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[H]uman work has an ethical value of its own, which clearly and directly remains linked to the fact that the one who carries it out is a person, a conscious and free subject ... The sources of the dignity of work are to be sought primarily in the subjective dimension, not in the objective one. [endnote 1]
In the modern period, from the beginning of the industrial age, the Christian truth about work had to oppose the various trends of materialistic and economistic thought.
For certain supporters of such ideas, work was understood and treated as a sort of "merchandise" that the worker - especially the industrial worker - sells to the employer ... [T]he danger of treating work as a special kind of "merchandise" ... always exists, especially when the whole way of looking at the question of economics is marked by the premises of materialistic economism.
We must emphasize and give prominence to the primacy of man in the production process, the primacy of man over things. Everything contained in the concept of capital in the strict sense is only a collection of things. Man, as the subject of work, and independently of the work that he does - man alone is a person. This truth has important and decisive consequences.
In the light of the above truth we see clearly, first of all, that capital cannot be separated from labour; in no way can labour be opposed to capital or capital to labour, and still less can the actual people behind these concepts be opposed to each other, as will be explained later. A labour system can be right, in the sense of being in conformity with the very essence of the issue, and in the sense of being intrinsically true and also morally legitimate, if in its very basis it overcomes the opposition between labour and capital through an effort at being shaped in accordance with the principle put forward above: the principle of the substantial and real priority of labour.
Working at any workbench, whether a relatively primitive or an ultramodern one, a man can easily see that through his work he enters into two inheritances: the inheritance of what is given to the whole of humanity in the resources of nature, and the inheritance of what others have already developed on the basis of those resources, primarily by developing technology, that is to say, by producing a whole collection of increasingly perfect instruments for work.
The machine, the frozen form of a living intelligence, is the power that expands the potential of your life by raising the productivity of your time. If you worked as a blacksmith in the mystics' Middle Ages, the whole of your earning capacity would consist of an iron bar produced by your hands in days and days of effort. How many tons of rail do you produce per day if you work for Hank Rearden? Would you dare to claim that the size of your pay check was created solely by your physical labor and that those rails were the product of your muscles? The standard of living of that blacksmith is all that your muscles are worth; the rest is a gift from Hank Rearden.
Christian tradition has never upheld this right [to own property] as absolute and untouchable. On the contrary, it has always understood this right within the broader context of the right common to all to use the goods of the whole of creation: the right to private property is subordinated to the right to common use, to the fact that goods are meant for everyone.
[T]he position of "rigid" capitalism continues to remain unacceptable, namely the position that defends the exclusive right to private ownership of the means of production as an untouchable "dogma" of economic life. The principle of respect for work demands that this right should undergo a constructive revision, both in theory and in practice.
In dialectical materialism too man is not first and foremost the subject of work and the efficient cause of the production process, but continues to be understood and treated, in dependence on what is material, as a kind of "resultant" of the economic or production relations prevailing at a given period.
[The Church's teaching on ownership] diverges radically from the programme of collectivism as proclaimed by Marxism and put into practice in various countries in the decades following the time of Leo XIII's Encyclical. ... [M]any deeply desired reforms cannot be achieved by an a priori elimination of private ownership of the means of production.
This group in authority may carry out its task satisfactorily from the point of view of the priority of labour; but it may also carry it out badly by claiming for itself a monopoly of the administration and disposal of the means of production and not refraining even from offending basic human rights. Thus, merely converting the means of production into State property in the collectivist system is by no means equivalent to "socializing" that property.
We can speak of socializing only when the subject character of society is ensured, that is to say, when on the basis of his work each person is fully entitled to consider himself a part-owner of the great workbench at which he is working with every one else.
[I]n the Church's teaching, ownership has never been understood in a way that could constitute grounds for social conflict in labour. As mentioned above, property is acquired first of all through work in order that it may serve work. This concerns in a special way ownership of the means of production. Isolating these means as a separate property in order to set it up in the form of "capital" in opposition to "labour" - and even to practice exploitation of labour - is contrary to the very nature of these means and their possession. They cannot be possessed against labour, they cannot even be possessed for possession's sake, because the only legitimate title to their possession - whether in the form of private ownership or in the form of public or collective ownership - is that they should serve labour, and thus, by serving labour, that they should make possible the achievement of the first principle of this order, namely, the universal destination of goods and the right to common use of them.
[T]he person who works desires not only due remuneration for his work; he also wishes that, within the production process, provision be made for him to be able to know that in his work, even on something that is owned in common, he is working "for himself". This awareness is extinguished within him in a system of excessive bureaucratic centralization, which makes the worker feel that he is just a cog in a huge machine moved from above, that he is for more reasons than one a mere production instrument rather than a true subject of work with an initiative of his own. The Church's teaching has always expressed the strong and deep conviction that man's work concerns not only the economy but also, and especially, personal values. The economic system itself and the production process benefit precisely when these personal values are fully respected. In the mind of Saint Thomas Aquinas, this is the principal reason in favour of private ownership of the means of production. ... If it is to be rational and fruitful, any socialization of the means of production must take this argument into consideration.
Anybody who has been following my writings knows that while I take a humanistic approach to most topics, I’ve consistently been critical of the New Atheists and their root-and-branch rejection of religion. I recognize that (with certain exceptions) many people’s religions make them happier, more compassionate people; and if they are, I don’t see how anyone would gain by convincing them otherwise. My parents were such people, and as they declined towards death I was perfectly content to let them believe they would soon be in Heaven.
But there is one point on which I agree with the Richard Dawkins/Christopher Hitchens view: It’s dangerous to make a place in your mind for divine decrees that are not to be questioned. If a mistake makes it into that citadel at the center of your worldview, it becomes immune to the ordinary processes of correction.
For example, if it somehow it got into the secular part of your mind that 2 + 2 = 5, you’d eventually catch on. You’d make mistakes, screw things up, and after you’d seen enough of those errors, you’d recognize what they all had in common. “Maybe 2 + 2 isn’t 5,” you’d say. “I need to take another look at that."
But now imagine that such an error made it into your divine-decree citadel: "God said: 'Two plus two equals five.' The heresy that 2 + 2 = 4 is a construction of the Devil, designed to drag us down to Hell."
Now you would screw up the same things that a similarly mistaken secularist would, but you wouldn’t learn from your mistakes. Every time the thought surfaced that the problem was in your arithmetic, you’d say, “Get thee behind me, Satan!” You’d look for something or somebody else you could blame for those screw-ups, and you’d keep making them.
If you want to see this process in action, look at gay rights.
A couple generations ago, the conventional wisdom said that homosexuality corrupted society, and so society was justified in punishing homosexual acts and refusing to recognize homosexual relationships. Just about everybody believed that — or at least they seemed to in public — and so it was hard to think otherwise. There was a circularity to it, as there often is when an idea isn’t seriously challenged: Gays stayed in the closet, most straights believed they didn’t know any gays, and so the idea that society could tolerate gays without being damaged mostly went untested.
But over the last few decades, gays and lesbians have been increasingly more visible, more recognized, and more tolerated. As a result, we now have evidence to look at. Overwhelmingly, that evidence shows that there are no ill effects to tolerating homosexuality and homosexual relationships. Again and again, the falling-sky predictions of traditionalists have not come true. Boston, for example, has allowed same-sex marriages since 2003. So by now the resulting social breakdown really ought to be showing up in statistical comparisons to Bible-belt cities like Houston or Atlanta. It doesn’t seem to be.
Straights who know same-sex couples are seeing the same thing anecdotally: It looks a little weird at first and your early interactions may be a bit clumsy, but before long you start to wonder why you ever thought something had to go wrong.
As a result, by now just about everybody who held their homosexuality-corrupts-society belief in a secular way has looked at the evidence and abandoned it. It just doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. And without that belief, there’s really no secular justification for punishing homosexual acts or refusing to recognize same-sex relationships.
But people who are anti-gay because God-says-it’s-wrong have not changed their views. Instead, their predictions of societal doom and divine judgment keep stretching further and further into the future and getting more and more bizarre. Anything that goes wrong — from 9-11 to Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy — somehow connects to gay rights. The more evidence piles up against their views, the more shrill and strident they become.
How long can this go on? Well, if the struggle to deny evolution is anything to judge by, centuries. Once a mistake gets into the God-says-so citadel, it’s very hard to get it out.
And that’s got to make you wonder if you should have such a citadel at all.
Unfortunately, the 1988 Toyota Tercel is among the hardest cars on earth into which one may break, which is ironic, considering how few people could possibly want to steal one. No matter my truly veteran efforts to open the door, I was having no luck even after ten minutes.
It was then, as I was furiously bending the hanger back and forth, trying desperately to jam it between the metal door frame and the rubber insulation around the window, that a police car pulled up. The officer hopped out and approached me.
"What’s going on here?" he asked, more curious than accusatory.
"I locked myself out of my car and I’ve got to pick up my girlfriend in like five minutes," I replied, exasperated with my shitty luck. I fully expected the officer to ask me for identification or some kind of proof that this was my car, which only goes to show how little I understood about the value of white skin in the eyes of law enforcement.
"Well, I can tell you right now," he interjected. "The problem is, you’re doing that all wrong."
"Excuse me?" I replied, not having expected to be told by a police officer than I lacked the necessary acumen to break into a car the right way.
"Yeah, that’s no way to break into a car," he insisted. "Let me show you how it’s done."W. E. B. DuBois was one of the leading black intellectuals of the early 20th century. In his classic The Souls of Black Folk, he describes the other side of privilege: How it feels to live in a world where “normal” means “not like you”, and your mere presence and your desire to be included makes “normal” society uncomfortable.
Between me and the other world there is ever an unasked question: unasked by some through feelings of delicacy; by others through the difficulty of rightly framing it. All, nevertheless, flutter round it. They approach me in a half-hesitant sort of way, eye me curiously or compassionately, and then, instead of saying directly, How does it feel to be a problem? they say, I know an excellent colored man in my town; or, I fought at Mechanicsville; or, Do not these Southern outrages make your blood boil? At these I smile, or am interested, or reduce the boiling to a simmer, as the occasion may require. To the real question, How does it feel to be a problem? I answer seldom a word.Peggy McIntosh is famous for her insight that privilege is obvious when someone else has it, but hard to see when you have it yourself. She captured that observation in the metaphor of the Invisible Knapsack, a set of assets that you can’t see because they’re on your back, but that will come in handy if you need them.
And then I decided, because this work was spreading in many places, I needed to help with the matter of white guilt. I don’t believe we can be guilty or ashamed or blamed for being born into systems both above and below the hypothetical line of social justice. They’re arbitrary. They have to do with projections onto us. … I don’t think blame, shame, or guilt are relevant to the arbitrariness of our placement in privilege systems. …
So beside [the metaphor of the Invisible Knapsack] I decided to put a second metaphor: white privilege as a bank account that I was given. I didn’t ask for it and I can’t be blamed for it. But I can decide to put it in the service of weakening the system of white privilege.
That is my energy, that is my financial commitment, that is my daily life, and it’s been transformative to use my bank account of white privilege to weaken the system. It has absolutely transformed my life to be in work that feels right… [This transformation] is not based on guilt. I don’t know exactly the wording for it. … [But] it has been transformative to use the power that I did not know, I was never taught that I had, in the service of kinder, fairer, and more compassionate life for everyone.
a talk presented at the Unitarian Church of Quincy, Illinois (the town where I grew up)
Edith Wharton said: "There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle, or the mirror that reflects it."
I’ve found that I don’t have to believe a theology to appreciate its beauty. And of all the Christian theologies I know, I think the most beautiful one comes from the early 19th century Universalist Hosea Ballou.
Orthodox Christians of Ballou’s day taught — as many still do — that human sin made God angry, and that his anger could not be put aside until someone had been punished. According a the doctrine called substitutional atonement, that was what Jesus did: he took the punishment on himself, so that anyone who believed in him could escape God’s anger and have salvation.
Early Universalists like John Murray had extended this notion of atonement by saying that Jesus’ payment was good for everybody, whether they believed or not. So everyone was going to Heaven.
But Hosea Ballou turned the whole atonement doctrine upside down. God’s love, Ballou said, was unshakeable, and so he had never been angry with us, much less desired our eternal punishment. Sin had affected not God, but us. It caused us to lose our awareness of God’s love. And feeling unloved, we became angry with God. [Interestingly, this same motif —the creature who is angry with his Creator because he feels unloved —shows up 13 years later in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.] So in Ballou’s theology, that’s why Jesus had to come: not to appease God’s anger, but to appease our anger at God, by showing us that we had always been loved.
In Ballou’s view, all those theologies of a wrathful God were what later psychologists would call projections: Picturing God to be as vicious and small-minded as we are, theologians had hidden their anger with him behind the anger they imagined he had for us. In this reading from Ballou’s 1805 classic A Treatise on Atonement, he summed that projection up in a wonderful metaphor:
Unhappily, men have looked at Deity through the medium of a carnal mind, and have formed all their evil tempers in Jehovah; like the deceived astronomer, who fancied he saw a monster in the sun, occasioned by a fly on his glass. The creature, being in the medium of sight, was supposed to be in the object beheld; and though it was small in itself, and would have appeared so, could it have been seen where it was; yet carrying it into the sun, it magnified to an enormous size.
So it is with the vile and sinful passions. Could we behold them in ourselves, and view them as they are, they would appear in their finite and limited sphere. But the moment we form those passions in Deity, they magnify to infinity.
How many various calculations have divines made on the fury and wrath which they have discovered in God! How much they have preached and written on the awful subject; and how many ways they have invented, to appease such wrath and vengeance!
When we come to see the error, and find those principles in ourselves, all those notions vanish at once. The fly on the glass might easily have been removed, or destroyed. But had there been a monster in the sun, what calculations could mortals have made to remove it?
Nearly a century later, William James gave the lectures that became The Varieties of Religious Experience. In one lecture he collected case studies of what he called saintly behavior. And in the next lecture he asked a question that until that moment had been completely unthinkable: What was saintliness good for? And he answered it like this:
Herbert Spencer tells us that the perfect man’s conduct will appear only when the environment is perfect: to no inferior environment is it suitably adapted. We may paraphrase this by cordially admitting that saintly conduct would be the most perfect conduct conceivable in an environment where all were saints already; but by adding that in an environment where few are saints, and many the exact reverse of saints, it must be ill adapted.
We must frankly confess, then, using our empirical common sense and ordinary practical prejudices, that in the world that actually is, the virtues of sympathy, charity, and non-resistance may be, and often have been, manifested in excess. The powers of darkness have systematically taken advantage of them. The whole modern scientific organization of charity is a consequence of the failure of simply giving alms. The whole history of constitutional government is a commentary on the excellence of resisting evil, and when one cheek is smitten, of smiting back and not turning the other cheek also.
You will agree to this in general, for in spite of the Gospel, in spite of Quakerism, in spite of Tolstoy, you believe in the excellence of fighting fire with fire, in shooting down usurpers, locking up thieves, and freezing out vagabonds and swindlers.
And yet you are sure, as I am sure, that were the world confined to these hard-headed, hard-hearted, and hard-fisted methods exclusively, were there no one prompt to help a brother first, and find out afterwards whether he were worthy; no one willing to drown his private wrongs in pity for a wronger’s person; no one ready to be duped many a time rather than live always on suspicion; no one glad to treat individuals passionately and impulsively, rather than by general rules of prudence; the world would be an infinitely worse place than it is now to live in. The tender grace, not of a day that is dead, but of a day yet to be born somehow, with the golden rule grown natural, would be cut out from the perspective our of imaginations.
I’m not sure how obvious this has been, but most of the talks I’ve given here over the last few years have had a common theme: What should we do with the legacy of traditional religion?
As you know, I was raised as a fairly conservative Lutheran, believing in the literal, historical truth of the Bible — the Flood, Jonah inside the whale, and all the rest. God was a real person, and Heaven and Hell were real places.
Many of you were also brought up in more orthodox traditions. And even if you weren’t, Christianity so dominates this culture that it’s nearly impossible to avoid having an opinion about it and a relationship to it.
Even if you personally don’t have a history with Christianity, Unitarianism and Universalism do. That’s why we meet on Sunday mornings and sit in pews and sing hymns. The great names of our history, people like William Ellery Channing and Hosea Ballou, interpreted the Bible very differently than most other preachers of their day, but God was very real to them, and the Bible and Jesus were very important.
So both individually and as a Unitarian Universalist, what should I do with that legacy? In one way or another, that’s what I keep talking about.
And I think I’ve made some of you nervous, with all the times I’ve read to you from the Bible or quoted some saint. Because you know how that goes: A Bible-quoting person may sound reasonable at first, but sooner or later he’s going to work around to explaining why you’re going to Hell.
I think that’s why many Unitarian Universalists feel that we have to go one way or the other. Either reject that Christian legacy firmly and leave it all behind, or eventually the currents of the larger culture will pull us back in.
I haven’t been taking either of those paths. So what have I been up to?
In my own mind, I sum it up with an image from Robinson Crusoe. Crusoe has run away from England, where his parents wanted to make him a lawyer, and after a number of adventures he has become a plantation owner in Brazil. Subsequently, he is sailing to Africa to get slaves when a storm wrecks his ship. Everyone else drowns, and he washes up on a deserted island. After spending an anxious night in a tree, the next morning he sees that the ship did not go to the bottom, but has gotten stuck on a sandbar close to shore.
At this point there are three ways the story could go. Crusoe could ignore the ship and say, “I’m not going anywhere near that death trap.” Or, if the story were more of a fairy tale, he could repair the ship, and single-handedly sail it home.
What he actually does, though, is build a raft, and scavenge the ship for the things he needs to survive on the island: food, clothing, a hunting rifle, and so on. But one thing is worth more than all the rest. When he finds the carpenter’s chest of tools, he describes it as “much more valuable than a ship-loading of gold”.
Maybe you can already guess where I’m going with this metaphor. For me, traditional Christianity is a wrecked ship. It didn’t take me where I thought it was supposed to go, and when it all fell apart on me I considered myself lucky to wash up where I did.
Now, I understand that the old-time religion is not a shipwreck for everyone. Back in 1966, when Time magazine’s cover asked “Is God Dead?” one of the churches here in town answered on its signboard: “Our God is alive. Sorry about yours.”
I have no complaint with that viewpoint. If traditional religion is working for you, if it gives you a sense of direction and purpose, and makes you a more loving, more compassionate person, then I have no desire to talk you out of it.
But the Christianity I was raised in is a shipwreck for me. And yet, it didn’t sink to the bottom of the ocean. There it still is, run aground, but within swimming range. What to do with it?
Some people will say: “Get as far away from it as you can.” And others will say, “Maybe it’s not as far gone as you think. If you fix it up a little, it might still get you home.” But I want to do something else. I want to scavenge it for tools.
That theme has been running through almost all my talks. One by one I’ve been picking up pieces of the old religion and not asking “Is this true? What are the arguments pro and con?” but rather “What is this for? What does it do? Can I make use of it? And if not, can I reverse-engineer something from it that I can use?” That approach, I’ve found, takes me out of the usual religious arguments that go round and round without convincing anybody, and sets me on a path I find more productive.
So when I led the Easter service, I spent no time at all on whether the historical Jesus did or did not rise from the dead. Instead, I looked at the tradition of spring holidays like Easter, Passover, and the pagan equinox, and I asked, “What do these holidays do? What are they for? Is there something an appropriately constructed spring holiday could do for us?”
And I concluded that there was. A spring holiday could be an occasion to re-examine our commitment to life, to ask ourselves whether we’ve really been living, or just marking time and getting by, waiting for the bad times to end. It could be a time to re-commit, to leave our safe but joyless places and start doing more with the gift of life. In short, we could reverse engineer Easter and make it our tool.
Another time, I talked about the afterlife. And again, I spent no time at all discussing whether or not Heaven is real. Instead, I asked, “What does the afterlife do? What is it for?” And I decided that of all the things it did, the one I envied most was that the afterlife helps people project their life stories into the future in a satisfying way. It helps them motivate future-directed action, in spite of the fact that they may not live to see the results. And then I discussed secular techniques for telling a life story that achieve a similar purpose. That was how I reverse engineered the afterlife.
The tool that I want to reverse engineer today is the love of God. Not the love that the believer has for God, but the love that supposedly streams down from Heaven onto all of God’s creatures.
When I read Hosea Ballou, the love of God comes to seem like a very real thing, not just an abstract principle or a phrase in some recited creed, but a powerful presence that he felt every moment of his life.
Universalists in Ballou’s day always ran into the argument that Hell was necessary. Without the threat of Hell, critics said, people would do whatever wickedness they thought they could get away with — steal, cheat, kill, whatever. And so, they thought, Universalists must constantly fall prey to all manner of temptation, and a Universalist church must be a complete den in iniquity.
Ballou always responded to these arguments with bewilderment. Because he knew that if you lived with a constant awareness of God’s love, if you felt it shining down on you every moment of every day, filling you with the joy of life, then what could you possibly do but reflect that love out onto others? In Ballou’s theology, sin didn’t mean giving in to pleasure, it meant turning away from the greatest pleasure of all, which was to bask in the unshakeable love of God.
Now, a theologian might examine whether Ballou’s perception was accurate: Is there really a God? Does that God love us constantly and unconditionally? Or does he instead love us when we’re good and hate us when we’re bad?
But as a religious engineer, as a scavenger on the shipwreck of faith, I ask a different question: That vision of the love of God — what did it do for Ballou? And when does my own life make me wish for a tool like that?
My answer is probably not what Ballou would have expected. Like his critics, Ballou was focused on the question: Why be good? The orthodox Christian answered with the threat of Hell, and Ballou answered with the love of God. Both would have expected doubters to struggle with that question.
But in fact we don’t. Contrary to expectation, ethics seems to come from somewhere deeper than theology. In my own life, there have been times when I believed in God and times when I didn’t. I can’t tell that it made any difference in how good I was. And whether you believe in some kind of God or not, I expect most of you have enough experience with atheists and agnostics to notice the same thing I have: that their overall morality is no worse than that of believers, and maybe even a little better sometimes.
No, when I try on Ballou’s vision of the love of God, I see a different benefit. My problem isn’t why to be good or how to be good, but that when I try too hard to be good, I burn out. Trying to be a giving person, a compassionate person, somebody who listens to everyone and takes their problems to heart, who (as James said in the reading) is “ready to be duped many a time rather than live always on suspicion” — it very quickly gets to be too much.
Maybe you feel it too. Every news cycle brings new horrors and atrocities. Do I really have to care about ebola in Africa or what climate change is doing to Bangladesh? About every panhandler who accosts me on the street? About every bad day in the lives of all my Facebook friends? It’s overwhelming.
James observed that his world was not conducive to sainthood, and ours seems even less so. In today’s consumer society, you are surrounded 24/7 by people who want something from you — your money, your attention, your time and effort. And if they can give you little or nothing back,so much the better.
To be a good person in such a world, to be caring and giving and compassionate, can make you feel like the only warm-blooded animal in a swamp full of mosquitoes. The constant pinpricks, losing a drop of blood here and another there, and feeling nothing afterwards but irritation. How long can you live like that?
One summer when I was feeling particularly burnt out, I spent a lot of time sitting in the sunlight. It was satisfying in a primal way that it took all summer for me to put words around. What I loved about the Sun was that it was too big for me to affect. The Sun couldn’t want anything from me, because there was nothing I could do for it. And yet, it shone down on me anyway. That was what I needed.
And that’s what Ballou gets from his vision of the love of God. Ballou’s God is too big and and too grand to spend his time weighing the virtues and vices of us tiny creatures. He just shines. And when you feel his love shining down on you, what can you do but reflect it out?
Ballou’s theology has a kind of balance that secular visions of goodness often lack. Love flows in, love flows out. Ballou doesn’t see himself as a generator of the world’s love. The generator is elsewhere. He is just part of the distribution network. In Edith Wharton's terms, he sees himself as a mirror, not a candle. And mirrors don’t burn out.
One thing a religious engineer knows is that not everybody can use every tool. Just because it would be convenient to believe something, that doesn’t mean you can. I feel that very strongly when I contemplate Ballou’s God and imagine experiencing the power of his love. I can envy that experience, and I can try on the worldview that evokes it. But it doesn’t stick. I don’t seem to be capable of maintaining a belief in that kind of God.
So what can I do? Is there a tool I can use that is like God’s love, that works on that same problem in a similar way?
When you hold a question like that in your mind, sometimes clues turn up in the most unlikely places. I used to watch HBO’s gangster series, The Sopranos. (Talk about a world that is not conducive to sainthood.) I loved the theme song:
You woke up this morning, got yourself a gun.
Mama always said you’d be the chosen one.
And the next line I couldn’t make out until I looked it up on the internet. It says:
You’re one in a million, you gotta burn to shine.
You gotta burn to shine. That’s the problem in a nutshell. Hosea Ballou didn’t have to burn to shine. He could just reflect the light streaming down from God.
But if you are trying to shine in the darkness, if you are one shining person surrounded by a million others, who suck up that light and reflect nothing back, then the only way you can keep shining is to burn some kind of fuel inside yourself. And since people are finite, someday you’ll burn it all up.
That’s the problem with shining in the darkness, shining alone, shining as one in a million. People can’t do that for long, because it’s unbalanced. In the long run, goodness doesn’t come from us, it has to flow through us. We can hope to amplify it a little, to give a little better than we get, but we can’t generate goodness out of nothing, not for long.
Ballou’s theology helps him cope with that limitation. By imagining an ultimate source of goodness, of light and love and joy and inspiration, by calling that source God, and placing it at the center of his world, Ballou was forcing himself to pay attention to that side of the equation.
Whenever he began to feel drained and cynical (as I’m sure he must have at times), his theology told him to work on his relationship with God, to read and pray and meditate and do all the other things that nourished his soul. Activities that in a secular framing might seem self-centered, his theology re-cast as centered on God.
We can learn from that. Yes, it’s vitally important that goodness flow out of you, that you do good things and make the world brighter. But that’s not sustainable unless something is also flowing into you, unless your antenna is attuned to the sources of goodness in your life.
Sources. Did you catch what I did there? I made it plural. Because if I can’t maintain a belief in one ultimate source, I also can’t deny that many things in life nourish me, restore me, and make it possible for me to keep shining: the Sun, obviously. The beauty of Nature. Also the created beauty of art and music and literature. Sometimes through museums or books I can feel the brilliance shining from those ancient masters, as if they were distant stars whose light is just reaching us now.
Through the media, I also receive the gifts of today’s artists and musicians, as well as the stories of scientists searching for truth, activists fighting for justice, and all those compassionate people who are healing the sick and feeding the hungry and grieving with those who have suffered enormous losses. Their examples also keep me shining.
But, you know, there’s no substitute for the people you meet face to face. And that’s why I belong to a congregation.
That’s something that puzzles a lot of people about Unitarian Universalists. They can sort of get that we have a different philosophy and look at life a different way. But why do we do the church thing? Why do you come here? Nothing we do this morning will get you to Heaven or forgive your sins, or improve your chances in the lottery. So why did you come?
For me, it’s that I need to be in the presence of people who are trying to shine, who are trying to give something to the world rather than just take as much as they can. That’s what draws me to my congregation at home, and that’s what I see here.
I only spend a weekend or two a year in Quincy, so there are only a few of you that I know to any depth, and I’m sure all of you do many things I never hear about. But even with my limited exposure I feel nourished and inspired and energized by the glow of this community.
I’m inspired, for example, when I drop by the mechanic’s workshop that Joe has turned into his studio. Because here’s somebody at a point in life where he can do pretty much what he wants, and what he wants to do is make beautiful things. I’m inspired by Carol, and so many others here who make music and look for ways to share it with the world. I’m energized by the infectious enthusiasm of Mike talking about restoring cool old cars, or when Rob brings up long-dead philosophers as if they were personal friends that he’s sure I’d hit it off with. More people than I have time to name have told me about community projects or political causes that they support and work on, not because they’ll benefit personally, but just to make the world better.This is a community full of people who want to shine, who have found a source of joy in life and want to share it.
Two years ago, when my father was dying, I felt this community’s light very personally. Several of you made sure that when I didn’t have to be at the nursing home or the hospital, I had somewhere to go and someone to talk to when I got there. I will always be grateful for that.
There is a lot of light shining in this community, and a lot of places to look for nurturance and inspiration.
But you do have to look. You have to pay attention. Opening up to the sources of light and love and joy and inspiration in a Unitarian Universalist church today may not sound as important as opening up to the love of God was in a 19th-century Universalist church. But it is, because that’s how you balance the equation.
If you don’t, then this all becomes just another drain, another set of responsibilities, another list of good deeds to do. There’s money to give and classes to teach and social action projects to organize and committees to chair and somebody has to make the coffee and on and on and on. More mosquitoes. More drops of blood. More irritation.
If you just keep your head down and work, you can start to believe that you are a single light shining in the darkness, and that the only way to keep shining is to keep burning up something finite and precious inside yourself. That misses the whole point of a Unitarian congregation. Lights are shining around you. On a regular basis, you need to look up and just bask in the glow.
The closing hymn is # 118, “This Little Light of Mine”. But before we sing, I have to confess that until recently I never liked this song, because I sang it wrong. I thought it was all about me promising to shine brighter, to do more. And where was the energy for that going to come from?
I was missing the significance of singing the song together. This isn’t just about you promising to shine brighter for others, it’s also about the rest of us promising to shine brighter for you. So as you sing, don’t just make a promise, accept the promises of the people around you. Not all of those promises will be fulfilled, but many will be. You aren’t going to have to shine alone. This community is full of light and love and the desire to give and create and do good. You don’t have to generate that, you just need to conduct it and reflect it out into the world.
So let’s sing.
Almost exactly a year ago, I gave a talk “Religion and the Imagination” at the Unitarian Church of Quincy, Illinois. The text and audio of that Sunday service is here. (It’s slightly longer, and has two additional readings.)
This past Sunday, I updated that talk for my home church in Bedford, Massachusetts. You can watch that service here, and also hear the choir do several thematic songs, including John Lennon’s “Imagine”.
All the text pieces of the Bedford service are in this post.
The human mind is a story processor, not a logic processor. — Jonathan Haidt
All [people] dream, but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds, wake in the day to find that it was vanity. But the dreamers of the day are dangerous ... for they may act on their dreams with open eyes, to make them possible. — Lawrence of Arabia, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom
From “The Folly of Half-way Liberalism” by John Dietrich (1930)
The modern liberal … is constantly telling us that things are both this and that, instead of either this or that. Would that our modern liberal would take the bull by the horns and grapple decisively with that tremendous either-or. Either the things of which religion speaks are realities, or they are illusions. If they are realities, let us embrace them. If they are illusions, let us dismiss them.
From “How My Daughter Taught Me To Love Myth-Making” by Kyle Cupp
Today my daughter would have been four years old. Though Vivian is no longer with us, we will celebrate her birthday this evening, lighting a candle, and in its glow, dine and sing and share her story. We’ll do all this in memory of her.
Her older brother, now seven, has a few memories and mementos. Her younger sister knows her only by our pictures, treasured keepsakes, and our words. My wife and I contemplate her life as best we can with what we have left to us.
This is our ritual, our tradition, our own little family myth-making. It is how we, in an ever new present, give meaning to a life lived in an ever more distant past. It’s how we bridge the distance. It’s how we devote ourselves to someone now with us only in memory.
Vivian breathed, cooed, and gave us one loud cry when she was first carried through the cold hospital air. Not what I’d usually call major life accomplishments, but they were hers and about all she did. My own achievements seem insignificantly small next to the movements of the planets and the stars. If I can think the world of anyone’s small steps, I can think the world of hers.
What is the meaning of her life? What is the meaning of my own? I’ve come to believe that these are not questions with answers “out there” discoverable only if I search long enough, but questions I am called to answer creatively in my own small way, responding to the past from where I happen to be in the present moment, making something new for the future.
Vivian won’t be present for her party, so we will have to make her present.
Why, a little girl once asked me, don’t grown-ups like to use their imaginations? Hidden in that question was a judgement and an accusation. At the time, we had just landed on a distant planet, and we had a mission that I kept losing track of. Her younger brother had a lot to add to the shared fantasy, but I could barely keep up. Why was I so dull, so unimaginative, so grown up?
That question stuck with me for months, especially when I was with children. And eventually an answer came to me: The adult imagination is every bit as vigorous as a child's, and we live surrounded by imaginary things. But rather than take credit for those imaginative products, we insist that they are real.
Much of a child’s education consists of learning to see what adults see, things that (strictly speaking) are not there. We see danger in streets that (at the moment) have no traffic. We see property lines, and invisible connections between objects and their owners. When the living room floor is cluttered, we see not just where things are, but also where they belong, and the system of organization that wants to pull them back into place. We see not just where we are in a room, but also where we are on the map and in the schedule and on the org chart. The left side of the highway looks physically different to us than the right side.
Kids don’t see any of that stuff until we teach them. Because it’s not real.
A few years ago I was in London with the LaFrance-Lindens. Jo-Jo was ten and Tommy seven. When they knew where we were going, they loved to run ahead, which got kind of scary in underground stations. The boys would thread their way through a crowd by racing up to within an inch of somebody, and then changing direction at the last instant like a halfback avoiding a linebacker. It was nerve-wracking to watch, but they never ran into anybody, and so it was hard to explain why they should slow down.
Eventually I realized that they simply did not see what I saw. I saw a bubble of personal space around each person. And so I saw the boys violently bashing their bubbles into other people’s bubbles. But they didn’t see that, because those bubbles were imaginary.
In some theories of physics, actual particles are surrounded by clouds of virtual particles, which probably aren’t there, but they could be; and somehow all that possibility needs to be accounted for. Similarly, in the adult world actual events are surrounded by clouds of virtual events: things that haven’t happened and maybe never will, but could.
So a child will set a glass of orange juice on the edge of a table and go on playing. But any adult who looks at that glass will instantly see all the ways it could be knocked off. It is as if the real glass were surrounded by virtual orange-juice glasses that have already toppled to the floor and broken. We see those broken glasses, but children don’t, because they’re not really there.
Some days a virtual event is the most striking thing that happens. Say you’re walking beside the Great Road holding a child’s hand. But your grip gets sweaty. She slips away, darts out into traffic, and in just a second or two is on the opposite sidewalk perfectly safe. A couple of cars screeched to a halt, but no real harm was done.
The girl will probably not think twice about that incident, because she experienced only what really happened. But you ... you saw all the virtual cars that didn’t stop in time and all the virtual little girls who were injured or maybe even killed. That’s what leaves you shaking, and what will come back to you in the middle of the night: not the real event, but the one you saw in your imagination.
Like children, we adults make our fantasies more elaborate and more stable by sharing them with others. A shared fantasy can seem to have an external reality, because even if it slips your mind, other people can keep it going and pull you back in.
But I like to run what I call the amnesia test: Test something's reality by asking whether it would still exist if we all forgot about it at the same time. For example, if one night we all forgot about the Sun, I’m pretty confident we'd rediscover it in the morning. And if we all forgot about gravity, I think it would regain our attention fairly quickly.
But on the other hand, if everyone simultaneously forgot that paper money has value, then it wouldn’t. Real as it may seem sometimes, money is an act of shared imagination. So are laws. If we all simultaneously forgot the laws, there wouldn’t be any. It’s our shared imagination that holds that system together.
Communities also fail the amnesia test. If I forgot about this church, I hope the rest of you would pull me back. “Where have you been?” you might say. “We miss you.” Or I might do the same for you.
But if we all forgot at the same time, First Parish would just be gone. Because the fundamental place this church exists isn’t in this building or in the legal structure of the bylaws, but in our imaginations. So if you new members are wondering exactly what you've signed up for, this is my answer: You've joined our shared fantasy, and we hope you'll lend the power of your imagination to the task of making this community as real as money or law.
Now, many of our social and cultural inventions serve some kind of purpose. So even if everybody forgot about them, they might eventually get replaced by something similar. Eventually there could be new communities and new laws and new economies that had some kind of currency. But I don’t believe those amnesiac people would rediscover the inherent worth of dollar bills or driving on the right. Because the value of those things is fundamentally imaginary.
But what would happen to the objects of religion? What would happen to God or the afterlife or souls? If everyone simultaneously forgot about those things would they be gone? Or are they as real as the Sun or gravity, so that we would have to rediscover them?
Reasonable people disagree about this, but personally I believe religion would be like law or money. New religions might develop. But the specifics of current religions — the theologies and cosmologies, the visions of Heaven and Hell and the plans of salvation that get us to one or the other — I believe those things would be gone, because they are products of imagination.
Now, for people who share my opinion, it’s easy to stop the thought experiment there and congratulate ourselves on how realistic we are: Jehovah and Allah and Zeus are imaginary; we don’t believe in them; aren’t we smart?
That self-congratulation is what I hear when atheists like Christopher Hitchens or Richard Dawkins compare God to the Easter Bunny or the Tooth Fairy. But I have a problem with that. Because it isn’t just other people’s God-based religions that fail the amnesia test. My own humanistic religion fails it too.
What would happen to, say, human rights if we all forgot about them? I think they’d be gone. Look at that list of Unitarian Universalist principles at the front of the hymnal. What would happen to the inherent worth and dignity of every person if we all stopped imagining it? What would happen to the right of conscience or the goal of world community? What would happen to the interdependent web of all existence? What would happen to something as venerable and glorious as Justice itself?
I think all those things would be gone. These things are not truths, they're visions, and they exist because we imagine them. And so that is another thing I believe you commit yourself to when you become a Unitarian Universalist: We're not asking you to commit yourself to believing in the truth of the principles, the way Christians commit themselves to the Apostles Creed. We're asking you to commit your imagination to envisioning the principles, to live as if everyone had worth and dignity, as if we were all part of an interdependent web, as if justice, equity, and compassion were as real as property or the banking system.
So where am I going with all this? My point is that John Dietrich's either-or question is the wrong one. It sets us up to keep having the wrong arguments about religion, arguments that will keep going round and round without convincing anyone. On one side, fundamentalists tell us that the objects of their religion — God, Heaven, and so on — are as real as the Sun or gravity. And so they are important and deserve respect. On the other side, atheists tell us that the objects of religion are imaginary like the Easter Bunny. And so they are unimportant and deserve scorn.
But what the amnesia test teaches me is that if God and the afterlife are imaginary, they do have something in common with the Easter Bunny. But they also have something in common with justice and human rights. Just because something comes from the human imagination doesn't mean that it isn't also important and deserving of respect.
The discussion we ought to be having is not whether the objects of religion are real, as if we ourselves stand in an unembellished reality and can reject the products of imagination whenever they invade our rock-solid realm. No, the discussion we ought to be having is why human beings have imagined these things, what we are trying to accomplish by imagining them, and which imaginative products best fulfill those purposes.
For example, when my father was dying, he used his imagination to envision a way that his life story might continue past his physical death. He imagined that he had a soul, and that when he died, his soul would live on in Heaven, a place where the souls of the dead go, where his wife and parents already were, and where his children might join him someday.
I didn't -- and don't -- believe in this vision. But that's not because I stand firmly in rock-solid reality and dismiss all imaginary things. I also use my imagination to envision my life as part of a story that does not end when my body dies. I do this by identifying with causes larger than myself, and by imagining connections between myself and the people who will carry on those struggles after me.
Tom Joad is doing something similar in The Grapes of Wrath when he says
wherever there's a fight, so hungry people can eat, I'll be there. Wherever there's a cop beatin' up a guy, I'll be there. I'll be in the way guys yell when they're mad. I'll be in the way kids laugh when they're hungry and they know supper's ready, and when the people are eatin' the stuff they raise and livin' in the houses they build - I'll be there, too.
That's vision. That's imagination. Humanists do it too.
Now, once you've had that realization, it's tempting to go relativistic: I imagine things, you imagine things ... it's all the same. But my point is different: Once we give up the pretense that our religion is realistic while their religion is fantasy, once we realize how important imagination is to everybody, then we're in a position to talk about the right issue: the difference between good imagination and bad imagination.
The reading about the birthday party for the girl who died in infancy is another example of this middle position. A fundamentalist might claim Kyle Cupp's family ritual speaks to a real soul in a real Heaven. An atheist might say that souls are not real, so there’s no point trying to “make Vivian present” on her birthday. She’s dead, so she’s not present, and that’s that.
But Cupp himself takes a more subtle view. He recognizes that Vivian’s presence is imaginary, but her imaginary presence is precisely the point. Without such a ritual, his ability to imagine Vivian would fade, and part of the meaning of his life would be gone. The ritual addresses a question whose answer is not “out there”, but one that he feels “called to answer creatively in my own small way.”
I don't think I can finish this talk without confessing just how far I've been willing to take these ideas in my own life. For a few years in the 80s and 90s, I had what should have been my ideal job as a mathematican: I made an industry-level salary, but had an almost academic level of freedom to research whatever interested me.
I thought I ought to be deliriously happy, and yet I wasn't, and I wondered why. So I asked myself: "What’s the difference between a good work day and a bad work day?" And the answer popped right into my mind: On a good day, I was motivated by a pure spirit of inquiry. I had questions I wanted to answer, so I just sat down and worked on them. But on a bad day, I fretted about the usual office stuff -- reviews and funding and promotions -- and the spirit of inquiry got lost.
And then I listened to what I had just said: “the Spirit of Inquiry”. Sure, it was a metaphor, a figure of speech. But the metaphor captured something. What my job had on its good days and lacked on its bad days was a reverent attitude of service. On my good days, my work was a kind of worship.
So I went with that. I created a one-man religion devoted to the Spirit of Inquiry. I drew a symbol for my religion on a big piece of paper and taped it to my desktop. All day long it was covered by my desk pad, so only I knew it was there.
When it was time to go home, I put my desk pad aside, looked at the symbol and asked how well I had served the Spirit of Inquiry that day. And then, whatever the answer, I would reverently put the four tools of my research -- compass, calculator, ruler, and pencil -- in their appropriate places on the symbol. The next morning, the symbol would be the first thing I saw when I came in. I would reverently ask the blessing of the Spirit, remove my tools, replace the desk pad, and begin my day.
I did that for years, as long as I had that job, and from those years of practice, I can report this about the worship of the Spirit of Inquiry: It worked. I became happier, saner, and more focused on what was important to me. And the Spirit never got out of hand. It never demanded sacrifices or made me its prophet or condemned my co-workers to Hell.
Now, a hard-line atheist might scornfully tell me that the Spirit of Inquiry is not real. I didn’t work in the presence of a deity, I just had an imaginary friend. In response, I could turn fundamentalist and argue for the Spirit’s reality. And if I were stubborn enough, that argument could go round and round, the way religious arguments do.
Or I could accept the content of the criticism and reject the scorn it carries: The Spirit isn’t real the way rocks and tables are real. It was a projection of my unconscious. I had an imaginary friend.
So?
If we make that shift, if we stop arguing about whether the objects of religion are real, and instead think about why we might imagine them and how well they serve the purposes we need them to serve, that opens a whole new conversation. Instead of questioning whether someone’s God is real, let’s talk about what is accomplished by envisioning that God.
If God is the organizing principle of someone’s life, what kind of life does God organize? Is it a life of compassion and generosity, or of self-centeredness and self-righteousness? Do worshippers open up to mystery and wonder, or embrace small-minded arrogance? Are they filled with awe and gratitude, or with a sense of special entitlement? Does a vision of the afterlife help people accept death, or fill them with guilt and anxiety? Does it give them confidence to live more fully, or does it freeze them into inaction or rationalize procrastination?
As I think we all know: It can go either way. In religion as anywhere else, the power of imagination can be used wisely or unwisely.
And once we recognize that, we face the challenge laid down by the philosopher Stan Lee: "With great power comes great responsibility."
If we tell ourselves that we just believe in what is real, we're not just fooling ourselves, we’re letting ourselves off the hook. Because reality can take care of itself, but visions need our participation. If justice is a vision, then it’s not enough to passively believe in it. We need to make it real. We need to practice envisioning justice, so that it will always be present to us and not wink out when we need it most.
If the inherent worth of each person and the interconnected web of all existence are visions rather than facts, then we need to invoke those visions, experience them, and pass them on to others.
And if a community like First Parish exists primarily in our imaginations, then we need to do more than just join and attend or even contribute. We also need to share our visions of what this community is and what it means and what it could be. A church is a vessel for shared imagination. So if we're not regularly filling that vessel and then drinking from it when our personal visions falter, we're missing the point.
Or, on the other hand, we could be asking ourselves what kinds of visions we need and the world needs. We could commit ourselves to that envisioning process and do it together, pooling our imaginative power to resist the cynical and nihilistic forces of the larger culture. If we did that, then, I believe, we would truly be using our imaginations like grown ups.
Adapted from “It Matters What We Believe” by Sophia Lyons Fahs:
It matters what we imagine.
Some visions are like walled gardens. They encourage exclusiveness, and the feeling of being especially privileged. Other visions are expansive and lead the way into wider and deeper sympathies.
Some visions are like shadows, clouding children's days with fears of unknown calamities. Other visions are like sunshine, blessing children with the warmth of happiness.
Some visions are divisive, separating the saved from the unsaved, friends from enemies. Other visions are bonds in a world community, where sincere differences beautify the pattern.
Some visions are like blinders, shutting off the power to choose one's own direction. Other visions are like gateways opening wide vistas for exploration.
Some visions weaken a person's selfhood. They blight the growth of resourcefulness. Other visions nurture self-confidence and enrich the feeling of personal worth.
Some visions are rigid, like the body of death, impotent in a changing world. Other visions are pliable, like the young sapling, ever growing with the upward thrust of life.
May 3, 2015 at the Unitarian Church of Quincy, Illinois.
Opening Words: "Outwitted" by Edwin Markham
Introduction to the Reading: Historically, Unitarian Universalism gets the “Universalist” part of its name from the Christian doctrine of universal salvation, the belief that Jesus’ sacrifice paid the freight for everyone, so sooner or later — no matter what they believe or how evil they are — everyone is going to wind up in Heaven. There couldn't possibly be a Hell, because God is too good to create one, and God loves each human soul too much to give up on it and cast it away forever.
As you might imagine, the Catholic Church considered universal salvation a heresy. They started stamping it out in the third century, but no matter how many books or heretics they burnedit kept popping up every few generations, until in colonial America it became the Universalist Church.
What made universal salvation so hard to suppress was that unpredictable people at unpredictable times kept having the same religious experience: a vision of the goodness of God and the unconditionality of God’s love.
Christians are still having that vision, whether they’ve ever been exposed to Unitarian Universalism or not. Occasionally they have it at very inconvenient times. In 2005, the radio program This American Life devoted an episode to the extremely inconvenient universalist awakening of Carlton Pearson.
Carlton was a rising black televangelist, a protege of Oral Roberts. He had appeared in the pulpit with Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. His Higher Dimensions megachurch in Tulsa was drawing 5,000 people a week. And then this happened:
Reading: From This American Life (December 16, 2005)
Well, my little girl, who will be nine next month, was an infant. I was watching the evening news. The Hutus and Tutus were returning from Rwanda to Uganda, and Peter Jennings was doing a piece on it.
Now, Majeste was in my lap, my little girl. I'm eating the meal, and I'm watching these little kids with swollen bellies. And it looks like their skin is stretched across their little skeletal remains. Their hair is kind of red from malnutrition. The babies, they've got flies in the corners of their eyes and of their mouths. And they reach for their mother's breast, and the mother's breast looks like a little pencil hanging there. I mean, the baby's reaching for the breast, there's no milk.
And I, with my little fat-faced baby, and a plate of food and a big-screen television. And I said, "God, I don't know how you can call yourself a loving, sovereign God and allow these people to suffer this way and just suck them right into Hell," which is what was my assumption.
And I heard a voice say within me, "So that's what you think we're doing?"
And I remember I didn't say yes or no. I said, "That's what I've been taught."
"We're sucking them into Hell?" I said,
"Yes." "And what would change that?"
"Well, they need to get saved."
"And how would that happen?"
"Well, somebody needs to preach the Gospel to them and get them saved."
"So if you think the only way they're going to get saved is for somebody to preach the Gospel to them and that we're sucking them into Hell, why don't you put your little baby down, turn your big-screen television off, push your plate away, get on the first thing smoking, and go get them saved?"
And I remember I broke into tears. I was very upset. I remember thinking, "God, don't put that guilt on me. You know I've given you the best 40 years of my life. Besides, I can't save the whole world. I'm doing the best I can. I can't save this whole world."
And that's where I remember, and I believe it was God, saying, "Precisely. You can't save this world. That's what we did. Do you think we're sucking them into Hell? Can't you see they're already there? That's Hell. You keep creating and inventing that for yourselves. I'm taking them into My presence."
And I thought, well, I'll be. That's weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth. That's where the pain comes from. We do that to each other, and we do it to ourselves. Then I saw emergency rooms. I saw divorce court. I saw jails and prisons. I saw how we create Hell on this planet for each other. And for the first time in my life, I did not see God as the inventor of Hell.
Talk: If you read my Weekly Sift blog, you probably know that I reliably take the positions that are known as “politically correct”: I support marriage equality, I think black lives matter, I believe women when they talk about rape, I defend Muslims, I wish the rich paid more taxes, I advocate negotiating with unpopular countries like Iran and Cuba, I think voting should be easy, I believe in unions and a higher minimum wage, I think poor people usually work harder than rich people, I want everyone to have access to health care, and the idea that a few cheaters might be abusing food stamps doesn’t bother me nearly so much as the possibility that there still might be some hungry people out there.
Down the line, politically correct.
Now, describing those positions that way is disparaging, because it implies that they are just a fashion. These are the chic ideas among the liberal tribe these days, and we display them so that we will recognize each other.
And it works. If I meet a stranger and she says, “It’s a shame Elizabeth Warren won’t challenge Hillary” I think: “Ah, one of my people.”
Because human beings are like that. We’re tribal. It’s evolution — another one of those fashionable liberal ideas. One explanation for why the brains of primates got bigger was that we needed to do a lot of social processing to hold together larger groups. Larger groups have a survival advantage, so evolution favors larger brains.
If you compare humans to other primates, our brain size says we should run in tribes of about 150, compared to under 100 for chimpanzees and bonobos. That’s called “Dunbar’s number” and even today, it shows up in the literature about church size. In congregations with less than 150 members, everybody can have a personal relationship with everybody else. But 150 members is often a crisis point, and requires some kind of reorganization. It’s biology.
Now, one way our ancestors got around those limitations and held together tribes larger than 150 was to invent fashion. We learned to identify with each other's external trappings even if we didn't have a personal relationship. So we’d paint our bodies red or put bones through our noses, and that way if we met someone we didn't recognize, we could tell whether or not he belonged to our tribe. And if the next tribe started to copy us, then we’d have to change to a different color or a different kind of bone. Because that's how fashion works. It’s how like-minded people recognize each other.
Naturally, it’s easier for me to spot political fashionability in people I disagree with. For example, I’ll bet most of you know some smart, scientifically literate conservative who for some reason is blind to the evidence for global warming. You can be having a perfectly intelligent conversation, but something strange happens when climate change come up. He just can’t go there.
It’s tribal. Ten or fifteen years ago, a John McCain or a Newt Gingrich could acknowledge global warming. But fashion shifted, and climate change became a global socialist conspiracy. Today, a conservative who admits to believing in it risks being ostracized from his political community.
Of course, liberals and conservatives aren’t perfect mirror images of each other, so just because the other side has some fault doesn’t mean my side necessarily has it too. But in this case I think it’s fair to say that sometimes we do. Because tribalism and fashionability aren’t flaws in the conservative worldview, they’re part of basic humanity. We are all tempted to bend over backwards to fit in with the people we recognize as our own.
But just because an opinion or a practice is fashionable doesn’t mean it’s just fashionable. There also might be some good reason for it. For example, children are still reciting “Eeny Meeny Miney Moe”, but they say it differently than I did. Today they say, “Catch a tiger by the toe.” But if you’re my age or a little older, maybe you remember saying, “Catch a nigger by the toe.” We didn’t necessarily think about what we were saying, that’s just how the rhyme went in those days.
That version is out of fashion now, but it’s not just fashion that keeps us from teaching it to our children. There’s a reason to say it the new way, and I don’t think the old rhyme is ever going to come back.
So yes, I understand that all the opinions I listed at the beginning of this talk are fashionable among liberals, but that doesn’t mean that nothing more than fashion links them all together.
Conservatives usually will grant me that. My views aren’t just liberal chic, they come from a higher principle. Like: I hate America. Or I want to destroy western civilization. Or maybe I just hate myself, so I push against whites and men and Americans and anybody else who resembles me.
Those certainly are unifying principles. But they’re not the one I had in mind. To me, all those positions on all those diverse issues arise from the spirit of Universalism as I understand it. Which is not to say that Universalism has a political dogma, or that you can’t be a good Unitarian Universalist if you disagree. But this is where Universalism takes me.
When I introduced the reading I talked about the origins of Universalism in the doctrine of universal salvation. When you describe it that way, Universalism seems very etherial and other-worldly. It’s all about God and the afterlife, and doesn’t seem to have much to do with food stamps or foreign policy. But those theological ideas laid the groundwork for a radical kind of Humanism that we're still practicing today.
You see, in orthodox Christianity, as in many other faiths, the afterlife isn't one place, it's two places: a blissful Heaven and a torturous Hell. And that creates a fundamental division in humanity between the Saved, who will be on the boat to Heaven, and the Damned, who will be on the boat to Hell. Orthodox believers see this not as some unfortunate accident, but as divine justice. The Damned are bound for eternal torment because that is what they deserve.
That vision of the afterlife doesn’t force believers to take a harsh view of life here and now — many people who believe in Hell are kind and generous here on Earth. But if you have any harshness already in you, this vision of the Saved and the Damned will magnify it. Because it does lend itself to the harsh view that once you step off the path of righteousness, you deserve whatever you get.
So if a young woman gets raped, well, what did she think would happen when she went to that party dressed like that? If a gay man gets AIDS, if a petty criminal gets killed by police, if a Muslim villager becomes collateral damage in a drone strike, why do they deserve our compassion? They stepped off the path laid out in a fundamentalist interpretation of the Bible, and they got what was coming to them.
If you’re not careful, the Saved and the Damned can come to seem like two different species. In the New Testament, Jesus uses Judgment Day metaphors that seem to say that. He talks about God separating the sheep from the goats, or about the harvest, when the grain is kept but the weeds are burned.
John Calvin went a step further. Not only would humanity be divided at the end of time, but it had been two species all along. From the moment of Creation, God had predestined some souls for Heaven and others for Hell. That was the kind of Christianity that many of the early American Universalists grew up with.
Human beings, as I was saying before, have a tendency towards tribalism. And if you’re not careful, this theology of the Saved and the Damned can ally itself with your tribal impulses. And then the Saved become the Good People, the people like us, and the Damned are the Bad People, the people like them. It becomes easier to look at someone who is different, and see not a fellow human being, a child of the same God, possessed of the same rights and faculties I have, but rather someone whose ticket to Hell is already punched and only the formality of death is delaying the completion of his damnation.
That is certainly how colonial Americans behaved sometimes. These heathen Indians — why shouldn’t they be driven off this land where I want to build my City on a Hill for the greater glory of God? These pagan Africans — why shouldn’t they be my slaves? And if I convert either of them to Christianity, well then they should thank me. I get their land and their labor, but they get eternal salvation, so it works out for everyone.
Universalism said no to all this. There aren’t two afterlives or two boats to the afterlife, no Saved and Damned. There are just people. Humanity is one species, and we are all in the same boat. We all have the same basic set of emotions, the same drives, the same temptations, and the same yearnings for a better life.
From the very beginning, that had political implications. When American Universalists began to think of themselves as a national movement, one of the first things they did was to call for the abolition of slavery. (They were the second denomination to do that, after the Quakers.) And perhaps the beginning of American feminism was the essay “On the Equality of the Sexes”, written in 1779 by Judith Sargent Murray, the wife of Universalist leader John Murray.
The political upshot of Universalism — which continues in Unitarian Universalism today, even among those of us who don't believe in God or the afterlife any more — is that since God isn’t writing anybody off, we don’t get to either. We are obligated to try to imagine the full humanity of everyone, to picture them not as damned or evil or inconsequential, but as people deserving of the same kind of consideration we would like to claim for ourselves.
That’s an easy thing to say, and easy to nod to when somebody else says it. But in actual practice, it is difficult and radical. Not many people manage it consistently, and I know I find it a struggle.
When people live far away from us, or live so differently from us that we are afraid of them, or if they act in ways we find inconvenient, or if they are unpopular and lack the power to make us respect their point of view, it’s easy to slip into imagining them in stereotyped ways rather than seeing them as human beings as deep and as complicated as we are.
When this country first started debating marriage equality, I’d often hear someone say, “I can’t understand why two men would even want to get married.” Of course the people who said this were often married themselves and knew exactly why they had done it: They wanted to share a life with someone, to tell the world that this relationship was special, to build a secure household for raising children. Why a same-sex couple might want to marry was a mystery only to straights who could not let themselves imagine that gays and lesbians could be so much like them.
When protest — and sometimes violence — was erupting in Ferguson, and again last weekend in Baltimore, I heard the most amazing explanations of why people were out in the streets: Looting and burning weren’t isolated responses to mistreatment, they were the whole point. Michael Brown or Freddie Gray were just excuses to throw off the constraints of law and civilization.
Again and again, I heard TV pundits talk about our fellow citizens as if they were animals to be tamed or vermin to be controlled. So few called on us to imagine our own neighborhoods being similarly tamed and controlled, or to ask ourselves how we would respond to such treatment.
Even when the poor are quiet, I hear astounding things about them. They are “lucky duckies” because they don’t have to work or pay taxes. They have no pride or ambition, and they don’t want their children to work hard and get an education and succeed. Somehow, that description is easier to believe than that the poor want the same things from life we do, but just have a harder time getting them.
Foreign countries are also split into the Good People and the Bad People. The Good Foreigners accept the place in the world order that the United States has assigned them, and the Bad Foreigners don’t.
And the reason they don’t is not because they love their land and their people the way we love ours. It’s not because they want their country to find its own place in the world or to shape its own system of government like we did. It’s not even because they fear and distrust us the same way we fear and distrust them.
No, they oppose us because they are all madmen and monsters. They hate freedom. They are enemies of all human civilization. There is no understanding them or talking to them; all we can hope to do is go to war and kill them.
Universalism says no to all that.
It says that if you want to understand other people, the place to start is with our shared humanity and all that it implies. People living very different lives from us may have been shaped by different experiences, but underneath all that nearly all of them have the same needs, the same drives, the same fears, and the same hopes that we do. They aren’t a species of Bad People pledged to the Devil with a reservation on the boat to Hell. They have the same ticket to life and death that we all do.
Now I can’t just stop there without responding to the most common objection to Universalism: Universalism, people will tell you, is a rose-tinted worldview. Everybody is nice. Everybody is trustworthy. Everybody is like us. If you believe that, the critics say, you’ll be a sucker. Because bad people exist, evil exists, and you won’t be able to deal with that evil, because you have made yourself blind to it.
There is a difficulty there, a challenge. But it’s not the one the critics claim. If you approach the world as a Universalist, if you envision all people as human in the same way that you are human, then you won’t be able to deal with evil — if you imagine that there is no evil in you.
But if you give in to the tribal temptation to say “We are the Good People”, if you give in to the egotistic temptation to say “I am Good”, then you need to believe in the Bad People. Because how else could the world be this way? We didn’t do it.
Earlier in the talk I criticized a couple of things Jesus said. Now I’d like to give him credit for an observation I find insightful: “Whosoever hates his brother is a murderer.”
A lot of people interpret that in a way that doesn’t do Jesus much credit. They think he’s holding us responsible for the bad thoughts we don’t act on. But I think he’s saying that you’re kidding yourself if you imagine that some great moral divide separates you from the Bad People.
Have you ever hated someone? Then you know where murder comes from. Have you been afraid and humiliated? Then you know why people lash out. Have you ever wanted to slough off inconvenient responsibilities? To forget a promise? To look at someone else’s suffering and say, “I don’t have anything to do with that” when deep down you know you really do? Then you know why people cheat and betray each other’s trust. Don’t act like evil is some great mystery; it isn’t. We all live with it all the time.
Universalism doesn’t deny the existence of evil, or the struggle between good and evil. It just refuses to frame that struggle as an external battle between Good People like us and Bad People like them. It doesn’t see the battle between good and evil as something that’s happening far away in Syria or the Ukraine, or in Washington, or in the poor neighborhoods of St. Louis or Baltimore.
Good and evil are both part of our human inheritance, and not even an Almighty God can divide them so neatly as to send the Good to Heaven and the Evil to Hell. The battle between good and evil is always happening, right here right now, inside each and every one of us. We win some and we lose some. All of us.
I want to close back where I started, with political correctness and the liberal tribe. One consequence of recognizing that humanity is one species and we’re all in the same boat is that we have to own up to feeling the same tribal temptations that we see in our opponents. Universalism can warn us against that human tendency, but it can’t completely inoculate us.
And so every day on my Twitter and Facebook feeds, I see link after link about the horrible things the other side is saying or doing;links that are there mainly to raise my anger, and to reinforce the idea that I and my friends are the Good People fighting the Bad People. And the Bad People do not have their own, perhaps misguided, view of right and good. They are monsters and maniacs, committed to falsehood and impervious to reason or compassion. So if my side doesn't do whatever it takes to win, the world will plunge into eternal darkness.
That’s not a Universalist style of rhetoric.
I face that issue every week when I put the Sift together. Whatever outrageous thing Michele Bachmann or Louie Gohmert said this week, am I tempted to include it because my readers need to know the full range of the ideas that are out there? Or am I just trying to raise their blood pressure and build their sense of our common righteousness?
I can't ignore that question. Because there is a weakness in the Universalist position, one that the other side doesn’t share: We can lose by winning. If we win by demonizing and stereotyping, if we win by casting ourselves as the Saved and our opponents as the Damned — then we’ve lost. If good vs. evil is a battle inside each person, then evil can win in us at the very moment that we are winning in the external world.
Polarization is a fact of today’s political landscape, and we have to deal with it. But we can’t afford to lose ourselves in polarization. Because our virtues are not divine, they’re human. And their vices are not demonic, they’re human.
Good and evil are both part of the human inheritance that everyone shares. And whenever we forget that, no matter what is happening on the battlefield out there, we’re losing.
Closing words: “Fire and Ice” by Robert Frost
· There is limited opportunity for or lesser value placed upon physical expression.
· Discourse about the body is marginalized or regarded as improper.
· Discourse about matters of the mind or spirit are privileged over matters of the body.
· The adolescent and pre-adolescent dichotomization between “jocks” and “nerds” continues to influence social arrangements.
· The dualisms of the Western world continue to make hierarchical distinctions between heaven / earth, spirit / matter, mind / body, etc.
· Liberal social institutions tend to be at the forefront of challenging oppression. Becoming “disembodied” is a conscious or unconscious strategy for combatting ableism and gendered bodily discrimination (fat shaming, sexualization, etc.)
Nothing seems to attract so much derision in a vegetarian diet as the prospect of a vegetarian ham.
Some, more serious vegetarians object to mock meats, and I’ve heard enough non-vegetarians dismiss the idea with disgust. “Why not eat the real thing?” But nobody looks at a sausage and asks, “why don’t you eat real snake?”
The fact is I liked ham before, and just because I don’t eat animals, it doesn’t mean I don’t tidbits of something chewy, smoky and savory in a hot or cold dish. That’s good enough to call it ham. Or even Spam. I liked it fried, in sandwiches, after all. If I can have that in a format I’m willing to eat, I will.
And they exist, in several different brands. But they’re almost all imported from Taiwan frozen, in one kilogram logs so large they can be fairly mistaken as a weapon. They’re not particulary easy to get, and a kilogram is a lot if you don’t like it. But I’ve never seen reviews (in English anyway, and the only other language I read is Esperanto.)
I want to help other would-be vegetarian ham eaters. My husband Jonathan and I bought three of these frozen ham logs — all vegan; be warned, some exist with egg white — over the Christmas holiday. As we eat them, I’ll review them.
At the risk of dissuading all of you from trying a vegan ham, Hubby and I started on the one we had never seen before and which — to be fair — didn’t even describe itself as ham or any kind of meat.
Introducing the Chef Bowl Frz. Soy Protein Food.
It weighs 1050 grams, so slightly larger than the others to be reviewed, which are 1000 grams. All cost pennies less than $10, and we bought them at the Good Fortune Supermarket, at the Eden Center in Falls Church, Virginia.
It’s slightly chewy, slightly spongy and eraser pink all the way through and so a better comparable might be cheap bologna (though not so fatty) than ham. Like bologna, it didn’t have much flavor and what flavor it did have wasn’t quite what you’d call ham-like. It was insipid in black-eyed peas.
The two things that it has going for it is that you can buy a half-sized log and that if it’s your only option it is better than nothing. I might bake it to warm through and serve it with a sweet-sour condiment like fried apples or pineapple, or cube it for fried rice. But we have better options and so I’ll buy those — and later review them — instead. It also had fewer ingredients than other vegan hams, but given its other failings, I’ll not call that a plus.
Let me start by saying I really like this product. Even if it has about two too many words in its name. I think “vegetarian ham” is easier to understand than a “chicken ham.” After all, a vegetarian analog is like the meaty original, but made without animals. But is a vegetarian chicken ham a now-meat-free version of a ham, but originally made with bird flesh? Or pork, made like bird, but now made with soy?
It’s none of these, I gather. It’s light, savory, lightly spiced vegetarian product that I’d call “imitation chicken lunch meat”– which I think gets the point across, even if that might not pass regulatory muster, and again suffers for having two too many words in it. And to be clear, it’s like a processed chicken product, like the inner part of a chicken nugget, so don’t expect long fibers of imitation meat.
A confession. I don’t think I ate this one hot, but it has probably enough flavor to stand up in a soup. Indeed, next time I hope to make a pot pie with it. But it’s so delicious cold that this is how we plowed through it. Often in strips on a plate with other food, or sandwiches. I think this is the same product that my go-to Vietnamese Buddhist restaurant serves in slivers in a cold lotus root salad (Gỏi ngó sen). Both the restaurant and the supermarket where we got the Lam Sheng Kee Vegetarian Ham (Chicken Flavor) is at the Eden Center, in Falls Church, in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. It comes frozen, in a 1 kilogram log for about $10 at the Good Fortune Supermarket.
My mother used to make a perfect-to-spread “blender chicken salad” and I think this product would be ideal for it. Other ingredients to buy would be the vegan Just Mayo (at Target) and vegan Worcestershire sauce. This used to be easy to find: just get the cheapest brand. But now they all have anchovies. The same supermarket has large, cheap bottles of vegan Worcestershire sauce, from Taiwan, with the soy sauce — a bit thinner than I like, but it’s not that you use much, right?
In any case, this vegan ham is a winner, and I’ll buy it again. But what if you wanted ham ham? That’s for next time.
The first two installments (1, 2) of this review series makes the third very easy — and satisfying. Until we have a chance to sample more vegan hams, Lam Sheng Kee Vegetarian Ham (Bacon Flavor) will be the one we will buy for hot and cold ham eating.
But to be clear, I mean “ham lunch meat” substitute, not country ham or honey-spiral-thingy. It’s not as sweet as the chicken flavored ham, but not as smoky as breakfast bacon either. Just think ham lunch meat. It’s chewy without being gummy, flavorful but not cloying and — in one hot preparation — made a delicious fried rice. Fine, as long as you don’t oversell it. $10 for the kilogram log.
If you find it (or the chicken flavor ham) please note it in the comments.
This is one of those blog posts that act as a note-to-self. and, I hope help others in the same boat. If you have a SnapScan 1300 portable and want to use it on Ubuntu Linux 14.04 LTS, follow these directions. They worked for me. (I found that from this page, so thanks all around.)
This is another one of those notes-to-self for later, and perhaps to inspire others to try. Putting the log back into blog. While I’d love to learn enough Python or what-have-you to scrape the data from a website, the following tools got the job done.
And pen and index cards, to note what I did so before I try and scrape data from another site, I’ll do a better job.
presented at First Church in Billerica on March 6, 2016
When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist. — Archbishop Hélder Câmara of Brazil
Pope Francis is often thought of as a progressive or even radical pope, but much of his message has been to re-emphasize Catholic social justice teachings that go back more than a century, and have been restated by every pope since. Our first reading is from one of those prior encyclicals, Laborem Exercens, written by John Paul II in 1981. (One progressive thing popes didn’t do in 1981 was to use gender-inclusive language. So I apologize for that in advance.)
Working at any workbench, whether a relatively primitive or an ultramodern one, a man can easily see that through his work he enters into two inheritances: the inheritance of what is given to the whole of humanity in the resources of nature, and the inheritance of what others have already developed on the basis of those resources, primarily by developing technology, that is to say, by producing a whole collection of increasingly perfect instruments for work.
The second reading is from Ayn Rand, a favorite author of Speaker Paul Ryan and many other conservatives. This paragraph is from her magnum opus Atlas Shrugged, and in particular from the John Galt speech that is the philosophical climax of the novel. Here, Galt is also talking about those “increasingly perfect instruments for work” — specifically, the steel factory owned by one of the novel’s other heroes, the industrialist Hank Rearden.
The machine, the frozen form of a living intelligence, is the power that expands the potential of your life by raising the productivity of your time. If you worked as a blacksmith in the mystics’ Middle Ages, the whole of your earning capacity would consist of an iron bar produced by your hands in days and days of effort. How many tons of rail do you produce per day if you work for Hank Rearden? Would you dare to claim that the size of your pay check was created solely by your physical labor and that those rails were the product of your muscles? The standard of living of that blacksmith is all that your muscles are worth; the rest is a gift from Hank Rearden.
I’ll hit this point harder later on, but look at what Galt has done to what the Pope called “the second inheritance”, the inheritance of technology. In Galt’s view, Hank Rearden is not just the inventor of the specific new products his factory produces, he is the sole rightful heir of all technological progress since the Middle Ages. Having been disinherited from the legacy of past inventors, the workers’ standard of living rises only through their employer’s generosity. Anything more than a medieval wage is essentially just charity. It is “a gift from Hank Rearden”.
The final reading is “The Goose and the Common”, a protest poem from 18th-century England. For centuries, the people of England had been suffering through a process known as Enclosure, in which a village’s common land would be fenced off and become the private property of the local lord. To appreciate the poem’s biting humor, you need to know this piece of 18th-century slang: a goose was not just a bird, it was also an ordinary person — a usage that survives today in phrases like “silly goose” or “What’s good for the goose is good for the gander.”
The law locks up the man or woman
who steals the goose from off the Common,
but leaves the greater villain loose ,
who steals the Common from off the goose.The law says that we must atone
when we take what we do not own,
but leaves the lords and ladies fine
when they take what is yours and mine.
The poor and wretched don't escape
when they conspire the law to break.
This must be so, but they endure
those who conspire to make the law.
The law locks up the man or woman
who steals the goose from off the Common.
And geese will still a Common lack
until they go and steal it back.
The meditation is a vision of peace and prosperity that comes from the prophet Micah: “They will sit under their own grapevines and their own fig trees, and no one will make them afraid.”
Unitarian Universalists talk a lot about social justice. And when we when talk among ourselves, we all more-or-less know what social justice means: Things should be more equal. The disadvantaged should be less disadvantaged. No one should be hungry. The sick or injured should be cared for. Education should available to everyone. And so on.
We’re much better making these kinds of lists than we are at explaining why this world we’re envisioning is just. Where is the justice in social justice?
Among ourselves, we usually don’t need to answer that question. Most people with UU values just feel it, without explanation. You say, “Isn’t it awful that in such a wealthy country, so many people are hungry or homeless or go without healthcare or education?” And whoever you are talking to probably says, “Yes, it is awful.” And the conversation goes on from there.
There’s nothing wrong with that conversation. But if that’s what we’re expecting, then we’ll be at a loss when we talk to people who have a different notion of justice. For example, justice could also mean that people get to keep the things they own, unless or until they decide to give them away.
If that’s what justice means to you, then when you hear that list of social justice goals, you’ll wonder where the money is going to come from. Who is going to pay the farmers and teachers and doctors who provide those goods and services? And more specifically, is the government going to take that money by force from the people who rightfully own it. Because, what’s just about that?
In one of the 2012 presidential debates, a young man asked the Republican candidates: “Out of every dollar that I earn, how much do you think that I deserve to keep?” Afterwards, Ron Paul had a clear and simple answer: “All of it.”
Former Judge Andrew Napolitano, a frequent Fox News contributor, has generated this fantasy:
You're sitting at home at night, and there's a knock at the door. You open the door, and a guy with a gun pointed at you says: "Give me your money. I want to give it away to the less fortunate." You think he's dangerous and crazy, so you call the police. Then you find out he is the police, there to collect your taxes.
Napolitano saw the income tax as representing “a terrifying presumption. It presumes that we don't really own our property.” We only own the part of it that the government chooses not to take.
No wonder Glenn Beck told his listeners: “Look for the words ‘social justice’ or ‘economic justice’ on your church web site. If you find it, run as fast as you can.”
When people respond to your social justice talk by grabbing their wallets and running away, it’s tempting to write them off as selfish or hard-hearted. But many of them aren’t. Some people who look at the world this way are quite generous. They give money away. They volunteer. They put themselves out for other people.
But the model they put on this behavior isn’t justice, it’s charity. They do it out of the goodness of their hearts, not because they are under some obligation. And they expect the beneficiaries of their generosity to receive those gifts with humility and gratitude. Because, after all, beggars shouldn’t be choosers.
And if the amount that individuals are willing to give away doesn’t match the need — which it never does — then the charity mindset sees that not as a flaw in the system, but as a problem of personal morality. We need to do a better job of preaching generosity, not change the way our economy works.
Ultimately, if our social justice work is going to succeed, we need to do more than just talk to each other and shake our heads at people who disagree. We need to critique that charity-based worldview and explain why it’s inadequate. In short, we need to explain what’s just about social justice.
The beginning of that critique was in our opening words: It’s fine to give food to the poor, but we also need to take the next step and ask why the poor have no food. Why can’t everybody buy their own food, save for their own retirement, pay for their own health insurance, and educate their own children? And if they can’t, what does that have to do with those of us who can? Why should our property or income be entailed with some kind of obligation to provide for them?
Those are hard questions, and so right away you notice a major difference between a charity mindset and a social justice mindset: Charity comes from the heart, and often finds itself in conflict with more practical thinking.
But social justice demands that head and heart work together. It’s not enough feel sorry for the poor, we need to understand how poverty happens, and how the system that creates such a gulf between rich and poor justifies itself. If the system that your reason supports leads to a result that your compassion rejects, social justice suggests that maybe you're taking something for granted that you shouldn't. Social justice doesn’t ask you to give up on thinking and follow your heart. Instead it tells you to check your assumptions and think again.
Whenever I try to rethink things, my first instinct is to go back in time and read works that are a little closer to the era when the original assumptions were made. In this case there’s also a considerable irony in the author I want to tell you about, the Revolutionary War pamphleteer Thomas Paine.
You see, at about the same time that Glenn Beck started telling everybody to run away from social justice, he was also styling himself as a modern-day Thomas Paine. He named one of his books Common Sense, and claimed to be updating Paine’s classic to call for the Tea Party revolution that we need today. Now, if you actually know something about Thomas Paine, this is perversely hilarious. Because in addition to his role in founding our country, Paine is also one of the founders of the American social justice tradition.
Thomas Paine was one of the true revolutionaries of the American Revolution. After we won our independence, he moved to England to stir up revolution there. And when the British deported him, Lafayette invited him to Paris where he tried to be the conscience of the French Revolution. That got him thrown into prison during the Reign of Terror, and only a bureaucratic mistake delayed his execution long enough for Robespierre to fall. Eventually the American ambassador, future president James Monroe, got him released. And in 1795, while he was staying with the Monroes and recovering from his ordeal, he wrote a little book called Agrarian Justice.
Agrarian Justice is addressed to the English, and proposes that when each young adult comes of age, the government should give him or her — I’m not being politically correct, Paine wrote gender equality into his system — a stake of capital to get a start in life. Also, those who survive to old age should get a pension. And all this should be funded by an inheritance tax on land.
Paine writes: “It is justice and not charity that is the principle of the plan.” In his mind, young adults were entitled to a stake in the economy, and old people were entitled to a pension. And the rationale for his inheritance tax would strike fear into the heart of Judge Napolitano: Paine believed that we don’t entirely own our property, and that all property comes entailed with obligations to others.
So Paine was not trying to appeal to people’s compassion and preach personal generosity. He was challenging their fundamental assumptions, and asking them to think again about one of the most basic concepts of the 18th-century economy: landed property.
When people have lived under a property system their entire lives -- as the English had then and we have today -- they tend to take it for granted. But Paine did not take the property system for granted, because he had seen the example of the Native Americans. He writes:
The life of an Indian is a continual holiday compared with the poor of Europe; and, on the other hand, it appears to be abject when compared to the rich. … Civilization, therefore, or that which is so called, has operated in two ways: to make one part of society more affluent, and the other more wretched, than would have been the lot of either in a natural state.
But wait, European-style civilization is supposed to be a good thing, isn’t it? Paine agrees:
The first principle of civilization ought to have been, and ought still to be, that the condition of every person born into the world, after a state of civilization commences, ought not to be worse than if he had been born before that period.
Now that’s a fine heartfelt sentiment. But if our heads are going to come along on this trip, we need to understand why things didn’t turn out that way. Was there some reason why the poor had to be wretched, or did European civilization make some early mistake that led to that result? Paine says there was a mistake, and it has to do with how we invented the concept of property.
Let me stop here for a minute, because I just snuck in a radical idea: Property is a human invention. Today, a lot of people write about property as if it were natural, something that exists prior to all societies or governments. But that’s just not true.
Paine uses theological imagery to lampoon this belief: "The Creator of the earth," he says, did not "open a land office from which the first title deeds should issue."
He might also have pointed to the animal world, because nothing remotely like property exists in nature. Animals have territory, which is a very different idea. A bird may chase rival birds away from the tree where it nests. But no bird has ever sold a tree to another bird, or rented a nest, or taken in someone else’s egg in exchange for a few worms. The tree and the nest are not property.
Similarly, land as private property is not a natural concept at all. Paine writes:
The earth in its natural, uncultivated state, was, and ever would have continued to be THE COMMON PROPERTY OF THE HUMAN RACE. In that state every man would have been born to property. He would have been a joint life-proprietor with the rest in the property of the soil, and in all its natural productions, vegetable and animal.
Being a practical man, Paine recognizes that modern agriculture would not work on those terms, because it requires a long investment of effort before you see any product. You have to cut down the trees and pull up the stumps and dig out the rocks. Each year you have to plow and plant and fertilize and weed. And who would do all that if, in the end, he had no more right than anyone else to gather the harvest?
So Paine believed it was right and just for the difference in value between cultivated land and uncultivated land to be private property. Not the land itself -- the difference in value between cultivated and uncultivated land. And here he locates the original mistake, the original sin for which the poor pay the price. Rather than just let people own the value of their improvements in the productivity of the land, we created a system in which they own the land. We created a system in which the Earth itself is owned, not by humanity in general, but only by the people who have their names on deeds.
Consequently, a hungry Indian could go hunt in the forest or fish in the pond that was part of his tribe’s territory, but a hungry Englishman could not, because those natural resources were owned by some other Englishman. In short, the poor of Europe were worse off than the Native Americans not because God created them that way, and not because they were lazy or stupid, but because they had been disinherited; their share of the common inheritance of humankind had been usurped.
Paine was just talking about land, but it’s easy to see how his ideas extend to other areas. No one would dig a mine or drill a well if they had no claim on the resulting iron or gold or oil, but some part of that output also has to belong to the common inheritance. It can't all be private property.
And consider not just our physical inheritance, but our cultural inheritance. I’m a writer. I work in words and sometimes I sell my words. But I did not invent the English language, or teach it to all of you so that you could understand me. And the ideas I’m telling you this morning: I have some claim to them, but large parts come from Thomas Paine and Pope John Paul II and other benefactors of our cultural legacy. So if there is value in my words, I didn’t create that value out of nothing. Part of that value should belong to me, but part rightfully should go back into the common inheritance.
The same is true for the Hank Reardens of this world, the inventors, researchers, and industrialists. They do indeed create value, but they don’t create it out of nothing. As Newton put it, they stand on the shoulders of giants, and the legacy of those giants should belong to everyone.
In short, I’m endorsing that idea that so scares Judge Napolitano: We don’t really own what we own, free and clear, with no obligations. And to that young man at the presidential debate, I would say: “You earned that dollar by using the common inheritance. Some part of it needs to go back.”
We all owe a debt to the common inheritance, because none of us makes things by calling them out of nothing, like the God of Genesis. Everything we make relies on the resources of the Earth and the tools that have been passed down to us. Paying our debt to the common inheritance -- and particularly to those whose share of that inheritance has been usurped -- is the “justice” in social justice.
The flaw in the charity mindset is that it refuses to recognize that debt. It accepts, without question or objection, disinheriting the poor from the common legacy. Once you have done that, they have no rightful claim on anything beyond what the rest of us volunteer to give them. And any tax collector who shows up demanding money to help the less fortunate is just a well-intentioned thief.
But if you do accept that the poor are owed a share of the common inheritance, how should they collect it? Paine, as I said, was a practical man, and he recognized that he couldn't even calculate the rents and royalties that the poor have coming, much less collect and distribute them.
Instead, he proposes that everyone be offered a deal: In payment for your share of the common inheritance, in exchange for your acceptance that you were born into a world where virtually everything of value was already claimed by someone else -- we’ll offer you this: When you reach adulthood, we’ll give you a stake, some bit of capital that can get you started in life. And if you make it to an age where you can’t reasonably expect to work any more, we’ll give you a pension. That's how he proposes to make good on the principle that civilization should benefit everyone, and not just some at the expense of others.
Notice that Paine does not propose a dole, or some program of bread and circuses, or make-work projects that will give everyone a meaningless job. His proposal is much more radical than that: The poor should be capitalized. Everyone should have a stake, a chance to launch themselves into the middle of the economy rather than start at the bottom.
In Paine’s day, that didn’t take much.
When a young couple begin the world, the difference is exceedingly great whether they begin with nothing or with fifteen pounds apiece. With this aid they could buy a cow, and implements to cultivate a few acres of land; and instead of becoming burdens upon society … would be put in the way of becoming useful and profitable citizens.
A similar idea has popped up in many other guises. In Biblical times capital meant land, which is why Micah envisioned every family under its own vines and fig trees. Later on in the encyclical I quoted, Pope John Paul II envisions the ideal society not as a Great Feeding Trough but as a Great Workbench, where we all have our place and access to the tools we need to be productive.
Launching yourself into today's information economy may be more complicated than in Paine's day, but the value of the common inheritance has grown. Exactly what deal it makes sense to offer now, in lieu of the inheritance we still can’t deliver, is a topic for another day. But certainly education must be part of it, and childhood nutrition. In general, people should be freed from poverty traps, from situations in which their short-term survival depends on doing things that harm their long-term interests. No heir of a rich inheritance should ever have to eat the seed corn.
The Pope’s image goes a long way towards helping us evaluate the adequacy of any proposal: Everyone should have a seat at the Great Workbench. That seat should belong to them by right, and not depend on anyone's approval or generosity.
Even if we had such a program, if we had a way to deliver to each and every person the value of their share of the common inheritance, things could still go wrong. A Prodigal Son might waste his inheritance. Unlucky people might lose their stakes to accident or illness. Some people's abilities might be so limited that no tools we can provide will make them productive. There would, in other words, still be occasions for charity.
But that is not where we are now. In the world we live in today, people are poor because the common inheritance has been usurped by people who believe that what is theirs is theirs, and they owe no one for its use; who believe that only land-owners are beneficiaries of the Creation; that businessmen and industrialists are the sole heirs of technological progress; that only the educated rightfully inherit our cultural legacy.
After the inheritance or some fair compensation for it has been delivered to all people, then charity might be enough. But until then, we should never stop demanding justice.
The closing words are by Billie Holiday and Arthur Herzog Jr.
Rich relations may give you
crusts of bread and such.
You can help yourself,
but don’t take too much.
Cause Mama may have,
and Poppa may have.
But God bless the child that’s got his own.
Of all the places I’ve ever done gongfu tea, my very favorite is my uncle’s living room. A true tea connoisseur, he took a personal interest in educating me and my American partner about tea during our last visit to my hometown of Fuzhou.
And then again, I am ruining the Tea Road by being a complete coffee addict. Coffee is the fuel to a hard long day followed by a harder, longer night. Coffee is the cheap addiction to jumpstart mornings, to quicken afternoons, and to prolong midnights. The character of coffee is attitude, a swagger in which priorities have been predetermined.
Moving to Glasgow, Scotland for studies, the first thing I learned from one of my Scottish flatmate who is an artistic hound of the city was that there is no way you will drink from Starbucks or Costa around here if you visited Frida’s.
That summer, since I have been postponing on seeing who’s Frida and how good is her coffee, I decided to grab a bus and see with my own eyes (and taste) this mystique coffee shop she’s been telling me about. And there I am, talking with Frida, just in front of the coffee store, not even entering the place, and things are just delightful from the beginning.
SHE OPENED UP THE TEA BOX AND MY EYES MUST HAVE LIT UP. SHE SAW I LIKED HER CHINA COLLECTION, AND SHE VERY MUCH LIKED THIS FACT.
She took pride in telling me how her mother keeps sending her different types and she asked me to choose the one we wanted. The first time I went with her favorite. The woman has some taste.
Thereafter I would simply say “Surprise me.” She hated it when I said that. That made me want to say it even more. I think I was in her room all of 10 times if that. Yet it all mattered so much.
Coffee is the fuel to a hard long day followed by a harder, longer night. Coffee is the cheap addiction to jumpstart mornings, to quicken afternoons, and to prolong midnights. The character of coffee is attitude, a swagger in which priorities have been predetermined.
Thereafter I would simply say “Surprise me.” She hated it when I said that. That made me want to say it even more. I think I was in her room all of 10 times if that. Yet it all mattered so much.
Coffee is the fuel to a hard long day followed by a harder, longer night. Coffee is the cheap addiction to jumpstart mornings, to quicken afternoons, and to prolong midnights. The character of coffee is attitude, a swagger in which priorities have been predetermined. Coffee is the cheap addiction to jumpstart mornings, to quicken afternoons, and to prolong midnights.
The post Those beats are made for listening appeared first on Rev. Heather Lou.
Anyone who’s spent a fair amount of time in the world’s hostel dormitories will have met the culprit. He sits there on the bottom bunk, emaciated tanned limbs protruding from a Bintang vest and a pair of baggy pyjama trousers printed with a flailing dragon, and then he starts to witter.
Go to Chinatown, alone, preferably in the late afternoon. Walk around. Go into one of the shops that sells mysterious (to me) herbs and dried things. Buy some condiments or beef jerky or sweet buns for, what, $2. Listen to the grandmas hollering at their children and grandchildren, and the vegetable sellers.
Those events that are always at, like, 11pm on a Wednesday, in the east 30s or something? Go to one. Just go. Go alone if nobody else wants to go. Maybe it will suck, maybe everyone you meet will be obnoxious, but the point is that it is happening, someone is trying something, and even though we all know New York is a terrible place for creative types, it is also a wonderful place for creative types, because sometimes people show up at 11pm on a Wednesday to watch grown adults roll around on a floor in the east 30s.
Walk around. Go into one of the shops that sells mysterious (to me) herbs and dried things. Buy some condiments or beef jerky or sweet buns for, what, $2. He sits there on the bottom bunk, emaciated tanned limbs protruding from a Bintang vest and a pair of baggy pyjama trousers printed with a flailing dragon, and then he starts to witter. Try to remember a place that used to make you feel like you loved New York. If it’s still there, go there. If it’s been turned into a condo or an artisanal mustard store or whatever, try to identify what it was about that place that made you love New York.
He sits there on the bottom bunk, emaciated tanned limbs protruding from a Bintang vest and a pair of baggy pyjama trousers printed with a flailing dragon, and then he starts to witter.
The post New York, Old York appeared first on Rev. Heather Lou.
I‘m a firm believer that how your day goes depends on how you choose to start it. The days I’ve gotten up late and eaten a junky breakfast, my day is usually sluggish and a bit depressing. However, when I wake up early and take the time to gently allow myself to come into the day, I know I have an awesome 24 hours ahead of me. So in typical California fashion, I decided to drive to my exercise. A quick Google search turned up Jack London State Park. If it was named after the author of White Fang and Call of the Wild, it had to kick ass, right?
Chalk one up for the analog experience. I love maps. I buy them just before I leave on any significant trip and they end up cluttering my apartment, living under the bed in plastic bins and shoved in the corners of bookcases. My hotel was in Yountville and I’d done no pre-planning. I asked the concierge for a running or hiking trail nearby, with underwhelming results. So in typical California fashion,I decided to drive to my exercise. A quick Google search turned up Jack London State Park.
That summer, since I have been postponing on seeing who’s Frida and how good is her coffee, I decided to grab a bus and see with my own eyes (and taste) this mystique coffee shop she’s been telling me about. And there I am, talking with Frida, just in front of the coffee store, not even entering the place, and things are just delightful from the beginning.
The days I’ve gotten up late and eaten a junky breakfast, my day is usually sluggish and a bit depressing. However, when I wake up early and take the time to gently allow myself to come into the day, I know I have an awesome 24 hours ahead of me. Chalk one up for the analog experience. I love maps. I buy them just before I leave on any significant trip and they end up cluttering my apartment, living under the bed in plastic bins and shoved in the corners of bookcases. In example reflecting this is that there was a big street with Caffès, in the part of Athens where I live in, which did not have street lights installed. Although they were struggling for months to fix that, the issue was conviniently solved just a couple of days ago. Coincidence? I do not think so.
The post “Wood Studio” Cafe Opening appeared first on Rev. Heather Lou.
Four fawns stood in the street over the creek in our subdivision as I was driving out for a beer yesterday evening. Four.
I’m told it’s unusual to see four fawns together, all skinny stilts and big ears and spots and not yet savvy about things like streets. Fawns and such have been a relief this week from the blaring dreariness of what humans have been up to.
If you have a pet, this should be a cautionary tale. Americans spent $14.2 billion on veterinary care for their pets in 2013—and that doesn’t include proprietary health diets and food supplements. Put another way, pet owners pay about $850 annually in veterinary expenses per dog, and about $575 per cat. Mysteries like these could be solved by more research, but how can we get vets to pay attention to the studies that have been done? It would help if professional bodies took a strong evidence-based stand.
SO IMAGINE MY SURPRISE WHEN I MOVED TO NEW YORK CITY AND FOUND THAT IT WAS HOST TO A LITANY OF FERAL CRITTERS
I’ve started to think that my gut is an asshole for another reason. If he’s so smart, and always right, why the hell is he holding out on me? What does he know that he isn’t telling my brain? Why does he know things that my brain doesn’t? It’s easy to forget our connection to nature, when so little of what we interact with in our daily lives reminds us of the natural world it’s all built upon — the products we use, the buildings we occupy, the streets we travel.
The first thing that comes to mind is their genuine presence. A child’s laugh, or a dog’s tail wagging, or a cat’s purr all feel like money in the bank to me. I receive palpable pleasure when seeing their joy, and it makes me want to create more of it by playing with them or petting them.
I’m told it’s unusual to see four fawns together, all skinny stilts and big ears and spots and not yet savvy about things like streets. Fawns and such have been a relief this week from the blaring dreariness of what humans have been up to.
If you have a pet, this should be a cautionary tale. Americans spent $14.2 billion on veterinary care for their pets in 2013—and that doesn’t include proprietary health diets and food supplements. Put another way, pet owners pay about $850 annually in veterinary expenses per dog, and about $575 per cat. Mysteries like these could be solved by more research, but how can we get vets to pay attention to the studies that have been done? It would help if professional bodies took a strong evidence-based stand.
And in the end, there is no one to blame, because the Universe will take care of it.
The post Is your city pet-friendly? appeared first on Rev. Heather Lou.
No more than three colors, when learning the color blocking collocation, you must stick to the no more than three colors in the whole look rules.
It mostly indicate the bright degree in the colors, various different colors fashion item, not including the black, grey and white colors collocation.There’s a certain aesthetic that we refer to when we think of 90s fashion. High ponytails, abrasive prints, colorblocking and bold jewelry choices. The 1990s were a truly unique and inspiring time to be alive and to be experimenting with fashion.
As for today color-blocking is more frequently seen in the home as a latest thing in interior design. Although some argue that color-blocking is a thing in the past, high fashion figures and enthusiasts believe that this retro trend continues to thrive as a result of the hipster generation, whom revive the trend and turn it into something seen as fashion-forward. Trend revival is the new fad.
The post Color-blocking: a day without black appeared first on Rev. Heather Lou.
Of all the places I’ve ever done gongfu tea, my very favorite is my uncle’s living room. A true tea connoisseur, he took a personal interest in educating me and my American partner about tea during our last visit to my hometown of Fuzhou.
And then again, I am ruining the Tea Road by being a complete coffee addict. Coffee is the fuel to a hard long day followed by a harder, longer night. Coffee is the cheap addiction to jumpstart mornings, to quicken afternoons, and to prolong midnights. The character of coffee is attitude, a swagger in which priorities have been predetermined.
Moving to Glasgow, Scotland for studies, the first thing I learned from one of my Scottish flatmate who is an artistic hound of the city was that there is no way you will drink from Starbucks or Costa around here if you visited Frida’s.
That summer, since I have been postponing on seeing who’s Frida and how good is her coffee, I decided to grab a bus and see with my own eyes (and taste) this mystique coffee shop she’s been telling me about. And there I am, talking with Frida, just in front of the coffee store, not even entering the place, and things are just delightful from the beginning.
SHE OPENED UP THE TEA BOX AND MY EYES MUST HAVE LIT UP. SHE SAW I LIKED HER CHINA COLLECTION, AND SHE VERY MUCH LIKED THIS FACT.
She took pride in telling me how her mother keeps sending her different types and she asked me to choose the one we wanted. The first time I went with her favorite. The woman has some taste.
Thereafter I would simply say “Surprise me.” She hated it when I said that. That made me want to say it even more. I think I was in her room all of 10 times if that. Yet it all mattered so much.
Coffee is the fuel to a hard long day followed by a harder, longer night. Coffee is the cheap addiction to jumpstart mornings, to quicken afternoons, and to prolong midnights. The character of coffee is attitude, a swagger in which priorities have been predetermined.
Thereafter I would simply say “Surprise me.” She hated it when I said that. That made me want to say it even more. I think I was in her room all of 10 times if that. Yet it all mattered so much.
Coffee is the fuel to a hard long day followed by a harder, longer night. Coffee is the cheap addiction to jumpstart mornings, to quicken afternoons, and to prolong midnights. The character of coffee is attitude, a swagger in which priorities have been predetermined. Coffee is the cheap addiction to jumpstart mornings, to quicken afternoons, and to prolong midnights.
And then again, I am ruining the Tea Road by being a complete coffee addict. Coffee is the fuel to a hard long day followed by a harder, longer night. Coffee is the cheap addiction to jumpstart mornings, to quicken afternoons, and to prolong midnights. The character of coffee is attitude, a swagger in which priorities have been predetermined.
She took pride in telling me how her mother keeps sending her different types and she asked me to choose the one we wanted. The first time I went with her favorite. The woman has some taste.
Thereafter I would simply say “Surprise me.” She hated it when I said that. That made me want to say it even more. I think I was in her room all of 10 times if that. Yet it all mattered so much.
Coffee is the fuel to a hard long day followed by a harder, longer night. Coffee is the cheap addiction to jumpstart mornings, to quicken afternoons, and to prolong midnights. The character of coffee is attitude, a swagger in which priorities have been predetermined.
The post Deep in the raw fields of Baltimore appeared first on Rev. Heather Lou.
It’s rare that I forge a friendship with someone from the second camp. And, if they get me on a bad day, their reaction can feel like a gentle kick in the stomach.
I thought about this. Then I thought about my childhood. It turns out that I rode the bus to school nearly 200 days a year for more than 10 years. That’s 2,000 days. I don’t remember most of those days. They blur together.
That summer, since I have been postponing on seeing who’s Frida and how good is her coffee, I decided to grab a bus and see with my own eyes (and taste) this mystique coffee shop she’s been telling me about. And there I am, talking with Frida, just in front of the coffee store, not even entering the place, and things are just delightful from the beginning.
Of all the places I’ve ever done gongfu tea, my very favorite is my uncle’s living room. A true tea connoisseur, he took a personal interest in educating me and my American partner about tea during our last visit to my hometown of Fuzhou.
I thought about this. Then I thought about my childhood. It turns out that I rode the bus to school nearly 200 days a year for more than 10 years. That’s 2,000 days. I don’t remember most of those days. They blur together.
I know my scope is a big one, so maybe it’s hard to apply it to your life. Maybe you have to worry about politics or process. The idea is to understand the “why” that is up in the clouds, and then be obnoxiously proficient at the “how” that is down in the dirt. No matter how narrow your scope is, there will always be stuff in the middle for you to trim away from your thought process.
The post There is no place like the fresh market appeared first on Rev. Heather Lou.
Rarely I forge a friendship with someone from the second camp. And, if they get me on a bad day, their reaction can feel like a gentle kick in the stomach.
I thought about this. Then I thought about my childhood. It turns out that I rode the bus to school nearly 200 days a year for more than 10 years. That’s 2,000 days. I don’t remember most of those days. They blur together.
Because of exactly the same reason, a flat saddle is better than one that has a pre-formed shape.The motor Guzzi California that you see in this picture has a perfect saddle: broad and long and flat, so you can move around to sit in different postures.
My hotel was in Yountville and I’d done no pre-planning. I asked the concierge for a running or hiking trail nearby, with underwhelming results. So in typical California fashion,
I decided to drive to my exercise. A quick Google search turned up Jack London State Park. If it was named after the author of White Fang and Call of the Wild, it had to kick ass, right?
Chalk one up for the analog experience. I love maps. I buy them just before I leave on any significant trip and they end up cluttering my apartment, living under the bed in plastic bins and shoved in the corners of bookcases. Once in a while I try to organize them, and instead get lost in the various topographies, hieroglyphic legends and squiggling lines. Because the truth is, I don’t expect everyone to be like me. Not at all. In fact, you should be focusing on what works for you. Because of exactly the same reason, a flat saddle is better than one that has a pre-formed shape.
I think people ask successful entrepreneurs questions like “What does a day look like for you?” because they think they might hold some secret to success. Some overarching wisdom that will change everything.
The days I’ve gotten up late and eaten a junky breakfast, my day is usually sluggish and a bit depressing. However, when I wake up early and take the time to gently allow myself to come into the day, I know I have an awesome 24 hours ahead of me. I am so afraid to miss that fragment of vision, I will have to sketch it down immediately in my book. And this above, is that vision I have been keeping for a good timing.
I’m a firm believer that how your day goes depends on how you choose to start it. The days I’ve gotten up late and eaten a junky breakfast, my day is usually sluggish and a bit depressing. However, when I wake up early and take the time to gently allow myself to come into the day, I know I have an awesome 24 hours ahead of me.
I buy maps just before I leave on any significant trip and they end up cluttering my apartment
Chalk one up for the analog experience. I love maps. I buy them just before I leave on any significant trip and they end up cluttering my apartment, living under the bed in plastic bins and shoved in the corners of bookcases. Once in a while I try to organize them, and instead get lost in the various topographies, hieroglyphic legends and squiggling lines. Because the truth is, I don’t expect everyone to be like me. Not at all. In fact, you should be focusing on what works for you. Because of exactly the same reason, a flat saddle is better than one that has a pre-formed shape.
I think people ask successful entrepreneurs questions like “What does a day look like for you?” because they think they might hold some secret to success. Some overarching wisdom that will change everything.
The post Dean’s road runner appeared first on Rev. Heather Lou.
Of all the places I’ve ever done gongfu tea, my very favorite is my uncle’s living room. A true tea connoisseur, he took a personal interest in educating me and my American partner about tea during our last visit to my hometown of Fuzhou.
And then again, I am ruining the Tea Road by being a complete coffee addict. Coffee is the fuel to a hard long day followed by a harder, longer night. Coffee is the cheap addiction to jumpstart mornings, to quicken afternoons, and to prolong midnights. The character of coffee is attitude, a swagger in which priorities have been predetermined.
Moving to Glasgow, Scotland for studies, the first thing I learned from one of my Scottish flatmate who is an artistic hound of the city was that there is no way you will drink from Starbucks or Costa around here if you visited Frida’s.
That summer, since I have been postponing on seeing who’s Frida and how good is her coffee, I decided to grab a bus and see with my own eyes (and taste) this mystique coffee shop she’s been telling me about. And there I am, talking with Frida, just in front of the coffee store, not even entering the place, and things are just delightful from the beginning.
She took pride in telling me how her mother keeps sending her different types and she asked me to choose the one we wanted. The first time I went with her favorite. The woman has some taste.
Thereafter I would simply say “Surprise me.” She hated it when I said that. That made me want to say it even more. I think I was in her room all of 10 times if that. Yet it all mattered so much.
Coffee is the fuel to a hard long day followed by a harder, longer night. Coffee is the cheap addiction to jumpstart mornings, to quicken afternoons, and to prolong midnights. The character of coffee is attitude, a swagger in which priorities have been predetermined. Coffee is the cheap addiction to jumpstart mornings, to quicken afternoons, and to prolong midnights.
I know my scope is a big one, so maybe it’s hard to apply it to your life.
Maybe you have to worry about politics or process. The idea is to understand the “why” that is up in the clouds, and then be obnoxiously proficient at the “how” that is down in the dirt. No matter how narrow your scope is, there will always be stuff in the middle for you to trim away from your thought process.
The days I’ve gotten up late and eaten a junky breakfast, my day is usually sluggish and a bit depressing. However, when I wake up early and take the time to gently allow myself to come into the day, I know I have an awesome 24 hours ahead of me. I am so afraid to miss that fragment of vision, I will have to sketch it down immediately in my book. And this above, is that vision I have been keeping for a good timing.
That summer, since I have been postponing on seeing who’s Frida and how good is her coffee, I decided to grab a bus and see with my own eyes (and taste) this mystique coffee shop she’s been telling me about. And there I am, talking with Frida, just in front of the coffee store, not even entering the place, and things are just delightful from the beginning.
She took pride in telling me how her mother keeps sending her different types and she asked me to choose the one we wanted. The first time I went with her favorite. The woman has some taste.
The post Frida’s coffee shop appeared first on Rev. Heather Lou.
Four fawns stood in the street over the creek in our subdivision as I was driving out for a beer yesterday evening. Four. I’m told it’s unusual to see four fawns together, all skinny stilts and big ears and spots and not yet savvy about things like streets. Fawns and such have been a relief this week from the blaring dreariness of what humans have been up to.
If you have a pet, this should be a cautionary tale. Americans spent $14.2 billion on veterinary care for their pets in 2013—and that doesn’t include proprietary health diets and food supplements. Put another way, pet owners pay about $850 annually in veterinary expenses per dog, and about $575 per cat.
Mysteries like these could be solved by more research, but how can we get vets to pay attention to the studies that have been done? It would help if professional bodies took a strong evidence-based stand.
I’ve started to think that my gut is an asshole for another reason. If he’s so smart, and always right, why the hell is he holding out on me? What does he know that he isn’t telling my brain? Why does he know things that my brain doesn’t?
It’s easy to forget our connection to nature, when so little of what we interact with in our daily lives reminds us of the natural world it’s all built upon
The first thing that comes to mind is their genuine presence. A child’s laugh, or a dog’s tail wagging, or a cat’s purr all feel like money in the bank to me. I receive palpable pleasure when seeing their joy, and it makes me want to create more of it by playing with them or petting them.
It would help if professional bodies took a strong evidence-based stand. I receive palpable pleasure when seeing their joy, and it makes me want to create more of it by playing with them or petting them. Put another way, pet owners pay about $850 annually in veterinary expenses per dog, and about $575 per cat.
Mysteries like these could be solved by more research, but how can we get vets to pay attention to the studies that have been done? It would help if professional bodies took a strong evidence-based stand.
A child’s laugh, or a dog’s tail wagging, or a cat’s purr all feel like money in the bank to me.
I’ve started to think that my gut is an asshole for another reason. If he’s so smart, and always right, why the hell is he holding out on me? What does he know that he isn’t telling my brain? Why does he know things that my brain doesn’t?
If you have a pet, this should be a cautionary tale. Americans spent $14.2 billion on veterinary care for their pets in 2013—and that doesn’t include proprietary health diets and food supplements. Put another way, pet owners pay about $850 annually in veterinary expenses per dog, and about $575 per cat.
The post Love your humble animals appeared first on Rev. Heather Lou.
The Clearing, founded by Transforming Hearts Collective co-leaders, is an emerging spiritual community in Durham, NC, that centers the leadership and needs of queer and trans people of color and focuses on self-love, self-healing, and community healing as radical and revolutionary acts. The Clearing is for people who don’t want or need organized religion but are yearning for community and connection, as well as people who love worship and spiritual community but haven’t felt at home in church for a long time.
In April 2016 the Clearing showed up in love for our communities when opening session began at the North Carolina General Assembly. We knew it would be a big day for trans and queer communities and organizers because it was the first major HB2 repeal effort since the special session that led to the passage of the bill. We also knew that we wanted to create a different kind of space for folks—one that would enable people to get away from the overly politicized, intensely divisive spaces that are often at the heart of protests.
We showed up with quilts and rugs, coloring books, and communion, and got a commitment from Believe Out Loud to supply us with snacks and fruit. We set up on the front lawn right in front of the legislative building, set apart from everything that was going on and in the midst of it, all at the same time, and waited.
Slowly but surely, people began to come. Many folks requested communion and a prayer before going to speak with legislators. Some folks wanted rest. Others wanted to color and talk with friends. We had community singing and a call-and-response moment of commitment and affirmation. People came to get a snack or some water. We had printed up many copies of a collection of inspiring and affirming quotes, and so some people stopped by to take a quote to keep with them because they knew they weren't going to leave when asked and would likely get arrested. One of the local organizers stopped by simply for a hug and a time to be quiet after a proponent of HB2 yelled at her that her mother should have aborted her. The Clearing was so much more than we could have ever anticipated that day, and it gave us the fire we needed to commit to moving it forward.
presented at the Unitarian Church of Quincy, Illinois on May 1, 2016
Opening Words
The opening words are from Camelot:
It’s May! It’s May!
The lusty month of May.
That lovely month when everyone goes blissfully astray.
It’s here! It’s here!
That shocking time of year.
When tons of wicked little thoughts merrily appear.
It’s May! It’s May!
The month of great dismay.
When all the world is brimming with fun,
Wholesome or un.
It’s mad! It’s gay!
A libelous display!
Those dreary vows that everyone takes,
Everyone breaks.
Everyone makes divine mistakes
In the lusty month of May.
Responsive Reading
(by Henry David Thoreau)
Why should we live in such a hurry and waste of life?
We are determined to be starved before we are hungry.
I wish to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life.
I wish to learn what life has to teach, and not, when I come to die, discover that I have not lived.
I do not wish to live what is not life, living is so dear.
Nor do I wish to practice resignation, unless it is quite necessary.
I wish to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life.
I want to cut a broad swath, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms.
If it proves to be mean, then to get to the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world.
Or if it is sublime, to know it by experience, and to be able to give a true account of it.
Meditation
I want you to imagine that you are two years old, and running is something you have just recently gotten good at.
All the energy that someday will animate a big clunky adult body is already in you right now. It's been compressed down into a tiny package, and you’re just bursting with it.
Adults are always so tired and slow. They plop down into a chair or a couch and it seems so hard for them to move. But for you, it’s hard not to move. There’s so much energy in you, you just can’t bottle it up. So you run.
You’re not going anywhere, you’re not racing anybody, you’re just running. You run out to the fence and then run back. You chase the cat. You run around the swing set and then run around it again.
Do you know how amazing running is? Running changes the wind. The day can be perfectly still, but you run and suddenly there is wind in your face and your hair lifts off your ears and streams out behind you.
And there’s one more thing you can try that just might work. You’ve seen older kids do it and it looks so unbelievable: You could jump.
Jumping is like running, but you don’t put a foot down to catch yourself. You get going really fast, and then you just pick your feet up and let yourself be in the air.
You’ve tried it before and it hasn’t worked, you screwed the timing up or something. But that was days ago, when you were practically still a baby. You’re faster now, and this time maybe you can do it.
So you go to the top of that little incline and start running down. You push it harder than you ever have before, and when you think you just can’t go any faster you give one last push and pick up your feet.
You’re in the air.
It probably doesn’t look like much to anyone else. You don’t get very high. You don’t go very far. But for one timeless instant you are off the ground, touching nothing but air.
It’s like flying.
Readings
Arguing with that spirit of May and Thoreau's ambition to suck the marrow out of life
is the belief that a truly enlightened person, someone of broad vision, would know that it’s all pointless.
That child who runs in circles is, after all, running in circles. She’s not getting anywhere, and her feeling that what she’s doing is intensely meaningful and important is just one of those illusions that people are prone to.
To this mindset, what it means to grow up and get educated is that you expand your scale of reference beyond your self-centered frame; maybe all the way out to the Infinite and the Eternal. And when you do that, you inevitably see the sheer insignificance
of anything human beings might ever achieve.
Shelley expressed that nihilistic view in his poem Ozymandias.
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: `Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear --
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.'
But the curmudgeonly statement that has had the most influence in Western culture comes from the Bible. According to tradition, the Book of Ecclesiastes was the last thing written by Solomon, the wisest of the kings of Israel.
“All is vanity,” he says, and it is foolish to think you are going to accomplish something that will last. Because the scale of the universe is utterly beyond you.
What do people gain from all the toil at which they toil under the sun? A generation goes,
and a generation comes, but the earth remains forever. The sun rises and the sun goes down and hurries to the place where it rises again. The wind blows to the south
and goes around to the north; round and round goes the wind, and on its circuits the wind returns. All streams run to the sea, but the sea is not full; to the place where the streams flow there they continue to flow.
All things are wearisome more than one can express; the eye is not satisfied with seeing or the ear filled with hearing. What has been will be, and what has been done is what will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.
Is there a thing of which it is said, "See, this is new"? It has already been in the ages before us. The people of long ago are not remembered, nor will there be any remembrance of people yet to come by those who come after them.
Ecclesiastes is the voice of the old man who has seen it all and done it all and lived long enough to realize that it was all pointless. He pursued every possible pleasure, acquired every kind of possession, built great works, ruled over a kingdom.
Then I considered all that my hands had done and the toil I had spent in doing it, and again, all was vanity and a chasing after the wind.
Even then, you might think: Oh, but reaching that place of grand perspective — that must have been satisfying. Solomon denies us even that consolation.
This also is but a chasing after wind. For in much wisdom is much vexation, and those who increase knowledge increase sorrow.
Talk
When Ellen asked me to speak on May 1st, I warned her that the first word of the talk might be: Comrades!
Because Mayday is famous as the holiday of revolution. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union would hold huge Mayday parades in Red Square, demonstrations of military might
that promised the eventual triumph of the workers’ revolution over capitalist oppression.
But the connection between Mayday and the workers' struggle actually predates the Soviets. Here in the United States in 1885, the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions threatened a general strike across the country if the 8-hour day didn’t become standard by May 1st.
The unions weren't really strong enough to pull off a nationwide strike, but some large cities did see several days of strikes and marches. In Chicago, a confrontation with police response became the Haymarket Riot, for which several labor organizers were sentenced to death. In subsequent years, the American labor movement held demonstrations on Mayday to honor the martyrs of Haymarket. The European socialist community, and eventually the Russians, picked it up from us.
But as the opening words reflected, Mayday celebrations predate the labor movement too. They go all the way back to the pagan festival of Beltane.
Beltane is the holiday of rising energy, and falls halfway between spring equinox and summer solstice. In the British Isles, where I think the growing season
runs a few weeks behind what we see here in central Illinois, Beltane marked the beginning of the season of generativity, the lusty month of May.
Beltane is a celebration of potential. In the same way that the meditation envisioned all the energy of an adult body compressed inside a two-year-old who just has to run, at Beltane the lushness and bounty of July and August and September is imagined as already existing in the Earth, waiting to explode into manifestation through these tiny sprouts and buds.
To quote another show tune, by the end of the lusty month of May, June will be busting out all over. Because all the ram-sheep and the ewe-sheep are determined there’ll be new sheep.
And so on Beltane, a maiden would be crowned Queen of the May, and would lead her village in raising a Maypole, (which is basically just a giant phallus), to remind everybody that, yeah, it’s that time of year.
It’s time to renew your fire — literally. Communities kindled a central bonfire, and households extinguished all their hearths and stoves and candles to relight them from the new flame. People would ritually walk between fires or jump over fires.
Young couples would have sex in the fields, partly to participate in the energy of the season, and partly as sympathetic magic, to make sure the plants were getting the right idea: It’s time to be fruitful and multiply.
Independent of Haymarket or any other anniversaries, it makes a certain symbolic sense that Mayday becomes the holiday of revolution. In the same way that a farmer might see the crops of the fall already existing as potential in the sprouts and buds of May, a 19th-century revolutionary might look at the discontented miners, the secret workers’ study groups, and the fledgling union organizing committees, and see the sprouts and buds
of a fully realized socialist society, where working people would not just make a subsistence wage, but would enjoy all the fruits of their labor.
Society might only have made it to May, but the imagination of a revolutionary can see August and September and October, when everything comes to fruition. All the energy needed to make that happen is already here, if we could only channel it and rise up.
Mayday is also the holiday of adolescence and first love, of the May Queen and her partners in the dance. When we use the calendar to symbolize a lifetime, May represents the adolescent. In the same way that the shoots and buds of May are ready to burst out into every kind of grain and fruit and flower, adolescents are ready to burst out into every kind of role and profession. Just as physical energy wells up inside toddlers, emotional energy and sexual energy and social energy wells up in adolescents, yearning to erupt into the world and become something.
Adolescence is a time of almost pure potential, neither anchored by manifestation nor disillusioned by experience. Nothing has happened yet, but everything seems possible,
even things that appear impractical to their more prudent elders.
Two and a half centuries ago, Adam Smith observed, “The contempt of risk, and the presumptuous hope of success, are in no period of life more active than at the age at which young people choose their professions.”
If I’m 17, I could still rule the world someday, or I could fail totally and be a complete nonentity. Day to day, and sometimes even hour to hour, an adolescent’s expectations can swing from one extreme to the other.
That unfulfilled potential is also the source of young people’s enviable resilience. A teen-ager’s dreams can crash and burnin a way that would be devastating in middle age. But in a week or two there can be new dreams, because the energy of life just keeps rising up, and it has to go somewhere.
But what about those of uswho aren’t in the May of our lives? What should Mayday or Beltane mean to us?
In a few months I’m going to turn 60, which puts me in the October of life. By October, the harvest might not all be gathered in yet, but you can pretty well see the shape of it. All around me, friends are retiring, or retired already, or bringing their careers in for a landing. Friends who raised children have seen those children graduate, and maybe even marry and have children of their own. If I'm hearing someone's plans for bigger and better things than they’ve ever done before, I'm probably talking to one of those children I watched grow up, and not to anyone my own age.
Physically, the late 50s are a period of decline. So, for example, I still go out for runs. But not with the idea that I’m going to go faster or further than ever before. Instead, I’m just trying to hang on to my vitality as long as I can. I run cautiously, with my medical insurance card in my pocket, in case I injure myself. I’ve gotten very far away from that two-year-old who runs just for the thrill of running.
By your late 50s, the rituals of Beltane have lost a lot of their appeal. Jumping over a bonfire seems like an unnecessary risk. And even the fantasy of sex in the fields sounds inconvenient and probably uncomfortable.
But getting older isn't the only reason a person may not feel like celebrating a season of unbridled potential and explosive growth. At any age, the future might not be filling you with anticipation. Maybe, instead, you’re facing defeat or recovering from failure or grieving for someone you’ve lost. Maybe the bright green cheerfulness of May doesn’t excite you, so much asit mocks your lack of excitement.
Yes, energy is rising out there in the world, but what has that got to do with me?
At such times, it is tempting to echo the curmudgeonly attitude of Ecclesiastes: Yeah, I tried all those things that people get so whipped up about, and I was even good at some of it, but now I’ve risen above all that. I’ve gotten wise enough to see that it was all pointless.
The child runs for the thrill of feeling the wind in her hair, and the old man says, “Vanity, vanity. It’s all just chasing the wind.” What does it matter than I ran and I jumped? That I ate good food and saw beautiful sunsets? That I built things or made things or owned things? That I read thick books and thought grand thoughts? The wind continues to blow this way and that, the rivers never manage to fill up the sea, and there is no new thing under the sun, or at least nothing that anybody will remember after a generation or two.
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.
But while I was preparing for this talk I re-read Ecclesiastes. (It’s short, you can do it in one sitting.) And this time, Solomon (or whoever the author really was) seemed to have a different message for me. He wasn’t trying to beat down my hopes or disparage my drive.
Instead, he was warning me not to try to justify my life through some external result. Because ultimately, the result of life is death. And if I think I can rise above that biological reality by getting rich or becoming famous or writing a book or building a company or even founding a dynasty, in the long run it’s not going to work. Because sooner or later the deserts return and the sands cover whatever we make.
Life is not a story where things work out in the end; in the end we die, and so does everybody we teach or help or influence. So the place where life needs to work out is in the middle. The point of life has to be in the living of it.
This time, Ecclesiastes wasn’t telling me to rise above life and all the silly things people do. Quite the opposite, it was saying that the two-year-old has it right. It’s fine to imagine
that you’re running to somewhere and that something wonderful will happen when you get there. But the best reason to run is for the joy of running.
Now, this point of view has gotten the reputation of being immature or unsophisticated. The sophisticated point of view is supposed to be that of the pessimist or the cynic.
But I think that’s because we describe it badly. The examples we usually give are like the one I just used: the two-year-old, the innocent. In the archetypes of the Tarot, the card that represents the joy of life is the Fool, who is happily striding towards the edge of a cliff.
Or we say “Eat, drink, and be merry” — something else sophisticated curmudgeons can feel superior to: Just indulge your animal desires, because if you thought about things at all, you’d realize that life is pointless and you’d get depressed. The attempt to enjoy life on the terms that it offers is sometimes portrayed as denial, like the partiers in “The Masque of the Red Death” who dance ever more frantically the clearer it becomes that something is horribly wrong.
But the physical pleasures of motion or consumption just symbolize the joy of life; they aren’t the whole story. In fact, there is no pinnacle of cold wisdom that rises above joy the way that an icy mountaintop rises above the treeline. Life-affirming experiences are possible at every level of consciousness. So on this holiday that celebrates possibilities, let’s recall a few of them.
Just as you can identify with your body and completely submerge yourself in whatever is happening physically, you can also identify with the role you’re playing, and for a period of time you can just be that role. For a moment or an hour or an afternoon, you just are a teacher or a healer or a friend. Sometimes doing the right thing, fighting for justice or uncovering the truth can give you a feeling of being exactly where you’re supposed to be, independent of how things ultimately work out.
Maybe you’re doing something entirely mundane, something you’ve done a thousand times before. You’re a plumber looking for a leak or a carpenter framing a house or a chef making a sauce, but you lose yourself in the activity, and for a while that’s all you need. Or maybe this moment is special. You are the father of the bride, or the grandmother who has brought the family back together for one perfect Thanksgiving.
Just as you can run for the joy of running, you can also think for the joy of thinking. Maybe you’re making the breakthrough that completes the Grand Theory of Everything or maybe you’re just working on the Sudoku puzzle in The Herald Whig. But you experience your mind in motion and it feels good.
Sometimes you can even blow your mind. Two or three ideas you’d always kept in their own little boxes turn out to be related, and suddenly a vast new landscape stretches out in front of you, and you have no idea how far it goes. The intricacy of the Universe is just more wonderful than you had ever imagined.
There are epiphanies of beauty. Sometimes you find them in the natural world when you look out at a sunset or up at the stars or down into a microscope. Sometimes you find them in the arts, when a painting or a sculpture hits you just right. Or you listen to a poem or a song or symphony for the hundredth time, but this time you really hear it. Such moments don’t have to mean something or lead anywhere. They just are.
There are mystical epiphanies, when you see the world in a grain of sand and discover that you love it, when you have compassion for every being that suffers, or when you make contact with a grace so enormous that it forgives everything.
And if you believe the mystics, they have maps of human experiences that keep on going from there. To tell the truth, I have no clue what some of those higher spheres or upper chakras are supposed to do. But those who claim to have experienced them describe them as bliss. There is no wisdom so advanced or enlightenment so grand, that all the joy of living is now beneath you.
So those of us who might have trouble identifying with May right now, whether because of physical decline or some other reason, if we refuse to become curmudgeons, if we refuse to use Mayday as an excuse to look down on these foolish teen-agers with all their dancing and flirting and impractical ambitions, how should we celebrate the holiday of rising energy?
I suggest that we take a broader view of what the season represents and what it might mean to us. There is a virtuous cycle, in which the energy of life rises up in you and through you. And if it manages to express itself as joy, a circuit gets completed that draws up new energy.
There are times when that process seems so easy. Energy becomes joy becomes energy,
round and round, as if it were happening on its own and didn’t require your attention at all.
But yes, there are other times, when energy and joy will not come to you no matter how loudly you call. You go through the motions of the activities that used to invoke the joy of life, but nothing happens. Poetry is boring and puzzle-solving is drudgery and every role you know feels like a trap you can never escape from. Sometimes your compassion is burned out, and even good food just makes you nauseous.
Eat, drink, and be merry indeed! As if things were just that simple.
And if someone suggests that a life-affirming experience is supposed to be available here ... that just increases the frustration and anger and despair that comes from not finding it.
One sunny day a year or so before he died, I picked my father up at Sunset Home and drove him out to the farm my grandfather bought almost a century ago, the one my father grew up on and still owned and had worked for most of his life. We looked at the fields, the crops, and the machinery, and he seemed to enjoy himself. But the next time I offered he didn’t want to go. He said it would just remind him of all the things he couldn’t do any more.
So how should we celebrate the holiday of rising energy if our own energies aren't rising? Perhaps Mayday could be a time of taking stock. Where does joy still manifest in our lives, and how can we help that process along?
It may not be happening where we’ve been expecting it, in the places where we used to find it. In a time of decline or defeat or depression, Mayday can be a reminder to search the garden of life for the shoots and buds it still produces, in whatever odd places they might be.
Socrates, when he was old and had lost his trial and was waiting in prison for his death sentence to be carried out, found himself drawn to write poetry for the first time in his life. Who would have predicted?
Those little shoots and buds, those tiny ways that small amounts of joy still enter your life, may seem unimportant, even trivial. But they are the offer Life is making, an indication of the energy it still wants to invest. And energy can become joy and draw up new energy. Small as they seem, if you nurture them, they could grow. Any tiny spark could be the beginning of new fire.
These tiny sprouts, these little flames, they may not bear comparison now or ever to what we’ve seen in the past. And they may look like nothing when viewed from the perspective of Eternity.
But they are what they are. And what they are is a sign that Life is not done with us yet. That, I believe, is worth celebrating.
Happy Mayday.
Closing
The closing words are from Ecclesiastes, because after all that discouraging talk about vanity and chasing the wind, the author does not advise us to lay down and die. Quite the opposite:
Go, eat your bread with enjoyment, and drink your wine with a merry heart; for God has long ago approved what you do. Let your garments always be white; do not let oil be lacking on your head. Enjoy life with the wife whom you love, all the days of your insubstantial life.
Whatever your hand finds to do, do with all your might.
We are now far away from the country of tortures, dotted with wheels, gibbets, gallows, pillories… The carceral city, with its imaginary ‘geo-politics’, is governed by quite different principles. The prison is not the daughter of laws, codes or the judicial apparatus; it is not subordinated to the court and the docile or clumsy instrument of the sentences it hands out and of the results that it would like to achieve; it is the court that is external and subordinate to the prison. In the central position that it occupies, it is not alone, but linked to a whole series of ‘carceral’ mechanisms which seem distinct enough – since they are intended to alleviate pain, to cure, to comfort – but which all tend, like the prison, to exercise a power of normalization. These mechanisms are applied not to transgressions against a ‘central’ law, but to the apparatus of production – ‘commerce’ and ‘industry’…
Writing really only happens for me if there’s an element of relationship, if there’s at least a chance of knocking over a domino or flicking on a light bulb in someone else’s brain. Secret diaries are not my thing.
So I’m back at blogging. This time around, I’m not writing on someone else’s dime, so I have the freedom to tackle anything that feels interesting or important — current events, ethics, politics, theology, the human experience.
There will also be mediocre photos and no small amount of silliness.
An editor once said to me, upon reading one of my beginnings, “I didn’t know where you were going, but I wanted to go with you.” Maybe you’ll feel that way, too. Time to give it a spin.
Me, on a Colorado playground, 2014.
Federal tax rules keep ministers from saying very much about political candidates, but I am allowed to talk about hats. And there’s a certain cap I’d like to discuss.
Perhaps you’ve seen this one up close at a recent family reunion. It says “Make America Great Again,” and it’s inspired a number of variations, such as “Make Baseball Fun Again” (cry for help?) and “Make America Great Britain Again” (history majors = clever).
But not all the variations are light-hearted. A young New York resident named Krystal Lake custom-ordered a hat saying “America Was Never Great.” She wore it to work, and a photo of her went viral, with predictable results. Because her hat spoke a truth: There are large groups of Americans for whom America has not really ever been great. African-Americans, women, GLBTQ folks like myself, and many others do not pine for days of yore. Nostalgia is often a privilege of the privileged.
My (American) calendar tells me it’s Memorial Day, a holiday created not for mattress sales or cabin trips, but rather so we might honor or at least think about our war dead. It’s an appropriate weekend to do some serious reflection on our large, messy, gorgeous experiment of a country, a country that seems to be in the midst of a harrowing and sometimes sinister identity crisis. It can be hard to know how to feel about a nation that gets so much right and has gotten so much wrong.
The truth is I’m actually 75 percent in agreement with the original hat. The first three words, “Make America Great,” are something I can get behind. We should all work to make the whole world great, and greatness itself is not a bad thing.
The problem is that conversations about America’s greatness can deteriorate very quickly, such as when we label ourselves as “the greatest nation on earth.” Any country’s assertion of superiority or supremacy is dangerous, misguided, zero-sum tribalism. And by many measures of human well-being, America’s “greatest” status is demonstrably untrue.
Greatness has been a justification for so many of America’s wrong turns. We’re invading because it’s our job as the greatest to try to fix things. We must know best. “The greatest” also can serve as a slippery military recruitment tool. You want to sign up to serve the country that’s the greatest, especially if you end up sacrificing a limb, your mental health, or your life. In the struggle to make meaning out of war, violence, and death, there can be a strong desire to believe that the suffering and loss happened in the service of something great. It can be shattering for veterans and survivors to realize that the greatness wasn’t true, and for them to have to live with the ways that America fails to care for those who have served it.
For Americans with no direct military ties, seeing our country as the greatest can play a different role. If we’re the greatest, there’s no reason to strive for change, ask hard questions, or even vote. Americans who struggle must be flawed, not the systems of our great nation. The complacent consumers and compliant citizens among us can be content to think that they’re part of the best, viewing their own comfortable lives as proof.
The biggest question to ask about the famous hat is, “Great again for whom?” I get an understanding of the answer whenever I drive through my mom’s hometown – past the site of the motel that has been chopped up and carted away, the bars that used to open every afternoon, the gas stations now abandoned, the industrial sites now shuttered. Even the newer motel, the one I stayed in a year ago for my uncle’s funeral, has gone out of business. The town’s working-class people never got rich, but they have seen better times – earlier, more prosperous decades when America seemed greater to them than it does now.
Feelings about one’s country are rarely separate from what one has seen with one’s own eyes. And if I paid attention to only my own life story, I really should think America is the greatest. I grew up in the middle of the middle class; I went to good public schools and a good public university; I’ve never been laid off. Although being gay did reduce some options for me, particularly in terms where I felt I could live openly, my privileges helped me find safe places to be. And in one way, being gay was for me a privilege: it exempted me from any risk of getting caught up in America’s military adventurism.
Eventually, I came around to the idea that, even though I personally was fine with the Pentagon’s exclusions, they were unfair and harmful to many GLBTQ people. And militarism was nevertheless taking a huge toll, overseas and at home, particularly in less prosperous communities where they don’t need a holiday to be reminded about casualties.
I came around on these issues because I had eyes to see and ears to hear and a heart to feel what other people were going through. Ambiguous, grown-up, complicated feelings about one’s country come from understanding the miseries caused by American policies and actions, both within our borders and well beyond them, and understanding how all that co-exists with all the goodness that Americans have done and can do.
Global perspectives also help with seeing all sides. I remember trying to explain to my partner’s Swedish cousins the concept of college tuition. Why would you have that? they asked. The government funds the university, there’s nothing more to pay. In another conversation, we learned that school lunch is free across Sweden. We explained that, in America, some students get free or discounted lunches, depending on family income, while other kids pay full price. You shame the poor by requiring them to prove their poverty? In a word, yes. We shared the chagrin and explained that American culture puts a high value on wealthy people being able to keep the money they’ve amassed, and that Americans tend to have an underlying suspicion that the poor deserve their fate. There’s nothing great about all that.
I had no idea at the time, but our conversations could have been straight out of Michael Moore’s 2015 movie “Where to Invade Next,” in which residents of places like Norway and Italy give Moore baffled looks when he asks about the dearth of guns or hands them photos of American school lunches. (“Frankly, that’s not food,” says a school chef in France.)
The movie has many hilarious moments. But it’s also utterly heartbreaking for anyone who understands America’s unrealized potential. We have the wealth but not the will. We have made an idol out of a disconnected, consumption-based concept of freedom. And radical individualism and a valorization of greed and violence have damaged so much of our shared life.
Critical thinkers in the United States have long been told to “love it or leave it” – a simplistic false choice that omits the option of making America into something better. If we didn’t love it at all, if we didn’t feel at least some way at home here, if we didn’t have any hope whatsoever for the USA, maybe more of us with means and privileges would try to leave. Google searches for “moving to Canada” have spiked, but becoming expats is not something that most of us are going to do.
One thing we can do is continue to be keepers of the truth, and to support media and educational institutions that deal in facts and support critical thought. The truth is in grave danger; facts are losing ground to emotion and identity in shaping Americans’ views of public figures and major issues. Earlier this month, Marty Baron, the editor of the Washington Post, implored Americans to ask ourselves: “How can we have a functioning democracy when we cannot agree on the most basic facts?” It’s a fair, and scary, question.
We can start by making sure we’re being truthful with ourselves. As Moore says in his film: “The first step to recovery, the first step to being a better person, or a better country, is to be able to just stand up and honestly say who and what you are. I am an American. I live in a great country that was born in genocide and built on the backs of slaves.” Acknowledging such truths can inform our decisions as citizens and allow us to live with the ambiguity and live with integrity.
The second thing we can do is to remember that positive change is possible. I’ve already mentioned the sweeping legal advances for GLBT people. Awareness of the problems with racialized policing is at an all-time high. We are on the cusp of seeing our first female major-party presidential nominee. Such stories of human progress are good to keep in mind in times like these.
And we should remember that the problems are usually interconnected. Economic inequality makes it easier to recruit lower-income Americans into the military. Public military spending boosts corporate profits. Private profits fund the campaigns of politicians who see nothing wrong with inequality or war. Around and around these things go, systemic cycles of greed and exploitation, grinding up communities and individual lives. It usually takes some concerned citizens or civic-minded public officials to throw a wrench into the works, in the form of a lawsuit, or legislation, or protest.
The gears may not come to a halt immediately – in fact, it can take generations. But the work of change is worth doing. And there’s no one but us to try to make America truly great, for all, for the very first time.
So, any blogging after the UUA General Assembly will be at my other blog, RevScottWells.com, but I couldn’t help but share a picture of this bahn mi (Vietnamese sandwich) made with vegetarian ham, from a stall at the North Market, a source of many delicious lacto-vegetarian meals and treats.
Now that this blog supports interests aside from those feature on my main blog, RevScottWells.com, I don’t write for it so much. And at some point, the individual pages links became corrupt. You could see posts on the front page, but couldn’t click through.
I’ve now fixed this and regret the disruption to would-be readers.
At some point in the mid-20th century, it came to the attention of demographers that the average American family had something like 2.something children. Now, most people understand that people don’t have fractions of a child. Most people get that this meant that some families had fewer than two children, and some had more. And yet. And yet, the statistics said this was the average American family, so as builders raced to build houses in suburbs following the example of Levittown, they built all these three- and four-bedroom houses. To accommodate all of those 2.something children families. Which was great, if you had a family with two or three children. But not really so much if you had seven children. Or five, even. Which wasn’t all that unusual in the neighborhood that I lived in as a kid.
But hey, it’s a formula. There are other things that we’ve learned from demographic statistics. Demographics have told us for a long time (although this is changing rapidly), that about 12% of the U.S. population was black. And it would seem that people in Hollywood must have gotten hold of this. That is the most charitable assumption I can make for how Hollywood has represented minorities on screen (I can think of nothing nice to say about how women have been represented).
Once upon a time, everyone on screen was white, unless there was a specific reason for someone to be a person of color (black slave, evil Indian, stereotyped Chinese guy with buck teeth who was probably played by a white guy anyway (see Part 1)). But eventually, more enlightened producers and directors caught on, and started including people of color. For example, in “The Mod Squad” – one default guy (you know, the “regular” white guy), one woman (i.e. a white woman, because we can only handle one variable at a time), and one black guy. So, boxes ticked. And there was “Star Trek”, which really was ahead of its time. But again, “Star Trek” had a predominantly white cast. The captain, of course, was a white human man. There was a black woman in a prominent role, which was truly fantastic. And there was a Japanese-American guy, and a Russian character (also a white man, but it was the 1960’s, so this was big – the two communist nations sitting there together). And there was a Scottish white guy, and an alien white guy. Boxes ticked.
But in the late 1980’s, when “Star Trek Next Generation” came around, things hadn’t changed all that much in terms of total diversity. This is supposed to be taking place centuries in the future. The captain is still a white guy. Of all the main characters on the series, two were black: LeVar Burton, who played a human, and Michael Dorn, who played a Klingon in heavy prosthetic make-up. Centuries in the future, and we were still envisioning people of color in token representation.
It’s no wonder that last week Tim Burton shoved both his feet down his throat when he allowed as how he’s bought into the whole idea that white people are the default for movies unless a character is specifically called to be a person of color (read more here). His exact words were, “things either call for things or they don’t.” Ew.
Here’s the thing — regardless of what the statistics say about the current population of the United States, we know from our lives that families don’t have 2.3 children, and we know that each school doesn’t have one black student, each office doesn’t have a single black employee, each neighborhood doesn’t have one black family. So why do we still represent the world this way on screen?
We can imagine better. When “Doctor Who” chose to represent the British Monarch in the 29th century, they gave us Liz X, a black woman. That’s a good start. I think we need to keep it going. And maybe Tim Burton ought to sit down and watch a few episodes.
That’s my mite. It’s all I’ve got.
Back in 2010, the New Humanism online magazine asked me if I’d write an article introducing Unitarian Universalism to Humanists. I sent them a text titled “Unitarian Universalism: A Church for Humanists?”, which they posted under the title “A Church that Would Have You as a Member”.
So far so good. But recently it has been pointed out to me that the New Humanism web site no longer exists, and so links that used to point to my article now go to some page that’s trying to sell you something unrelated. I’ve googled lines out of my draft and haven’t gotten any hits, so I don’t think the article has moved somewhere else.
So I’m going to repost it here. I didn’t keep track of my agreement with New Humanism, so it’s possible I’m violating copyright by doing so. If so, and if that bothers whoever has a right to be bothered, they should just leave a comment. I’ll happily take this post down if you can point to somewhere else on the internet where the article can be found.
Bear in mind: What I have in my records is the article as I sent it to them, so it’s missing whatever edits they might have made, for better or worse. I fixed a mistake. (James Barrett died in 1994, not 2003.) Also, I’ve had to fix the links, which may not go to the original places anymore, but should go somewhere relevant. Anyway, here it is:
A Church That Would Have You as a Member
Unitarian Universalism has long had a unique relationship with Humanism. What other religious group would showcase an outspoken atheist at its national convention, as the UUs did when they invited Kurt Vonnegut to give prestigious annual Ware Lecture at the General Assembly of 1984? UU Humanists have their own national organization (HUUmanists) with their own journal (Religious Humanism). In a 1998 survey, nearly half of UUs identified themselves as Humanists. New Humanism's publisher Greg Epstein spoke at the 2008 General Assembly, and has been invited to speak again in 2010.
Unitarians were largely responsible for the first Humanist Manifesto, and in his 2002 book Making the Manifesto, former Unitarian Universalist Association President (and the AHA's Humanist of the Year for 2000) William Schulz claimed that there were more Humanists in UU churches than in the American Humanist Association.
Few other religious organizations have so consistently stood with Humanists in those battles where traditional morality and human rights take opposite sides. The lead plaintiffs in the Massachusetts same-sex marriage case took their vows at the Boston headquarters of the Unitarian Universalist Association, with then-UUA President William Sinkford officiating. About a hundred UU ministers -- a significant fraction of the entire UU clergy -- marched with Martin Luther King in Selma in 1965, and the murder of one of them (James Reeb) provided the white martyr that President Johnson needed when he urged Congress to pass the Voting Rights Act. Another UU (James Barrett) was murdered in 1994 while trying to protect an abortionist from religious-right violence. Linus Pauling, the two-time Nobel laureate who led an international groundswell of scientists pushing for a nuclear test-ban treaty (and co-founded the International League of Humanists) was a UU.
UU General Assemblies have passed more than a dozen resolutions supporting the separation of church and state. People for the American Way founder Norman Lear was another Ware lecturer in 1994, and a Unitarian Universalist (Pete Stark) was the first congressman to announce in public that he did not believe in God.
Small wonder, then, that when Humanists go looking for a like-minded community -- a place to raise a child in humanistic values, look for social-action allies, solemnize a wedding or funeral, or perhaps just be reminded once a week that American consumer culture is not the only alternative to God -- the local Unitarian Universalist church is a prime option. There are about a thousand UU churches around the country (far more than Ethical Culture societies or other Humanist-friendly groups), and you can find at least one in every state of the union.
But is the humanist-community problem really that simple? Should we all just go join UU churches? As a Unitarian Universalist myself -- I am, in fact, more comfortable identifying myself as a UU than as a Humanist -- I wish I could make that sweeping recommendation in good conscience. But while many Humanists are happy as UUs, many others are not, and every year some number of UU-Humanists stomp out the door in disgust.
So would you be a contented parishioner or a stomper-out-the-door?
*
Probably the best way to get a handle on UUism is to understand where it comes from. Believe it or not, the story (or at least the Unitarian branch of the UU family tree) starts with the Puritans. When they came to the New World in the 1600s, the Puritans weren't any kind of Humanists or even particularly liberal Christians. But Puritan churches lacked two features that anchor religious institutions against the progressive forces of evolution: They didn't have a creed and they didn't have a hierarchy.
Each local congregation was supposed to read the Bible for itself, and no external authority could force a congregation to read it any particular way. Puritans believed that an external authority was unnecessary, because the Holy Spirit would keep pulling congregations back to Christian truth. What happened instead was that many of those congregations drifted towards liberalism.
The drift was gradual, but over the centuries the small changes added up. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, people like William Ellery Channing started interpreting the Bible according to reason rather than tradition, and noticed that some of the more unreasonable Christian doctrines, like the Trinity, were also un-Biblical. So they affirmed the unity rather than the trinity of God and became known as Unitarians.
By the middle of the 19th century, Ralph Waldo Emerson was challenging the uniqueness of the Bible itself, which he saw as the record of one people's inspiration. People in other times and places (like us here and now) might hope for their own divine inspiration. And if that was the goal, why not look to Nature or Art rather than to scripture?
From there, each generation of Unitarians became a little more humanistic than the last, until by 1920 Unitarian minister Curtis Reese could announce to his colleagues (in public, no less) that God was "philosophically possible, scientifically unproved, and religiously unnecessary."
The fact that Cotton Mather was not rolling over in his grave was, in itself, powerful evidence against the Afterlife.
Reese-style Unitarian Humanism was controversial for about a generation, but by the time of the merger with the Universalists in 1961, it was the majority point of view in most UU churches. Since then things have drifted in a different direction, which we'll get to in a few paragraphs.
*
This unique history explains the otherwise bizarre combination of features you will find in a typical UU church. If you walk into a UU Sunday-morning service wearing earplugs, you might imagine you are in a Christian church. Families arrive together and children go to their classes. Adults stand up or sit down in unison. Sometimes they sing together or read something out of the hymnal together. There might be a choir and an organ. Candles might be lit. More often than not, a minister will stand up and give something that might be called a "talk" or an "address," but looks an awful lot like a sermon.
UUs might appear to be imitating the more popular Christian denominations, but they're not. Like the evolutionary product it is, UUism comes by all that stuff honestly through a common ancestor -- the same way that dolphins get their lungs.
No matter how naturally those Christian trappings arise, though, they provide the first test of whether you'll be happy as a UU: If they drive you crazy, independent of the the service's intellectual content, then your life as a UU will be difficult. Don't torture yourself.
But if you can tolerate the appearances -- I've grown to like them myself -- then take out your earplugs and listen. You'll hear a message that is not always capital-H Humanist, but is decidedly humanistic: People of goodwill need to look past their disagreements about metaphysics and start fixing the world -- where fixing means creating the conditions for human happiness and fulfillment here and now, not preparing our invisible souls for some higher happiness after death. The world's many scriptures are read for inspiration, not for authoritative pronouncements, so a UU discussion doesn't end when someone quotes the Bible. Prayer is a community meditation on human needs and desires, not a request for supernatural favors. Science's description of the physical world is accepted, and while UUs may at times be skeptical about whether technology is creating a Heaven or a Hell for us, they completely understand and sympathize with the scientist's desire to solve whatever earthly mysteries might be solvable. Unlike Bluebeard's castle, a UU universe has no locked rooms.
*
Before you say "sign me up," though, you need to consider the continuing drift of recent decades. There was a moment in the 1960s or 70s when Unitarian Universalism might have become an unofficial Church of Humanism. Humanism was clearly the dominant philosophy and all forms of traditional religion were in retreat. Many UUs felt that their centuries-long evolutionary journey was done now: They had shaken off the barnacles of orthodox Christianity and had arrived at Humanism.
Many still feel that way, but the community as a whole has gone in a different direction. Particularly among the ministry, there is a trend to view traditional religion not as an encrustation to be shaken off, but as a resource to be mined. The solid shore of Humanism is largely taken for granted, but from that shore many 21st-century UUs dive back into religion, to see what can be salvaged: community-building rituals, teaching stories, techniques of personal transformation, invocations of awe and wonder, and so on.
And so, religious words that once seemed to be on their way out -- worship, prayer, God, holy, sacred, salvation, divine, and many others -- are on the upswing again. If you tap on those words, if you ask what UUs are trying to get at by using them, chances are you'll hear an explanation largely compatible with an underlying Humanism. But if you view the words themselves as the carriers of a dangerous infection, you'll find today's UU churches to be unhygienic environments.
Finally, UU congregations are tolerant to a fault. Literally anyone can show up at a UU church, believing any kind of craziness, and will not be told to go away. (In fact, if you take it on yourself to tell someone he or she doesn't belong, you are the one who is likely to be reprimanded.) If you mingle at the coffee hour after the Sunday service, you may run into astrologers, crystal gazers, faith healers, and new-agers of all varieties. They won't be anywhere close to the majority and most of them don't stay more than a few months. But if one such encounter ruins your whole week, you won't be a happy camper.
In short, if you are allergic to the appearances and words of traditional religion, Unitarian Universalism is not for you. If you are looking for a community of pure and unadulterated Humanism, you won't find it at a UU church.
But if you want to be accepted for the Humanist you are, without any fudging or hypocrisy, you can have that. If you want allies in the struggle to make the world a better place, you can find them. If you are stimulated by diverse points of view and enjoy engaging people who frame the world differently (but not too differently), a UU church is a good place to meet them.
If you came to my church, you'd be welcome. You might be happy there, or you might not. Only you can judge.
If I believed that we were born in total depravity, then I would have to believe that I am more mature than God. That is a horrific thought. No — I believe — I must believe that God is greater than I am, that God is more mature, wiser, kinder, gentler, more patient, and better in every way than I am. After all, I do believe that I am made, that we are all made, in God’s image. No, I don’t believe in a literal interpretation of the Genesis creation stories, but I do believe that we are made in God’s image, that we carry God’s Divine spark, the ruach – the Divine wind, within us.
But being made in God’s image does not make us God. We are not the original. We are the copies. We are not as good. We are striving to be.
So I do not believe that we are born in total depravity. I am a Universalist. A capital U Universalist and a lower-case U universalist. I believe that God never gives up on us. Never. Not ever. Which already makes God better than me.
Because right now – and a lot lately, I find that I am just this close to giving up on humanity. It’s not just this election, or any election. It’s the general level of nastiness that we are showing one another. The rape culture that is being condoned and excused. Rush Limbaugh, the poster boy for the total depravity argument, on 12 October, 2016, allowed as how those on the left would call any sexual contact that didn’t include consent as rape. Um…yes. By definition! That’s exactly what rape is! You can read his statement here if you haven’t just eaten.
A man thought it would be appropriate to dress his son in blackface as a Black Lives Matter activist for Halloween. Because his son wanted to go as something stupid. And then he posted the photo proudly on Facebook. I weep for this child – for the way he is being brought up.
A seven-year-old was beaten up by other children on his school bus in North Carolina. Because he is Muslim. On his school bus. Where an adult is present, driving the bus. The family is now moving back to Pakistan, because they don’t feel safe in the U.S. Let that sink in for a moment. They are moving back to Pakistan, where they feel safer.
And today, on the 287th day of the year, as I write this, 843 people have been killed by police so far in the U.S. this year. That’s just about three people every single day. Every. Single. Day. And yes, police do get killed in the line of duty. They aren’t all killed by people, but police do die in the line of duty. So far, in 2016, 99 police officers have died in the line of duty. And there were 130 police deaths in 2015, and 146 in 2014, so fortunately, that number is trending down. (The average daily death toll for civilians killed by police in 2015 was about the same as it appears to be trending now).
So I see all these things, and many more things, and I get discouraged. I say “Black Lives Matter,” and someone says, “well, I think all lives matter!” And I get tired of explaining that all lives can’t matter if we’re erasing the black lives.
I take a stand against rape culture, and someone says, “can’t you take a joke?” I can take a joke. Having agency over my body isn’t a joke. And I get tired of explaining to men, and sometimes even to other women that my body isn’t here for your amusement.
I say that I want to learn about other faiths, that my way isn’t the only way it is one way, and someone says, “but they can’t be trusted, they could be terrorists.” And I get tired of pointing out that terrorists abound in every flavor, and that while we sit and cower in the corner about terrorists, the poor are still poor, the hungry are still hungry, many people still don’t have adequate healthcare or education, and so much more.
We spend so much time looking for ways to hate each other. We spend so much time looking for the things that divide us. If you don’t love the way I do, you must be broken. If you don’t eat, worship, think, look the way I do, you must be broken/wrong/inferior.
So I think that God must have infinite patience. I think there must be so much more that we are capable of. Because I cannot bear to believe that we are totally depraved. This is my prayer. That God grant me the strength to continue the work. That we will come to know how to be better humans. That we will continue to build the kingdom. To repair the world. It is the only way. God must be greater than all of us. Let us find our way to God.
That’s my mite. It’s all I’ve got.
Dear President-Elect Trump,
The election is over, and, because the founders of our nation were fearful of direct democratic power in the hands of the populace, despite a majority of voters having voted for Secretary Clinton, you will be the next President of the United States. A job you never even wanted. Ironic.
But Mr. President-elect, this is a job. A real job. With real responsibilities. And now you will have real work to do.
Most of the people in this nation didn’t want you to be our President. So you area already starting out in a nation deeply divided. People are scared. You could, as fascists before you have done, play on that fear, and continue to divide and cower the nation for the next four years. You could destroy the economy, entangle us in wars, and make this country, and the world a more dangerous place. But I don’t think that would be of any benefit to you. You would go down in history as the worst President ever, if not the last President ever, in the history of the United States.
Alternatively, you could rise to the occasion and the office. You could recognize that you now have responsibility to everyone in this country. We do not serve you — you now will serve us. All of us. Not just the rich, but the poor. Not just whites, but blacks, latinos, Asians, and everyone else. Not just Christians, but Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Sikhs, atheists, and those of every other faith. Not just straight married people, but lesbian, gay, and bisexual people, married or single. Not just cis-gendered people, but transgendered people. All of us. Everyone.
Your wife has said she wants to campaign against cyber-bullying. You have been the biggest cyber-bully of them all. You will have to lead by example. The name-calling will have to stop.
Mr. President-elect, people are scared. If that’s what you wanted, well, you’ve got it. But how much more would we be able to accomplish if we weren’t frightened of each other and instead worked together? The ball is in your court.
That’s my mite. It’s all I’ve got.
Sincerely,
The Mite-y Widow
This post is the text of the talk I gave on the Sunday after the presidential election.
A few weeks ago, I had the chance to sneak out of town with my partner for a getaway weekend. Ready to relax and just read a magazine for a change, I sat down with the one copy of the New Yorker that I had managed to grab while rushing out the door. Then I opened the magazine. The Politics Issue.
The whole magazine was about the election. I briefly considered a ritual burning. The presidential race was wearing me out even then, before any of us knew what we know now.
I did not set the magazine on fire, nor, to my surprise, did I set it aside.Instead, I found myself drawn into a photo essay. It was about first-time voters from around the country. Each voter, ranging in age from 18 to 72, was pictured next to a quote about the presidential candidate they had decided on.
And I found myself most interested in the stories of three young voters, two 20-year-olds and an 18-year-old. They lived in Kentucky, Colorado, and Missouri, and they were all planning to vote for the candidate who, as it turned out, won the election.
I have a lot of hard-right relatives in my extended family. So while I didn’t know these Trump voters personally, they were not totally unfamiliar. I found the minister part of me wanting to reach out to them with care, and the former journalist part of me wanting to share some information with them. And so I started writing imaginary letters to the three of them.
The 20-year-old guy in Kentucky was a coal miner. He was voting for the pro-carbon candidate to try to save his job and his town. In my letter to him, I explained that my uncles had worked in iron mines and paper mills, and that whenever I go back to where my mom grew up, there’s always another empty storefront; it’s so different from the community I used to visit as a kid. But I also wrote that coal was never going to be great again, and praised his decision to take college courses, because the global market has collapsed. I mentioned that one of the other candidates actually had a plan to help Coal Country make a transition, and I asked him to give it some thought.
The 20-year-old in Colorado was a welder who was working on a bridge. He was voting for the pro-gun candidate because he and people he knew hunted elk and deer for food; they were able to get enough meat in their freezer to skip buying beef at the store for a year. In my letter, I told him about the many hunters in my family, how it was not unusual to find a deer hanging in my grandpa’s garage in November, and how none of the meat went to waste. And I told him that no one running for president had any interest in taking away guns for hunting wildlife; that those of us who are concerned about urban violence and mass shootings had other kinds of guns in mind, to keep people from hunting each other. I also pointed out that, if his future employment as a welder was a concern, some political parties tended to be more open to public-works spending than others, and I hoped he would give it some thought.
The 18-year-old in Missouri voted as she did because 1) she was opposed to abortion and 2) she felt lied to by Hillary Clinton, and, she said, “I hate being lied to.” In my letter, I explained, with kindness, that, if reducing the number of abortions was important to her, health care and family planning access work very well toward that goal, and that she should research which candidate would do best in that area. And I directed her to a couple of websites that kept close track of the number of lies each candidate had told during the campaign. I hoped she would take a look and give it some thought.
I really did type out these letters on my laptop, to these young adults who probably got most of their information from political ads on TV, who didn’t have conversations with liberals in their daily lives, whose main reasons for voting the way they did had nothing to do with building a wall or excluding Muslims. These three should not in any way be given a pass for their disregard for the lives of so many other people. But their reasoning does help explain how we got to where are.
We cannot blame the outcome of this election solely on blue-collar white people who voted for Trump any more than we can blame it solely on the white-collar white people who voted for him, or on the millions of left-leaning people who stayed home. This national tragedy was complex and multifaceted, with voter suppression, voter apathy, and the complacency of the comfortable playing major roles.
I must count myself among the comfortable and complacent. These letters I wrote before the election, I was thinking that I might post them on my blog, just to see what would happen – maybe they’d go viral and change a mind or two. But they didn’t seem essential, so they stayed in my computer. Just like I stayed in my house instead of door-knocking. The polling was looking pretty good. How many people would really vote for someone like that?
Well, now we know. And I can hardly look back at the pictures from Tuesday afternoon, photos of smiling friends with their “I voted” stickers, photos of 100-year-old women in pantsuits casting their vote for the first woman president. Photos that are now somewhat heartbreaking. Photos that now feel so distant that they may as well be black and white.
That’s one of the things that grief does to our minds. Grief warps time, and it fuels our regrets; it makes us furious and steals our sleep. The grieving people I minister to usually have experienced the death of a loved one, but the symptoms of grief are similar regardless of the source of the sense of loss. The strong feeling of there being a “before” and an “after” is the same. I have been recognizing my own deep grief this week, and I see it in many of the people I know here in my deep blue city and in the deep blue congregation I serve.
The things being grieved are real. They go beyond feelings of safety or a sense of having lost the country we thought we knew, and losing the world we hoped to see. I like to be reassuring and positive whenever I can – hope is part of my job. But I cannot stand up here today and assure you that everything is going to be OK, that everyone will be fine, that love always wins. We are evidence-based around here, and the evidence is not looking good right now.
There’s been a spike in hate crimes and hate speech in just these past five days. People of color and immigrants and our LGBTQ neighbors are living with new levels of fear, fear of citizens and government alike. Women and girls, never truly safe to begin with, are on heightened alert, with an unrepentant sexual predator on his way to the highest office in the land. The very functioning of our democracy and the functioning of our press are at risk. And I can barely talk about what’s going to happen to the earth. Most of the coastal counties from Corpus Christi all the way around Florida to the Virginia state line voted to put a climate denier in the White House. They voted to let their own communities drown.
We as a country, as a whole, have never been here before, nothing even close in modern times. But other nations, many other nations, have been where we are right now. And there are groups within our own country that are less shocked than others. Groups that have had justifiably low expectations from white-dominated America for a very long time.
I want to share with you a series of posts by an African-American writer who goes by 5’7 Black Male on Twitter. Here’s what he has to say:
This feeling you have right now. Amazement that the country could be so short-sighted, that it could embrace hate so tightly? Welcome. This despair and dread you feel. The indignation, the bewilderment, the hurt, powerlessness, the fear for family and livelihood? Welcome. That knot in your stomach, that feeling of heartache? That uncertainty about your safety? The deep sense of fundamental injustice? Welcome. I do not say this to diminish what you feel today. What you feel is real and valid. I’m giving you an opportunity to truly empathize. For it is the lack of that empathy that allowed America to shrug as the marginalized shouted warnings.
I’ve read similar thoughts from Native Americans. And Alice Walker, the African-American novelist and humanist, wrote this the other day: “How to survive dictatorship: That is what much of the rest of the world has had to learn. Our country has imposed this condition on so many places and peoples around the globe it is naive to imagine we would avoid it. Besides, do Native Americans and African American descendants of enslaved people not realize they have never lived in anything but a dictatorship?”
So there are plenty of people in America who have felt powerlessness, who have had to learn resilience and survival, who have planted a beautiful garden in the backyard when it wasn’t safe to sit on the front porch. What has just happened in America has never happened here before, except since the beginning, it has always been happening to some of our people. American authoritarianism was not invented on Nov. 8; it was revealed anew.
So there are people to learn from and things to learn, be they strategies for bringing about change, or tactics for preserving one’s dignity and human spirit. A blog post with the title “I Know What to Do” was written in response to the election by the Rev. Dr. E. Scott Jones, a United Church of Christ minister. “I know what to do…” he writes. “I know, because I’ve done it before. I lived as a very public gay man in the state of Oklahoma during a time when a state legislator said we were worse than terrorists, and the Aryan Brotherhood murdered a gay man in a horrific hate crime.” Rev. Jones says he and his partner received death threats and were denounced by name in the state Republican Platform, yet they still chose to get married in a public park with 200 guests for all to see. “Every day I lived with hope, courage, and integrity, refusing to let others define me or rob me of my power and my voice,” he writes. “I insisted upon my right to be equal and free and worked tirelessly on behalf of my community, in the face of overwhelming opposition and a climate of terror and violence.”
So, there are some strong people out there. And there are strong people in here. Some know it; some don’t realize that they have always been strong; some have not had much chance to prove it. We are now going to have plenty of chances, opportunities we didn’t want but opportunities that are arriving. Opportunities to show up and support people we know and people we don’t; to stand up for ourselves; to speak up for institutions that have never been perfect or fair for everyone, but that are so much better than some of the options we are facing.
From afar Americans had witnessed the Prague Spring and the Arab Spring, and now we here at home are looking at something that’s going in the opposite direction, something of an American Winter. A freezing or reversing of freedoms, a chilling of free speech, a time when new things do not grow, a time when our reserves of energy and hope may become depleted. A hard frost that few saw coming has suddenly plunged us into a different season.
But here’s the thing about winter. We here in Minnesota know how to survive a winter. We know that winter is not a season of growth, but we know how to keep living things safe until the warmth returns. We know to keep an eye on our neighbors, to make sure they have what they need, to offer them a jump-start or a push when they get stuck, and to accept their help when we ourselves are digging out. We know the importance of not letting the harsh reality outside dim our inner light. And we know that beauty and joy can always be found and celebrated, even on the coldest days.
So we know winter, and we know what to do. But there are some things we can’t afford to do as this American winter settles in. We simply can’t hunker down and stay home and wait this out. Yes, we need to grieve and heal and take care of ourselves, but those of us with the option to retreat cannot do so for the next two or four years. The stakes are too high.
If we choose passivity, we will contribute to the normalizing of this situation, to the idea that this is just another president, another transition. The Nigerian-American writer and photographer Teju Cole, writing in this weekend’s New York Times, pointed out that People magazine is already running photo spreads of the Trumps in the White House, with headlines describing the pictures as “way too cute.” We are already being asked to cuddle up to the family of a demagogue. Cole writes:
Evil settles into everyday life when people are unable or unwilling to recognize it. It makes its home among us when we are keen to minimize it or describe it as something else. This is not a process that began a week or month or year ago. It did not begin with drone assassinations, or with the war on Iraq. Evil has always been here. But now it has taken on a totalitarian tone.
America does have a long history of normalizing evil. It’s normal to restrict black people to one part of town and to fill our prisons with them. It’s normal for misery to prevail on native reservations, normal for Americans to fill their closets with clothes made by modern-day slaves on other shores, normal to pump untold tons of carbon into the air. We must resist this latest attempt to normalize evil.
And while I know we need to grieve and take care of ourselves, we can only resist and bring about change by getting out of the house. The safety pin telling others that you are a safe person for immigrants to interact with won’t work in your living room. The Kentucky coal miner and the Colorado bridge welder, as well as the Wisconsin factory worker and the Minnesota farmer, felt seen and heard by Donald Trump because so many other Americans stopped coming by or looked away. The kinds of one-on-one conversations across political divides that helped stop Minnesota’s marriage amendment four years ago did not happen on any kind of scale this time. They were replaced, with great futility, by angry Facebook exchanges and family members blocking each other’s pages.
We have to find new ways, or go back to old ways, of acknowledging and understanding one another’s realities, rather than reinforcing the limited realities we each live in. Relationships need to happen. And we somehow have to get across the idea that it’s a small group of people at the top who are responsible for the false scarcity and destructive infighting among all the rest of us.
So we need to show up. Not just virtually by pushing the “like” button, but really show up in our physical bodies – at a fund-raiser for Syrian refugees, at a rally to preserve reproductive freedom, at a gathering to celebrate trans lives, at a protest to stop private prisons. Showing up has been the work of the few. In an America where the ways of governing have been upended, showing up needs to be the work of the many. As we continue to grieve, it would be best if we grieved in motion.
Before I close, I want to talk a bit about hope. It’s a hard feeling to come by right now, for reasons that are very real. But I was reminded in recent days of the work of Joanna Macy, who wrote a book that some of you have read, called Active Hope. She defines hope not as something you feel, but as something you do.
“Active Hope is a practice,” she writes. “Like tai chi or gardening, it is something we do rather than have. It is a process we can apply to any situation, and it involves three key steps.
“First, we take a clear view of reality; second, we identify what we hope for in terms of the direction we’d like things to move in or the values we’d like to see expressed; and third, we take steps to move ourselves or our situation in that direction.
“Since Active Hope doesn’t require our optimism, we can apply it even in areas where we feel hopeless. The guiding impetus is intention; we choose what we aim to bring about, act for, or express. Rather than weighing our chances and proceeding only when we feel hopeful, we focus on our intention and let it be our guide.”
As we head forward into this uncharted new reality, may our intentions be our guide. May love be our guide. May we stay at each other’s sides, and be with those in greatest need. May we grieve in motion and in solidarity. Together, courageously, is the only way.
This text was originally delivered at First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis on November 13, 2016. Audio and PDF versions available here.
At times our light goes out and is rekindled by a spark from another person. Each of us has cause to think with deep gratitude of those who have lighted the flame within us. -- Albert Schweitzer
You may not always have a comfortable life, and you will not always be able to solve all of the world's problems at once. But don't ever underestimate the importance you can have, because history has shown us that courage can be contagious, and hope can take on a life of its own. -- Michelle Obama
Most of the time, some ceiling or roof blocks my view of the sky: in my apartment, my car, in stores, offices, churches, and just about anywhere else I go. Even when I’m outside, I don’t always remember to look up. Occasionally I check what the weather is doing or how much daylight is left. I might admire a beautiful sunset, or the Moon, or the stars on a particularly clear night. But I look at them the way I look at paintings in a museum. I contemplate them for a while and then I move on.
So while I am well acquainted with the sky, I don’t live with it the way my father did when he was farming, and certainly not the way ancient peoples did. Not many of us do anymore. And so it can be hard for us to grasp what the Winter Solstice must have meant centuries or millennia ago, when our culture’s mythic intuition was forming.
Our calendars tell us that the Solstice is about a week away, and of course we notice that days are shorter this time of year. But ancient peoples who lived with the sky as a constant companion would have seen much more than that. Even children must have noticed that the path the Sun takes across the sky was dropping ominously towards the horizon. And every child, at some time or another, must have asked the obvious question: "Is it going to keep dropping, until someday the Sun won’t bother to come up at all? What will happen to us if the Sun never comes back?"
Today, that question sounds even more childish, because are educated: We know about the solar system and the Earth’s tilted axis. We understand that the Sun’s shorter path across the sky does not mean that it is getting weaker or lazier. In the Southern Hemisphere, we know, days are bright and long now, and the tropics are as hot as ever. In short, the Sun is doing fine, however it might look from our angle. The Earth is in its usual orbit, and everything is right on schedule. The fear that the Winter Solstice might fail this year never really crosses our minds.
Millennia ago, it probably did. If you were that questioning child, no doubt your elders would reassure you: “The Sun always turns around about now. Wait a week or two, and you’ll see for yourself.”
But I wonder just how reassuring that was. I doubt it communicated the clockwork certainty we feel today. Probably it sounded like those somewhat less convincing reassurances we all get from time to time, like: “That fault line is stable.” or “People with your credentials always get good jobs.” or “America would never elect someone like that.” — reassurances that may have been true in living memory, but which come with no guarantees. “Maybe it has always been that way,” you think, “but is it going to be that way this time?”
So I imagine that ancient peoples of all ages watched the sky this time of year with a certain anxiety, believing, but not completely certain, that the age-old pattern would hold, and a cosmic catastrophe would be averted once again.
But of course, the pattern did always hold. Every year, the Sun’s arc across the sky stopped sinking and began to rise, the days got longer, and Spring eventually came. But no matter how many times you lived through it, I imagine that the Solstice never really lost its miraculous quality, because the mechanism behind it remained invisible.
And so it became that rarest of events: a predictable, regularly occurring miracle. In time, the Solstice came to represent something a little more abstract than just the promise of Spring: It was evidence that miracles were still happening. It symbolized the lesson that you should never lose hope, because situations that just seem to get worse and worse every day can turn around, even if you don’t see exactly what is going to turn them.
Over time, symbols and stories and holidays of hope clustered around this time of year: The Temple lights that should burn out, don’t. The Golden Child who will change all of our lives — whether it is the hero Mithras or the savior Jesus — is born. Even our secular Christmas mythology reflects this hope that things can turn around: Scrooge gets back his humanity. The Grinch’s heart grows three sizes. George Bailey discovers he actually is living a wonderful life.
And every year, we are encouraged to bring that hope into our own lives: Maybe an old friendship can be rekindled. Maybe that ancient family quarrel can be patched up. Whatever part of your life seems stuck or broken, you should give it one more try, because this is a time when things might turn around, even if you don’t necessarily see how. This season of darkness is also a magical season, a season of hope.
But what can Unitarian Universalists do with all that?
Hope is fine, I guess, but we don’t put much stock in magic, or in things that are supposed to turn around for no particular reason. We want to see the mechanisms.
We are also skeptical of saviors. When I was growing up Lutheran, we called this season Advent, and we sang:
O come, O come, Emanuel.
And rescue captive Israel
That mourns in lonely exile here
Until the Son of God appear.
Rejoice! Rejoice! Emanuel
Shall come to thee, O Israel.
That tune is still in our UU hymnal, but we changed the words. Because we are a proud people, a people of action, and we don’t plead helplessly for someone to come save us, not even God.
A lot of us don’t believe in God, and even those of us who do probably don’t believe in the kind of God who steps into history and fixes things that humans have screwed up. At most, we might believe in the upward tilt of Progress, or in the Theodore Parker line that Martin Luther King liked to quote: “The arc of the moral Universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
Many of us don’t even believe that much. The universe simply does what it does, and whether it ultimately bends towards Heaven or Hell is beyond our knowing. Our so-called “progress” may lead to annihilation rather than paradise. Rather than grant us freedom, it may enable a tyranny more all-encompassing than even George Orwell could have imagined. Rather than evolve into an interconnected global village, the world may fragment into echo chambers that are increasingly suspicious of one another.
Instead of adventure and innocent fun, the literature of our young people is full of dystopian wastelands and zombie apocalypses and heroes who hope for little more than to survive with a few of their friends. And who can blame the young for dwelling on such dark scenarios? Aren’t they just bringing into popular culture the private fears their elders are reluctant to discuss?
So we can see the darkness, but where is this hope we are supposed to celebrate?
In order to present that hope to Unitarian Universalists well trained in doubt and skepticism, I’m going to need to take advantage of something else we do well: appreciate subtle distinctions. UUs can split hairs like nobody else, and I’m going to split a really important one right now.
So far I’ve been using the word hope interchangeably with the belief that things will get better. But those two notions aren’t the same at all. Believing that things will improve isn’t hope, it’s optimism. The opposite of optimism is pessimism, the belief that things will get worse. But the opposite of hope is something far more devastating than pessimism, it’s despair. To be in despair is to believe that it’s useless to try, because your actions don’t matter. Nothing can be done.
So here’s the hair splitting: Optimism and pessimism are beliefs about the future. Hope and despair are attitudes towards the present.
Pessimism is going to the plate in the ninth inning when your team is behind, assessing the situation, and concluding that you’re probably going to lose. Despair, on the other hand, would tell you not to bother taking your turn at bat, or if you do step into the batter’s box, to let the pitches go by without swinging, because what’s the point? What difference could it possibly make?
Hope is the opposite of that. Hope is that feeling deep within you that you are alive, and that in this particular time and place, the only thing you need to concern yourself with is what you do next. Hope means refusing to prejudge the situation, it means doing whatever you can think to do and then whatever happens will happen.
Optimism and pessimism both claim to know something, but hope thrives on the unknown. It focuses on those parts of the future that remain undetermined, and it says, “Let me see what I can do.”
Once you appreciate that distinction, I think you’ll agree that while some UUs are optimists and some are pessimists, we are, at our core, a hopeful people. We don’t claim to know the future. We throw ourselves into the unknown and we act, because we have a deep, abiding faith that actions matter.
People sometimes ask me, as they probably ask you, why Unitarian Universalists bother to form congregations at all. Why do we set our alarms on Sunday mornings, make ourselves presentable, and show up? After all, if you’re going to make up your own mind about the Big Questions and follow your own conscience, can’t you do that just as well at home? No UU Hell is waiting for the unchurched. No authority is going to condemn you if you sleep in. So why bother?
I suspect that these last few weeks, you’ve known exactly why you bother. We are now in a season of darkness in more ways than one. The values Unitarian Universalists cherish are challenged today in a way they have not been in my lifetime. We are told from the highest levels to fear the stranger, and blame our misfortunes on those least able to defend themselves: on immigrants and refugees and the poor. Those who are different are presented to us as threats to our well-being and our very way of life. Science, we are told, is just another bias, and compassion is weakness. Those we might previously have seen as victims are in fact just losers, people unworthy of our concern.
In the middle of this immense darkness, if all you can see is the small candle of goodwill that you carry yourself, then you may well fall into despair. Because no matter what you do or how hard you try, you cannot light the world. If you worry that your candle might really be the only one left, then you might do well to hide it, for fear of those who would snuff it out.
Or you could bring it here.
On the Sunday after the election, I was speaking in the place where I grew up, a small Midwestern town in a rural county that voted three to one for Trump. The Unitarian church there is small, but we drew a good crowd that day.
I don’t think people came to church that morning because they wanted to be jollied back into optimism. We gathered together for reassurance, but not the kind that says everything is going to be OK. (A lot of things are not going to be OK in the coming years. I think we all know that.) No, the reassurance we were looking for that morning, that I think many of us are still looking for, is to be in the presence of people who are not surrendering to despair.
I led the congregation in a responsive reading of the UU Principles, just so we could hear each other and hear ourselves say out loud what we stand for: the worth of all people; justice, equity, and compassion; acceptance of one another; the search for truth; democracy; world community; the interdependent web.
We’re not ready to give those things up, or to hibernate for a few years and let them take care of themselves. We don’t all have a plan yet. We don’t know exactly what we’re going to do. Most of us are still casting about, trying to figure out what we can do, what roles we can play, where we might make some kind of difference. But UUs across the country are determined to do something, because we are a people who believe that our actions matter. We are a religion of hope.
We are also a religion of faith. Not necessarily faith in some perfect world after death. Not necessarily faith in an all-powerful God who makes our stories come out right. Not even faith that some great leader will ride in with the cavalry to save us in our hour of need. But we do have faith that the potential for human goodness is far more widespread than it often appears. That flame you feel inside yourself, that desire to live in a more just and compassionate world, that willingness to make an effort and take some chances to help bring that world about — it also burns inside other people, including many you would never suspect. An old-time Universalist like Hosea Ballou would tell you that if you could look deeply enough, you would see that flame burning somewhere inside everyone.
You can never predict when or how it will shine through. Several years ago, I was worried about my wife, who was facing a life-threatening cancer she eventually recovered from, and so I did not notice that I had picked up a virus myself. It hit me suddenly one afternoon in our local mall, and I dragged myself to Food Court to sit down and try to recover enough energy to drive home. But instead I just felt worse and worse. Looking around, I saw only strangers, no one I could ask for help. So I decided to make a run for the bathroom, hoping to be sick there rather than in front of everyone.
But when I stood up, I keeled over, and woke up a minute or two later on the floor with people all around me. The man at the next table had caught me as I fell, and an impromptu emergency response team had formed around me. Mall security had been notified, 911 had already been called, and an ambulance was on its way.
When I had looked around at all those strangers, I had not seen that level of caring, that willingness to get involved and help. But it was there.
That is a story of personal caring, but history is also full of moments when caring for the public good has burst forth, seemingly from nowhere: when crowds have faced down armies, when workers have stood together in unions, when citizens have marched together in support of civil rights or against war, and very recently when Native Americans and their allies from across the country — including a sizable contingent of UU ministers — came together at Standing Rock.
Hope thrives on the unknown, and we do not know what depths of goodness and courage might be hidden inside the American people. During this past year, it has been hidden pretty well sometimes. Sometimes I have felt that I didn’t know this country at all. But it is the faith of a Universalist that human goodness does not die just because it is hidden, any more than the Sun dies when it sinks behind the horizon.
If we are honest with ourselves, we have to admit that our own goodness is hidden sometimes. We haven’t always done what we could have done. We haven’t always spoken up when we should have. In hindsight, I suspect, most of us can look back at times when we were on the wrong side of some important issue. (I know I can.) But the goodness inside us didn’t die in those moments, it was just obscured by ignorance, or by fear, or maybe just by exhaustion.
It is the faith of Universalist to give others the same benefit of the doubt that we need for ourselves. And it is the faith of a Universalist to believe, as Michelle Obama said, that actions of courage, of generosity, and of inspiration are contagious.
The challenge of a season of darkness is to start such contagions and to spread them. If you step forward, you do not know who will follow you. Maybe it will be people you never would have expected.
In terms of optimism, I can offer you only the vaguest reassurance. Human history shows that things do not go on getting worse forever. Eventually they turn, and the moments when they turn are hardly ever obvious at the time. Even decades later, historians are usually still arguing about them. Right now, we could be closer to a turning point than anyone suspects, or it could still be a long way off. I don’t know.
One thing I can guarantee you: In a season of darkness, whatever you can think to do will seem totally inadequate to the immensity of the situation. What does it matter if I wear a safety pin? Or correct that fake news story my friend posted to Facebook? Or put a Black Lives Matter sticker on my car? Or sit next to that kid who’s being bullied? Or call that congressman? Or go to that demonstration? Or work for that candidate? Or run for that local office? How is that going to turn the world around?
And the answer is: We don’t know. By itself, nothing you do will turn things around. You cannot light the world.
But we also do not know how much hidden goodness is out there, and how it might reveal itself. If you do that thing that it occurs to you to do, you do not know who will see it and be inspired by it, or what you yourself might learn from it, or what either of you might go on to do next.
Here, in a time of darkness, we choose to act, but we do not know what will come from that action. We cannot know. And so, we hope.
Last week Transforming Hearts Collective co-leader Teo Drake served as one of four leaders of a powerful four-day training on mindfulness, compassion, and social justice, organized by the organization Off the Mat, Into the World.
The training was intended for yoga practitioners who wanted an intensive exploration of effective social justice activism grounded in compassionate practice. Each day of the training featured a mix of practice, teaching, exercises, small group work, individual reflection, and integration of all of these elements. Mindfulness meditation and daily yoga practice created a foundation for participants to open their hearts to the pain of injustice, heal themselves and their communities from the trauma of oppression, and foster the resilience they need to stay in the struggle over a lifetime.
Over fifty participants dug into the impacts of injustice and inequity and grew their skills in being agents of social change, supported by embodied practice. Those who were new to social justice work gained an understanding of systems and historical context for our current political moment, as well as learning how yoga and meditation practices can support their ongoing engagement. Participants with marginalized identities and/or those who have been in the struggle a long time were able to have space to be together, share wisdom across identities, build solidarity, care for their bodies and spirits, and gain hope from being in community.
In the current political moment, it is more important than ever to help each other stay present, be able to sit with discomfort, and meet this moment of increasing awareness of oppression—particularly racism—without becoming too overwhelmed, shying away from culpability, or shutting down. Embodied spiritual practice is one key way to meet these goals.
Never Again. This is carved in stone in seven languages on the monument at the Treblinka death camp. I wonder if we ever meant this. It says never again, but we do this again and again. We annihilate each other time and time again, and God weeps.
Aleppo has been devastated (view before and after photos here). Misinformation from Russia has interfered with the evacuation of civilians from the city.
But this is just the most recent atrocity we have committed against each other. Cambodia. Bosnia. Rwanda. Darfur. All of these genocides occurred since the words were carved on this stone in Treblinka. And what for?
Bashir al-Assad wants to remain in power in Syria even if there are no people left to rule over. Russia and Iran are happy to back Assad at any cost. Human life is cheap. It’s about maintaining power for them, too.
Until we begin to see each other as God’s creation, as equals each carrying the face of God, we will continue to treat each other as commodities. We will continue to do this. Again and again. We can carve whatever we like into stone. God already tried that with us, giving Moses the tablets containing the big 10. We aren’t doing to well. Just to recap here:
From Exodus 20:1-17
Then God spoke all these words:
I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; you shall have no other gods before me.
You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I the Lord your God am a jealous God, punishing children for the iniquity of parents, to the third and the fourth generation of those who reject me, 6 but showing steadfast love to the thousandth generation of those who love me and keep my commandments.
You shall not make wrongful use of the name of the Lord your God, for the Lord will not acquit anyone who misuses his name.
Remember the sabbath day, and keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work. But the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God; you shall not do any work—you, your son or your daughter, your male or female slave, your livestock, or the alien resident in your towns. For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but rested the seventh day; therefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day and consecrated it.
Honor your father and your mother, so that your days may be long in the land that the Lord your God is giving you.
You shall not murder.
You shall not commit adultery.
You shall not steal.
You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.
You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or male or female slave, or ox, or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.
We’re screwing it all up. It’s time to pay attention to the words on the stones.
That’s my mite. It’s all I’ve got.
I’m back! I haven’t written in ages. I haven’t written in ages because, pretty much since November 9, I’ve been, well, despondent. I really haven’t had the energy to write much. But I’m writing now. I’m writing now because there was the Women’s March on Saturday. And it was important.
A dear friend and colleague has been telling me lately that marches aren’t what get things accomplished anymore. I understand what he means. This isn’t 1964, and we aren’t going to bend the will of politicians these days by marching. No, these days, politicians are putting party politics well above their actual jobs and what’s best for the nation, and they aren’t going to be moved by millions of marchers. But that’s not why we marched.
This is what the march did. It energized us for the work. Official estimates for Washington DC were 500,000. I’ve seen marches of half a million people before. This was more. WAY more. There were so many people that the official march never actually got started. The march was the non-stop walking to and from the rally points, and walking to the metro to leave. Swarms and swarms of people filling the streets all around downtown.
Now, I’ve been attending marches since 1968, when I picketed Gracie Mansion in New York City with my parents and their colleagues during the New York City teachers’ strike. I’ve had non-violence training, and I’ve been a marshall at a few marches, too. This march was remarkable.
This was the most respectful march I’ve ever been to. Sure, there were outside agitators who were attempting to make trouble. But the folks who came to the march just refused to engage them. At all. They were left to their bizarre ranting on the sidelines while people from all over engaged with each other.
This was the first time that I really noticed the intersectionality at a march. It was intentional and it was important. There were signs in multiple languages. Marchers engaged with one another – and not just the people they came with. People were talking to people they didn’t know and helping each other out. And people were listening to one another.
Chants of “Black Lives Matter” and “We want a leader/Not a creepy tweeter,” and many others didn’t so much compete with one another as they did flow into one another.
I ran into people who said they felt ashamed at how much they’d taken for granted before the election. People who said that they’d felt despondent but now were feeling energized and ready to get to work. People who were committing to calling their elected officials regularly. People who were ready to dig in.
And this was just the march in Washington, D.C. There were marches all across the U.S. and on all seven continents (yes, there was even a march on Antarctica). People are mobilized. It would have been good to have this energy before November 8, but we do have it now.
The point of this was not that it’s one and done. The point is that the beast has awakened. This was just our grand entrance. We’re coming. And we who believe in freedom will not rest.
That’s my mite. That’s all I’ve got.
At the annual Creating Change conference hosted by the National LGBTQ Task Force this January, attendees were able to access care and spiritual practice in two brand new ways. Along with other LGBTQ faith leaders, co-leaders of the Transforming Hearts Collective spearheaded the creation of a Spiritual Care Team and a dedicated spirituality room, the Many Paths Gathering Space.
The Spiritual Care Team is a thirty-person multi-faith, multi-racial, multi-gender, multi-generational volunteer team of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, two spirit, and queer faith leaders who were "on call" throughout the conference to provide care and support to attendees in many different ways. The team also led a variety of spiritual practices in the Many Paths Gathering Space that were open to all: offerings ranged from Muslim prayer to meditation to queer-inclusive Christian prayer to Earth-centering ritual to Catholic Mass.
A highlight of the conference was an interfaith ritual held during the inauguration on January 21, where more than forty people from more than fifteen different spiritual paths had space to grieve, heal, hope, and sing together in community.
Art speaks. Art loud and quiet, in your face and under the radar, beautiful and ugly, obvious and enigmatic, and art is subversive. Art is powerful. Art can support, art can bring down, art can evoke and provoke, and it is dangerous. And if our So-Called President doesn’t understand art and its power, their are people in his administration who do.
The Administration is proposing cutting the funding for the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) in the 2018 budget. They are proposing this as a cost-saving measure, but at $148M, this represents a mere 0.003% of the federal budget. To put that in perspective, the cost to U.S. taxpayers for the S0-Called President to travel to his personal Florida retreat for nearly every weekend since his inauguration has been $10M so far. For one month (CBS News). It’s not about money. It’s about an attempt to silence artists.
Just last week, I visited the Women Now exhibit at the Lorton Workhouse in Lorton, VA. Lorton was a workhouse and a prison, and is now an arts center. This exhibit highlights the struggle of women one hundred years on from the suffragists who were imprisoned at the workhouse. This exhibit is political. It speaks to the workhouse that exhibits it. It speaks to the struggle of women. It speaks to persistence. It speaks.
There are interactive elements of the exhibit that invite us to be participants, not only in the moment, but in the creation of the art from a deep place. Interaction invites us to consider our own struggle, our own commitment, our own persistence, or perhaps our own complicity.
Art is like water. It can seep in where more direct communication often cannot. And we can understand. When Sen. Joseph McCarthy was engaging in metaphorical communist witch hunts through the Senate Permanent Sub-Committee on Investigations, the playwrite Arthur Miller wrote the play “The Crucible,” which appeared to be about a literal witch-hunt, based on the transcripts of the Salem witch trials of 1692-93. The play was produced in 1953, at the height of McCarthyism, and Miller’s statement was clear. Except that it was about something that happened in Massachusetts in the 17th century. So Sen. McCarthy couldn’t come out and say that it was about him, without acknowledging that he was, indeed, conducting a witch hunt. Art is ingenious.
Artist Shephard Fairey created a series of posters called “We The People” in response to the inauguration and dramatic increase in hate crimes since the election. The posters depict all sorts of Americans who are diverse in all sorts of ways. They are powerful statements. Recently, the Carroll County Schools in Maryland insisted that teachers remove these posters from classrooms, because some people perceive the posters as “anti-Trump.” (read more here). The posters say things such as “We the people protect each other” or “We the people are greater than fear” or “We the people defend dignity.” Think about that for a moment. This is what is perceived as being “anti-Trump.” Art is provocative. This means that the So-Called President and his supporters are claiming that it is against him to be greater than fear, or to defend dignity. Art is important. You can see the posters and download them for free here, by the way.
Since the time that the prophet Nathan told King David a story about a rich man who stole a sheep from a poor man to provoke David to do the right thing, people have been using art as tool for justice. Use art. Go and see art. Support it. Make art.
Art is dangerous. It’s subversive. And it’s important. What will you subvert today?
That’s my mite. It’s all I’ve got.
WWUUD stream 
