then in 1859, William Carney, who had escaped slavery in Virginia and come to New Bedford, went to Snow seeking help to purchase the freedom of his wife, Nancy Carney. (Carney later went on to become the first African American to win the Congressional Medal of Honor, for his heroism during the Union attack on Fort Wagner during the Civil War.)

Snow’s Italianate house still stands on County St., on the north side of Morgan St., just a block or so from the church. Since this is the house where Isabella White arrived, it is one of those rare places that is documented as a station on the Underground Railroad.

Joseph Ricketson (pew 30) refined oil and had other interests in the whaling industry. He is best known today for helping Frederick Douglass on the path to freedom. Douglass tells the story this way in his Narrative:

“[U]pon our arrival at Newport, we were so anxious to get to a place of safety, that, notwithstanding we lacked the necessary money to pay our fare, we decided to take seats in the stage, and promise to pay when we got to New Bedford. We were encouraged to do this by two excellent gentlemen, residents of New Bedford, whose names I afterward ascertained to be Joseph Ricketson and William C. Taber. They seemed at once to understand our circumstances, and gave us such assurance of their friendliness as put us fully at ease in their presence. It was good indeed to meet with such friends, at such a time.”

Later, when he wrote his Life and Times, he added a few details:

“We arrived at Newport the next morning, and soon after an old-fashioned stage-coach with ‘New Bedford’ in large, yellow letters on its sides, came down to the wharf. I had not money enough to pay our fare, and stood hesitating to know what to do. Fortunately for us, there were two Quaker gentlemen who were about to take passage on the stage — Friends William C. Taber and Joseph Ricketson, — who at once discerned our true situation, and in a peculiarly quiet way, addressing me, Mr. Taber said: ‘Thee get in.’ I never obeyed an order with more alacrity, and we were soon on our way to our new home.”

(Ricketson was another of the Quakers who became Unitarians in the 1820s, and retained his Quaker dress and speech throughout his life, so it is not surprising that Douglass mistook him for a Quaker.) Some historians believe that Ricketson and Taber had been sent on purpose to Newport to meet Douglass; in any case, Ricketson had no compunction about serving as a conductor on the Underground Railroad.

Conclusion

Because of the range of opinions on slavery, we cannot say that First Unitarian Church was an abolitionist church in 1838. By contrast, the Universalist Church in New Bedford voted to support abolition, and had African American members, at about the same time. Yet we can also see that First Unitarian moved towards an anti-slavery position over the course of the mid-nineteenth century.

We can see the movement towards an anti-slavery position most clearly in the church’s choice of ministers. In the 1820s, Rev. Orville Dewey did not take a stand against slavery, or for equality for African Americans; after he left our church, he became one of the Unitarian ministers whom abolitionists did not like at all. By 1837, when our current building was built, the church moved towards an anti-slavery position when it called Rev. Ephraim Peabody, who, while not a radical abolitionist, opposed slavery. (Peabody’s wife, Mary Jane Derby Peabody, is famous for being the one who paid Frederick Douglass his first wages as a free man.) And by 1847 the church was ready to call Rev. John Weiss, then well-known as a staunch abolitionist. While not everyone in the congregation agreed with Weiss’s abolitionist views, the congregation (including those who invested in textile mills) gave him perfect freedom to continue his abolitionist activities and state his abolitionist views throughout his eleven-year ministry here.

Update: Added Joseph Ricketson 29 January 2009.

I got a failing mark (250 out of 450) on the online Africa geography quiz. Boy, I’m embarrassed. I knew East Africa and the Horn pretty well, but I failed miserably at everything else. If you take the quiz, let me know how you did.

Thanks to….

Last night I sat and listened
to the rain falling on the city.

I was sitting indoors, warm,
dry, cozy, with work to do. But still,
I kept listening to the rain.

Last night’s rain came in waves:
soft, then pounding loudly on the roof.

I kept imagining it
meant something — I don’t know — climate change —
greenhouse gasses — some world disaster —

Last night’s rain was only rain.
It rained and rained and finally stopped.

I went to bed. Nothing happened.
I dreamt — I don’t know what — vividly —
At first light, I came awake.

The rain melted snow, it swept
debris down, it crept under our door.

My latest post on the PaxPac peace blog is now up. Administration geek that I am, I propose peacemaking through good management.

“I admit that through my adult life I have lacked religiosity. But I make no boast of it; understanding, as I do, how essential religion is to many, many people. For that reason, I have little patience with the zealot who is forever trying to prove to others that they do not need religion; that they would be better off without it. Such a one is no less a zealot than the religionist who contends that all who ‘do not believe’ will be consigned to eternal hell fires. It is simply that I have not felt the need of religion in the commonplace sense of the term. I have derived spiritual values in life from other sources than worship and prayer. I think that the teachings of Jesus Christ embody the loftiest ethical and spiritual concepts the human mind has yet borne. I do not know if there is a personal God; I do not see how I can know; and I do not see how my knowing can matter. What does matter, I believe, is how I deal with myself and how I deal with my fellows. I feel that I can practice a conduct toward myself and toward my fellows that will constitute the basis for an adequate religion, a religion that may comprehend spirituality and beauty and serene happiness….

“The human mind racks itself over the never-to-be-known answer to the great riddle, and all that is clearly revealed is the fate that man must continue to hope and struggle on; that each day, if he would not be lost, he must with renewed courage take a fresh hold on life and face with fortitude the turns of circumstances. To do this, he needs to be able at times to touch God; let the idea of God mean to him what it may.”

  — So wrote James Weldon Johnson, in his autobiography Along This Way, back in 1933. Reading this, I imagine that Johnson would have felt quite at home in one of today’s Unitarian Universalist churches. He would even have felt at home in one of our more progressive Unitarian or Universalist churches back in 1933, except for the fact that he was black, and in 1933 both the Unitarians and the Universalists were basically lily-white denominations. Well, be that as it may, I still like to imagine what Johnson would have felt if I could have said to him: That’s pretty much what I preach from the pulpit, and in fact I’m going to steal that last line of yours for my next sermon. And what you say is pretty much what we do in our church: we don’t have religion in the commonplace sense of the term (which is these parts means orthodox Christianity); we try to practice conduct towards ourselves and our neighbors that constitutes our basis for religion; we feel Jesus is a great spiritual and ethical thinker who inspires us; and each day, if we would not be lost, we take a fresh hold life life, and we renew our courage to do this by touching the face of God, whatever God may mean to each one of us individually.

Every morning this past week, I awakened before my alarm went off. With the days now perceptibly longer, the first light of dawn appears in the sky before the alarm sounds. Just as happens every year at about this time, I have been awakened by that first light of dawn, dim though it is. And, as usual at this time of year, I need significantly less sleep these days than I did in December and the first half of January, and my appetite is less. Best of all, my mood has perceptibly lightened with the increasing length of daylight. Even though they’re forecasting snow for Tuesday and Wednesday, it feels as though spring is getting closer.

After my spectacular failure on an online African geography quiz last week, I resolved to spend some time brushing up on my African geography. As part of this learning goal, I’m going to do a short series of posts on African countries that have Unitarian Universalist congregations in them. Here’s the first installment:

UUs in Nigeria: There are two Unitarian Universalist groups in Nigeria. Both Ijo Isokan Gbogbo Eda (Unitarian Brotherhood Church) and The First Unitarian Church of Nigeria are in Lagos. The Unitarian Brotherhood was founded in 1919, and is the second-oldest Unitarian group in Africa; First Unitarian was founded in 1994. Both are full members of the International Council of Unitarians and Universalists (more about these congregations).

People: Nigeria is Africa’s most populous country, with 148 million people. It is a major oil producer (and the biggest oil producer in Africa), yet half its population live in poverty. Major languages include Hausa, Ibo, Yoruba, and English; English remains the official language. Religions include Christianity and Islam; some Nigerian states have imposed Islamic rule, causing non-Muslims to flee those states. Lagos is the biggest city, one of the fastest-growing cities in the world, with a current population of nearly 8 million.

Political: The Federal Republic of Nigeria, a former British colony, achieved independence in 1960. A series of coups established military rule in the mid-1960s. Biafra, in the southeastern corner of the country, tried to break away from Nigeria in the late 1960s. In the 1980s, there were border clashes with Cameroon over oil and mineral rights. Civilian rule and democracy were re-established in 1999. The capital of Nigeria is Abuja. (BBC country profile: Nigeria.)

Physical: Nigeria lies roughly between 2 and 15 degrees east; and 4 and 9 degrees north. It covers 356,669 square miles, about the size of Venezuela or Egypt. It is bounded by the Atlantic Ocean (Gulf of Guinea) on the south; Benin on the west; Niger to the north; Chad in the northeast; and Cameroon on the east. The short border with Chad lies in the middle of Lake Chad. The Mandara Mountains and the Gotel Mountains run along the border with Cameroon. (Satellite image of Nigeria.)

Climate and climate change: Rainfall exceeds 100 inches a year in some places along the coast (i.e., the delta of the Niger River); due to global climate change, excessive rainfall in the south is leading to erosion and other problems. Rainfall tapers off roughly from south to north, down to less than 20 inches per year in the far north. Vegetation is tropical rainforest in the areas of heaviest rain, and predominantly tall grass savannah inland. Desertification is a growing problem in the northern part of the country.