All the controversy surrounding the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, senior minister at Trinity UCC in Chicago, where Barack Obama worships, got me to wondering how leaders of the United Church of Christ were dealing with this all-out media attack on the pastor of the denomination's largest congregation.
In a quick survey I find that the Rev. John Thomas, president of the United Church of Christ, offered high praise for Dr. Wright at his retirement ceremony about a month ago when right-wing critics were shouting relentlessly from the tube. And the Rev. Jane Fisler Hoffman, the northern Illinois district minister of the United Church of Christ, who also attends Trinity church, spoke out in January in strong support of the church’s ministry. I would love to find that Unitarian Universalist leaders are speaking up, but I do recognize that at stake here are deep philosophical and social issues which challenge all thoughtful Americans.
It turns out the assault on Dr. Wright and Trinity church has been going on a lot longer than you or I may have realized. The Christian Century in a substantial article profiled Trinity UCC back in May, 2007 as a church already under attack by “right-wing bloggers and TV pundits” intent on swiftboating Obama.
I listened to all of Dr. Wright’s rousing 40 minute sermon from April 2003, “Confusing God and Government”, now circulating in a seemingly endless two minute loop on YouTube. The full sermon was quite an experience for this liberal not-Christian, but, apparently, it is an apoplexy inducement for evangelicals who equate G_d and country. This seems to be exactly as it should be given the sermon’s challenge to such beliefs. Elsewhere, Dr. Wright challenges those evangelicals who equate G_d and money-making, but you’ll have to do your own research on that one — at least for now.
Jeremiah Wright is an unabashed student and follower of the black liberation theologian, Dr. James Cone. Barack Obama is not. Obama says he has heard Dr. Wright make statements with which he ‘absolutely’ does not agree. You will understand immediately what he may mean after you hear “Confusing God and Government”; their differences in attitude toward race are passionate. I’m with Obama, but I had great sympathy for Wright’s angry views. I am thrilled to see the United Church of Christ try to embrace such dramatic differences and saddened to recognize the difficultes our own denomination faces along this complex racial fault-line.
Friday, March 28, 2008
Thursday, March 20, 2008
A More Perfect Union — Obama Speech
Read the whole speech at The Christian Science Monitor site. Is this the "I Have a Dream" speech of our time?
When Politicians Express Concern for the Environment Mixed with Love for Ronald Reagan
You’ve heard them; don’t claim you never watch Fox ‘News’. Reagan is the last anointed prophet of American conservatives. Presidential candidates have proclaimed his virtues for months. Some paused for a moment at the grave of William F. Buckley, but that moment has past.
Here in The Mail* I find Steve Nelson recalling some of that sobering stuff we like to call history: “To reduce our dependence on imported oil, in 1977 a national goal was set (with bipartisan support) to derive twenty per cent of our energy from renewable sources and conservation by the year 2000. Toward that end the Solar Energy Research Institute was established, in Colorado, along with four regional centers ... to help foster commercialization and adoption of alternative technologies and practices. When Ronald Reagan took office, he slashed the institute’s budget, ordered the four centers shut (on Christmas Eve), allowed tax incentives for renewables to lapse, and, for good measure, removed the solar panels that Carter had installed on the roof of the White House.”
How does being conservative lead to the fervent embrace of Oil at the expense of all other energy sources? Are there really any actual conservatives left in American politics?
*The New Yorker, Mar.24,2008, p. 5. Yes, the print magazine.
Here in The Mail* I find Steve Nelson recalling some of that sobering stuff we like to call history: “To reduce our dependence on imported oil, in 1977 a national goal was set (with bipartisan support) to derive twenty per cent of our energy from renewable sources and conservation by the year 2000. Toward that end the Solar Energy Research Institute was established, in Colorado, along with four regional centers ... to help foster commercialization and adoption of alternative technologies and practices. When Ronald Reagan took office, he slashed the institute’s budget, ordered the four centers shut (on Christmas Eve), allowed tax incentives for renewables to lapse, and, for good measure, removed the solar panels that Carter had installed on the roof of the White House.”
How does being conservative lead to the fervent embrace of Oil at the expense of all other energy sources? Are there really any actual conservatives left in American politics?
*The New Yorker, Mar.24,2008, p. 5. Yes, the print magazine.
A Stroke of Insight
This is such a remarkable talk! I hope you will take the time away from the demands of career and plans and fears acquired to listen to Jill for just a few moments. This recording is, of course, widely available on the Web, but, perhaps, finding it here will prove useful. Perhaps, even inspirational.
Wednesday, March 19, 2008
"A Date which Will Live in Infamy"
Yes, March 19th is the day that our armed forces “suddenly and deliberately attacked” a nation with which we were “at peace and still in conversation” (the two things FDR — in his famous speech condemning the attack— found most revolting about the Japanese government’s behavior at Pearl Harbor).This evening marks the beginning of Norooz, the Persian New Year. May we all begin sweeping out the old year’s mess along with the everyday folks in Iran, and hope that by morning the world will seem a little brighter despite the dark cloud emanating from the backsides of our leaders. We breath a little easier knowing that, at least on this fateful day, the Lord Cheney has not been pressing to expand this outrageous war across the river into Iran.
Ordinarily, I leave the recognition of anniversaries and such to Monkey Mind, but today he is preoccupied with much brighter news* of his own. So today let us mark the anniversary of The Three Trillion Dollar War, but let us also rejoice in the smaller, hopefully less nefarious events that enrich our personal lives.
*Congratulations Mr. Ford!
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
Leonard Cohen World Tour
This summer's Leonard Cohen tour, which I was so excited about, never stops in the USA. Yes, I suppose, I could make the journey to Toronto or Montreal, but that don't seem likely, do it. [That's 200$ Canadian for seats at the Place des Arts!]Perhaps the stock market will make a miraculous recovery and the value of our horded greenbacks will soar! Ha! Perhaps my father’s investment in Florida’s panhandle will suddenly become beachfront property thanks to melting icecaps and rising seas. More likely.
Most likely, I will hunker down in a dark room this summer with my Austin City Limits DVD of Cohen’s October 1988 concert and revel in the way things used to be. "Take this waltz, take its broken waist in your hand."
Monday, March 17, 2008
Getting Perspective
"When people tell you to get your life into perspective, they usually seem to mean that there is one rational, objective way in which to view what you are doing. This will enable you to see things, they say, as they 'really are'.
But I say, 'See things in different ways. At the same time, preferably.' You need to see life at least three different ways to know where you are. Use just one and you're completely lost."
Thursday, March 13, 2008
Bread & Roses
The power of beauty for people in desperate circumstance was very much on Bill Schulz’s* mind when we heard him speak Thursday afternoon at Andover Newton Theological School. Recalling one of his trips to a refuge camp in Darfur he told us of a woman, living in the horror of this displacement from human circumstance, who none the less wore a treasured turquoise colored glass necklace which she referred to as herself — not simply something valuable to her, but her very self (the self still in existence despite the degradation of camp life).
Pierre-Auguste Renoir, the French impressionist painter, cautioned art purchasers to choose with care what they hung on their walls for the power of the paintings they chose would influence them each time they viewed them.
This same power of the beautiful was recognized by the 20,000 striking women textile workers during their famous 1912 confrontation with mill owners in Lawrence, Massachusetts.
The legendary banner the women carried, as part of one of their demonstrations, called for Bread & Roses, just as garment workers had in 1908 when demonstrators marched after the death of 128 women in a New York garment factory fire.
The banner and the courage of the strikers so inspired James Oppenheim, an Industrial Workers of the World union organizer at the time, that he wrote this commemorative poem, later set to music as it appears in our Unitarian Universalist hymnal:
“As we come marching, marching, in the beauty of the day,
A million darkened kitchens, a thousand mill lofts gray,
Are touched with all the radiance that a sudden sun discloses,
For the people hear us singing: Bread and Roses! Bread and Roses!”
*Dr. William F. Schulz, a past president of the Unitarian Universalist Association and former executive director of Amnesty International USA.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir, the French impressionist painter, cautioned art purchasers to choose with care what they hung on their walls for the power of the paintings they chose would influence them each time they viewed them.
This same power of the beautiful was recognized by the 20,000 striking women textile workers during their famous 1912 confrontation with mill owners in Lawrence, Massachusetts.
The legendary banner the women carried, as part of one of their demonstrations, called for Bread & Roses, just as garment workers had in 1908 when demonstrators marched after the death of 128 women in a New York garment factory fire.
The banner and the courage of the strikers so inspired James Oppenheim, an Industrial Workers of the World union organizer at the time, that he wrote this commemorative poem, later set to music as it appears in our Unitarian Universalist hymnal:
“As we come marching, marching, in the beauty of the day,
A million darkened kitchens, a thousand mill lofts gray,
Are touched with all the radiance that a sudden sun discloses,
For the people hear us singing: Bread and Roses! Bread and Roses!”
*Dr. William F. Schulz, a past president of the Unitarian Universalist Association and former executive director of Amnesty International USA.
Monday, March 10, 2008
What Can We UUs Offer to Those Who Hunger & Thirst for G_d?
Those who hunger and thirst after G_d should not allow themselves to be deflected from their yearning by our or any other church. It is G_d who answers our prayers, not an institution, not religion.
So the first thing I think we can say out of our UU experience is: “You are on the right path. It is your hunger that will feed you. Hold it close and do not let it go.”
Unitarian Universalists begin with the individual. The ultimate basis of our thought is personal experience. We start in our awareness of life — not in holy books or creeds or traditions. This is not to say that there is no help in these resources, but this is not where it begins. It begins in the heart, in the striving, in the quest, in the transcendent mystery that moves us to renewal of the spirit.
The heart is the seat of knowledge. Our science teaches us that we think with our whole bodies, not merely with our brains. Those who hunger and thirst in their pursuit of true knowledge are already on the path to G_d. We do not urge them to leave that path in order to take our predetermined, one-size-fits-all way.
We can teach that wisdom gathered from many of the world’s religious resources will lead such seekers to recognize that true knowledge does not lie in the content of what we have learned alone, but in the insights we have accumulated through experience of our actions and awareness of our personal characteristics.
For the great Muslim philosopher al-Ghazzali:
“Such knowledge is a ‘disposition deeply rooted in the soul from which actions flow naturally and easily without means of reflection or judgment.’ Such knowledge is not only what we know but what we feel. It is knowledge that is not only known but meant. The fusion of knowing, feeling, and doing integrates the outer and the inner man.” *
In the process of such integration the individual may best hope to find G_d. Unitarian Universalism does not need to invent a separate unique path to G_d. We need to actively point to the many paths already available. In doing so we may reveal the power of the diversity we embrace and provide the open path particularly suited to post-modern times.
The second thing I think we can say out of our experience is: “You are on the right path. It is your hunger that will feed you. Hold it close and do not let it go.”
In your hunger you will digest your experience, becoming one with it. In your thirst you will taste, not merely consume what life brings to you. This path of integration is the path of G_d.
The respect, that you will gain as you experience the interconnectedness of all existence, will draw you more and more deeply into what Christians sometimes call the kingdom of G_d — this place where we belong; this place where your heart’s hunger can find satisfaction; this mystery where you recognize the living G_d that exists beside and within you.
*Revivification of the Religious Sciences as quoted in Ira Lapidus, A History of Islamic Societies, p. 165.
So the first thing I think we can say out of our UU experience is: “You are on the right path. It is your hunger that will feed you. Hold it close and do not let it go.”
Unitarian Universalists begin with the individual. The ultimate basis of our thought is personal experience. We start in our awareness of life — not in holy books or creeds or traditions. This is not to say that there is no help in these resources, but this is not where it begins. It begins in the heart, in the striving, in the quest, in the transcendent mystery that moves us to renewal of the spirit.
The heart is the seat of knowledge. Our science teaches us that we think with our whole bodies, not merely with our brains. Those who hunger and thirst in their pursuit of true knowledge are already on the path to G_d. We do not urge them to leave that path in order to take our predetermined, one-size-fits-all way.
We can teach that wisdom gathered from many of the world’s religious resources will lead such seekers to recognize that true knowledge does not lie in the content of what we have learned alone, but in the insights we have accumulated through experience of our actions and awareness of our personal characteristics.
For the great Muslim philosopher al-Ghazzali:
“Such knowledge is a ‘disposition deeply rooted in the soul from which actions flow naturally and easily without means of reflection or judgment.’ Such knowledge is not only what we know but what we feel. It is knowledge that is not only known but meant. The fusion of knowing, feeling, and doing integrates the outer and the inner man.” *
In the process of such integration the individual may best hope to find G_d. Unitarian Universalism does not need to invent a separate unique path to G_d. We need to actively point to the many paths already available. In doing so we may reveal the power of the diversity we embrace and provide the open path particularly suited to post-modern times.
The second thing I think we can say out of our experience is: “You are on the right path. It is your hunger that will feed you. Hold it close and do not let it go.”
In your hunger you will digest your experience, becoming one with it. In your thirst you will taste, not merely consume what life brings to you. This path of integration is the path of G_d.
The respect, that you will gain as you experience the interconnectedness of all existence, will draw you more and more deeply into what Christians sometimes call the kingdom of G_d — this place where we belong; this place where your heart’s hunger can find satisfaction; this mystery where you recognize the living G_d that exists beside and within you.
*Revivification of the Religious Sciences as quoted in Ira Lapidus, A History of Islamic Societies, p. 165.
Sunday, March 9, 2008
Peter & Amy Tell the UU Story
We all have to start somewhere. What could be better than to be a Beginner with such good hearted souls as Peter Bowden and Amy Freedman? Amy grew-up in our Waltham church and is the minister at Channing Memorial Church in Newport, RI. Check out Peter's website especially if you are thinking about trying to organize small groups in your church.
Friday, March 7, 2008
Wednesday, March 5, 2008
"What do we offer to those who hunger for God?"
I don’t usually wander very far in the blogger world, but I had to check out the popular PeaceBang site when a friend sent me a referral to her treatise on “What Depressed Me About GA”.
I had to read this, my correspondent said, because we (she, Sue & I) were standing with PB when she witnessed, at last year’s General Assembly, this really stupid spectacle of a UU man mocking an evangelical Christian who was distributing pamphlets on the street corner nearby.
It was not the first time I had had the pleasure, if you will, of witnessing this sort of arrogant behavior by one of our merry band of tolerant souls. Perhaps I should have been more shocked, but church-people-behaving-badly is pretty old news. It was old news in my childhood Methodist church. It was old in either congregation of the United Church of Christ in whose choirs I sang. That’s why we observers of the world reject the idea that the USA would be a more moral nation were it also a Christian nation. [That and the George W. experience, of course.]
I was shocked the first time I heard a UU belittle Christianity. When I first stepped into the UU world, I hoped to find a far better place than I had known before, but I learned quickly that we are pretty much like everybody else.
What remains truly shocking for me is the perception that, without a quick descent into warmed over liberal Christianity, a large percentage of UU clergy would be unable to answer PB’s question, “What do we offer to those who hunger for God?”.
PB, herself, seems drawn by this escape back to Christianity. But, if mainline Protestantism is answering her question so well, why are its churches losing membership? Why do so many people, who join evangelical churches, leave them? I can’t imagine why any capable UU minister would long to run off to the long-struggling Episcopal church down the street here in my adopted hometown, no matter how classically reassuring its wordy ritual.
Liberal Christianity seems to be struggling, just as Unitarian Universalism is, to enter the 21st century with a meaning filled understanding of G_d that relates successfully to the way-things-really-are. Thanks to the stubborn rationalism of modernists (as, I think, we may well suppose our UU mocker of Christians to be) and the blind attachment to the distant past of evangelical traditionalists on the corner significant portions of our populous are left hungering — certainly PB is right here. But, if either liberal or evangelical Christianity were working, why this hungering?
I am not arguing that contemporary Christianity is wrong. I’m just saying that it is irrelevant to the post-modern world because it doesn’t see the life that we are actually experiencing. It is stuck in scientific beliefs of the past that have led it down deadend paths. And it is further hampered by an inappropriate relationship to its traditions. But, are we, Unitarian Universalists, any more relevant as a Third Way? That’s the real question, isn’t it.
PB seems frustrated by Unitarian Universalism’s continuing failure to provide that Way. Good. But how about broadening the search for truth and meaning beyond our Christian heritage? How about bringing forward those UU clergy whose reactions are leading them to a better understanding of the life unfolding around us? Surely, so powerful a person as PeaceBang could find them were she determined in her search.
Blaming denominational leaders is a peculiar way to go, I think. If the average elected politician could lead, our world would be full of Barack Obamas. Believe in ground up leadership. Be true to our democratic experience. Be the change we are seeking.
I had to read this, my correspondent said, because we (she, Sue & I) were standing with PB when she witnessed, at last year’s General Assembly, this really stupid spectacle of a UU man mocking an evangelical Christian who was distributing pamphlets on the street corner nearby.
It was not the first time I had had the pleasure, if you will, of witnessing this sort of arrogant behavior by one of our merry band of tolerant souls. Perhaps I should have been more shocked, but church-people-behaving-badly is pretty old news. It was old news in my childhood Methodist church. It was old in either congregation of the United Church of Christ in whose choirs I sang. That’s why we observers of the world reject the idea that the USA would be a more moral nation were it also a Christian nation. [That and the George W. experience, of course.]
I was shocked the first time I heard a UU belittle Christianity. When I first stepped into the UU world, I hoped to find a far better place than I had known before, but I learned quickly that we are pretty much like everybody else.
What remains truly shocking for me is the perception that, without a quick descent into warmed over liberal Christianity, a large percentage of UU clergy would be unable to answer PB’s question, “What do we offer to those who hunger for God?”.
PB, herself, seems drawn by this escape back to Christianity. But, if mainline Protestantism is answering her question so well, why are its churches losing membership? Why do so many people, who join evangelical churches, leave them? I can’t imagine why any capable UU minister would long to run off to the long-struggling Episcopal church down the street here in my adopted hometown, no matter how classically reassuring its wordy ritual.
Liberal Christianity seems to be struggling, just as Unitarian Universalism is, to enter the 21st century with a meaning filled understanding of G_d that relates successfully to the way-things-really-are. Thanks to the stubborn rationalism of modernists (as, I think, we may well suppose our UU mocker of Christians to be) and the blind attachment to the distant past of evangelical traditionalists on the corner significant portions of our populous are left hungering — certainly PB is right here. But, if either liberal or evangelical Christianity were working, why this hungering?
I am not arguing that contemporary Christianity is wrong. I’m just saying that it is irrelevant to the post-modern world because it doesn’t see the life that we are actually experiencing. It is stuck in scientific beliefs of the past that have led it down deadend paths. And it is further hampered by an inappropriate relationship to its traditions. But, are we, Unitarian Universalists, any more relevant as a Third Way? That’s the real question, isn’t it.
PB seems frustrated by Unitarian Universalism’s continuing failure to provide that Way. Good. But how about broadening the search for truth and meaning beyond our Christian heritage? How about bringing forward those UU clergy whose reactions are leading them to a better understanding of the life unfolding around us? Surely, so powerful a person as PeaceBang could find them were she determined in her search.
Blaming denominational leaders is a peculiar way to go, I think. If the average elected politician could lead, our world would be full of Barack Obamas. Believe in ground up leadership. Be true to our democratic experience. Be the change we are seeking.
Tuesday, March 4, 2008
More Recovered Memories
I remember these guys as old friends. We met in 1999 and '98. They were difficult to find, but, once discovered, they demanded that I stay in touch.
Monday, March 3, 2008
Found Images
By some miracle of technology or lucky intervention, these images (and several others) that I created over a decade ago are still readable thanks to my now ancient Zip Drive. I’m wondering what to make of them.
I remember spending countless hours engrossed in the minutia of each picture, fussing over details most viewers would, in all likelihood, never notice. Was I ill or enraptured? The distinction between artistry and insanity is not always that clear to me.
Leonard Cohen says that it can sometimes take years of revision before he is ready to call a song or poem satisfactory. Perhaps my pictures are like that. Will they ever be finished? Do I even want them to be finished? How can a picture ever be finished, if the artist is always changing?
Today’s me is really an emergent form of the old me; not something radically new. That makes sense, doesn’t it? So each version of any one of these pictures reflects the emergent phenomenon* that goes by the same name on each renewed driver’s license.
Even though I be Born Again down by the riverside, I am still born anew as a version of the self that used to be. Yesterday I may have been just a green plant, but today I emerge as a flower nestled in green leaves. Wow!
When the flower fades and the green leaves wither, will I still be me? Will you recognize me in the wrinkled aftermath of earlier glory or disaster?
*See Jim Sherblom's November sermon at the First Parish in Brookline, "You are an emergent phenomenon".
Quote of the week
"What is the point in all this effort to be your true self, if you must always do what other people want just to please them?"
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